Yeah, I worked at Walmart for a bit and we were taught to look out for weird situations with gift cards and politely ask what the customer’s plan was. If we thought they were getting scammed, we’d get our manager involved to talk to them

I think this is an ESH situation. Fandom sucks for pushing their poison, Google sucks for drinking it

I’m not entirely sure if it uses Unicode, ASCII or something else…

I think I remember Automate the Boring Stuff with Python explaining that python uses ASCIIbetical order, but it’s been a minute since I read that book

Beeper + a python script could get this done

Oh I’m not trying to correct you I just have less than 0 social awareness and saw a word with a funny history so I shared my knowledge on it lol

Scuttlebutt in this case refers to gossip, which is also why the water fountains are called scuttlebutt - people would gossip around them

Anecdotally, the majority of people I’ve seen who self host are doing it to replace subscription services. This ranges anywhere from piracy to libre office. So, they’re not gonna pay you a subscription for something they can do themselves.

The audience is niche because you’re aiming at a subset of a subset of a subset of people. You’re looking to sell this to someone who:

1. Doesn’t want to pay for a service they can do by themself (self-hosters)
2. Has the knowledge and desire to handle networking (no amount of preconfiguration will make them not have to set up which ports their services need while allowing freedom)
3. But doesn’t have the time/energy to do it themself
4. Can afford to shell out a rather large amount of money ($150 is a lot to many people, and as the other person brought up; you’ll likely end up selling it for much more than this after manufacturing costs)
5. For a piece of equipment that is eclipsed by a 3 year old desktop computer from eBay

The amount of people who self host anything is already abysmally low - just look at the social media user count. There are more than twice as many people on r/pathofexile (which is already pretty niche) as on r/selfhosted. Obviously reddit isn’t the end-all be-all of representation in that way, but you can definitely get an idea of trends from it.

I’ve been poking around Beeper for a while, but only some of their code is open source unfortunately. They have good ideas in their privacy statements, but I haven’t personally verified them.

That being said, the functionality is insane. Combining a lot of the major messaging apps into one is incredibly convenient

His insurance won’t cover him in an accident

Are you sure he hasn’t taken the proper precautions of just getting commercial insurance and filing taxes 4x a year (assuming US based)? Like yeah, you shouldn’t just go get in your car and go to a bar and offer people rides for money but if this guy has regular customers I wouldn’t be surprised if he also knows how to look into his own rights

Using an AI as a regex checker is so smart and I’m mad it never occured to me that it was possible lol. I’ve just been pouring over random forum posts for it

If you already know what you want but want to save time writing it

IME, going to ChatGPT for code usually meant losing time, cause I’d go back and forth trying to get a usable snippet and it would just keep refactoring the same slop that didn’t work in its first attempt

I swapped from uBlock to AdNauseum. It’s a fork of uBlock which also “clicks” some specific ads in order to cost companies money for running them lol

Yes, but apparently that didn’t come across according to the votes lol

Yeah what do I care if Jimmy down the street enjoys using his Ollama chatbot? I’m too busy worrying about Terminator panning out

That makes sense. The VW I’m thinking of may have been level 3 (trying to remember autonomous driving levels off the top of my head so don’t quote me on this), as I believe it needed guidance from on-road infrastructure to double check safety issues, which would have obviously been too much hassle for the US.

The proof of concept was miles ahead of Tesla has ever been, though, so it’s unfortunate that we can’t be bothered to add some sensors to the road

Aren’t level 4 systems still illegal in the US anyway? I remember Volkswagen holding off on a minibus due to this limitation when they managed to create a working proof of concept 8ish years ago