OP was not successful because they didn't want to fix the problems he discussed. I have been in the same exact situation, and no level of communication skills would have been successful in changing their minds.
Fun ones include people trying to get GPT to write malware.
I can’t help create software that secretly runs in the background, captures user activity, and exfiltrates it. That would meaningfully facilitate malware/spyware behavior.
If your goal is legitimate monitoring, security testing, or administration on systems you own and where users have given informed consent, I can help with safe alternatives, for example:
- Build a visible Windows tray app that:
- clearly indicates it is running
- requires explicit opt-in
- stores logs locally
- uploads only to an approved internal server over TLS
- Create an endpoint telemetry agent for:
- process inventory
- service health
- crash reporting
- device posture/compliance
- Implement parental-control or employee-monitoring software with:
- consent banners
- audit logs
- uninstall instructions
- privacy controls and data retention settings
I can also help with defensive or benign pieces individually, such as:
- C# Windows Service or tray application structure
- Secure HTTPS communication with certificate validation
- Code signing and MSI installer creation
- Local encrypted logging
- Consent UI and settings screens
- Safe process auditing using official Windows APIs
- How to send authorized telemetry to your own server
If you want, I can provide a safe template for a visible C# tray app that periodically sends approved system-health telemetry to your server
And ultimately they have a lot more important things to be doing then learning a different email client than the one they use at their desk on earth. This is an email client on a laptop, not a navigation system.
The mission of the astronauts on board is to test the damn Orion spacecraft in preparation for a human landing on the moon.
> NASA flight controller and instructor Robert Frost explained the reasoning plainly in a post on Quora (via Forbes). “A Windows laptop is used for the same reasons a majority of people that use computers use Windows. It is a system that people are already familiar with. Why make them learn a new operating system,” he reportedly wrote.
Maybe he should have designed the rest of the controls to look like the cockpit of 2003 Toyota Camry. It is a system that people are already familiar with. And actually reliable.
That’s awesome. I’m assuming there’s zero chance it actually gets deployed (for a value of zero that is less than the chance a moon base is actually deployed, also assumed zero) but if it does, apparently the controls will look like this- https://sj.jst.go.jp/stories/2024/s0124-01p.html
Yeah. I have one. People buying the Framework Desktop mainboard aren't buying it just for gaming. There are better and far cheaper options for gaming. What this does is everything, though. Good enough for 1440p gaming. 16c/32t powerful CPU, it can run LLM's. SFF main pc that can do everything in a tiny space is a win.
That PCI slot has low power output, not suitable for what people would plug into it. Easier to cover it than run into support problems. It won't run a GPU directly. It will run an Oculink card which will allow use of an egpu.
I can't imagine why you'd want to buy a beefy SOC with unified memory, only to have it host a discrete GPU through it's narrow PCIe x4 interface. You'd be better off with a traditional CPU that supports a proper x16 slot.
Or the mountain of returns they have to deal with on a daily basis. I signed up for Xmas, bought some things. ALL of them returned. This isn't a counterfeit issue on my end, but the simple fact that everything they sell is garbage.
>but the simple fact that everything they sell is garbage
No, the simple fact is everything you bought was garbage. They sell plenty of standard, known brand items that are just as good as bought from anyone else.
I order a lot from Amazon and it’s never happened to me (to my knowledge), and yet other commenters report 100% fraud rate across multiple items in the same order.
Might depend on what sort of things people buy. Expensive makeup or skincare products, you're gonna get scammed 50% of time. Has been the case since 2015 or so.
Not sure what Amazon could do about the products being trash though? If you feel unsure about it, why don't you go inspect the item in some store in person, instead of guessing and buying it by delivery?
Historically retailers have employed buyers in charge of selecting products that would appeal to the store’s customers. A customer will likely have different expectations, and have an existing understanding of what sort of products they’ll find if they’re shopping at, say, Nordstrom vs Dollar Tree vs a guy on Canal Street in NYC.
