An upscale but retro-themed gaming cafe would probably do well in a big enough city.

Like, instead of selling only Red Bull (but do sell that too) sell quality espresso. Instead of just instant Ramen (but do sell that too), sell Japanese-restaurant style Ramen. Charge a fair price for that, heck overcharge for it. It’s a bit like a movie theatre, but you’re getting quality goods not just popcorn.

You could also do well with the kinds of setups that most people can’t have at home because of space / time constraints. Like a proper VR setup with the space you actually need to take advantage of it. A Flight Sim cockpit with a good HOTAS setup. A racing setup with pedals and stick. Also, just simple stuff like couches in front of a big screen for playing console games together. Even people who have a couch, big TV and good console at home probably don’t get to have their pals over for gaming sessions much because they need to share the couch with spouses and kids.

Also, have lockers on-site people can rent out to store consoles, peripherals, etc. So, someone can come in, rent out a “booth”, and go get their gear out of the locker if there are specialty things they want that aren’t provided by the cafe.

I used something recently where it wasn’t possible to use the traditional-style args. I think it was a “diff”, which meant I needed a “-f”. It wasn’t a big deal, but, occasionally it does happen.

Very patriotic.

If you want famous actresses who contributed to technology, you want Hedy Lamarr:

At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.

One reason is that tar supports both traditional style args “tar tf <filename.tar>” and unix-style args “tar -tf <filename.tar>” but there are subtle differences in how they work.

You can throw Margaret Hamilton in there, who was in charge of the software team that landed people on the moon. The picture of her standing next to a printout of the Apollo guidance software is iconic.

No, I don’t think so. It’s true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.

In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today’s programming were from Grace Hopper’s era in the 1950s.

In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.

That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.

Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”.

Do rockets count as artillery science? The first rockets basically served the same purpose as artillery, and were operated by the same army groups. The innovation was to attach the propellant to the explosive charge and have it explode gradually rather than suddenly. Even the shape of a rocket is a refinement of the shape of an artillery shell.

Verne wasn’t able to imagine artillery without the cannon barrel, but I’d argue he was right. It was basically “artillery science” that got humankind to the moon. The first “rocket artillery” were the V1 and V2 bombs. You could probably argue that the V1 wasn’t really artillery, and that’s fair, but also it wasn’t what the moon missions were based on. The moon missions were a refinement of the V2, which was a warhead delivered by launching something on a ballistic path.

As for generative AI, it doesn’t have zero fidelity, it just has relatively low fidelity. What makes that worse is that it’s trained to sound extremely confident, so people trust it when they shouldn’t.

Personally, I think it will take a very long time, if ever, before we get to the stage where “vibe coding” actually works well. OTOH, a more reasonable goal is a GenAI tool that you basically treat as an intern. You don’t trust it, you expect it to do bone-headed things frequently, but sometimes it can do grunt work for you. As long as you carefully check over its work, it might save you some time/effort. But, I’m not sure if that can be done at a price that makes sense. So far the GenAI companies are setting fire to money in the hope that there will eventually be a workable business model.

If you use it basically like you’d use an intern or junior dev, it could be useful.

You wouldn’t allow them to check anything in themselves. You wouldn’t trust anything they did without carefully reading it over. You’d have to expect that they’d occasionally completely misunderstand the request. You’d treat them as someone completely lacking in common sense.

If, with all those caveats, you can get this assistance for free or nearly free, it might be worth it. But, right now, all the AI companies are basically setting money on fire to try to drive demand. If people had to pay enough that the AI companies were able to break even, it might be so expensive it was no longer worth it.

The special area of “Etc” is used for some administrative zones, particularly for “Etc/UTC” which represents Coordinated Universal Time. In order to conform with the POSIX style, those zone names beginning with “Etc/GMT” have their sign reversed from the standard ISO 8601 convention. In the “Etc” area, zones west of GMT have a positive sign and those east have a negative sign in their name (e.g “Etc/GMT-14” is 14 hours ahead of GMT).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#Area

I saw this one posted recently. Two British actors, both 34 in their respective photographs. One is Sean Connery, born in 1960 so the photo was taken in 1964/65, the other is Thomas Brodie Sangster, born in 1990.

