Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Hey internet, I'm trying to remember something I read about in a news article we will say maybe 5 years ago or more. Searching with such vague keywords isn't proving fruitful.

There was a hotel that was opening, and they made a big fanfare about how posh and modern they were going to be. Robotic AI concierge and things like that.

However, all of their proprietary custom tech was in development for so long that it stagnated and by the time the hotel actually opened its doors... guests found that the AI concierge literally couldn't do things that were nearly as useful as, say, Siri on the iPhone.

Does anyone remember this? I want to cite it as an example of a kind of trend in an upcoming video.

UPDATE: this was it! ....https://birdbutt.com/@colinstu/113546001652788858

🐹 Dan, you know coin-ops, I run a small business and would like some coin-ops in there, how does that happen?

🦝 That depends on the sort of coin-op.

PINBALL
🐑 The whitest man you've ever seen hands you a business card. After mulling it over you call the number and a pinball machine shows up. It develops a fault within three days. Within two weeks you have eight machines and weekly tournaments, during which your bar is full to capacity but nobody buys any beer. Two of these machines work at any given time.

FRUIT MACHINE / GAMBLING
🐻 A large stranger turns up with a large cabinet. He places it somewhere inconvenient, plugs it in, points at the plug, says "See that? Touch that, you're fucking dead," and leaves. You mind your own business.

JAPANESE RHYTHM GAMES
🐿 These are delivered by a trans woman you met on Discord. She brings five friends to help. Setup takes longer than planned and you want to close and go home. They offer to finish the job and lock up. In the morning they're still updating firmware. Their pizza boxes attract mice. You have to remind them periodically that they're not allowed to sleep here.

ARCADE / VIDEO, GOLDEN AGE
🐨 A man in his fifties asks if you want a Pac-Man. You say sure. Next week there's a Pac-Man, all good. The week after, it glitches out, and he puts in a 60-in-1 emulation board as a temporary measure while he fixes the Pac-Man board. The 60-in-1 brings in way more money. You feel you have to persuade him not to fix the legit board. This discussion becomes far more heated than the situation warrants.

ARCADE / VIDEO, 90's
🐍 These are delivered by a green-haired guy you met on Discord. There's no firmware to update but he still brings five friends and wants to sleep there. The Japanese rhythm games lady is his ex but they're on friendly terms.

CRANE / CLAW PRIZE GAMES
🐐 These are delivered by a big hard-faced woman with places to be, but not so quickly she doesn't pause for a cigarette before unloading the truck. She explains the scam and you would prefer if she hadn't; you feel robbed of your innocence and complicit in something seedy. You ask her to set the payout as high as possible, to soothe your conscience. As she pours cuddly toys from a big black bin bag she tells you people have more fun if it doesn't win as often, but if you really wanted, she could set it to give a toy every time and you would both still make money. She smiles as she says this, and calls you "Honey." You feel dirty.

GUMBALL / BULK VENDING
Scenario 1: 🦊 a man in his fifties with a moustache and Willy Wonka energy talks you into a single gumball machine and then two months later you're selling Pokemon cards.
Scenario 2: 🐺 a man in his seventies arrives with a small girl in a brown vest. He says 🐺 Go on honey, ask. She mumbles something about how her 🐇 troupe's raising money and can we please put one of these on the counter please. He says 🐺 good job honey. He has a kind and careworn face. Thirty years ago he told a man "Touch that, you're fucking dead."

#Enby #nonbinary #Gender

my friend: why are you looking in both directions, it's a one-way road
me: dude, it's almaty. i'd probably even look up just in case

Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that a safe and inclusive social network simply isn’t something that can be created by architecture or feature selection, any more than something like “allyship” is a specific set of voting positions.

If you have a place where people congregate you have to accept that you will have to evolve it in realtime to address threats. There are anti patterns you can avoid, but abuse and exploitation are APTs, not bugs.

"Racisme alleen erkennen als racisme wanneer er expliciet de taal wordt gebruikt uit de negentiende eeuw, is eigenlijk dus een ontkenning van het bestaan van racisme in de huidige tijd."

"Wanneer we de intentie, de ideeën of ideologie van mensen bepalend laten zijn of er wel of geen sprake is van racisme, dan kunnen we nauwelijks racisme vaststellen. In iemands hoofd kijken is namelijk bijzonder lastig. Je kan makkelijk zeggen: ‘Maar het was niet zo bedoeld.’"

https://www.socialevraagstukken.nl/racisme-ontkennen-drie-bekende-tactieken-blootgelegd/

i have noticed that productivity under adhd is like racing in mario kart. it's hard to start moving but if you keep building up momentum and doing things you can blaze through all the stuff. the problem is, if you get hit by an obstacle, you drop everything

*voice drops by an octave*
I ran out of gender fluid, where is the next refill station?

Underappreciated Scrivener feature I miss whenever working in LibreOffice: splitting a document view into two so that I can scroll to two different places in the same document and compare.

(This is, of course, familiar to me from Codium and other code-text editors.)

The salmon remember
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241122-salmon-return-to-californias-klamath-river-after-dam-removal

I haven't gotten a communicable illness in almost five years, and I'm immunocompromised and highly susceptible to communicable illnesses! How did I do it, you ask?

It's masking. That's it. That's the whole secret.

I wear an N95 when I'm around people who aren't my spouse or I'm in a space that recently had those people in it, and he does the same. We don't unmask around anyone who's been unmasked around others in the past two weeks. Zero exceptions. Zero infections.

#CovidIsNotOver #WearAMask

Need a fancy name to use instead of #selfhosting? I got something for ya ;)

Introducing #SPI — the Sovereign Private Infrastructure. Sounds a lot more sophisticated :) (Yes, I work in marketing, I admit :)

And yes, the S could also be Self-managed or Self-owned if you want to avoid Sovereign. I however think it is time to take language back from the extremists. Best way is to confuse them. Divide et impera, as true Federati should do :)

New lupus treatment could end need for lifelong medication
Doctors are hailing a groundbreaking new treatment for lupus that genetically modifies a patient’s cells to fight the autoimmune disease and could end the need for lifelong medication. About 5 million people worldwide are thought to have the condition, which mostly affects women. "“If this works, it’s life-changing. Until now, there’s never been anything for lupus that is a possible cure." https://buff.ly/4eOFlZ8
#ShareGoodNewsToo

If anyone happens to know the street photographer in Exeter who just caught me being attacked by pigeons, please: I *need* a copy of that. Thank you!

#Exeter