Could be 100x fewer, or 10,000x fewer. 5x fewer would mean that rich people and poor people resist DCs at the same rate, but that there are 5x fewer DCs in rich areas. But, my guess is that rich people would actually resist a lot more if someone dared to consider building a DC in their area… but that probably never happens, because why would a company buy up expensive real estate for a DC?
For me: Gnome + extensions.
The default Gnome feels way too locked down to me, and I don’t like some of the choices. But, with the right extensions “locked down” becomes “simplified enough to get out of your way”.
I wonder if there are other " genericized trademark" companies that have failed that spectacularly. You can still buy Frigidaire refrigerators. Vaccuuming is known as “hoovering” in the UK, and Hoover is still around.
It would be pretty interesting if “a GoPro” exists as a word for an action camera and the company / brand no longer exists.
At the beginning they weren’t “kinda crappy” because there really wasn’t anything else you could compare them to. Nobody else made a camera that you could strap to your chest, or your helmet, or your motorcycle while you did something action-ey. They had fully waterproof cases too, so you could take them underwater.
As a camera, they weren’t amazing. But, people weren’t using them to take wedding pictures. They were using them in situations where a normal camera would be too heavy, or wouldn’t stay attached, or wouldn’t survive.
There’s a reason they became a household name. They enabled people to do things that had never been done before, and they changed the way a lot of sports are shot.
Boomer and Gen X retired people didn’t typically grow up with computers. So, I think part of the challenge is a way to play games that’s easy. Probably games on mobile phones are a good approach because the process of finding, installing and launching those games is easy if you’re not a “computer person”. OTOH, old people’s eyes aren’t great, and they don’t tend to have a lot of dexterity, so while a phone UI might be good, the actual device is maybe too small and fiddly. Games on tablets is probably a much better option.
Steam deck might be ideal, but only if you can bump up the UI font size so that it’s more readable if you’re older. That would give them access to hundreds of thousands of games. But, the problem is most are probably designed for a PC screen, so they’ll have tiny UI elements.
In terms of the games themselves, probably something turn-based would be ideal. I happen to like those kinds of games anyhow. But, as I get older and my reaction speed gets worse, I think I’ll play fewer and fewer games that require fast reactions and good aim.
Another consideration would maybe be something social. A lot of older people are still in relationships, and want to be able to do something together. That also means either multiple steam decks so each person can have their own, or maybe couch co-op games.
So, I think it’s:
Based on that, I can see why Nintendo Wii games were really popular. The system is very easy to use. It runs on the TV so fonts can be nice and huge. A lot of it is couch co-op so couples can play together. They also have a lot of games meant for kids, but those games are also easy for older people to understand and enjoy. They also didn’t have sexual / violent themes that old people are sometimes more sensitive about than your typical gamer.
It also shows why Nintendo’s follow up consoles didn’t work as well. The Wii U had a gamepad. That’s more intimidating, and not as easy to use if you have poor vision. Then came the Switch, which was even worse if you have poor vision. Plus the detachable controllers are ideal for kids, but old people now have to fiddle with little almost hidden buttons to detach them. Not good.
Suuuuure they are. No accounting gimmicks at all! Just suddenly profitable via magic right before they go public.
They make it up in volume.
(Volume being how loudly they shout about how it’s going to change the world and dupe more people into investing.)
What’s funnier is that typically the AI providers lose money on every query their customers make. So, this may have cost some company $500m to Anthropic, but it cost Anthropic a whole lot more than that.
I remember using it back when it was called “Audioscrobbler”. I think the “scrobbler” part stuck around somehow?
The demo would be a lot more impressive if the questions you were asking weren’t longer than the extremely simple SQL queries it generates.
First reason is that during covid they tried shifting all business over to these pickup services. Well…without direct control of the services, you’re kind of at the mercy of the workforce that can’t get jobs that have a boss. You are not their boss. They are their boss. You’re allowing them to do your work without any oversight on your behalf. So why would Joe the delivery driver, whos 4 hours late picking up this order, give a shit about quality control?
It’s worse than that.
You’re looking at it as if the app-based delivery service has low standards. The reality is even worse. They use all kinds of surveillance and data analysis techniques to figure out which of their drivers is the most desperate, and will keep working for the lowest possible fees. Then, they give the most work to those drivers because they are the most profitable. The drivers know they’re getting screwed, but they are doing app-based deliveries because they can’t find anything better.
The apps are a middleman between the restaurant and the customer and they don’t just squeeze those two, they also squeeze their drivers.
It’s good that they’re attacking them on the software side, but they should also go after them on the legal side.
You can literally hear the power going through the lines.
Which is the problem. People get scared of them, even though there’s no danger, but they convince themselves there is, and they get a Nocebo Effect.
