I was going to ask how he knew it was Arch, but I feel like that is just setting up the next comment.

Huh, the more you know. It was some time back that I was selling them, a depressingly long time ago now I guess. It’s a shame they have bowed to economic circumstances, the article I just read (which was translated so nuance may have been lost) makes it sound like they fell into the pandemic trap of scaling to meet demand during an unforseen boom and then couldn’t justify the size and scope of the workforce once that demand rationalised.

My family recently purchased a Bosch front load washing machine (autodose 1 button operation and teenagers is a match made in heaven) and they have 3 series available, 2 are manufactured in China, the other is manufactured in Spain. I had several retailers tell me to steer clear of the Spanish product, it carried a higher price tag than the Chinese lines and had a higher fault and return rate. We have been happy with ours so far but time will tell.

I’m not sure Miele is struggling that much, was a few years ago now but I remember a sales rep telling me the story of the annoyed German executive who “was unhappy” with a division of Miele as they had run out of room and had to “off shore” a factory to keep up with demand. The new factory was in Austria.

I am a huge advocate for them, back when I sold white goods and small appliances they often had really solid products and they maintained their “prestige brand” status by testing their products to an extent I haven’t seen many other brands bragging about.

Usually we sold to new customers on word of mouth from existing, and existing customers who wanted to scale up or down as family requirements changed.

Sorry I just see a “In compliance with government regulation to provide you with a full set of search results you need to be logged in” prompt in the near future. If they can drive people to log in, or even better/worse make people who haven’t had an account create one, I see some big financial incentives for them to do so. Of course that is going to be offset by the potential cost of any breaches, but I can also see the silver lining on that of raising a bigger barrier to entry for any new competition that wants to get started in Australia, and a bit of supporting legislation that blocks “non-compliant” search engines from being accessed in Australia might actual serve to increase lock in. Maybe I am just being paranoid, but when I see an Industry aligned body co-authoring legislation I start to look for their angle.

Seems like a case of a Industry lobby group getting out ahead of the government to try to push an agenda to me.

Logged in users are worth more than logged out users as far as digital profiling and advertising so let’s conceal the juicy stuff behind a log in. Doing it this way makes the government the scapegoat. So I would guess 100% compliance isn’t anything too concerning, they just want to juice their numbers to make line go up.

If Google & Microsoft have to degrade our privacy and freedoms to raise their Oceania region profitability by 0.00000001% that’s a price they are happy for us to pay.

To be honest the answer is obvious, straight forward and impossible. Society just needs to reject entirely any company that embraces shitty “AI”.

I mean it’s not as though “AI” is in any way intelligence, it’s just utilising large data sets to make it look that way, think about it, you meet a person at a party who is entirely oblivious to social norms, incapable of understanding tone, not able to improvise and adapt to conversation, but is really good at stating and restating and respinning facts that they picked up in previous conversations, is that the smartest one in the room?

In every one of my interactions with AI it has reminded me of talking to my ex’s autistic son, he was astounding with the things he could remember and repeat (and would do so with absolute conviction) but would crash out when given too many explicitly contradictory tidbits of information.

So assume that any company that replaces workers with it is happy to embrace slop and ask yourself if that is a company worth your business?

Unfortunately the world is far too influenced by America and has spent too long buying into the narratives that have been used to strip Americans of all the characteristics that they like to believe define them.

So the general public is dumb, reactionary, intolerant and beligerent in far too many places around the world.

The tiniest trace of class solidarity and any company that opted to embrace the shit slop as anything other than a tool to enhance the existing workforce would be shunned and reduced to irrelevancy and the world could move on.

For what it’s worth I fully 100% believe that AI is attainable, but when we get there we will see LLMs as equivalent to alchemy and shake our heads about the amount of resources we spent trying to turn virtual lead into digital gold. I also wonder if our descendants will curse our wholesale destruction of the planet following these modern day charlatans down the path of environmental collapse just to explore a dead end that was never going to yield a positive result.

Yeah you’re right, unlike evangelical Christianity, which treats women as valuable and treasured members of society… Nah just kidding they are just ambulatory wombs that occasionally make noises as far as the evangelicals are concerned.

