This assignment is literally a fill in the blanks to complete a set of code to make it produce values expected by the assignment.

I’m currently doing an online Master’s with Northeastern. Honestly not surprised this happened, the quality of classes is WILD.

Taking 2 classes per term, and each term so far 1 class has been very well designed but also insanely easy, while the other has been so poorly implemented that the course learning materials don’t actually help you do the coursework.

Probably most astonishing so far though is a course I’m taking now just served me with the literally exact same assignment that I did for a course I just finished. Now, granted that both classes are from the elective course choices, so not everyone will take both, but come on… and they grill me about plagiarism with every submission I make…

See, people say that ad companies can use all this information they gather to better serve targeted advertising, but that’s just not my anecdotal experience.

I get served ads all the time in languages I don’t speak, for VERY specific job related audiences that I’m not even close to related to, state politics that I’ve never lived in, services that I’m already actively subscribed to, just the worst targeting ever.

If I have to get advertised to, I’d so much rather get an ad that could actually be at all relevant to my life, or even some generic ad over the total misses.

Like, if you’re going through the trouble to do all this shady shit to get my data at least be good at it using it…

Settings is the bloat. Control Panel reigns supreme.

The only 100% effective method I’ve found is pulling the plug.

Idk about anyone else, but my struggles to even just execute the command to shut off a timer/alarm…

Contracts are no where near that standardized, it might just come down to the specific language/clause that was used, either done deliberately or just some lawyer group’s normalized process.

Some human ones are also just actively really bad at it. As both a manager and applicant, I’ve seen they can hinder hiring good candidates.

Article says the erroneous menus weren’t distributed. So, probably not.

Removing the allergen warning is basically some form of attempted manslaughter.

I would generally say they’re great with anything you happy being 100% right 90% of the time.

Maybe more like the new Oak Island Money Pit.

I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted.

My wife has a NordicTrack bike, it auto adjusts resistance and incline. Insane people would pay more and not even get that.

There are women who intentionally choose to be a single parent. Like they’re single, they get a sperm donor, have a kid. It’s not some insane thing. Kids should have a supportive and caring environment, whomever raises them. Not every kid with a single caregiver is neglected, nor is every kid with 2 or more caregivers properly cared for.

Gotta crank up that dystopia meter.

This is slowly moving toward having Content On Demand. Imagine being able to prompt your content app for a movie/series you want to watch, and it just makes it and streams it to you.

If by AI, you mean the things people are making today and calling AI, no, they’re all basically powerful regression algorithms. They can be strong tools for people to use to solve complex problems. Anything a program does will be based on what it was programmed to do, at best it will find novel things based on being programmed to look for novel things randomly and people will test and confirm those guesses. They already kind of do this for some medical purposes. Is trying an uncountably large number of randomized guesses and giving a probability for success based on historical data intelligent?

Could a true AI exist like we see in SciFi, maybe?

Other people had the capability to do what Copernicus did, but lacked desire/resources. A LLM will never have the capability for a novel idea.

The Kickstarter wasn’t just selling “the book”, it sold four things (we’ll get back to this) and wasn’t trying to “get back at Amazon”. I believe the Kickstarter was an appropriate option, even without considering his inability to independently bankroll the final scope of the project.

The four things:

1. A Premium Hardcover of the novels. This is the first time that the initial print version of one of his novels was released as a Premium Hardcover (albeit they did glue the binding), demand was very much not predictable and using KS helped to ensure everyone who wanted the limited print hardcover could get one (over 90k of each were needed).

2. DRM-free ebook of the novels. This was entirely risk-free for the consumer, they already essentially existed. This was essentially a pre-order, it is really only justified on KS because of #1.

3. Audiobook of the novel. Similar to #2, however I guess there was some minor consumer risk in that the audio needed to be recorded still, but Brandon does have reliable narrators and though he tried and failed at getting special narrators, that wasn’t part of the pitch.

4. Swag Boxes. This is the biggest item type to justify KS usage, they needed tools like they get from KS to be able to properly manage the monthly subscription box fulfillment. This did have some consumer risk, because it isn’t what they normally do, Sanderson couldn’t bank roll it himself (even after the $40M Kickstarter, he’s only got a 6M$ net worth) and it was largely an unknown in the book publishing space.

Back to the Amazon bit, it wasn’t a selling point to the KS, Amazon isn’t mentioned at all. He did decide to support competition in the Audiobook space as part of his fulfillment. In fact, all 4 of the novels are available on Amazon as print and ebooks, published through deals with his traditional publishers.

The way in which he decided to sell these novels (bundled content types and subscriptions) wasn’t something his traditional publishers were agreeable to and the KS was used as a proof of concept for that.

The KS raised $41M dollars, it’s the largest KS campaign ever by double. There’s a 0% chance the project would have been any where near remotely successful (and enjoyed by fans) if he’d tried to deliver it in a more traditional way. He didn’t have support of his publishers for that, he couldn’t afford it himself and the only other option would be a business loan, which we don’t know if he could have received a large enough one. Regardless of funding, the demand smashed expectations, less people would have got what they wanted in a traditional purchase method.

Yeah, there are bad board game companies on KS, take your complaints up with them. Which reminds me, I need to see when my physical edition pledge of Z from 2013 is due…