Seems the two German supermarket chains really like to have the same infrastructure everywhere. Everywhere I go the Aldis look exactly the same. They have slightly different products depending on the country. But the price tags, interior, … is basically the same. Okay and we don’t have “Flaschenpfand” everywhere… (deposit on the plastic bottles and the machines where you can return bottles.) I bet all of this makes it a lot easier for their techs and management. And it could also explain why they sometimes redo a store that still looks fine and fit it with the latest shenanigans.

And as an aside: I’ve shopped in the first Aldi store ever. It’s not far from where I live.

They’re already widely adopted in supermarkets here (Germany).

I have Debian on my servers for a decade or so, and on several workstations. My past experience doesn’t quite reflect that. The Debian guys and gals have always been pretty quick with patching the vulnerabilities. Like outstanding fast.

There is some merit to the bugfixing. But that’s kind of the point of Debian Stable(?!) Like in the meme picture of this post I don’t want updates each day. And I also don’t want the software on my servers to change too much on their own. I know my bugs and have already dealt with them and I’m happy that it now works seamlessly for 6 months or so…

And that’s also why I have Debian Testing on my computer. That gives me sort of an unofficial rolling distro. With lots of updates and bugfixes. I mean in the end you can’t have no updates and lots of updates at the same time. It’s either - or. And we can choose depending on the use-case. (I think the blame is on the admin if they choose a wrong tool for a task.)

Meh. No Flatpak, no worries. And no updates, no new software or security patches.

I think that’s a good question. And a nice video. The findings in the paper seem to arrive at that conclusion and we might need to find a better approach. Mind that (as he pointed out) it doesn’t rule out growth in AI. It just hints at probable stagnation with the current methods. I’m already fascinated by the current tech and the new possibilities. But AI is really hyped as of now and I too, think we should take the claims of the big AI companies with a grain of salt. I’m sure the scientists at OpenAI are already concerned with exactly this as they do research for the next generations of ChatGPT. It’s a bit of a bummer that lots of the research get’s done behind closed curtains and we’re going to have to wait for a bit longer to find out.

It’s a shame that nowadays everything “needs” a phone number. I just put in a proper prefix code and then all zeroes as a number if some company forces me to. That works for some of the websites. Some stores even print that on a shipping label. So it might supposedly be there for a reason. But I’ve never heard this helps if a parcel gets lost or something. They won’t call anyways and the real reason is they can store it in some database and depending on the exact business do all kinds of other stuff with it.

Seems in this case they got own domains and independent stores.

And Aliexpress and Temu are very different. Aliexpress seems to be a halfway decent platform. Never had any major issues with them, except what’s to be expected when importing stuff from China. I think it’s very similar to ordering the same thing on eBay.

Temu isn’t. That platform is made to harvest data and prey on their “customers”.

And I can’t comment on Wish. I haven’t been interested in cheap crap.

Hmm, I think summarization is a bad example. I’ve read quite some AI summaries that miss the point, sum up to a point where the simplification makes sth wrong or the AI added things or paraphrased and made things at least ambiguous. Even with the state of the art tech. Especially if the original texts were condensed or written by professionals. Like scientific papers or good news articles…

What I think works better are tasks like translating text. That works really well. Sometimes things like rewording text. Or the style-transfer the image generators can do. That’s impressive. Restoring old photos, coloring them or editing something in/out. I also like the creativity they provide me with. They can come up with ideas, flesh out my ideas.

I think AI is an useful tool for tasks like that. But not so much for summarization or handling factual information. I don’t see a reason why further research coudn’t improve on that… But at the current state it’s just the wrong choice of tools.

And sure, it doesn’t help that people hype AI and throw it at everything.