I am disgusted by religion, all religions, but let’s not blind ourselves to the reality that when religion is an excuse for shitty behaviour it’s not restricted to a single religion, and its not like getting rid of the religion would remove the shitty behaviour it would just mean coming up with a new justification.

I don’t know your teachers or situation and I am going to wildly generalise here, but having worked with teachers, they were probably just their best.

They are teaching a syllabus they didn’t write (you can only put so much make up on that pig) to a group of largely disengaged students, for generally insufficient pay.

They probably just wanted to make it through the day without contemplating self harm.

A spirited contrarian student who fancies themselves an intellectual can be dealt with the ideal way, engaging them, acknowledging the short comings of teaching content to a wide range of intellects/engagement levels.

Or the less ideal way, draconian authority. Sounds like you ran up against the former. Sorry that was your experience.

Well that is their special skill, and their happy place.

Its pretty notable that almost all the smokers I know have moved over to black market imports. $2+ per cigarette means that a pack of black markets charged at $1 per cigarette make it far to tempting, and there is a big enough profit margin on them that people will bring them in to the country despite enforcement actions.

They haven’t been able to stop weed, or cocaine, or heroin or ice what makes them think they will be able to stop tobacco products, especially when there is a legal version of cigarettes and e-cigarettes out there that at first glance can be hard to tell apart from the illegal ones.

I also heard that there is a tobacconist who couldn’t get a license in my old home town, so they pivoted to selling novelty products above board and illegal cigarettes under the counter. The council basically posed them the option of stay in business and break the law or shut down.

Because they don’t give a shit about driving? They care a lot more about their family members that own car dealerships, or are involved with the petrochemical industry.

Or they saw that American rightwing grifters talk like this so they are cargo culting the fuck out?

I have written and rewritten my response here trying to find the right tone. I feel like we are closer to agreement here than might be immediately obvious. I think a lot of what we are seeing now is a result of 50+ years of people who find the idea of your republic distasteful seeking every method they can to erode it away. All the details are just components of this project, seems to me that MAGA is a result of years of stoking xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. Turns out if you spend decades laying the groundwork you can make the situation seem completely hopeless to a whole populace. I sincerely worry the long term goal is to perfect the formula for dismantling democracy and then start exporting it to the rest of the world.

Or I could be a fool, I don’t know and I don’t want to rewrite this again. Sorry that this was so rambling.

From my detached non American (but still a citizen of the planet so likely to get fucked hard by the way Americans vote) point of view, seems like Americans are continually letting perfect be the enemy of least bad. “Well since Democrats are kinda bad in these instances maybe we should just go fully fascist theological doom cult. That will force the Democrats to improve, or kill us all.”

I’m kinda looking forward to finding out which Chinese OEM is building this thing and how they will be contorting the definition of Made in USA to apply it here.

The signs of quality and attention to detail are already there for all to see!

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Actually I am misremembering, apparently capacitors are bad for audio, so to get the best you have to have chunky inductors and circuitry to do powerfctor correction to get a PF of 1. I was remembering big chunky power conditioners that look like batteries but are actually huge iron core inductors. They get your audio equipment “closer” to the power generation, which “improves your soundscape”. I’m sure he was using the stupid crazy priced audiophile powercords as well.

Oh, I was going to say you know a higher grade of audiophile than I do, but then I remembered that no I have met one. He had installed what was in effect a powerwall with supercaps and was generating his own waves through. His speakers cost more than my car, individually. I want to say Palladium Studio References. Wow yep. Thanks for that little blast from the musty vaults of deep memory… Well a 10 minute conversation 20ish years ago and a lot of “Ohs” and “Ahs” at his photo album.

Oh and the latencies, the really minimal processing that a CRT does compared to an LCD means that input lag could be insanely low. Subtlely different to refresh rate, I always felt it was the gamer equivalent of audiophile grade speaker cables personally, but some people swear they can detect it.

Oh that’s OK I just wanted to reminisce on the glory days, my backlog is so long already I could use all my spare time for the next year and still barely make a dent.