I feel like there is potentially great therapeutic value in this sort of AI companion bot for people who have certain kinds of social anxiety, or neuro-atypicalities, or working through trauma. This needs to be implemented with all of the medical rigor of a therapy program administered by trained professionals, and the technology doesn't have that kind of maturity, yet.

But, what this app demonstrates is that there are a lot of people out there who are deeply lonely in some way and crave interaction, and this is an axis along which they are willing to engage. Meet them where they are, and then work towards more healthy interactions whatever that may mean.

White Castle just got dinged for a multi-million dollar amount for their fingerprint scanning employee tracker tech that sent biometric data to a third party in Illinois. Currently, Illinois' BIPA is the strongest and most enforced biometric law on the books in the US, but a few other states have them winding through the legislature (there are a few other niche laws, like NY and I think NJ regulate facial recognition use by residential management/landlords).

Even the big players with access to sophisticated lawyers are messing this up, and the legal landscape is only becoming more perilous. In the era of "big data distrust", I don't see why Panera thinks this is the way to go over a token on an app, or something that goes into a digital wallet.

There’s been a lot of misreporting regarding the recent HiQ v. LinkedIn case from the 9th Circuit. The best write up I've encountered is by an Internet and Web Scraping attorney, Kieran McCarthy

The key takeaway is that in the 9th Circuit (which has the most developed law in this area) web scraping a publicly available website doesn’t necessarily constitute a CFAA violation, but that doesn’t mean what you did was either legal, or that you won’t face legal liability.

You ask your tech to "enhance the pixels" and use an algorithm to fill in the missing data. Wait, show me what's behind the car in this photo, then zoom up on the reflection off the of the store window. There he is! Get a close up of the wrist - that tattoo is only worn by shot callers in the Sinaloa cartel. This has Hector Garza written all over it! Testicular, get me Boarder Patrol on the phone, we're going to need a joint task force!

> Last September, he publicly stated that Amazon did not “have a plan to require people to come back,”

Well, it appears true they did not have a plan. They required people to come back, but the plan was clearly not there.

Not quite. Apple's stock increase from mid 2007 (when the iPhone was released) to today is around 38x when using the "adjusted close" price from June 29, 2007 and present day. That accounts for splits and dividend payments in some fashion, and I'm not going to dive too deeply into the best prices to use (because I have no useful input into that question), but the math is pretty close whichever way you look at it.

Right at the beginning of the pandemic, when we started taking long walks around the neighborhood, I found a fiver on the ground during our first walk.

The next day, we went for another walk and I spotted what looked like a $20, but turned out to be TWO $20s folded together. I was like “Woohoo! Up $45 this week alone, if this keeps up, it’ll cover our grocery bills!”

Of course, I never found any more loose cash, but those 20s lived in my wallet for like 18 months because we weren’t going anywhere and weren’t using cash. Occasionally my wife would ask if I had money just in case, and I’d look and say, “yeah, I still have those ‘ground twenties’ from the walk!”

Apple never really entered the high end portable music space. They eventually introduced Apple Lossless Audio codec, but their players didn't really have high end audio features like fancy DACs, or pre-amps for driving high end headphones.

This seems weird to be explaining to anyone in 2022, but there's lots of interface use cases where the trackpad isn't a very good solution. Thinks like graphic design/layout work, spreadsheets, filling out forms where the UI is tight. There's also the matter of a physical mouse being MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better for people with loss of hand dexterity.

All that said use cases for this device are pretty rare because they mainly focus on people who need to travel between locations to work frequently, but also require a mouse. This seems great if you are traveling with a small laptop or tablet in a small sleeve. Fitting this into that package would work great, and a mouse is like carrying a stone of about that size (basically requires a different kind of bag). I work on a full-sized laptop, so carrying a mouse around isn't that big a deal.

Arc mouse is 14.22 mm thick and weighs 82 g, and uses AAA batteries, and is a two button mouse that lacks a scroll function.

This thing is 4.5 mm thick over most of its surface, with a 10 mm bump where the sensor lives. It has a scroll pad and weighs 40 g. These things are in different universes in terms of size and thickness.

You can say, "the Arc Mouse is only three times as thick and twice as heavy, but it also changes shape, and I see no reason for a better solution." you can say that, but thinking the arc mouse does the same thing as this device is hard to square with the basic dimensions of each mouse in question.