rockostrich

The UI and graphics are 100% just a reskin of Krillion...

Holding flights and hotel bookings like that is possible although any kind of online travel agent doing it at scale will not last very long. Travel is still pretty relationship focused when it comes to inventory and if an OTA tries to do things that create churn on that inventory then it will get flagged pretty quickly.

An aggregator or AI assistant like Muse might have better luck although the mechanism for those will require charging whatever credit card you give it. For flights, it should work just fine in the US. There is a mandatory fully-refundable 24 hour cancellation period on all flights booked more than 7 days in advance through US point-of-sale, or they have to honor a 24 hour hold without payment but not both. Hotels get a bit dicier since the policy there will be dependent on each hotel.

For what it's worth, the same thing happens with physicians.

For some reason when I was living in Jersey City about 7 years ago, there was a lack of dermatologists in the area that took my insurance and were also taking new patients. I finally found one, made an appointment, and went in for a full skin exam. I waited for about 20 minutes after my appointment time, finally was called in, the dermatologist commented that someone my age (late 20s) shouldn't have any acne on their chest and tried to prescribe and sell me a bunch of ointments directly from his office. He spent maybe 2 minutes looking at me and definitely didn't do a full skin exam.

A couple of years ago I moved and had to find a new PCP. Went to the first one I could find that was close-ish and took my insurance. While I'm in the waiting room, I see 50% of the people leaving with these packs of meal replacement shakes for weight loss. When I was finally called back, I see a bunch of signs about subscriptions for the shakes and all of the different flavors they had. I ended up getting a physical from the PA in the office instead of the physician that I had made my appointment with. I have nothing against PAs or NPs, but I expect to see the physician I make my appointment with. The whole thing was so shady that I ended up just finding a new PCP.

Most states still have very strange laws around alcohol due to the aftermath of prohibition.

I grew up in NY where beer cannot be sold in liquor stores, but can be sold in grocery stores. But grocery stores can only sell beer that is less than 6% ABV so any beer that is higher ABV can only be sold directly by breweries or by beer distributors.

Right next store in NJ, beer is only sold in liquor stores and for the longest time breweries could not legally sell you beer for on-site consumption so a bunch of breweries got around this by offering a $5 tour and as a part of the tour you were given a glass of beer.

Your point is valid for individual developers or small teams of technical folks.

However, MCPs are a godsend to anyone trying to manage access to systems (especially SaaS systems) in a large organization that includes a ton of non-technical employees. We use at least a couple of SaaS products where RBAC is severely limited in what it can govern or where API keys do not have any kind of governance so handing one out is basically handing out read/write on the entire system. Being able to configure an MCP to only have read endpoints enabled it a very useful piece of duct tape. Obviously it would be great if the underlying API was just designed with proper governance but that's out of the user's control.

My primary beef with my home built in 1963 is that half of the switches aren’t wired to what you would expect and I have no attic or basement with access to make it easy to rewire. Home assistant and smart switches are a godsend because I can repurpose the existing switch boxes to actually do what I want them to do with the added bonus of being able to control them remotely from my phone.

Google: Charges out the wazoo for a half baked product built on top of Dataflow

It's crazy how good puzzle creators are. I've watched a bunch of videos on it and I'm still in awe of how effortless they make it seem.

Not sure if this is some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or if OP just also did the NYT crossword this morning.

I've lived in east coast cities (NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia) for the majority of my adult life and while homelessness is less of a problem in the northeast because of the climate there is still a good amount of it in the major cities. I think it becomes way too easy to tune out those commentaries and avoid the parts of the city that they apply to.

In Philadelphia, I lived a few blocks away from the Girard stop on the L train. I would just avoid walking by the station because it was a hang out for homeless people and drug users in the area. Pretty much everywhere within a 10 block radius of the station is built up, there's always people out, and it feels like all of the local businesses in the area are thriving (more recently there's been too many chains opening up which sucks but I digress), there's barely any homelessness or crime with the exception of package thieves (I just bought a $20 box off amazon to put in front of my house and never had a problem) and the occasional car window being smashed.

In NYC, especially Manhattan although the same applies to the outer boroughs, unless you live around a more touristy area then you don't even think about it. In Boston even less so besides downtown.

I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution. There's obviously a greater social issue across the US and other developed nations and it's a very hard problem to start solving, but I would guess that most cities continue to ignore it as long as its easy for the majority of the population to ignore it.

To be fair to the person you're responding to, airbag systems in modern vehicles are a lot safer than the single airbag per front passenger in older cars. The original airbag systems were just a single bag that deployed at a single rate based on an inertia sensor. Modern systems have several bags with multi-stage deployments that are inflated depending on seat belt and weight sensors.

But yea, as for the rest of the "safety mechanisms" the only modern change that I can think of that's not easy to retrofit but is a huge safety boost is blind spot detection. As someone that drives older (and smaller) cars, being able to see the blind spot detection light on other cars' mirrors is always a bit of a relief that their car will notify them if they try to change lanes.

> They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.

> USB-C got mangled by office chair. If I had been a USB designer in an office, this would have been the FIRST thing I would have stress tested for

Seems like you managed to break one even though it was in the environment that you're saying they're designed for. Maybe you're the problem and USB-C, the technology that billions of people manage to use just fine without breaking on a daily basis, is perfectly fine.

I don't think so. LLMs tend to over-index on providing results in general whether it's a conclusion or not. When you ask it "What are typical things that go wrong with this type of vehicle?" you're forcing it to make a conclusion about which results to include and it will almost certainly provide results even if those issues aren't as much of a concern compared to typical issues with other vehicles.

For example, I just prompted Kimi-K2.6 with:

> I'm considering buying a used base model 2010 Honda Civic with 80k miles that's been garage kept. What are typical things that go wrong with this type of vehicle?

It listed 10 issues including the engine block cracking (which wasn't even an issue with 2010 Civics). Started a new chat and asked about a 2010 Toyota Camry, another unbelievably reliable car, and it listed 9 similar issues. Started a new chat and asked about a 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee, a notoriously unreliable vehicle, and it listed the same number of issues.

Sure it's data to make decisions on either way, but it really all comes down to how good your prompts are and whether or not you can think critically about the output, whether or not that output is a conclusion or just data collection.

Heh, I hear stories like that everyday from my partner who is an ICU nurse. Not as dire, but there are constant inter-department arguments about moving patients because of resource constraints and the ICU could end up completely understaffed/resource constrained if the wrong NP or charge nurse is working. I'm amazed our healthcare system works at all to be honest.

The whole point of the article is that families found spaces in their house to fit in a computer and it became the computer room even if it served other purposes.

> At my grandparents’ house, it was their office in the corner of the house. Their desktop PC was far from the kitchen, bedrooms, and living room, sandwiched between the coat rack and the washing machine.

In my house, the computer room was just our spare bedroom which ended up being the bedroom that my cousin lived in when we moved in with us to finish high school. I remember bugging my mom while she was playing solitaire, free cell, or minesweeper to see if I could use the computer to play Civilization 3 or Roller Coaster Tycoon.

At my friend's house it was a little inset desk on the middle floor of their split level that doubled as their dad's office. At my aunt's house it was a deck in the back of their living room next to their CD collection.

It was never a room completely devoted to the computer, but to the person who used the computer the most it became the computer room.