I’ve noticed a recent change in Walmart Scan & Go (Walmart Pay) that really illustrates how far their purchase tracking goes. If you’ve set up Walmart Pay with a credit card, and you later use that same physical card in-store, Walmart now appears to associate those transactions with your account as well.
I’m fairly confident of this because the app has started showing me in-store purchases that were not made using Walmart Pay. It suggests they’re linking transactions at the card-number level, not just through the app.
I suspect they may also be tying in-store purchases to your profile if you’ve ever placed an online order, though that part is speculation.
Yes they 100% associate the card number with your account if it's on file. I have never used Walmart pay and use my physical card only.
The strange thing I've noticed is that there is a failure rate of probably 20% where it doesn't associate me.
I do not use the app or scan and go. But I have a walmart account, and if I use my credit card at walmart all of those purchases show up on my online account. My email is of course intimately tied to my credit card (I am not in payments, so I am not sure where that happens, its not surprising but its there).
That’s really interesting. I always thought grocers probably tied loyalty cards and credit card hashes but it’s interesting that it’s been in home improvement that long.
My issue with it has always been that I just don't think the way TDD requires.
I think in terms of building features. TDD generally requires thinking in terms of proving behavior. I still can't wrap my head around first writing a test that fails and then writing minimal code to make it pass (I know I am simplifying it).
Different strokes for different folks. I'm sure it works great for some people but not for me.
Well, all it does is basically enforce you code with testing (abstraction) in mind, and only focus on what you need.
So you build feature A. Great.
Why not write a test to instantiate the feature? It will fail, because you haven’t built it yet. Now go build it.
I assume you build the interface first already, before every little detail of the methods?
Also, you really don’t have to stick to the TDD principles that much. It’s basically to ensure:
1. You have a test which can fail (it actually tests something)
2. You actually have a test for your unit
3. You actually only code what you’re supposed to
This is great for juniors, but as you have more experience, these individual steps lose value, but the principles remain I think.
Also, I would never write tests for every method (as TDD might have you believe), because that’s not my “unit” in unit testing.
I bought my 2018 Wrangler with the same idea... keep it for life. That was also the last year they offered the "lifetime" warranty. Glad I went for that.
So far, the Jeep has been fairly reliable, with my issues being:
- Electric door locks and mirrors stopped working
- Radiator leaked
- CV Joints
The Lifetime Warranty has now broken even (~$2500).
Unfortunately, now my issue is rust, and the warranty doesn't cover that.
Rust. I live in the north half of Ohio, so my stuff gets bathed in salty brine for several months out of the year and rust is a real problem for me.
What I've found that works (for me):
For stuff that isn't yet rusted, Fluid Film. It's easy to buy (it's on the shelf even at Wal-Mart). It's made primarily from lanolin, which is a product of the wool industry and is how sheep stay dry. If I were Very Serious about it, I'd find a shop that would cover the whole bottom of the vehicle (and anything that can be reached through holes) in the stuff and pay them to get that done. (I buy it in spray cans; some shops buy it in 55 gallon drums.)
For stuff that is definitely already rusting, Corrosion-X. It's some kind of oily chemical soup that is supposed to prevent existing rust from getting worse, and also prevent new rust. One interesting feature is that it's available in 3 different viscosities; vaguely speaking, those viscosities are thin, medium, and elephant snot.
The thin one does a fantastic job of creeping around to cover even unseen surfaces, but it washes off the fastest. The thicker ones hang around longer and creep less. (Tradeoffs, I guess.)
I prefer Fluid Film just because it's more natural than some other things are and that makes me feel good in some way that I don't care to rationalize, but Fluid Film is not very good at recovering from existing rust.
Corrosion-X, though? I can get the thin version of that worked into the joint of a completely rusted-stuck pair of box-jointed pliers and have them working very well (and looking fairly decent, though not "new") in a few minutes with a shop rag. I've heard stories of it being used to hose down whole electrical rooms in ocean-going boats. It's amazing stuff. (And it's expensive.)
The practical downside is that these products all feel greasy, and they all turn black with enough time and enough miles. They're all ugly.
For visible painted body panels, the best way I know to deal with small spots of rust from rock chips and stuff is to go full-ass on it. Get the Dremel out, pick an appropriate abrasive stone, and start grinding those little pinholes out until there's nothing but clean, shiny metal surrounded by paint. And then: Fill in with touchup paint that matches the factory paint code. (It's never perfect, but it does get easier to do a job that looks better than little rust spots do with some practice...and the little spots then don't turn into big spots.)
There are many shops in the US which will apply Noxudol both underneath and inside body panels and frame rails with special 360 degree applicators. I believe it is a formula developed in Scandinavia.
All of my cars are sprayed with the stuff for over a decade with no other maintenance.
Perhaps, but: I don't want to deal with avoiding permanently-affixed overspray on parts that don't want to be coated.
I also don't want to work with fasteners that are coated in bedliner: I'm already not having a fun time of things when I'm crawling under an old car doing some manner of repair. I want every possible advantage while I'm down there, and a well-stuck layer of bedliner seems like a big disadvantage.
