I'm curious of source on this being more than anecdotal?

The most natural way for shoe mismatches is from the showroom. Customer grabs 5 pairs, tries some on, they get mixed up when returning to stock. Same shoe and size (hopefully, lol), but different production number and different factory/origin.

How often do you really expect a customer is grabbing multiple pairs of the same size/model/color of shoe to try on? Maybe it's just where I shop but it's rare that there's even more than one example of the size I need in the style/color I want to allow such a scenario to occur.

I looked (briefly) online for evidence of the factory claim and found none.

GP didn't give enough context ("MY shoes are weird so I extrapolated" vs "I know this is true; here's proof."), but the casual one-off scenario is absolutely a showroom level of "random happens".

Babysitting all those individual shoes and styles and sizes seems ... expensive, logistically.

In fact, if this were a thing, I'd imagine they'd start offloading them as though it were a cool feature. "Want to mix-n-match shoes? buy just a left!"

I'd expect this to be temporary while the educational system figures out how to manage LLM-bolstered students.

The intern I worked with last year said her graduating class all felt like they were the last "real" graduates. Meaning: the class after her had less credibility in her eyes, having been presumed to have used AI to get past the "pons asinorum"/"bridge of asses".

That depends if there's still a demand for educated people. Doesn't matter how good they are for society - only how much demand there is. If there's no demand, the schools have no reason to change.

We'll call ourselves "Eloi"[1], I guess?

On the one hand, one really can't remove all of humanity from the economy. Humans are what makes the economy matter, and if you cut them all out, they'll just replace the economy with something else, call it "the economy", and move on. ("Butlerian Jihad" pivot, I suppose.)

On the other hand... I'm reminded of dock workers and the advent of container ships. The only way to handle that was to basically pay those workers a living wage for the rest of their lives to ... not work.

So... we have options, I guess!

  [1] In Orson Welles's Time Machine, the eloi were the lazy "child-like" humans not challenged to grow intellectually.

DELL was an innovator in this "incomparable pricing" model for normal consumers.

You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.

IIRC they won business awards for this.

Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?

We sold web traffic analysis software to Dell Europe, around 1998 or so. They never kept their data more than a week. As the traffic and purchase behaviour they were analysing in the store changed so much every week they said (if I remember correctly) it didn’t make any sense to compare the data over time. I took from that that what they sold every week changed all the time. Of course, data storage and processing was then not as cheap as it is today, so maybe there was more to it.

try adding wifi, you don't get DVD. Remove DVD, you don't get wifi. It's ridiculous. Dell is a joke of a company

Did they learn this from the airlines ?

... this also made me swear off DELL and discourage everyone I knew from buying from them, too.

I'll bite.

    - Nothing like it in style and execution.

    - Superb and unique universe. It's brilliant. Fight me. ;)

    - Charming, engaging storytelling full of wit and humor. Charm and humor are particularly hard to pull off, it seems, given how few games I can think of that have them. (Bard's Tale and... uh...)

    - If you like the adventure games of the era, then this one is right up your alley. The puzzles are much more frustration-friendly than modern games, so they're not for the coddled gamers of today who, frankly, would just use an answer sheet when they got stuck. OTOH forcing yourself to stick with it and get that "Ohhhhhh the *diamond* makes the boat sink around us! *that's* how we climb out!" -- which is a real example from a *different* LucasArts game -- is very satisfying.

Yeah but you really could just guess and be right most of the time, since the question was likely "A/S/L?" ;)

Curious how/why all this negative attention is focused directly on the Flock brand (current example notwithstanding)?

Seems like if I were a competitor of Flock I'd be pretty happy right now and all this negative press is making them artificially cheap to buyout right now.

Motorola/Vigilant, Rekor, Leonardo/ELSAG, and Axon are huge companies making mint off the same thing and no once in 20 years have I seen this level of attention... not on the overarching issue of surveillance-state-ing, but of one particular company.

1) Flock developed a nationwide network to track innocent people, tried to get in as many places as possible, and handed law enforcement agencies carte blanche access with virtually no oversight. Their whole schtick was being the mass surveillance company, and striking fear into people's hearts, in order to prevent crime. Despite being founded in 2017, they quickly reached hundreds of thousands of cameras installed.

2) The US Executive branch formed concentration camps and a private army, and started using this nationwide mass surveillance network to track down any brown people with a Spanish accent to lock them up in dangerous squalid conditions and/or deport them with no trial. This is an immediate, nation-wide harm being done to millions of Americans, and this new company is enabling it.

Flock has over 80% of the US market.

You've seen this level of attention on a market leader before: on Microsoft, on Adobe, and others.

I can't speak for everybody, but in my case, my city has Flock cameras. It does not have Motorola, Rekor, Leonardo, or Axon.

"As brevity is the soul of wit, I shall be brief. [then bloviates on and on.]" ~Polonius

I’d have written a shorter comment, but I didn’t have the time.

That's the essence of it, I suppose. Cheap walls of text.

Edit: although another quote comes to mind- "Quantity has a quality of its own."

My guess is your sessions are interactive conversations rather than planning a course of action then, separately, executing each piece.

No. It's a typo.