Are these companies worth the suffering of vulnerable gamblers?

or simply inconveniencing them though

Screwing. 100% screwing.

An inconvenience is not being able to get someone on the phone in minutes or hours. Screwing is making someone spend days, weeks or months trying to get you on the phone and navigate a system that’s supposed to help them, not hurt them.

My dad isn’t at pension age yet and has been struggling the last few years whilst being a full time carer of my grandmother. It has often taken days to weeks of calling to get through and weeks to months get things approved.

Whereas, there are so many services we have that are for ACTUAL emergencies, and require fast service, where the money would save lives.

You have this so backwards.

Centrelink saves lives. Support saves lives. Welfare saves lives.

If you don’t support people then they end up having to use the emergency services. Is it cheaper to support people before the need emergency services rather than after. You can’t house all the unemployed, disabled, pensioners, veterans (and other people I’ve probably forgotten) in emergency wards, these people don’t magically end up fed, housed and cared for if make Centrelink and related services a nightmare to deal with.

My dad has been keeping my grandmother out of hospital. She’s now in a nursing home, funded mostly by government, that is keeping her out of hospital. It is extremely costly to put her in a hospital bed.

I click on my “From” address and then select “Customize From Address…”. I can then type anything I want up there. It’s a little annoying when replying to an email chain with an alias, but not too many steps.

The actual quantities are pretty small

In pure, stable form, yes. A hundred or so grams released in my house won’t be noticed or cause any problems.

But a few hundred grams of burnt fluorine hydrocarbons? 😬 That’s a whole other story.

Most modern domestic fridges stick with a plain hydrocarbon refrigerant anyway (akin to butane) these days.

I’m yet to see R600a in Australian domestic fridges, I thought we were lagging in that department? Can you just get them at retailers now?

if you’ve got burning refrigerant there are much bigger problems going on seeing as the refrigerant circuit is hermetically sealed

Strong disagree xD Inhaling burning fluorine compounds > fridge not cooling any more

That kind of thing would also provoke a product safety recall.

I’m not diagnosing the most likely cause of a normal fridge failure, but considering some interesting causes that align with the unusual scenario depicted in the article. Don’t panic, I’m not going to go all “fridge bad” on you.

Could be burning refrigerant (some are flammable AND fluorinated).

I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI). Whilst the hype for crypto imploded the use for the hardware sort of didn’t. I wonder if the next bubble with be the same, or if we get some refreshing variety to our money sinks?

Microsoft et al are subsidizing GenAI to an insane degree. […] prices shoot up for their customers and serve as a rough awakening to all the websites that integrated a crappy chatbot.

I’ve run some much simpler chatbots on just my desktop PC, so they will have some fallback (if they really choose to take it). Still it locks up my entire computer for a few second for each reply, so even a few hundred users per second peak would be an expensive service.

(Insert joke here about customers not noticing or caring about the difference between website chatbots built on big company services vs smaller ones, because they have exactly the same problems just in different hues.)

I’m confused. Sacholding?

Sorry to hear you’re feeling crap.

I’m having trouble looking for work for the past few months. Very few replies, the first “no” I got actually made me feel a bit more human.

I’m convinced that some of the jobs I’ve applied for or enquired about are not real or just for external-advertising-before-hire requirements. I’ve gotten some rude responses after daring to ask questions (eg: jobs funded by research money tend to have fixed funding start dates that might not be for another several months). Most straight up ignore me.

An old boss of mine thinks that my CV isn’t conforming and mundane enough, so I’m giving his suggestions a go.

What sort of work are you looking at? I design electronics and get into arguments with computers.

Windows update fetches all sorts of things now. If the hardware advertises X device then Windows update will check if it has anything for it. Approved vendors can provide all sorts of guff. Historically that has included drivers that intentionally brick your devices. HP probably packaged up some software that updates the BIOS and got it into the Windows Update DBs.

This is something HP should have handled.

If a bad update is rolled out then it’s the responsibility of the software maker partner (HP) and the distributor (Microsoft), not just one or the other.

Those laptops are THEIR products, not Microsoft’s.

Both Microsoft and HP have branding on their laptops and a responsibility post-sale for the reliability of their systems. Hardware, firmware and OS responsibilities are all party to this chain of failure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KmXPcSxz2g

I honestly didn’t read it

Please read it.

“Eat now, …” is terribly depressing. It sounds like you’re trading financial autonomy in exchange for another basic human right.

Bad bot. Several of your selected sentences are verbatim repeats.

The one real risk is that it’s a respiratory depressant and that it’s LD 50 is only a few tens of times a standard dose

The article claims it’s much closer than that:

Experts and festival-goers agreed on the likely cause of GHB’s disproportionate overdose burden.

“As little as 1 millilitre difference can tip you from what you’re looking for to what you’re not looking for,” Daniel Fatovich, chief investigator of EDNA, told Hack.

I tried to find some stuff to back this up. The “therapeutic index” is probably what I’m after (ratio of effective dose to dangerous dose), despite this technically not being a therapeutic use.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8843350/ - The narrow therapeutic index of GHB renders its use hazardous with poisoning or toxicity not uncommon with small titration of doses.

Thats… annoyingly nonspecific. A number for the T.I. would be a good educational tool.

This paper claims its around 5:1 to 8:1:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462042/ - Mortality rates after abuse of GHB are high, because there is only a narrow safety margin between a recreational dose and a fatal dose, which is only 5:1 to 8:1 [4-8]. Accordingly, accidental poisoning after recreational use of GHB is not uncommon as evidenced by admissions to hospital emergency departments for treatment [9, 10] and during forensic medical investigations of drug intoxication deaths [11-14].

Someone else in the comments here mentioned that the recreational dosage for different individuals varies, if that’s true then it could make this worse.

polydrug using who get hurt […] education if we want to save lives

Agreed. Most people don’t understand what’s in pills they have bought or the interactions with alcohol.

SAAS isn’t a one-off purchase, it’s a rental with ongoing rental fees.

The intention of the wording of the petition is that it only covers “purchased” items. If a customer is given the impression that they are buying something then it should act like any other bought item. If they are given the impression they are renting something then it’s out of scope, that’s expected to abruptly die one day.

effectively withdrawing customers’ rights under the Australian Consumer Law to ownership and undisturbed possession of their purchased goods

^ it’s a bit subtle if you’re not familiar with the campaigns’ language.

This means other people will misinterpret it too :(

Little do you know that I’m secretly in charge of the Bureua Bureua Bureau. I believe https should be a premium feature that valuable customers will pay for.

Corrected, thankyou. I blindly took the page title.

Do geo storms affect up into the GHz where wifi sits? I can only find material talking about the ionisphere and frequencies up to HF :|

I wouldn’t know, but it’s totally not on there, or so I’ve been told.