This has been widely tested. Some people claim that WiFi makes them ill, so they did tests. The tests showed no difference in people’s reported symptoms when they were next to a real WiFi router that was emitting WiFi signals vs. a sham WiFi router that was designed to look real but didn’t have any active radio components.
They’ve also done studies that show that exposure can result in symptoms. Exposure to media claiming WiFi is dangerous, that is.
He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person
Which can’t be explained by an unfocused eye. They do a lot of speculating to come up with a reason why he could possibly see something out of the corner of his eye. But, that’s only the physical part of it. It doesn’t explain why he might think that whatever he was seeing was “a figure” and moved like a person.
That’s like saying that ghosts can be explained by wearing glasses with dirty lenses, then going into detail about how dirty lenses can cause someone to see something that isn’t there, while ignoring the elephant ghost in the room. Except it’s even worse because a smudge on your glasses causing you to “see something that isn’t there” is really easy to test and barely needs an experiment to confirm it’s true. But, low frequency waves causing someone to see something that isn’t there isn’t something that has been tested. It’s pure speculation.
So, pure speculation that low frequency waves can cause someone’s eyes to blur in such a way that the corner of their glasses is mistaken as something that isn’t there. No proof that has happened or can happen, just speculation.
Then ignoring the elephant in the room that just because someone might not see clearly if their eye is vibrating, that is somehow magically interpreted as a figure moving like a person, which they interpret as a ghost.
There’s a humongous jump there from “a certain frequency might cause the eyes to wiggle” to “and therefore that’s why he saw a ghost”.
Ok, that’s a paper that attempts to explain the feeling that a building might be haunted. There’s nothing in there about causing people to hallucinate. They talk about the supposed “resonant frequency of the eye”, but then they say:
The resonant frequency is the natural frequency of an object, the one at which it needs the minimum input of energy to vibrate. As you can see from above, any frequency above 8 Hz will have an effect and some sources quote 40Hz
If the values are that vague, then there is no resonant frequency. There may be frequencies that transmit vibrations to the eye, but with a big enough speaker you can cause anything to vibrate.
The closest the get to hallucinations is to say that "the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious “smearing"of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.’s spectacles.” So, no hallucinations, just some blurry vision that might vaguely count as an excuse for seeing a ghost if your eye is vibrating significantly. Notice that that’s all just speculation, saying “this seems like it could be possible” rather than actually testing for that hypothesis.
It’s pretty clear it’s a BS condition. Jimmy even tests him. It doesn’t mean that Chuck is lying, it’s also pretty clear from the show that it’s some kind of Nocebo Effect. He doesn’t want to believe he’s a bad person, so his body effectively comes up with this “solution” to the problem.
The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), a non-profit organization, said that high- and low-frequency sounds emitted by these industrial sites can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas, with noise levels reaching as high as 96dB for 24 hours a day and seven days a week.
It says “these industrial sites” so it’s making a generalization, it says “as high as” so that’s presumably the maximum they measured at one of those many sites. They also talk about high and low frequency sound, so it may not be the infrasound that is “loud” but the high frequency sound, which doesn’t as easily travel through the ground, etc.
Because sound tends to follow an inverse square law, if they measured that 96 dB at 100m from the sound’s source, it could be just 2% of that level at 800m away.
So, that “96 dB” figure needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The figure as actually measured in some person’s home might be a tiny fraction of that amount.
Again, it doesn’t mean there’s no problem, just that it needs some further investigation.
Anxiety, nausea and sleep problems can be caused by many things. One of those things is believing that a nearby datacenter is making you ill.
Sure, investigate it and see if it is actually happening. But, do a proper double-blind study.
I take this personally because my mother is a conspiracy nut who thinks that everything is making her ill: wifi, chemtrails, street lights, electricity, gluten… if she heard about infrasound she’d add it to the list of things that are hurting her health.
That’s right. Even if the person won the lawsuit it doesn’t mean the science is true. It’s one really frustrating thing about the legal system, sometimes people win lawsuits based on absolutely terrible BS science. A persuasive lawyer has to convince a jury that something is true, not convince a scientist who knows about that field.
This polling seems to work extremely hard to avoid noticing the elephant in the room: a company isn’t going to build a datacenter in the middle of Beverly Hills.
The data from the article seems to suggest that people in the top quartile of income resisted 14 DCs out of the 365 projects considered.
They then decided that that is a resistance rate of 14 / 365 * 100 = 3.836%.
Um. No.
The resistance rate is number resisted / number proposed for that income quartile. If only 14 were proposed in upper-income areas, and 14 were resisted, that would mean that the resistance rate for high income areas was 100%.