Spyke

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One In Five Drivers Switches Off The Safety Tech Meant To Save Their Lives

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I had my Tesla slam on its brakes from 55 mph because it was convinced the car sitting at a stop sign at a crossroad was about to turn into my lane. Last time I trusted Autopilot in anything other than stop-and-go traffic. Not really in a hurry to find out if the Ioniq I have now does it any better.

Give me fully autonomous vehicles on roads where human drivers aren't allowed, or let me keep control, thank you very much.

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Nevar Forget

Stein wasn't even the only third party candidate stealing votes. I voted for Gary Johnson with the Libertarian party as a "protest vote". Glancing at national results, he had almost three times as many votes as Stein did.

I was 100% the moron this meme is targeted towards. I voted for Harris yesterday.

funny

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Basically this

Can we please stop posting headlines from Kalshi and Polymarket like they are news organizations?

They only do it to draw more people in to gamble with money they can't lose right now.

games

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Valve's monthly survey reveals that almost 45% of Steam users on PC are still using Windows 10 even with the sword of Damocles hanging over them

The whole point of the Sword of Damocles was that the threat was always looming and Damocles didn't know when it might fall. We know exactly when Microsoft says they are going to drop support. There's a decent chance that they'll push that date back due to slow adoption at least once.

This is more about rats not fleeing the sinking ship until the sea has reached the bow.

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What is a well known 'public secret' in the industry you work in that the majority of outsiders are unaware of?

Phone systems that give you the prompt, "Press # for more options" etc are called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. If you encounter an IVR that asks for credit card info, social security number, etc, don't enter it in! If you stay silent, you will usually be routed to an agent, though that varies on whichever system you are calling into.

Even if the system is designed for completely non-nefarious purposes, the IT people who maintain the phone system can analyze call logs to pull electronic keypresses (DTMF) and reconstruct every digit entered to capture your data. Most IT people would never consider abusing this access, but some organizations contract or sub-contract their phone support out to the lowest bidding third parties and might not do a great job of vetting their techs.

Giving this information to a live agent has its own risks, but if you initiated a call to a documented telephone number for the organization you are trying to reach, it is generally a safer option than keying in sensitive digit strings to an IVR. It is much harder for anyone outside of the call center to scan recorded audio for information like this. (Though technology is closing that gap)

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Holy entitlement, Batman! Republicans are furious Democrats didn't save Kevin McCarthy from himself

There's a junior Congressman from NC, Jeff Jackson (D) who offers really candid views of the House floor. He sent out a newsletter after the vote which provided some insight on what Dems were thinking about the vote.

The Speaker knew he was going to lose those folks, but he was hoping to peel off a few votes from the minority party.

Some folks in the minority were expecting him to reach out and say, “Hey, let’s make a deal. I’ll offer you this, and I want your vote.”

But instead, he went on TV the day before and basically said, “Here is my offer to the other party: Nothing.”

The minority party heard that from him and said, “Well, ok then, best of luck.”

That said, I’m not sure the Speaker could offer anything to the minority party. If he did, and his party found out, they’d be furious, and then he wouldn’t need six votes anymore - he would need 20 or 30 or 50.

...

My sense is that if he had felt it were at all possible for him to stay in power by working with the minority party, he absolutely would have done it - he just knew it wasn’t.

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United Health at it again

The drug I've paid $25/15 pills for the past couple months suddenly jumped up to $140 this week. I tried giving CVS a GoodRX coupon to knock it down to $75 and they told me they no longer accept them.

It's an important drug to me, but luckily not vital to my survival. Still, fuck this healthcare system.

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What was "the incident" at your work place?

Not technically AT the work place, but a couple employees decided it would be a good idea to sneak off to a side room during the company Christmas party to fool around. They got caught and nothing happened for a couple weeks. Then, for the first and last time in the company history to my knowledge, both employees were asked to provide proof of gym attendance to justify the stipend they were collecting, then fired when they failed to do so.

What's fun is the couple were married (to each other) and it didn't happen on company property or during business hours, so this was totally just a "We're icked out by this" move by HR. Gotta love working in the South.