Root_Denied

A couple more to add to your list: an inch is about as long as your thumb joint (with some variation between individuals obviously). It's an easy way to gauge the size of everyday objects without needing to carry around a tape measure.

The recommendation for emergency supplies is about a gallon of water per person per day - or 3.7 liters if you're using metric.

I've also heard it claimed that the 0-100 Fahrenheit scale is more functionally useful because the endpoints of 0 and 100 represent the tipping point of serious danger for humans from hot or cold weather. The closer you get to 100 degrees the more care you need to take about heat stroke and keeping hydrated, and similarly the closer you get to 0 degrees the more care you need to take about retaining heat and staying out of the elements - the freezing and boiling point of water isn't a necessary marker for survival. And people like nice round numbers to serve as markers for such things, divisibility be damned.

Metric is sterile and functional for calculation and consistency, which is fine and necessary for many things, but that's not a reason to completely ditch Imperial.

The datacenters certainly aren't helping their case.

We're 10 years out from the Epochalypse as well. Past a certain point you need a governing body to intervene to force the issue in advance of problems with systems, and we've got a dearth of functioning governments these days.

I was going to say that the court looking at this at all is a recession indicator...

Did you get better?

Yeah, Fintech is specifically the kind of startup and post-startup space. Companies that predate the DotCom Bust and GFC would be a decent delineator for banking/finance companies that aren't fintech.

Fintech != banking/finance, at least not necessarily.

From a consumer perspective there's an unknown number of layers between your actions or instructions and what the backbone tech of the bank is doing, but having worked in the space I can point to a few things.

Firstly, the transaction failed and notified you about the error - that's certainly intentional.

Second, there's failures that would be invisible to you as the customer, such as "instead moving $100 from account A to account B it credited account B but didn't debit account A, without generating an error". Those are mostly the systems I'm talking about being insulated from AI development. Without more detail about the exact problem you had it's hard to tell if it's a failure in customer facing systems or backend infra.

Third, I'm assuming you were able to reach out to the bank directly and resolve the issue by talking to a person (if the issue was really outside the norm), which isn't something you can assume will be possible with a lot of customer service ops these days (or you're going to be waiting hours/days for that callback).

Fourth, you can't really know the error rate of the bank's systems, or how common a given particular error is. It may be a known issue, or it may be a completely unreported one. Assuming it's an error with something on the backend/backbone of the bank's operations, it's running code that can be inspected, reviewed, understood, and fixed - sometimes by a very expensive COBOL consultant.

Banking/Finance is the one industry I've seen push back against this type of thinking. Transactions must be handled in a perfect and repeatable way, or the system is unusable as far as the company is concerned.

There's definitely still AI/LLM integration happening, but is kept out of specific areas of the business.

I'd say it's still very worth playing. It has a lot of tropes that future games took inspiration from, and it's art style is iconic (in part because the character designer and art direct was Akira Toriyama, of Dragonball fame). If nothing else the soundtrack will grab you by the ears and draw you in.

I've seen people bounce off of it, no shame if that happens - in typical JRPG fashion of the time it came out it's involved (there's some non-intuitive progression steps) and takes about 20-30 hours to complete.

There's a DS version which I can't speak to since I've only played the original SNES version, but I understand it adds some additional content that's not required for the story.

> The purpose of a system is what it does.

I'm a fan of a slightly different version of this that I heard years ago:

"Just because something isn't working as advertised, doesn't mean it's not working as intended."

I'm seeing this happen in the security space right now. Someone on my team I was helping train and bring along is all of sudden regressing in their understanding of the issues we're working on, and instead focusing on AI tool outputs to do their job for them.

The problem I see with this approach is threefold.

First, from a technical standpoint the required context window would be massive if you're looking at a person's career/life holistically. Probably solvable, but definitely something to be aware of.

Second, privacy goes completely out the window since you're sharing everything. You don't know what's relevant and what's not up front so you need to provide everything.

Third, you would need a training dataset of all those input variables and their outcomes to be able to provide any sort of useful output. The first set of people to share everything wouldn't be able to derive any value from the tool, and I think you'd be hard pressed to convince enough people to do it to get a useful dataset.

One issue that I see with this type of system is that it doesn't allow for parental/guardian oversight of what kids are doing or discussing.

Ever gone down the auto-suggestion rabbit hole on YouTube Kids? You start getting into weird and potentially disturbing territory much more quickly than you'd expect.

China has spent the last couple of decades making inroads into Africa to secure raw materials, not because they want to annex anything on the continent.