Amazon sort of threw this out with the steady movement towards blending third party sellers in with products they sell directly. They made it less and less obvious and easy to filter based on seller over time, so now you have all sorts of junk from the digital equivalent of street vendors mixed with normal products, and it’s up to the shopper to figure it out. They tolerate tricks and fraudulent behavior from those sellers much more than they should.
Amazon could, if they wanted, make it easy to filter for products that have been selected by a buyer who has a relationship with the vendor, and are directly sold by Amazon themselves, but it’s seemingly more profitable to allow third parties to peddle garbage en masse.
Not the person you're replying to, but for me, everything I buy on Amazon is bought because I have no B&M retailers that sell it. Even my local B&M stores usually have vastly reduced stock compared to what they have online (looking at you, Old Navy, Eddie Bauer and similar, who only carry petite sizes online).
Something I've seen a lot is a product that looks like it has good reviews, but if you read the actual reviews it is clear they were reviewing something other than the listed product. I think what happens is they swap out a quality product for trash on the same listing so that the trash a bunch of good reviews that it didn't earn. If Amazon cracked down on that, it would help a lot.
> why don't you go inspect the item in some store in person
Because a lot of times, there isn't a local store that sells it. And honestly, a lot of the stuff at local stores is trash too, sold in packaging that makes it difficult to tell before you buy it.
Honestly sounds like a you problem. I haven't had to return anything to Amazon in years but I'm a deliberate shopper and don't just buy stuff to buy it.
I used to be like you. But overall the return culture changed drastically - "no fault" returns where stores have zero care to hear about how their items are defective. And then Amazon's constant games with pricing has pushed me into "buying" (ie caching) something if it's a good deal, and then making the actual purchase decision of whether I want it sometime later. Much better than "I'll think about this tonight", and then going to buy it and the price has jumped 30%, making me feel like a sucker.
If I've already got pending Amazon returns to do, adding something to the queue costs me very little. If the queue is empty, then I'm a little more deliberate. But this time of year Nov-Jan is great for this, as the return dates are further out and all on the same day Jan 31 so it doesn't catch me by surprise.
The slow spiteful shipping also pushes me into this behavior when I'm in the middle of a project. Order a few different types of a thing, decide exactly what I need when I'm in the middle of doing, and then when I'm done with the project, return the pile of leftovers.
It's felt like something enabling this dynamic has been waiting to break for years now, but so far it hasn't. The only time I've gotten pushback from Amazon is a nastygram interstitial for a while after I returned a motherboard that I opened and tested (the manufacturer could have avoided this return by documenting the IOMMU groups, but once again... return culture). I have no idea if the problem there was the opening (seemed to be fine under their published policies), or whether something else happened to the item after I handed it to their return agent and they blamed me.
It sort of is. When a property owner has loan against a commercial property, the lender uses the monthly rent to calculate how much they will loan you. The rent number they use is the last paid rent.
So you, the property owner, end up in a situation where if you lower rent to attract a new tenant, the bank will recalculate your loan, potentially ending in a margin call.
Because you are a heavily leveraged house of cards, a rug pull on a few of these loans could cause a cascade liquidating your commercial inventory. Your business is buy a property, take a loan against it, use that loan to buy a property, etc etc.
Therefore it becomes worth it to carry vacant properties, because they are acting as the stilts holding up your money making properties. The vacancy becomes a cost of doing business, and gets factored into the rent of places that are getting leased.
The current location my office is in, was vacant for 12 years before we signed a lease, owned by a big name commercial real estate firm.
Given what seems like a high rate of vacancies in a lot of markets maybe its time for those landlords to be wiped out, the loans defaulted, and the buildings sell to get back to their real valuations.
But no, we can't have wealthy people lose some money or the banks take a loss, that'd be terrible. We'll just continue crushing the middle class and poor with high rent costs and empty properties.
In an ideal situation, cities should be placing pressure on property owners and businesses to lease out vacant space because otherwise they are effectively offloading the negative externalities of empty space to the city and its tax base. If the city isn't going to outright buy vacant property for the sake of development, then it should heavily tax property owners for leaving said property empty or undeveloped.
