Oculus was pretty fun and a really nice piece of hardware. What was painful was all the meta things on top of it, which I doubt was something he personally added.
I worked at the Staff level for a while, I think the key is to report to a director who manages managers. Every time I did I had a good time, projects were easy to define and people were easy to convince. I had the same level with a few managers who were managing other ICs, and that never worked. Other ICs try to compete on tasks, people don't come to you with their needs, you learn about different projects often too late, other teams are territorial and don't really want you to intervene.
I was considering it but got cold feet when I've been told that you could damage it when cleaning it. When I open/close my laptop I leave a ton of finger prints. I'm not too good with delicate hardware stuff.
I clean mine routinely and it's fine for me. I did recently start keeping a thin cleaning cloth on my keyboard for when I close it though. Oil from my fingers on the keyboard was getting on the screen.
isopropyl alcohol, 70%, as a first pass, soapy water after that. I might skip the isopropyl if things aren't too bad. This is per apple's own recommendations.
Amazon search looks bad for us because it is designed to sell ads. Its goal is to make company pay the most money to show articles.
Iirc, when this was proposed, Jeff Bazos said that this was the most stupid idea he ever heard.
I think the reason why it was introduced, and why Executives don't want to change it, is that it generates a ton of money for Amazon.
I'd personally love if in the end this would be the reason that Amazon stop making money and it would have been some short sighted greedy move. I'm afraid that advertisement, when it comes down to numbers, is just damn too profitable.
Unfortunately the store's primary revenue source seems to be from advertisers bidding on sponsored search result slots instead of the actual product sales.
Which can't possibly be actually true, since advertiser bids must necessarily be funded by actual product sales - I guess there's an edge case where an independently successful business intentionally overspends on Amazon ads to quash potential competitor discovery, relying on non-Amazon sales to make up for the deficit, but I can't imagine that's a particularly common result.
If people give up on buying things from Amazon because there's just no way to find reliably usable products, Amazon will eventually lose out on that advertising revenue. So either we're mid way through that process, or there's something more complicated going on.
"""
Unfortunately, I can't generate images of people. My purpose is to be helpful and harmless, and creating realistic images of humans can be misused in ways that are harmful. This is a safety policy that helps prevent the generation of deepfakes, non-consensual imagery, and other problematic content.
If you'd like to try a different image prompt, I can help you create images of a wide range of other subjects, such as animals, landscapes, objects, or abstract concepts.
"""
It's unfortunate they can't just explain the real reason they don't want to generate the image:
"Unfortunately I'm not able to generate images that might cause bad PR for Alphabet(tm) or subsidiaries. Is there anything else I can generate for you?"
The rejection message doesn’t seem to be accurate. I tried “happy person” as a prompt in AI Studio and it generated a happy human without any complaints.
It’s possible that they relaxed the safety filtering to allow humans but forgot to update the error message.
It's hard to put a specific number on it, since it's been progressively improving the whole time I had it. I bought it in the fall of 2023, and got it "running" then, but it was not actually doing any useful work. Summer of 2024 it was doing useful work but required constant hand holding and a series of hardware and software upgrades to get it more stable. This year it is actually doing the majority of the mowing. It still requires frequent rescue but it's a lot less work than actually mowing the lawn myself.
However my lawn is probably the most difficult lawn of any openmower user. I'm in Vermont, so I have very steep terrain, a bumpy yard, poor GPS reception, very wet weather, and also my lawn is very large and complex shaped. For a simple use case it would be working great a long time ago. I also chose to do a "Mowgli" build which is based on more reverse engineering, which added complexity and unreliability (but saved some money).
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