yknow what i love? like what i really really love. fuckin.... PNEUMATIC TUBE LOGISTICS. like they're shit at bulk transport but you need something securely sent to a person within a minute, you blow it down a tube in a little capsule. that rocks. in fact, i know in england, big stores like asda have pneumatic tubes for sending money to the cash registers

yknow actually in a bunch of different industries, pneumatic tubes are still used! in factories it's convenient to have parts and tools sent direct to work areas via tube, and in many hospitals and laboratories, samples are sent for analysis in the same way

in the past they were used for a bunch of shit, mainly rapid transit of light materials like mail. across the world, mail sorting offices would have these crazy tube routers where people would work all day taking funny little capsules and sending them where they needed to go

all that being said, hyperloop is stupid. anyway enjoy these old pics of tube routers. crazy we still rely on these

everything at once (+ alternate version)

full resolution inspired by

drawn 2024-11-05

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#pebbleart

When someone tells a thirty-year veteran of Visual Basic that it’s a dead language.

ah. they’re saying the quiet part out loud now. that’s great

Microsoft has a new pitch to persuade businesses to spend money on artificial intelligence–powered services: If you use them, you won’t need as many employees.

The potential of AI to replace human workers is an old idea, but one most companies have avoided bringing up explicitly, for fear of suffering reputational harm and political attacks. But as tech companies try to overcome customer uncertainty about the value of AI, they’re becoming more direct about that possible benefit.

[…]

Typically, “these companies won’t say there’s job replacement because it looks bad for their reputation and image, and they don’t want to spark an outcry,” said Lisette Espín Noboa, a researcher at the Complexity Science Hub, a Vienna-based tech policy think tank.

In its new pitch to customers, though, Microsoft is also touting its own savings on labor costs thanks to AI. The company says that using technology from OpenAI, it built internal tools that help salespeople automatically generate customer lists and perform cold outreach, and it separately built a tool to help customer support agents send automatically generated responses to customer questions, allowing them to handle more cases.

Microsoft executives say these tools are a reason the company has maintained its sales growth rate despite laying off 10,000 people last year, and the executives have been encouraging salespeople to use that example to entice customers, according to three current sales employees.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-new-sales-pitch-for-ai-spend-less-money-on-humans

#ai

@nic postgres absolutely rocks

@apogeesys @bookofbeasts it sure sounds like potential Lawsuit Material to me

@portalz 1000%, I often work with wordpress (not directly, thankfully) and it Kinda Sucks

oh hey its bandcamp friday in 20 hours
what an excellent time to point critters towards our bandcamp page…………….
currently there’s just a bit of bailey’s ambient stuff but expect more to show up there Someday.

https://bestiarysys.bandcamp.com/

@KaydeArcane while I generally prefer playstation controllers, I have used an xbox controller with this type of dpad and it’s pretty great

today’s reading: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?:

It’s possible that consumers are happy to have the most minute details of their lives surveilled and monetized in return for seeing ads they might want to click on. This is a hard theory to test, because very few people even know they’re making the trade. However, one organization recently tried to find out. After the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect in 2018, a Dutch public broadcasting agency started prompting all visitors to its website to choose, in a clear and straightforward manner, whether they wanted their data shared with advertisers. The result? Ninety percent opted out, and the agency abandoned behavioral advertising altogether. (A Google spokesperson notes that all users can opt out of personalized ads, and that Google has long prohibited personalized advertising based on sensitive information.)

All things considered, "openly murdered someone in midtown Manhattan and made a clean getaway" is a pretty strong argument for bikes being the best mode of transportation.

Self-explanatory.

@RebaRabbit

@alyaza @it I didn't know calibre has a mobile app, I've just been using koreader on android with the calibre content server on my pc

thinking today about this Iceland Socialist Party quote: "What do you think it is worth to keep tens of thousands with a gnawing fear of income, to make it impossible for thousands upon thousands to use their talents, will, creativity and thirst for life to improve their lives and enrich society?"

hell we put shit we DO need in piles. we put shit we think we need in piles?? really we just like piles. the entire concept of a silo is just a pile with reinforced sides so we can make it higher. a quarry is just a reverse-pile so we can create piles out of the stuff we take out. a warehouse is just a pile with labels and shelves. factories take piles and turn them into more piles. a conveyor belt is a horizontal pile

@triangle-dog @Sacchihikaru yeah, that’s true, AM4 is still going strong (and also tbh I recommend AMD in general, their CPUs are better in pretty much every way imo, and also they don’t have the socket mess that intel has with their CPUs)

My cuban coworker just hit me with the “my phone is slow can you clean it for me” move but in spanish and I’m like “damn this shit really does transcend every barrier”

@Sacchihikaru it’s still being used, but tbh you might actually want a ddr5 mobo for better future upgrade paths

@Sacchihikaru the old GPU should still work with a new mobo, but it probably will be a bottleneck

you almost def will need new memory though (unless you pick smth that uses the same type)

protip everyone: if you ever heard anyone talk about electronic voting, whether positively or negatively (but primarily negatively) and they never once mention brazil, their argument is hot garbage and should be thrown straight into the trash.

this post was brought to you by: brazil has been doing country-wide electronic voting for longer than I’ve been alive and the fact that foreigners (primarily americans) think it’s some kind of novel untested idea makes me want to scream.