Dollar, Thrifty and Hertz are all the same company now. They intentionally overbook. I don’t know the exact reason why, short of naked profiteering and not giving a fuck.

The last time I rented with them (initially Dollar) I booked several months beforehand and when I got up to their kiosks, I ended up getting one of the last cars that they had on hand. I know I got one of the last because as I was waiting (for hours), they first closed the Dollar storefront, then they closed the Thrifty storefront - funneling everybody into one line ultimately ending up at the Hertz storefront. Shortly after I got up to the desk and they were finally giving me my paperwork and keys, they began to shut down the Hertz storefront. At this point there were still literally more than a hundred people standing in line (it was a holiday). So closing up left a whole bunch of people carless and very, very angry. So even waiting for hours through this bullshit, I was one of the LUCKY ONES.

I booked the car online at the extortionate price of $800 for a week, but ever since the pandemic, rentals have been overly expensive so whatever. Subsequently, they proceeded to apply every possible extra to the rental, without my knowledge. Extra insurance, top tier insurance, full tank of gas, roadside assistance - everything - all of which are also at inflated prices. Not until I got home did I notice that the actual cost of this rental was going to be almost $1500, TWICE THE FEE I HAD BOOKED ONLINE. I had no choice but to accept it and get on with my driving vacation, but I never forget.

I truly do not know. I was using Budget, my truck was in the shop and two days’ rental was going to be $142. Two hours after reserving it my mechanic tells me he’s going to have me done today - so I cancel the reservation.

Because I chose “pay now” rather than “pay later”, I’m charged a $150 cancellation fee on a $142 rental (the fee posted on the website - $50 - is not for “prepaid” “same day” cancellations - not that the website told me this anywhere obvious, of course).

So I literally would have done better financially to drive the fucking thing around for two days for no good reason.

Protesting to customer service gets me a resounding “go fuck yourself.”

I’m now open to suggestions, I was using Budget because they had the best prices of what remained to me, but never again.

Dollar, Hertz and Thrifty car rental. Also Budget, but for different reasons.

Never use Dollar, Hertz or Thrifty under any circumstances unless you want to be fucked. Never prepay with Budget unless you want to be fucked.

We need to just work on making our own. Then the Vulcans will find us.

Can’t. Google shanked them all with anticompetitive behavior. So instead, I think I will do all I can to punish them for that.

I think where it shines is in helping you write code you’ve never written before. I never touched Swift before and I made a fully functional iOS app in a week. Also, even with stuff I have done before, I can say “write me a function that does x” and it will and it usually works.

Like just yesterday I asked it to write me a function that would generate and serve up an .ics file based on a selected date and extrapolate the date of a recurring monthly meeting based on the day of the week picked and its position (1st week, 2nd week, etc) within the month and then make the .ics file reflect all that. I could have generated that code myself by hand but it would have probably taken me an hour or two. It did it in about five seconds and it worked perfectly.

Yeah, you have to know what you’re doing in general and there’s a lot of babysitting involved, but anyone who thinks it’s just useless is plain wrong. It’s fucking amazing.

Edit: lol the article is referring to a study that was using GPT 3.5, which is all but useless for coding. 4.0 has been out for a year blowing everybody’s minds. Clickbait trash.

So… they think it will… vaccinate them?

I am confused. I realize this is just a flag change not even a dev problem but PEBKAC, still - in the event of an actual bug, why wouldn’t Microsoft have a dev contribute to the project and fix it instead of just opening a ticket?

Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.

Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.

But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can’t link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren’t a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it’s not just Facebook.

This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you’re searching for.

And it’s another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.

I’m sorry, which editor allows you to exit easily with escape colon q bang enter?

Uh huh. That’s what I thought.

What is religion, if not conjecture about the origin of mankind (and by extension the universe) that people believe without evidence?

Religion identifies the simulator and insists that its intermediaries can offer a liaison between you and them, and also that if you don’t believe in their particular simulator, you will be punished. It has been used for centuries to control the populace and to take their money.

A proponent of simulation theory isn’t likely to tell you that it solves any philosophical problems, or that they now understand the universe wholly. I’ve never heard anyone talking about it claim that they know who/what is behind the simulation.

So IMO the distinction between the two couldn’t be more clear.

I imagine there’s at least a couple wacko groups out of there trying to twist simulation theory into a purely religious endeavor, but that wouldn’t represent the mainstream conversation about it.

I hate an open catbox. I also don’t want to directly pick it up, bag or not. So I had to unclip the top and use a scoop, and I had three cats so I did it every day and I just effing hated it.

Did you have the large one? I have a 17lb long-haired Maine Coon and he has no issues with it, but I do have the large one.

This is going to sound like hyperbole, but this thing changed my life and I always love it when I get a chance to share it with somebody. It requires no electricity, it has no moving parts and in the 11 years I’ve been using one, it’s never broken. I give you: Omega Paw.

It requires clumping cat litter, so if you use that you’re golden. When it’s time to clean, you roll it - and as you roll, the loose litter flows through a grate, but the clumps and waste stay on top of the grate. As you continue to roll it, the waste falls to the ceiling. When you roll it back, the waste all falls into the drawer, which you pull out and dump. Cleaning the litter box takes literally 10 seconds. It’s awesome.

ChatGPT’s Answer:

The expression 6/2(1+2) involves both multiplication and division. According to the order of operations (PEMDAS/BODMAS), you should perform operations inside parentheses first, then any multiplication or division from left to right.

Let’s break down the expression step by step:

Inside the parentheses: 1 + 2 = 3

Now the expression becomes 6/2 * 3

Division: 6/2 = 3

Multiplication: 3 * 3 = 9

So, 6/2(1+2) is equal to 9.

Amazingly well put. Capitalism is necessary. Unrestrained capitalism is deadly. The unfortunate reality of capitalism is that even as it is in the process of burning everything to the ground, it looks for all the world like glorious success. And it is glorious success, if you don’t compare it to what could be in a system where it was properly restrained.

Soaking seems like a particularly egregious loophole.

Boy does this ring true. I worked for years for a giant multinational publisher and one of their biggest sources of income was taking government money for educational stuff for schools and turning that money into absolutely no useful products while making sure no opportunity to hire another middle manager was overlooked.

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No, dynamic content should absolutely be able to be delivered through the open Web, not just through walled gardens. Apps are almost universally shit.