squaresinger

Thanks for the summary! That sounds freaky!

Well, the trade-off between trusting a huge corporation or a single dude on the internet.

What exactly happened there? It was the big thing, then I didn't use it for a month or so and then it was gone.

In a company I used to worked in, they hired a new guy for our team. Contract was signed, he resigned from his last position. New budget comes in a week before he was supposed to start, and his position was cut.

He was basically let go before he started working for us.

Even if you make them in large quantities, material cost alone will be at least €50k. You will need a skilled operator nearby, and constant maintainance, and if you lose even one per year, a regular underpaid human worker will be much cheaper.

These things are pure marketing devices to pacify investors, generate headlines and make unions and workers afraid.

Because it's not real. It's purely for marketing, not for actual wide-spread implementation.

Even in the best of cases, even factoring in economy of scale and all that, a robot like that will cost upwards of €50k at least, probably closer to double that, will require constant maintainance, and the risk of vandalism or accidental damage is really high. And you'll likely need a (skilled) human operator nearby anyway, because the delivery vehicle doesn't drive itself.

The purpose of projects like this is marketing and public perception.

• The company looks futuristic and future proof. That's good to get investors.
• The company looks like they could replace humans with robots at any time. That's good with negotiations with unions and workers.
• The company gets into headlines worldwide. That's advertisement they don't have to pay for.

This robot is not meant to ever go mainstream. Maybe there will be a handful of routes where they will be implemented for marketing purposes, but like drone delivery and similar gimmicks, it won't beat a criminally underpaid delivery human on price, and that's the only metric that counts for a company like Amazon.

"Prescription glasses" only mean "glasses with optical properties", so glasses that actually do anything with focus, as opposed to e.g. non-prescription sunglasses or non-prescription accessory glasses that people wear to look smart or something.

It doesn't mean you need a prescription for them.

(That said: in some countries you need a prescription for your prescription glasses if you want your health insurance to pay for them.)

I'm considering getting a Switch 1 now. I can find hackable ones for €100 in my area.

But then again, it doesn't really do anything I can't do with my other devices.

I researched a little to figure out what they are on about, and there seem to be three main options, depending on how much of a semblance of a democracy they want to keep up.

The simplest yet weakest way is what you described: A shadow president. Worked for Putin, why should it not work for Trump. The downside: If the puppet president develops a mind of his own, things can turn ugly(er).

The next option is to have Trump become vice presidet (the presidential term limit doesn't seem to apply to VP), then have the president resign and make Trump president instead, claiming that the 22nd only limits being elected twice, which might be ok with the letter of the law, but only an idiot or a tyrant would interpret it that way.

The third option would be to have the president use the appointment clause, which is very vague about to what exact offices the president can appoint someone. It doesn't explicitly state that the president can't appoint someone else to the office of president. But again, only an idiot or a tyrant would interpret it that way.

Goes to show: in many cases the hireing process is about dumb luck and nothing else. For both sides.

Not saying it necessarily belongs there, just that I saw it there.

Then again it was in a display about the evolution of consumer tech, and there were some newer smartphones there too, so I guess it did fit well into that.

Well, IRL hacking doesn't have exciting gameplay mechanics. So more realistic hacking game might not be such a clever idea.

A friend of mine was applying for a job where they required "at least 5 years knowledge with Angular version X.Y.Z" (can't remember the exact version, but they asked for all three numbers).

He said "I've got 7 years of knowledge with version X-2 to X+2".

The HR person was like "But you don't have 5 years of knowledge with version X.Y.Z, so you don't fit for the job".

The real fun part was that version X.Y.Z had only been out for two years at that time.