I don't see this at all. Staple foods are cheap and abundant. Fruits and vegetables don't cost much at all. Some animal proteins can get a bit pricy (beef mostly) but chicken and pork aren't that expensive. Eggs are like $2 a dozen.

I love my meat but if I switched to a vegetarian diet it would be trivial to make varied, delicious meals at $1.50-$2 a portion.

Where? It's $4 for a dozen eggs where I am and I think that's pretty cheap. It's $5 for a bag of shitty apples. And then another $5 for a bag of oranges, so my kid can have fruit for the week. I cook from nothing but fresh and my kid gets one bag of chips or cookies a week. I buy 2lbs of meat for us both. I still spend over 100 dollars.

I guess we could have beans and rice every day, but I don't think it's a lot to give my kid a varied diet based on what's in season. Out of season is awful and that's how I ended up spending $15 on berries my kid wanted.

When people talk about these cheap meals, I wonder if they just expect everyone to eat the same thing every day at the lowest quality. I can go to a budget grocery store and get $3 eggs. That's true, but I feel like the local national chain should ve a good enough yard stick.

I do most of my grocery shopping at Target. In my large Midwestern city 12 large eggs are $2. A 3 lb bag of apples is $4. A 3 lb bag of oranges is $4.29.

>When people talk about these cheap meals, I wonder if they just expect everyone to eat the same thing every day at the lowest quality.

Eating cheap doesn't have to mean eating the same shit meal every day. I like to have a framework to work from where I have some structure but can vary it a lot based on what I want to eat. Rice+vegetable(s)+protein has endless variations. One week I might do a taco style rice bowl. The next maybe I do an Asian bowl. Stews are also great for this. By varying the ingredients a bit and using different spices I can get stews with very different flavor profiles that taste great.

I bought 12 eggs from trader joe's yesterday for $2, organics were $5

I get 18 eggs from another grocery store for about $5 and kroger has them really cheap too. Even Whole Foods has 18 for $5-ish in one brand and much more $$ in another.

Publix is the egg-gouger around me (and just overpriced in general)

IMHO the same cheap whole food meals are healthier than a variety of $2 frozen dinners.

You can hit a middle-ground with some frozen stuff to save a little time and money a few days per week too.

Find a role at a large "non-tech" comapny in a large department on a mid sized team. I had several jobs like that and the amount of effort required in the average day was minimal. Probably less than an hour a day of actual meaningful work. You'll hate your job but it's extremely easy and pays decent.

I'm a big fan of Garmin watches, it's really impressive what they've built. They're responsive, they have the smart features I want without the bloat I don't want, the battery lasts forever (if I don't use GPS at all it lasts something ridiculous like three weeks, with GPS it's still around a week). And they're so good I don't feel any urge to upgrade to a newer model even though the one I currently have came out in 2019. I bought it "renewed" 2.5 years ago at a significant discount and I could see myself happily using it for at least another 4-5 years.

I have firstinitiallastname and I get A LOT of emails sent to firstinitial.lastname. Someone even used it for their bank account.

It's a positive for a nameless middle manager somewhere who can show their boss a graph with a line moving to the right and up with a title like "AI Adoption Across Platforms" and hit their bonus target.

This is 100% the why.

Whenever I see this much vehement agreement about something on HN, it sets off serious groupthink alarm bells.

Idk what the answer is, but it is not 100% this. It’s too simple and satisfying of an answer to be true.

I understand what you mean, but it does match MBA/mckinsey thinking very closely.

Make a metric a goal, work tirelessly towards that new metric.

Does it make the product better? Well, the product is already made- so it doesn’t make a difference.

It’s only software developers who think a product is never “done”- normal MBA thinking is “we have invested in R&D, now there is a product, how do we get as many users of our product as possible”.

You don't think the reason we have seemingly broken optimization is because poorly thought out metrics are being gamed?

That's all its been for the last few decades. Everyone is now "data driven" and "metrics oriented". That's a footgun - if people can game it, they will, and numbers don't say what people think they say.

Normally I would agree, but I've seen this happen too often. Common sense be damned, just make the number look good.

3 Billion Devices run Java, I mean Copilot.

No, the boss is asking for more salt. Employees are then replacing sugar with salt and getting bonuses, no matter what the customer reactions are.

And then word gets around that you put salt in coffee instead of sugar, and people stop going to you. Unless you’re the only deli in town.