As a point of comparison, stuff like Fluid Film [and the others that have been mentioned] can be applied to just about anything under the car that's metal (including bendy things like springs), and can be scrubbed off sometime later if it accidentally gets on body-colored parts using just soap, water, and some elbow grease.
Fasteners that are both rust-free and oily usually come apart like a dream when the time comes, and oily coatings that stay goopy tend to self-heal after being abraded by whatever the tires might kick up from the road.
Fluid coatings seem like the right set of tradeoffs in this non-ideal world compared to something like bedliner.
They're not perfect, but nothing is.
(Ideally, I'd live in a place that doesn't require driving through brine... but my world isn't ideal.)
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["elephant snot"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.
What sticks with me about Pet Sounds, aside from its unique sound, is that Brian Wilson put sand in his house around the piano to make a more physical and emotional atmosphere in which to help his creation. Here is the only photo I have seen of that. [0]
It is funny when you hear the stories behind some of the biggest albums and there is more often than not something like that. It looks odd but the results tend to yield some amazing results.
I am not the biggest fan of Wilsons stuff but you could never accuse him of just phoning it in.
For those in the UK at the time, how was the code consumed? It sounds like the BBC Micro was somehow hooked up to the same "cable" as a TV. Is that right?
Did it decode the data automatically, or did programmers at home have to build something on top of it?
It just sounds incredibly ingenious on both ends. First, to invent the process and second, to use the data. I'd appreciate any knowledge that can help with the latter.
Apparently it was on at 17:30 on Channel 4, listed as "4 Computer Buffs" [0]. Channel 4 was an independent TV station, and one of only four over-the-air channels.
From another site [1] the show was one of a short series of 7 programmes, probably hosted by a professor on a sabbatical. You can cross-reference the time slot on the first site. In the same time slot, at other dates, are other computer-related shows like Me and My Micro [2].
In the UK, it was an era of affordable home computers and hobbyist activity in the media. There was a large variety of microcomputer systems, with one or more hobby-level magazines dedicated to each manufacturer. Television programs would often partner with magazines to present a column, recap, or serve as a reference for more detailed work. You see some screen time dedicated to building hardware, as I/O was very primitive and you had to do the grunt work yourself. Made to order PCBs and surface mount was quite a way off.
EDIT: Sorry! I answered without first reading the article. What I'm talking about below is different from TFA.
You could record the audio to an audio cassette tape. If you had a good enough cassette deck, you could use acoustic coupling (holding up the tape deck to the TV speaker).
The BBC Micro had a 7-pin DIN socket for audio in/out and remote control of an external tape deck.
Thanks for that! That makes sense and is very cool. In the US in the 80s we did something similar from the radio (the UK probably did too). So, I assume it was a similar principle.
Data broadcasting companies did use scanlines originally intended for Teletext/Ceefax in the 90s to transmit public information (e.g. weather forecasts, water levels): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datacasting
In that case the "antenna in" signal did go to an ISA decoder card in the PC, but it appears that the BBC Micro also had an adapter for receiving classic Ceefax pages, some of which also contained software: https://www.teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/telesoftware/
I have always heard of different conclusions from too many choices. It was from a study known as the "Jam Experiment." [0] They found that in a grocery store that if customers had six choices, they bought more jam than if there were 14 choices.
> Never heard of decoy effect. Always referred to this phenomenon as “anchoring”
Correct. The example they gave is anchoring.
Anchoring typically looks like $10-$25-$50, and they want you to buy the $25 item. Sometimes the presence of the $50 item can have zero sales, but the $25 item will sell better than if the options were just $10 and $25.
Decoy would be more like $10-$40-$50, and they want you to buy the $50 item and the $40 item has less than it’s sticker value. Decoy is commonly used to encourage people to buy at the top of their budget range (as one example).
Personally, when presented with too many choices, I always feel like some of the choices are the wrong ones - perhaps the cheap ones are garbage, or quite oppositely, you're paying an extra for nothing - and I'm afraid of being a fool for picking them.
No matter how it goes, it's always a negative experience for me.
It would be nice to try it with SAAS and then buy a local license.
It is similar to the Tydbit device [0] where you can program the device but it runs on their cloud. That is fine unless Tydbit goes out of business. That fear of loss stopped me from doing too much programming with it.
I drew a similar conclusion from the abstract as you. The only negative I could think out of that is with higher essay scores, one might expect higher knowledge gain, and that wasn’t present.
However, I agree that that doesn’t really seem to be a negative over other methods.
I ran into the language very differently than many posts here. The Tidbyt [0], a retro-style smart display designed to provide at-a-glance information on the weather, sports scores, transit schedules, etc., uses it to enable people to create their own custom displays.
For those purposes, it is simple. The simplicity reminds me of Lua. It is a perfect choice for the device.
I have the opposite perception from you; I tried to create apps for Tidbyt, only to run into obscure differences between Starlark and Python, inability to parse data from API endpoint, inability to debug. I followed your link and saw that the platform somewhat matured so I'll give it one more try
I’m fairly confident of this because the app has started showing me in-store purchases that were not made using Walmart Pay. It suggests they’re linking transactions at the card-number level, not just through the app.
I suspect they may also be tying in-store purchases to your profile if you’ve ever placed an online order, though that part is speculation.
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