No answer just curious as well, I’d love a good text to speech function. There are so many books I want to “read” but don’t have audiobooks for them, I have a hard time focusing on text for very long, so it hard to get through longer things.

oh yah, I remember the absolute torrent of crypto shills that started spamming the place when crypto shill posts from other subs started getting posted there.

They were proper angry that they got called out.

Companies definitely astroturf on Reddit, but, they do it through third or even fourth parties. There is a whole micro industry of vote buying and comment spamming, ad firms or companies will pay such groups to add certain messaging to their comment spam. You can actually make a quick buck by selling any old Reddit accounts to such groups.

Most menus are fixed paper with back lighting not changing displays, most of the places that have the new displays added them at the same time as the touch screen stations.

The menu is 6 foot across, above the counter where you order, glowing, with pictures of each item and number next to it. Even someone who couldn’t read could order food using the normal system.

I’ve literally ordered by signing a number with my fingers to indicate the item I wanted in a country where I don’t speak the language at a fast food franchise I’d never been to before.

I prefer just saying “can I get a medium #2 combo, please.” And being done with it.

I suspect that even if they were abandoning future plans for AI drive through ordering, they wouldn’t say they were. Saying you’re not doing anything with AI might actually hurt a companies share price right now.

Because they’re playing a role, an actor so to speak, they’re not presenting their own personal opinions. They’re vocalizing and embodying the output of a series of complex internal mechanism, it’s a slow moving self optimizing system beyond the comprehension of any individual working with in the system.

Much like AI’s it often outputs stupid shit.

most of the bitcoin being spent on electricity and hardware gets exchanged for actual currency before it is spent. And most of the luxury goods sales are gimmicks and limited time.

And there is a huge amount of criminal activity with bitcoin still, they just mainly use it to launder money now as the transactions are impractically slow and costly for anything but particularly large trades.

The vast majority of the crypto world failed to understand one key concept, money is not the value for which goods/services are exchanged, it is the value by which they are exchanged. People do not have a use or value for money beyond what it can be exchanged for, if no one is willing to exchange for it, it has no value.

Crypto only had value as a currency if people would accept it for goods or services, and the only thing people ever accepted it as payment for, in any meaningful capacity, were illegal goods and services. The value beyond that was purely based on a speculative ideological assumption that people would abandon the traditional banking system for a new system that they couldn’t buy anything with.

What I find most interesting, is not that twitter is failing in active users faster than the others, but that all the other listed in the article are also all seeing a decline in user ship. Even the new “up and comer” TikTok is losing users.

To some extent I suspect that it’s just a result of people breaking their social medias built during the pandemic. But is there something else? Are they just going to new platforms? Is there a modal shift on how people congregate online driven by the issues with platforms? Or are people just spending less time online with the pandemic mostly over.

My favorite are people out here advocating for battery/hydrogen buses and trains, like we have overhead/third-rail electrification! IT IS A SOLVED TECHNOLOGY! It is older than internal combustion engines, for pete’s sake!

Suburbs, are inherently higher carbon emitting that proper urban areas. For an extreme example, if everyone in the US lived in an area with similar characteristics to NYC, it would reduce the counties carbon emissions by 3/4.

Beyond that, they’re only really able to exist, as they do in the US, thanks to exploitative and predatory economic practices. Almost no one who lives there makes their money there, they work somewhere else, extracting value, and then bringing it back to the suburb to fund incredibly inefficient infrastructure.

I’m not saying ban them complete, I’m just saying, take away the massive amount of economic incentives and support that makes them possible. Build out housing in cities and ensure the value generated in them goes to funding their services, infrastructure and development of the cities.

Make the suburbs pay for them selves and they will nearly disappear very quickly.

Yah, Plenty of liberals shit them selves when you suggest giving an unalloyed good away for free.

The term environmentalist has so much stupid baggage tied to it.

I’m tired of having to share labels with people who refuse to do anything other than small superficial personal choices. Folks who will baulk at the suggestion of a carbon tax, their energy bills going up, more nuclear plants being built near them or, subsidies and infrastructure for low income people who are seriously hurt by such changes.

This is a systemic problem that requires systemic changes that will fundamentally alter things we take for granted right now. It’s going to suck and it’s going to be hard, there is no easy simple way out.

Which is to say, the average person is in fact not stupid, they are average. By definition.

Look up a bell curve, most measurements of intelligence that have been conceived end up making a bell curve distribution. That’s your answer, most people pool up around the middle with smaller tails on either end.

I think the problem is that a lot of political discourse is super constrained, most of these polls are “do you like trump or like Biden” there’s no option to express the opinion of “I hate both of them but one slightly more”. Of course that’s going to create weird results! If they have to twist the answers to get there displeasure across and scare the DNC in to taking them seriously, that’s what they have to do.

I think there is possibly a dissonance being created by how lobby money influences the thinking of campaigns. Say voters care about reducing fossil fuel dependency, say they care about ending support for Israel, say voters care about ending for profit health insurance, say voters care about breaking up corporate oligopolies, these are all toxic pills to many donors. Campaigns don’t feel they can endorse or condemn these things, so they refuse to even engage with the topics. These incredibly important political issues are just… removed from official political discourse, thus such things are kept out of the polls or reduced to anemic platitudes, so people can’t accurately express what they care about.

Younger voters are pissed at the democratic establishment and there is no statistical data based way for them to measure why. So the democratic establishment is left flailing in the dark, boxing with ghosts because they’ve blinded them selves to issues that pit their continents against donors. WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES FOR MOST YOUNGE VOTERS.