Vanth

I'm tired. I read "Costco gay bars" at first and thought $1.50 hot dogs at a gay bar would be a helluva good business idea.

Now I'm thinking of some nice man wearing a party shirt with the Kirkland logo all over it.

Maybe it's just any gay bar that caters to middle age and older. After the days of youthful, wild parties give way to tamer, fiscally responsible nights. Gotta get to bed early enough to wake up for a run to the real Costco before it gets too busy. The kids need a palette of La Croix.

Yeah, billion$ that got bogged down by state level politics, telecomm company resistance, and lack of Democratic party backbone.

I don't know how much momentum was even left to get DOGE'd.

My dad just switched to Starlink. I advised he watch his bill closely because Musk is going to start playing money games any day. He blew me off, confident they would operate like most other cable companies and keep his prices set for 2-3 years even without a specific contract lock. Don't say I didn't warn ya'.

Also, double fuck you to Musk. My parents are rural and this is far and away the best service they're able to get. Instead of paying around what the others charge plus a little more because they are better, my folks are going to get taken to the cleaners.

They're probably doing that to protect the identity of any Google workers providing them with information. If they posted the actual meme, Google could possibly trace it back to an employee and fire them.

Some of the memes they do have in the article, they note they are reconstructions and not the actual memes from Googles internal channels.

I agree it's long though, they could have just recreated them and skipped the written description.

Best part of the article, hat tip to author Emanuel for how he included the correction request:

After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."

Good luck. Tough to pick a more DIY-oriented bunch of hobbyists who would rather build their own hardware and compile their own software over allowing their printer to narc on them to the government.

RepRap 2: Countersurveillance Boogaloo, launching soon.

Yep, $5.99/month last time I looked maybe 6 months ago.

I don't know anyone with a tracker ring that doesn't also have a watch. Feels like extra tech for the sake of having cool tech, to me. Very much a niche item that is even more luxurious than a smartwatch.

They weren't already?

I was super good at recording the local music radio station to a cassette tape to minimize the DJs chatter. My brother would pay me to catch songs for him. Too bad he had awful taste.

I did tier 1, 2, and eventually some 3 support back in the day for a software company. I liked how they handled it.

Customer called in, reached a live person doing intake. The intake person noted their question and callback number, helping to scope the problem if needed, and entered a ticket into the queue. The intake person gave the caller an expected wait time for a support tech to call back, pointed them to online written help documentation, and ended the call. Then push the ticket to tier 1, 2, 3, or "urgent, need to call NOW" queues. Depending on tier and call volume and time of day, they'd get a callback from a tech anywhere from immediately to the next morning.

Support techs like myself were coached to help over the phone, but also to point out the written materials and encourage their use. I would commonly say, "sure, that's a problem we can fix, go ahead and go to screen x, click on button y, etc. By the way, you're not the only one who had had this question, we even have an entry on this in our support documentation. Let me show you where you it's at so you can get to the fix even faster than a phone call next time".

Having the intake person take numbers, then techs call back later saved customers from having to wait on hold for lengths of time. We had very few cases of irate customers stuck waiting.

My shittiest experiences are the companies that don't do any intake and make all tiers of calls wait on hold in the same queue. Luck of the draw if the tech you end up with is a tier 1 still in training pants or a tier 3 pissed to be walking a customer thru updating their password for the millionth tim.

I just wish I could find an RSS feed of it.

Yeah, this is a super common theme from queer people in small rural and/or religious communities. Online may be the only interaction they have for information and support.