But all the other delis are doing it as well. So is your supermarket. So is your farmer (somehow they figured out how to add salt to the veggies they sell at the farmer's market!)... Whaddya gonna do? Grow your own? THE SEEDS SHALL HAVE SALT TOO, has been decreed...

“We’d like to introduce you to Copilot Enterprise”…

Yes, the only deli in town. Office, Server, Desktop, now your TV, pretty soon your car.

> And then word gets around that you put salt in coffee instead of sugar, and people stop going to you.

Right, but that's somebody elses problem a few quarters from now.

I got my promo for increasing salt adoption, what do I care? I'm jumping ship next week

> Unless you’re the only deli in town.

pretty much.

back in the before times, we broke up AT&T, but we don't do that anymore.

Then your social media & newsfeeds are buzzing about salted coffee, and your work has mandated salt in the coffee, insisting that it increases productivity, and if you’re not partaking you might fail your next performance review.

Any press is good press, amirite?

Accountability and responsibility are not so clear and large, insanely profitable, behemoths like Microsoft.

Yea, and that's the reason we pay taxes and tolerate a government, they're supposed to provide a counter force to this apparent corruption.

You've clearly never worked at a large tech company

“In Q2 our P0 goal is to deliver Project Footgun. Your focus on delivering this important goal will put us in a good position to finally fund your favorite tech debt projects.”

Its now Q2, you worked your ass off on delivering Project Footgun, excitedly signing in the next morning to work on that tech debt to a message from your manager that the PMs didn't see value in the P1's and were transitioning to Project Footgun 2.0 The Shotgun

Smart TVs are so user hostile now that this doesn't work for me personally anymore. Every TV I've seen recently always tries to get back to the "home" screen so they can funnel you into more ads and/or content that makes them money. If I have the TV set to the HDMI source for my connected HTPC, turn off the TV, and turn it back on again, it will be back on the TV's home screen. If I switch to an HDMI source that isn't currently outputting video it will switch back to the home screen in five seconds. I was at a friend's house over Thanksgiving and when he tried to navigate away from the home screen on his Vizio TV to a different HDMI input he got a confirmation dialog box with an ad embedded in it asking him "are you SURE you want to change inputs?" It's ridiculous.

For now I spend the extra money for "digital display" TVs that are just dumb input for HDMI devices but I fear that someday that option will either disappear or fall significantly behind regular TVs in display technology.

Try TCL. I just got a second one after 6 years with a previous model of theirs that was showing signs of death. On both this new (Google-based OS) and old one (Roku-based OS), I have done the steps I mentioned above. I wouldn't have bothered typing that up if it didn't work.

Turning a HDMI device on wakes the TV and then it automatically selects that input. I've never been to the homescreen except by choice, and even then it is completely stock. Barebones, no ads - it has no internet to get any.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check them out.

I used Walmart delivery for groceries a fair amount last year and didn't have a single issue. I used it maybe six times this year and there was an issue with the order five of those times. Several times it was delivered to the wrong address. The other times I was missing around half of my order. I was able to get refunds without any issue every time but the experience was so awful I canceled and haven't used it at all the second half of this year.

Your experience mirrors mine. My wife and I used Walmart+ for grocery deliveries basically every week for a year without any issues up until a couple of months ago. Suddenly, they started fucking up every single order, delivering things to the wrong address, missing items, or even claiming to have delivered an order that never arrived. After calling and complaining for the 10th time in a row, we gave up. We were so pissed off we even made a point of canceling the service, even though we get it for free as a credit card perk.

YouTube search will also only show you maybe 10 videos relevant to your search terms and then just give you random videos it wants you to watch that have little or nothing to do with your original search.

Yes! This is exactly it and at least for me the change happened sometime in the last year. I often look at real estate online in Vietnam and a year ago I could scroll through pages of houses, now I get a handful of somewhat relevant videos and then it’s cirque videos. It’s wild how bad it is.

Reminds me of how they blew up the rabbit hole of next videos long ago. I remember long long ago, my favorite part was the next video queued up after watching a video. You would go down these wild rabbit holes of videos that got ever more specific. Now it’s the same issue with search a bunch of unrelated videos recommended for watching next.

Its like tiktok search but way less awful.

Whatever you search, doesn't matter, it's just people dancing.

You want a recipe for chickpea soup? How about people dancing instead is that good?

They already do that. I've gotten a few full screen "notifications" on Windows 10 telling me to upgrade to 11 with options to "Accept" or "Ask Me Later."