Based on the description, my guess is that the script solved the problem of having the line interrupted by only doing a single 56k transaction per phone call.

Lots of times, phone calls were billed $$$ for the first minute and $ for every minute after that. If her script only did one transaction per call and not even using the full minute, that could add up fast.

And, given that it took a month for the bill to come, she could have been doing something wrong even during the day. Nobody would have noticed until the bill, and the 1am calls stood out the most when the bill finally came. Maybe there was a local exchange that didn’t require long distance?

Also from this fine media establishment:

• Warning: 73% of garden soil contains hidden drain chemicals affecting families for 18 months
• I tried this 2-ingredient summer mask at 53 and my dark spots faded 70% in 3 weeks (dermatologists explain why)
• Cold plunge warning: this 15-second exposure raises senior blood pressure by 40 mmHg

Also, for a writer named “John,” he seems to really like wearing women’s clothing

And I don’t know where he finds the time to get dressed considering he’s written 18 articles so far today some in just 14 minutes.

many book scanners use a wedge shape and two angled cameras to scan the pages when the book is held open at about a 5 degree angle

Very well executed, though not sure how I feel about the glass plate squishing the pages down like that.

CS 1.6 is how I learned about port forwarding

Ya gotta give me time to answer.

I used to teach AP physics to kids on the weekends. One asked me why Farads were so big. I had to explain that there’s a fixed ratio between Farads, Volts, and Joules. One of them had to be crazy big or crazy small.

See also Coulombs.

Caps are especially scary because they can develop their own charge through static electricity, so large value caps are often shipped with their terminals tied together.

The issue is not going up, it’s going over. If we only cared about the private sector getting people into space, that happened on a fully reusable vehicle twenty years ago.

The problem is getting things to stay in space. Not trying to Elon-stan here, but getting a rocket into orbit is many fold more difficult than just getting into space.

cosmetically tweaked

It would have to be super tweaked considering the phone you referenced has four cameras, and a notch style front camera.

My bet is that this is a 10 second photoshop job and the actual phone will look nothing like that.

I mean if you do a difference blend of two of the cameras, you get a perfectly black circle (minus some blending at the edges):

.

This means that the cameras are exact pixel-perfect copies of each other arranged in that order by photoshop. They don’t exist on any phone.

Accurate thumbnail

Mario taking a nap basically anywhere in Mario64 is cute.

eventually

It’s been ten fucking years. They are one of the top five companies in the world. What are we waiting for here?

All of the investors that originally paid into the idea have already made their money. There is no reason to continue the project.

I think that’s kind of the thing. They can’t physically make the camera any smaller, but they assume you’re going to make the phone thicker with a case. So it’s a compromise based on customer preference.

Highly recommend the When Phones were Fun series.

Even as pitched, you still have to print out a QR code and staple it to your front lawn for every package. Presumably, they want you to be home for it since it’s dropped out in the open and might bounce into the street.

Amazon announced using drones in 2014. In pop culture, drone delivery is like an assumed common practice. Yet fucking nobody gets their packages delivered by drone. It’s been over a decade.

These robots are vaporware. Amazon will get a stock bump and that’s the whole point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5133VkJ5Hlc&list=PLvHDW6f8HUaSL0XUD52Sox0z-kPjU-zcZ&index=21

It DOES NOT matter if it’s done with 3 feet to merge or 300 feet to merge. There’s no efficiency gain.

Merging early leaves unused road. Shoving the cars into fewer lanes makes the traffic jam longer and makes it impact more interesections far behind the actual hangup. If you can merge early without slowing down, sure go for it. I’m mostly talking about the scenarios where it’s already slowed to a crawl and people feel like they have to merge early to not be seen as “cutting in line.”

Edit, also to add, if everyone merges early even at speed, eventually, the car density in the reduced lanes will reach a point where people naturally slow down and you have bumper to bumper traffic.

I suggest Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt for more.

Zipper merging.

If your lane is closing ahead, it is better for everyone in traffic if you drive all the way to the end of the lane and cut in at the last moment.

Note that this does not apply to exit lanes. The basic rule is if late merging blocks someone from going somewhere, merge early. Otherwise, merge as late as you can.

I want everyone to realize that the only reason AI seems intelligent is because it speaks English.