The companies won’t pay the 10% out of their own pocket, as they most likely couldn’t. At least here in Germany, supermarket margins are pretty thin.

This doesn't pass a quick reasoning check:

1. Self-checkout machines cost the store capital investment (they introduce some new technology, there is a larger number of devices)
2. Self-checkout machines cost the store operating budget (more devices means more parts to be serviced)
3. Stores have added significant numbers of self-checkout machines

So the stores must be getting better margins at self-checkout than at human-checkout, or they wouldn't introduce it.

Whoah how did you type those words that are illegal to say? You must be so brave

Right?? It's bizarre to me that otherwise-smart-seeming people will think they can write "explain your reasoning" to the AI and it will explain its reasoning.

Yes, it will write some fluent response that reads as an explanation of its reasoning. But you may not even be talking to the same model that wrote the original text when you get the "explanation".

I've always liked playing under-powered or useless or cursed characters. But you have to make sure the whole group is into it. Just because I want to play the germophobic sword-fighter who can't be in melee range doesn't mean anyone else wants to be part of that story...

It works against the general population, if this particular one doesn’t, don’t get too busy strutting, there is almost certainly something else that does work on you.

That is very well put! I feel like I've talked to so many people who see one ad that doesn't land and say, "ads don't work on me."

I thought it was because the "groypers"(? some US Nazi clan?) felt he was not Nazi enough. Who knows whether that means pro- or anti-Israel. I'm sure that changes day to day.

The people cheering are just honoring Charlie's legacy.

It's shitty, but it's not "enshittification".

Doctorow's explanation goes

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification

What the OP describes is just obnoxious design. To be enshittification it should be a change from better UX to worse and the change should be an attempt by the site to grab some extra cash.

Twitter requiring an account to see replies to a tweet is an example--they're trying to juice their user-count.

Working hard, or jerking hard?

I think Mojo's comment is meant sarcastically. I.e. UCH does murder sick people.

But to your question: the presumption of innocence. You've got the burden-of-proof backwards; it's not "prove he didn't commit murder" but rather "prove he did". What I've seen is: some blurry pictures of a white man with brown hair in NYC, security footage of a white man with brown hair doing the killing, and the police say that they found a confession-manifesto and a ghost-gun on Mangione when they arrested him.

As a white man with brown hair who doesn't trust the police, I feel concerned about this standard of evidence!

The physical evidence would seem pretty strong but: a manifesto is something you mail, not carry around with you waiting to be arrested. And a ghost-gun is something you throw away immediately, not hang on to across state lines.

My main point here isn't that it's a slam-dunk "no possible way he could have done it". But that it's just not a ton of evidence. And the pressure to get a conviction and execute someone is incredibly strong. I'd say there's decent evidence that the NYC cops are corrupt and setting up an innocent man to make themselves look good. If we're going to jump to a verdict before the trial, what made you pick the one you picked?

To someone watching network traffic, a VPN connection looks like two machines exchanging encrypted packets. You can't see the actual data inside the packet, but you can see all the metadata (who it's addressed to, how big it is, whether its TCP or UDP, when it's sent). From the metadata, you can make guesses about the content and VPN would be pretty easy to guess.

When sending a packet over the Internet, there's two parts of the address: the IP address and the port. The IP address is a specific Internet location, blocks of IP addresses are owned by groups (who owns what is public info) and there are many services that do geo-ip mappings. So if you're connecting to an IP address that belongs to a known VPN provider, that's easy.

The second part of the address is the port-number. Servers choose port-numbers to listen to and the common convention is to use well-known ports. So, for example, HTTPS traffic is on port 443. If you see a computer making a lot of requests to port 443, even though the traffic is encrypted we can guess that they're browsing the web. Wikipedia has a list (which is incomplete because new software can be written at any time and make up a new port that it prefers) and you can see lots of VPN software on there. If you're connecting to a port that's known to be used by VPN software, we can guess that you're using VPN software.

Once you're running VPN software on an unknown machine and have configured it to use a non-standard port, it's a bit harder to tell what's happening, but it's still possible to make a pretty confident guess. Some VPN setups use "split-tunnel" where some traffic goes over VPN and some over the public Internet. (This is most common in corporate use where private company traffic goes in the tunnel, but browsing Lemmy would go over public.) Sometimes, DNS doesn't go through the VPN which is a big give-away: you looked up "foo.com" and sent traffic to 172.67.137.159. Then you looked up "bar.org" and sent traffic to the same 172.67.137.159. Odds are that thing is a VPN (or other proxy).

Finally, you can just look at more complex patterns in the traffic. If you're interested, you could install Wireshark or just run tcpdump and watch your own network traffic. Basic web-browsing is very visible: you send a small request ("HTTP GET /index.html") and you get a much bigger response back. Then you send a flurry of smaller requests for all the page elements and get a bunch of bigger responses. Then there's a huuuuge pause. Different protocols will have different shapes (a MOBA game would probably show more even traffic back-and-forth).

You wouldn't be able to be absolutely confident with this, but over enough time and people you can get very close. Or you can just be a bit aggressive and incorrectly mark things as VPNs.

OpenTofu is mostly getting users from the corporate world. My work is on Slack and we're moving to OT. The lowest-friction for me as an OT-when-at-work user is to add another Slack. (I'd personally rather that they used an open platform. But it's easy for me to see why they didn't.)