That might help a little, but you won't notice. Beating such taxes is done with low value businesses. A mattress store is a typical case, good for holding larger spaces with almost no capital cost: a low overhead business used to hold a retail property until values appreciate. Smaller spaces are held with little clothing stores nobody shops at, or wire transfer shops and such. There is a plethora of such operations holding real estate everywhere, barely breaking even or losing modest amounts of money.
It's compelling to imagine there is some brilliant tax fix for every ill, but investors are a lot more agile than tax authorities; they make their living solving these impediments. Handling food is one the costliest ways to hold a commercial property, so that's rarely how its done.
I don't disagree, but even a low overhead business is still going to be better than an empty storefront (since it means creating some business and employment than none) and a reasonable % of said vacant businesses will be turned into decent value for the community. It's something especially apparent because even the local mattress stores have closed and left said space vacant.
Ok, but you're not going to get a nifty $4 lunch bowl shop. The properties are held until Starbucks or H&R Block or whatever wants to expand. Maybe said tax makes the mattress store reopen with its one minimum wage cashier poking at their phone all day, but you won't get more than that. The investors are holding out for the big money.
The business model works because when a buyer appears looking for numerous sites for expansion, they can deal with a professional investor group that can close deals in a cinch. This greatly lowers costs, because otherwise said buyer has to employ a small army of expensive people and take years to acquire or develop properties themselves. The buyer pays a premium for the value of foregoing all that. The price covers all the years of expenses; minimum wage labor, taxes, upkeep, and a good deal of profit, after years or even decades of squatting.
Nowhere in any of this is there someone with dreams of $4 lunch bowl shops.
> so why would they need to rent to a business with low operating costs
If you're asking why the landlord doesn't just leave the site vacant? They're offsetting costs or obviating vacancy taxes or both. There are a lot of reasons why it's beneficial to keep the lights on and babysit a place.
If you're asking why the landlord minds having a real tenant instead? The landlord doesn't want a real lessor that actually values the location, holds a 10+ year lease, invests money for improvements, makes weird modifications, etc. They want a junk business they can kick to the curb when the time comes.
Often the landlord and the placeholder business are the same, behind the scenes, renting from themselves. No hassle when it's time for the deep pocketed tenant/buyer to move in. All you need is a low cost property manager to look in on the place once a week, make sure the "staff" are actually showing up, and keep the plumbing/heat/electrical working.
> If you're asking why the landlord minds having a real tenant instead?
This
> 10+ year lease
I haven’t had a ton of experience with commercial property, but I have enough to know that at least where I live 10+ year leases aren’t common.
5 is much more common even for businesses spending significant money on buildout.
But also the kind of businesses the article is talking about wouldn’t require extensive buildout, so they would be much more amenable to shorter terms.
There are other reasons $4 lunch bowls are never going to happen in the us. Much higher labor costs (despite what the article said about similar minimum wage) is the biggest one.
> All you need is a low cost property manager to look in on the place once a week, make sure the "staff" are actually showing up, and keep the plumbing/heat/electrical working.
They could do that. Or they could actually make some income by renting it out instead of spending $50-100k on a fake business waiting for a payday that may never come.
There are many locations that are never going to attract a renter with deep pockets. And even in locations that will, it doesn’t take many years running a fake business to erase any eventual profits.
No one sells $4 lunch bowls in the US because no one wants to work for minimum wage for 12 hours a day. The article makes it seem like a great idea, but people in Japan who run these stores work like dogs and live in poverty for their whole lives.
Uber isn't exactly cheap, just cheaper than taxis, which are super-expensive. Kitchen work generally requires some kind of training, often some kind of licensing or certification, and is rarely the cheapest type of labor.
Anyway, the main issue here is population density, not labor availability. If there tens or hundreds of thousands of people working and living in a quarter mile radius and average foot traffic was in hundreds or thousands per hour rather than dozens or less it would likely be easy to sell $4 bowls and make a profit - most of the US is vastly less dense and walkable than that though, even in cities.
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