I have to feel that an online booking system is substantially lower tech than an ai voice assitant chatbot, and makes it even easier to ruminate as you pick the time that works for you.

In my case, the business did have human support assistants, but didn't do reservations via the phone. I had to switch to the web app for that, which was annoying (I was driving?). I guess doing user identification over the phone and scheduling the appointment are time-consuming for the human assistant, while these are some of the few things an app can do well. I presume the logic is to preserve human assistants for actually complicated or dynamic assistance, for the sake of cost-efficiency. A voice llm can bring down the cost of these basic-but-time-consuming interactions.

> when that happens, the rational conclusion is that you're in the wrong.

No it isn't. The news media has a bias like anything else. They have traditionally been against all sorts of groups and topics that they are now in favour of.

> But in fact it virtually never happens,

If it sometimes happens, and if you can take the inside view of a particular topics, then you can determine if it is one such instance.

> if there's any validity at all to the claim that it's misinformation and that it is being pushed by "one side" then it necessarily follows that there's another side that is your source

Your source may not be considered valid by wikipedia, for reasons that are fundamental to wikipedia as an institution, but incidental to an individual trying to determine the truth. One particular example is where an individual can reference primary sources (including personal experience) which are not covered or referenced by "reliable" (wikipedia term of art) secondary sources.

> Python is also ugly, due to the required indentation

As opposed to the not required indentation that literally everyone who writes code ever does anyways?

> believe more in the ecosystem, specifically how the computer vision and machine learning movements have adopted python extensively

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

There are tens of much more successful robot vacuum companies. You do not buy roomba because of their capability in making robot vacuums, that already drove them bankrupt. If all you wanted was the brand name, you could have bought just that. The valuable asset here is the large number of products in people's homes which can now be monetized.

Self custody of cryptocurrency, for the vast majority of people, is riskier than putting their money in the bank. Most people lack the technical competence to keep their crypto secure, and the downside of losing access is much more significant. Notice that the stories regarding banks go "I had to sue them to get it back". With cryptocurrency, in the vast majority of cases, it would instead be "the money was gone for good".

If they thought you were money laundering, maybe giving it back would be a liability.

Ordinary backups don't aim to replace the full service. When you have a stock of food, you don't have enough to last you a lifetime. You have enough to weather a storm. The equivalent for tech would probably be having an offline copy of your "essential" data, but not of every photo you ever took. It would protect you from temporary internet disruption, or if a provider suspended you for a few days, but not if they banned you completely with no recourse.

I had remembered it was "convert and copy", but cc was already taken by the c compiler so they shifted it down a letter. That might have been apocryphal.

Same here. But I also seem to remember claims that this isn't true…

I had it learned as "data duplicator" or something like that... seems also bogus.

Sadly, the Hunger Games are more likely than Star Trek.

If you have an iphone on an old version of ios, you can install the latest version of some software you bought/downloaded for free compatible with that ios version.

Or you get an error and can't do that despite the popup prompting you to do so