I’d love an NFC tag embedded in them that I could scan and see X weeks/months of history! But that level of transparency would only ever happen with regulation, and in my country (Canada) the grocer oligarchs own the politicians these days…

I can’t wait for allergy season where they make the cost of my off the shelf medication absolutely unaffordable due to high demand!

And my country has price laws where tagged prices have to be honoured (I forget all the technicalities of the policy) - so if something scans up wrong, what stops the employee at service from changing the shelf price to reflect the wrong one while another employee walks over to verify with me? It would need a nefarious intent, which most minimum wage shop employees could care less about, but it’s a theoretical that could happen, especially on higher price items.

I’ve often wondered what the “saving the environment” numbers of these actually look like. Is making and recycling paper shelf labels worse for the environment than a small device that’s a mix of plastics and electronics and has a battery that will eventually need replacing? Especially when I consider my local grocery store probably has thousands of these tags, all rolled out overnight one night, that will probably all need replacement batteries at similar intervals too.

I did it when I was travelling to the US a few years back and the store clerk looked at me like I had two heads. It’s so normal in Canada I never thought much of it, and here I was a celebrity in this store and everyone was just wow’d at the magic I’d done.

We must have the same inlaws haha. Similar situation with my wife’s parents and one sibling. They’ve never met our kid and still put all their right wing Facebook conspiracies ahead of meeting him. No loss to us - we’d rather spend time with sane people anyway.

Most importantly - is it watching my porn with me too and learning about that?

Switched to mint on my laptop a couple months ago and love it, using it full time on that system. Still need to run windows on my desktop for some audio production and VR gaming, but honestly that system is going to Mint next for the other 90% of the usage. Couldn’t believe how refined the Linux desktop experience has gotten, but then again last time I gave it a try was probably well over a decade ago :)

If this takes off I figure it’s only a matter of time until services start blocking them. What’s changed between the old days of Trillian and now is that capitalism has advanced much further along and these companies have too much to lose by not being able to data harvest right in their own apps now 😉

I’m waiting for Version 2.0 where they don’t care about whether you’re watching content or not and just randomly inject ads every 20 minutes.

Guaranteed this will happen. Even skylum has been taking Luminar on a steady path toward subscriptions too (Luminar and affinity being the two paths I went when ditching Adobe).

The one near me (in Canada), just can’t seem to figure out what it wants to be and reinvents itself, and fails further, about every five years or so. They went through a phase with a massive music section, probably 25% or more of the store and tried to take on music store chains - that was always dead empty. Then that section went away for a while, and then they fully closed for a huge overhaul and re-opened with about 75% of the store now just an appliance store. The whole place is a ghost town and used to be quite busy when it was an electronics store like we normally associate them to be. I don’t even shop online anymore because they’ve expanded into the whole “marketplace” concept and are just another amazon where you need to closely check where you’re even buying from. I bet there’d be more success in doing what they’re good at instead of having to try and be like everyone else.

Sadly, that’s also the exact description of who Canada is most likely to elect as their next leader too. “bitcoin millhouse” we call him.

We just shut off our Toyota fobs every time we park, it’s a few extra button presses on the fob but gives some piece of mind. Why they can’t just put a simple power toggle on the fob that everyone could easily use when done is beyond me. Most people, Toyota employees included, didn’t even know the fobs could be powered down with a button combo.

I remember evaluating call centre systems probably 12 years ago where I was working at the time and this was becoming a thing - I’m surprised it hasn’t become more widespread in that time. I’ve honestly only interacted with two companies between then and now where this was an option given to me.

Like all the companies I’ve worked for that have off-shored work, and then later brought it back on shore after realizing the horrible quality work and drop in delivery times their attempts to save money resulted in.

I had all but forgotten about Trillian! Man, that was huge in my circles back in my youth. Such nostalgia reading that name again.

I guess if you have a crappy brand of hybrid that might be true. I’m 8 years into owning a Toyota hybrid and I’ve done nothing but once a year oil changes, one set of tires, and just did my first set of brake pads. I guess cabin air filters and other regular consumables too. There’s actually added reliability in the fact that the engines have no belts or mechanical driven accessories, which are common failure points, because the mechanical engine isn’t always running to drive those accessories. The electric controlled accessories are overall more reliable with less moving parts to fail. Being friends with a recently retired Toyota mechanic he said they didn’t often see the hybrids for anything but routine stuff. I suppose there are exceptions to this, and there are certainly far shittier car brands than Toyota making hybrids too.

I didn’t even think of that point! That could have teeth in a lawsuit if someone had the time and funding. I’m sure there’s a lot of security and privacy related things with this bait and switch tactic that wouldn’t fly with courts.

Oh a lot has changed in 8 years. 4-5 years even. I’ve run many large international support teams out of their ticket and service cloud and they’ve all loved it way more than alternatives like zendesk and such.