Readit NewsIt's an idea from a video game where AI is spying on your life 24/7 and infers who you would vote for so you never actually need to (or can) vote.
Although then, Zuck's, Bezos' and Musk's AI would still send out lobbyists to manipulate politicians to fuck us plebs over (Hah, the overpaid codemonkey thinks he's a pleb...).
It'll be a future when an AI orders escorts be sent to Supreme Court justices' rooms in the golf vacations paid for by the billionaire. "Data says, Justice [____] likes long haired blondes with nice buttocks, send Tiffany. She should bring beer, he likes beer.".
However I'm struggling to parse the round object in the first Switzerland poster. Anyone care to help me out?
Although, it might also be a hat (2nd pic on https://civilisable.com/traditional-swiss-clothing/ )
There's no particular need to change this, because one person can only use so many shopping carts. If you maintain the price at "free", demand saturates and people stop stealing carts.
It's common for people to return carts to a designated area, and it's also not rare for people to just leave the carts somewhere convenient for them. Store employees periodically go around and move the carts back to the place where you expect to pick them up.
Costco is an interesting hybrid case. They make it easy to return the carts "correctly" by providing little depots scattered throughout their enormous parking lot. Realistically, the parking lot is so large that very few people would be willing to return a cart to the front of the store, where you get the cart from if you're going shopping.
However, people also aren't going to pick up carts from those depots deep within the parking lot and wheel them over to the store. So Costco employees still have to make rounds of the parking lot and move carts that have been left there to their correct location at the front of the store. But for Costco, you're supposed to leave the cart in the parking lot, but only in certain locations.
> If you maintain the price at "free", demand saturates and people stop stealing carts.
If the price is $1, the same people who'll steal them will keep stealing them (with a screwdriver it's easy to pry your coin back out of the slot anyway).
> it's also not rare for people to just leave the carts somewhere convenient for them
With the coin, guess what... it will be rarer, because the people have incentive to get their coin back. At least in theory. And if someone doesn't care about their change, some enterprising kids might return the carts anyway to gain some money, and the end result for the supermarket is the same: carts at their designated return locations. The worker just has to go to 3 or 4 of these locations instead of running up and down the parking lot collecting all the stray carts.
I've had success with just repeating "Agent please" or "I wanna talk to human" if I notice the chat bot isn't a traditional conditional-if-else-bot but an LLM, and it seems like most of them have some sort of escape-hatch they can trigger, but they're prompted to really avoid it. But if you continue sending "Agent please" over and over again, eventually it seems like the typical context-rot prevents them from avoiding the escape-hatch, and they send you along to a real human.
Walking down the street I receive a text to say my glasses were ready to be picked up. I had not purchased any glasses, and the store that I was to collect them from was not in the city I live in. By coincidence I was approximately 30 meters from a branch of the same store in my town. I popped in to tell them that someone had entered a phone number incorrectly and someone might need to told by other means that their glasses were ready.
The response? "Certainly sir, can I have your name, and address". Explaining how this information was not relevant was not fruitful. I was reluctant to provide this information because about the only thing they could have done with it was to add it to the account that matched the phone number. I wasn't in the mood to engage in identity theft for a free pair of glassees, but the conversation was going in circles. Eventually another staff member observed the rising tension and offered to take care of this difficult situation. She took my phone number, and the address of the branch that had sent the text, said thank you for the notification and she would sort it out with the other branch. I was out of the store within 30 seconds of her taking over.
SPOILERS FOLLOW as I will be discussing the answer.
Looking at the table, device 3 obviously tells you if the bottle is from the "high" group (8-15) or the "low" group (0-7). So you line up the bottles and start using device 3 on them, and move them into two groups, 0-7 on the left and 8-15 on the right, as you get the results of each test.
Also, once you've found all eight bottles of one group, you can stop testing because all the remaining bottles will be in the other group. If you're lucky this might happen as soon as test 8, but worst case you must test 15 bottles, then you'll know which group the 16th belongs to without needing to check it.
Worst case: 15 tests done so far.
Now look at what device 2 does. For each group, 0-7 and 8-15, it tells you whether that bottle belongs to the "low" half of the group (0-3 or 8-11) or the "high" half of the group (4-7 or 12-15). Furthermore, in each group of eight, once you've identified four "highs" or four "lows" you can skip testing the rest. Worst case, you have to test 7 bottles of each group before you find four of a kind, and can skip at most 1 bottle per group. 2 skips total, 14 tests.
Worst case: 15+14 = 29 tests done so far.
Now you have four groups, 0-3, 4-7, 8-11, 12-15. You use device 2 which will tell you whether each bottle is in the "high" or "low" pair for each group (0-1 or 2-3, 4-5 or 6-7, and so on). Worst case you have to test three bottles from each group before you are guaranteed to find a pair and be able to skip the fourth bottle. So worst case here is 12 tests.
Worst case: 15+14+12 = 41 tests done so far.
Now you have eight pairs that are 0-1, 2-3, 4-5 and so on. The final device, device 0, will tell you whether the bottle you tested is the "low" or "high" bottle of that pair, so you can arrange each pair in correctly-sorted order after testing one bottle. Guaranteed to need 8 tests, with no possibility of luck of the draw changing that number.
Worst case: 15+14+12+8 = 49 tests done and you've arranged the bottles in order from 0 to 15, so you now know the year of every bottle.
I spotted a typo in your explanation though, after the paragraph "Worst case: 15+14 = 29 tests done so far." you need to use device 1, but you wrote in the next paragraph "device 2".
We're so far from the original spirit of the event.
If someone had money to burn (come on cryptobros..), they could make a t-shirt that says "This T-Shirt earned by not participating in Hacktoberfest 2025"...
I suppose people who are familiar with the t-shirt fiasco might not want to avoid association with any further fests, I can't imagine someone wearing the t-shirt proudly, and if they bragged about it in a job interview it might even be a negative..
Edit to add: the prospectus PDF says sponsorship applications were in previous months, and August 2025 is the launch of the site. Sponsorship earns you a mention on their site.. so, since the site doesn't mention any other brand than DigitalOcean, were there no takers? Why is there still a form to enquire about being a sponsor?
And yes they're still going to have t-shirts... So will clothing made in Bangladesh go halfway around the world to end up in their neighbour country?
Also, it reminds me of this HN conversation I found fascinating a few years back: Finding the longest straight line you could sail without hitting land - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965650
I'd guess showing the coordinates of the hit (and make it a link to maps) would be beneficial.