Sean Connery’s path to 34 involved a lot more drinking and smoking. Sangster presumably has a skincare routine. But, still, it’s striking.

P.S. That isn’t Connery’s natural hair.

No? Where don’t they do that? Is what they have similar to the terrible US system?

Yeah, most places do. AFAIK it’s just Canada and the US that don’t.

Unfortunately, the tool WealthSimple provides used to be called SimpleTax. It was made by a team in Vancouver and operated as donationware. You could file your taxes then choose however much you wanted to donate to them for the tool. They promised that they’d never sell your data, and never charge for the tool.

But… then they sold out to WealthSimple, who of course removed that promise to never sell your data.

They don’t trust him, but they don’t want to get on his bad side. They’re basically hoping that he’ll ignore them or forget about them, and focus his attention on his other enemies.

It’s much more complicated than that though. The lobbying firms hire people who are former politicians or former senior staffers who have all kinds of contacts all over Washington. Getting those guys on the payroll is extremely expensive.

Then, those lobbyists generally don’t just go off and bribe someone. They build and strengthen relationships. They know all the pain points that the politicians have, and they just make things easier. If a politician’s staffer is having trouble finding a good place to live in DC, the lobbyist knows a guy who knows a guy who can get them a great apartment.

Eventually, the lobbyist isn’t this guy who tries to get the politician to change some laws. He’s basically part of the team. So, when new legislation comes up, the whole team works on it together, including the lobbyist.

The end result is that the $5k or whatever is only the direct contribution to the politician’s re-election campaign or something. Most of the spending is hiring the lobbyist and paying all his/her various expenses that make them indispensable for the politician, so that they can step in at the right time.

Add to that that Grover Norquist runs an organization called Americans for Tax Reform. GOP politicians all have to sign a pledge with them that they will never vote for a tax increase or for anything to make filing taxes easier.

Supposedly, this is because if taxes are easy to file, Americans won’t hate them enough and it makes it easier for the government to raise taxes. But, it’s awfully convenient that this is exactly what Intuit, H&R Block, etc. all want too.

No. You can file your taxes for free. And, if you ever pay to file your taxes, you’re not paying the government, you’re paying for tax preparation software or for a tax professional to do your taxes for you.

But! Even if your tax situation is very simple, filing your taxes on your own is difficult. In Europe, the government sends you a form with what they think you owe based on all the information they have on you. If you agree with the calculation, you just send the form back and either pay or receive a refund.

In the US your employer gives you some sheets of paper with some values on it. Your bank gives you some different forms. And so-on. When it’s tax time, you gather up all that paper, hope you have it all, try to remember what forms you need and if you have them, and then painstakingly try to copy the right values from the W-2, 1099-INT, and so on into the right boxes on form 1040, 1040 Schedule 1, 1040 Schedule 2, 1040 Schedule H, 1095-A, and so on. Then, you try to do the calculations where it says to multiply the value from 1040 row 43 by the correct value in table A9. A9 has different values depending on how many dependants you have, and if you’re filing jointly or alone.

Basically, it’s doable on your own, especially if you have a fairly standard / simple tax situation. But, it’s easy to make a mistake along the way. If you ever need an explanation about what you’re supposed to do, that information exists, but it’s in accountanteze, and it often refers to about 5 other IRS publications that just complicate things further. And, when you’re dealing with thousands of dollars, a mistake could be really costly. So, most people buy a copy of TurboTax every year for $30, which somehow turns into $60 by the time you’re actually ready to file because the $30 version only covers people in situation X, and since you have Y you need to upgrade.

TurboTax then takes $1 out of the $60 you paid them, and goes to Washington with that to lobby politicians to keep the tax code complicated so that people need to buy a new TurboTax every year. (Oh yeah, and things change just enough that every year you need to buy the latest software to file your taxes.)

Exotic dancers, waitstaff, sales people…

I imagine it won’t be long before Steam turns into the badguy.

People have been predicting Steam will do a heel turn for more than a decade. But, their consumer-friendly policies and ease of use have kept them the dominant platform despite immense spending from other companies.

They’re still a store, and I don’t think anybody’s confusing them with a charity. But, a nearly 20 year track record suggests that they know that being trustworthy and consumer-friendly is essential to their long-term financial success.