It’s been 8 years since VI came out. That’s the longest they’ve gone between releases since the original. It’s also difficult to say if it’s necessary without actually seeing what VII has to offer. If it’s VI with a new coat of paint, then I agree. But I hope they bring a novel aspect like districts was for VI that made it worth it.

Exactly. If it’s a regulated industry, they’re not just paying for Teams. They’re paying for someone else to worry about meeting certain compliance requirements and take the heat if things go wrong. I’m not sure how many companies besides Microsoft can offer that. At most it’s a fraction of the available options.

Two points about R&D costs:

First, they aren’t just trying to make up what they spent on this treatment, but others that failed during research/trials. There’s a lot of them the general public will never hear about, and pharmas generally don’t like to bring attention to their failures. Part of that is many shareholders are morons who don’t understand how science works.

Second, the costs can get fuzzier for larger companies who in-house much of the R&D process, since the costs get shared among many programs. Properly attributing spend in that case can be a serious challenge.

All that said, they’ve clearly seen an opportunity to rake it in with this trendy drug and are charging way more than they need to.

Not being in constant contact with everyone you know, and not having a neverending stream of notifications assaulting you via your phone.

When you got to see relatives who lived far away, you talked about what had been going on in their life because you probably had no idea.

You read, listened to, or watched the news when you wanted to, unless someone you know told you sooner.

If you had to wait somewhere without a book or magazine, you just sat there with your thoughts. During childhood, you learned how to be bored and practice imagining things.

The only thing I can muster in their defense is that Outlook search is garbage, and filtering in Excel to find relevant messages may have been marginally easier. But that’s playing devil’s advocate and going out on a limb.

It was probably in response to some manager saying it’s not a good idea to keep documented agreements in email, so some genius thought putting those in an Excel and attaching to email was compliant with that idea.

I used to see this a lot when a team had to engage with an external vendor temporarily (or not so temporarily), but the only approved software both companies shared was Office before Teams was ubiquitous.

In the worst case, the file wasn’t able to be shared live (e.g., SharePoint), so it was just going back and forth in email attachments. That was just as much of a nightmare as you’d guess.

The year before last we achieved 1% test error rate in an area, and the bosses were seriously considering having the following year’s goal be 0%. Someone had to point out that if anyone had 1 error on Jan 1, we literally couldn’t do anything to achieve the goal the rest of the year and may as well give up entirely.

It’s even better when these metrics explicitly become your yearly goals. Or department-wide metrics you have very little influence over. I sure hope all these people I don’t manage happen to achieve a specific error rate this year so I get a good bonus.

Check out their controversies section on Wikipedia. This doesn’t seem out of character for this publication. It’s more likely incompetence than malice.

Consequences for their families/friends. It’s not a choice I’d ever want to have to make.

Especially with certain accents. You really want your voice commands to be quite distinct. There’s virtually no extra labor is saying two or three extra syllables.

One of the regional grocery stores in my part of the US has these (if you have an account). Before I did online ordering with curbside pickup, this was how I shopped. I didn’t understand why it wasn’t more popular. It made checking out so quick. Every twenty or so trips I’d be randomly “audited,” where some poor employee had to rifle through my bags to double check I wasn’t stealing anything.

As someone who’s consumed every album and special George Carlin produced, it felt like someone retelling their memory of some of his bits. Like regurgitation. It’d be impressive if your nephew performed this at his thirteenth birthday party after becoming obsessed with Carlin.

I’ve gone back and forth, but I agree. People just need to stop assuming that a game being on Steam is an endorsement. It’s just a platform. They’ve removed almost all barrier for entry to enable truly indie developers to have their game on the premier PC game store. I’m sure indies prefer paying $100 and doing whatever they can to gain social traction compared to begging the gatekeepers at major publishers to give them a chance, though I could be wrong.

The physical limitations are an important difference. A human can only read and remember so much material. With AI, you can scale that exponentially with more compute resources. Frankly, IP law was not written with this possibility in mind and needs to be updated to find a balance.

Ave! True to Caesar.

Vegas already has a poorly implemented monorail.

I don’t think that’s the message at all. It’s disproportionately punishing women for nudity that is sexist.

It’s ok if they buy lunch for the juniors every one in a while.

Sometimes it’s really valuable to have a greybeard with no fear for their job who just stops everyone from making stupid decisions that they’re too in the weeds to appreciate. Hopefully they’re one of the funny ones, and not one who condescends everybody constantly.