I’m JHarris on Metafilter, and rodneylives on mefi.social. I help run the gaming blog Set Side B, I do Q&As for the website Game Developer, I wrote sometimes about roguelikes, and I used to write the column @Play long ago on the (now sadly deceased) website GameSetWatch.
I DoorDash regularly. I frequently get offers so low that it’s not worth it in gas+time to deliver them. There’s a chance that a lowball offer will tip me after the fact, sure, but it rarely happens, probably only one time in ten.
If the initial offer doesn’t tip, and not just tip but enough to make it worth it relative to the travel distance and time, then I don’t accept it. No experienced driver would, and no driver should.
It remains the only good way to track hundreds of websites at once.
Who even asked them?
Steven Universe (it’s accessible to adults on a different level than kids)
Much of the old web is still there. A lot of old sites have gone dark, but there are still some that remain, and some have persisted for surprisingly long.
Usenet and IRC still exist! As public and distributed services, like the Fediverse and the World Wide Web itself, one node can go down but others remain. Things that don’t remain? AOL IM; Yahoo Messenger; MSN Messenger; Google Talk (in its original form).
When everyone chased after social media, many people declared the old web dead. They were wrong. When mobile platforms hit it big, a lot of people thought the days of the desktop PC were gone. They were wrong too. The demise of Google Reader was an attempt to kill off RSS, but a lot of sites still have feeds. And a lot of blogs still exist, even if it’s getting harder to find them due to Google Search’s ongoing decay.
Corporations have big PR budgets, and a lot of tech reporters are uncritical about what they hype. Witness the attempts to get cryptocurrency, NFTs, and now LLMs, to take. But we do not have to buy what they’re selling.
We don’t need a new internet. The old one survives, for now at least. But we have to remember it exists, and make it easier to find.
The problem with screening by AI is there’s going to be false positives, and it’s going to be extremely challenging and frustrating to fight them. Last month I got a letter for a speeding infraction that was automated: it was generated by a camera, the plate read in by OCR, the letter I received (from “Seat Pleasant, Maryland,” lol) was supposedly signed off by a human police officer, but the image was so blurry that the plate was practically unreadable. Which is what happened: it got one of the letters wrong, and I got a speeding ticket from a town I’ve never been to, had never even heard of before I got that letter. And the letter was full of helpful ways to pay for and dispense with the ticket, but to challenge it I had to do it it writing, there was no email address anywhere in the letter. I had to go to their website and sift through dozens of pages to find one that had any chance of being able to do something about it, and I made a couple of false steps along the way. THEN, after calling them up and explaining the situation, they apologized and said they’d dismiss the charge–which they failed to do, I got another letter about it just TODAY saying a late fee had now been tacked on.
And this was mere OCR, which has been in use for multiple decades and is fairly stable now. This pleasant process is coming to anything involving AI as a judging mechanism.
I can do both! Doordash really REALLY should pay more. But also, practically, I can’t take offers that are not worth it economically to do so. And I can only decide to do that with the information I’m provided before I take the offer.
I’ve been asked to drive a total of 24 miles (12 miles there and back) for $3.75 before.