A lot of engineers view the touchscreen head unit to be the central nerve system of the car, when in reality it's just a peripheral. It's an accessory. It's like those gimmick CPU coolers with a watch sized display. They use different models of that screen for different trims of same cars. This article in fact discuss removal of the DCM unit, not removal of the touchscreen; the touchscreen is still 100% functional. Because the entire screen is just an accessory.
What that means is, those data collections don't necessarily go through that display thing, therefore collections consent/disable screen just might not be there. Maybe it's in the paper contracts or maybe they think cars aren't people, but my point is, a car is not built around the display, and there is no guarantee that the tracking code is on that part of the car.
Mullvad is a tiny world-famous ISP in Sweden that has zero KYC and explicit zero-log policy, specifically designed that way to enable mild abuses, that also accept PayPal, credit cards, and today I learned, cash in an anonymous envelope for payments. That doesn't scream US three-letter organization at all.
I do all my illegal shit over Mullvad and I've only been raided once.
(yes, I've been raided)
(I started using Mullvad after - because of - that)
(I don't do illegal shit, I just like some obfuscation of my trail because I enjoy fiddling with this stuff - which may have been why I ended up a raid target in the first place)
The pressure comes down through processors from Visa/MC. The new processor you sign up for gets the same phone call and give into the same set of demands, like a clockwork. The alternative has to be something that consumers of your product can handle that don't go through the CC infra, one that this caller don't have the numbers for.
It could be through vouchers sold at gas stations, bank transfers, QR payment apps, etc. But CC has by far the best penetration and most alternatives are weak at best.
If you do figure out the alternative payment or distribution strategy immune to pressure through CC, then it changes targets to legal systems and NGOs. You'd want couples of congresspeople or to push back on that front.
I see random offhand unsubstantiated online comments here and there including here on HN, that 1) chargeback rates of porn, games, and digital contents are significantly lower than anything else, and 2) credit card companies already charge higher fees for porn despite that.
Combined with prevalence of the suspiciously well standardized "because porn users and gamers chargeback Steam purchases way too often" canned responses, I think it's just an excuse, if not "the" excuse somewhere - like the basis for using incorrect data for internal risk modeling or something like that.
I've seen the chargeback rates, they are low. Consider that most adult consumers are repeat purchasers (subscribing to their favorite artist/dev/performer). They do not want to get banned for a chargeback and lose out on content! Most adult content creators also have friendly voluntary refund policy when requested. So chargeback rates are very low in adult.
Meanwhile other industries like travel have crazy high chargeback rates. This is because it is notorious for a no refund policy / locking customers into purchases months in advance... and then people just chargeback instead of accepting a consumer hostile no refund policy. So travel ends up having high chargebacks... and yet has minimal trouble getting processing.
I thought that, managers are employees to the corporate too, they're themselves measured and they need proof of work to get paid just like campus janitors.
If a manager or a manager's workforce under it just sat around and ignored AI just because it's stupid and irrelevant and useless, they lose one tool to justify their existence amongst their peers who do not express such views. If they sat around and did their jobs as-before WHILE "investing" on tokenmaxxing, they gain a double dip-able vanity metric like "we spent 12.34 quadrillion tokens last quarter" plus "our new method helped us reduce token count by 10^24 this quarter".
You may call it a fraudulent behavior from a hypothetical shareholder's perspective in this hypothetical scenario, which it is, and call it Goodhart's law scenario too, which it also is, but it's a completely normalized behavior in relative terms. Project Hail Mary is a lighthearted work of fiction.
They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers. They couldn't survive without banning them. The situation was similar to IBM PC, but Prusa Research was no IBM.
yeah, they seem all confined to being an American-consultant-Chinese-authoritarian split personality with broad second language capabilities. I suppose they become too incoherent otherwise.
IMO that was a really weird choice that everyone seemed to make. DDR5 2x64GB before the spike was like $250. I had not much justification to NOT go with 64GB for my pre-COVID build.
It seems that a lot of PC building people are confused too deeply by Intel marketing and fixated on getting the flashiest CPU attainable within budget. Similar things happened with previous AI hype, and some people were using HDD boot drives on GPU rigs and asking others whether low end i7 would cut it. They acted very confused when told that they need SSD and Pentium is plentium.
I mean, there is a shortage going on, but when it'll be over anyhow - whether due to all the last three standing filing bankruptcy or CXMT-Huawei starts delivering in shiploads or Kioxia enters the market - and it comes back down to $2/GB, or even $5/GB, just max it out and forget about it for 10 years. Why not.
Oh so AdBlue shortage is about to hit the US too?
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