101–110 of 179 posts
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Does he? I don't think I've ever heard that complaint.
How many folks within five to ten years of retirement do you talk to? If you’re surrounded by people under 50, you probably wouldn’t hear much about it.
I (or really, my parents) were burned by something like this recently. They bought my kid an FAO Schwarz marble run tower for Christmas. It's made of terrible plastic, with rough seams, and every play session ends when a marble gets stuck somewhere nearly impossible to reach. It requires partial disassembly, bending, and a screwdriver to pry things out. I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked a…
Yes, something you print yourself will likely be lower quality than a bought one from years ago and you'll pay more in material and time than buying a new one will cost, but... it may be no worse quality than a new bought set, possibly better, replacement parts can be reproduced easily or additional parts added to the set cheaply (no buying a full set to get a couple of extra pieces that you want) and things can be customised.
One of the bigger 3D catalogue sites (I think MakerWorld, but without checking I'm not 100% certain) ran a marble-run themed contest some months ago for which there were a lot of interesting entries, some just copies of basic parts/sets (great if that is what you are looking for) but also some that were more innovative than that. If you have a printer, or know someone who has, it might be worth you looking into that if your kid would appreciate a new set, there are a lot of free designs¹ out there you could experiment with.
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[1] and paid ones, some designers try to make a living this way and some of them produce designs that are well worth the cost as they may be free of issues more amateur designs could have
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Also Barnes & Noble weirdly
You're trying to say they are good quality!? I recently had to gift someone some books, so I decided to try B&N online shipping since Amazon sometimes damages books. I ordered 3 books: all 3 came loose in a big box, all 3 were damaged: they looked like used books, unacceptable as a gift. I returned them, they didn't have ship-to-store option (which was what Gemini was telling me to push for), and they sent me new one…
Amazon has had massive quality reduction over the years in their service, but this one and the poor-quality knock-off books are the ones that bother me most.
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Is there any reason to believe that the same carpet-pull won't occur with those brands? I thought the whole trick was arbitrage on the delayed awareness of reduced quality.
> Is there any reason to believe that the same carpet-pull won't occur with those brands? No, but nothing's forever. The important piece of information is "is this brand good, right now , when I'm looking to make a purchase."
Right, which is the very thing that makes branding less than useful. You have to research everything before every purchase regardless of the brand precisely because the brand is no longer a good indicator of quality. That means that the brand doesn't mean much. Just because a brand signified high-quality goods yesterday doesn't mean it signifies the same today.
In the business of apparel, I think this is a natural consequence of high-end buyers turning their noses up at long-lived brands, and working to differentiate themselves from mainstream middle-class buyers. It's a revolt against modernism making more and more goods accessible to people outside the economic and cultural elite. If you're fancy, what do you do when mass production and the internet make the markers of fa…
We need a Manhattan Project for curing Cluster B disorders.
Get this: the byline, Keyana Sapp? A Palantir employee in AI strategy. https://www.linkedin.com/in/keyanasapp/ They're iterating AI-written consumer populist blog posts and using us as guinea pigs, until we stop noticing they're AI. Their last one was "Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose", which we did great on. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209 , flagged off main page) Don't let them get away with this,…
I'm troubled by your statement because I can't tell if you are saying it is incorrect and AI made it and therefore BAD. Or if you are just saying AI made it and therefore BAD.
Writing is at such a precipice. Every time I compose an email, gmail underlines every single sentence to say there is a better and more concise way of saying it. I feel stupid so I generally accept it. Isn't this AI writing as well? But, the thoughts and intentions are mine.
How is this different here? The author is pointing out really relevant information that I know anecdotally to be true. If that story is 85% written by AI, or 15% written by AI, I still see the human behind it.
I'm troubled by AI writing, don't get me wrong. But, it deserves further thought. (And, I also have strong negative bias towards palantir...)
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Brooks has their "factory outlet" crap that is also what you're likely to see at "overstock" stores like Nordstrom Rack (or TJ Max, though I'm not sure they get Brooks-branded stuff; NR does). That entire market is basically one big decentralized fraud operation, they took a model that used to involve selling brands' real goods that had, for whatever reason, not sold well or had minor quality defects, at steep discou…
> the government is captured by rich crime-loving assholes It’s funny how fast average joe complains when a lack of economic growth slows down their 401k’s though… Edit: Apparently I’m surrounded by non-standard Joe
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Brooks has their "factory outlet" crap that is also what you're likely to see at "overstock" stores like Nordstrom Rack (or TJ Max, though I'm not sure they get Brooks-branded stuff; NR does). That entire market is basically one big decentralized fraud operation, they took a model that used to involve selling brands' real goods that had, for whatever reason, not sold well or had minor quality defects, at steep discou…
> the government is captured by rich crime-loving assholes It’s funny how fast average joe complains when a lack of economic growth slows down their 401k’s though… Edit: Apparently I’m surrounded by non-standard Joe
The author of website will be flooded with submissions about almost every known brand. Instead of ledger of bad brands it should track brands that remain, - it will be a lot easier and less work.