Topic I know about: I worked for ECCO corporate for about 7 years, and have a pair of Ecco shoes I made myself. I no longer work there.

A well fit pair of ECCO’s can last multiple years. They genuinely do try and make quality shoes and there’s a lot of work done to keep the materials and manufacturing processes producing high quality shoes.

That being said, any shoe made with a polyurethane sole (like ECCO and most shoes nowadays) will not last for a lifetime. Polyurethane is a great material but not a lifetime material. The only shoes which could qualify as buy it for life material are ones with leather soles, but they require occasional resoleing, so are a ship of thesus sort of affair. A pair of ECCO's lasting 5 years is a reasonable goal but not one always attained.

You say you were wearing them everyday - this will decrease the overall lifetime of a pair of shoes. Your feet sweat and the inside gets wet, the leather uppers benefits from being allowed to dry out. Conversely, any shoes you own with polyurethane soles must be worn occasionally (a few times a year minimum) or the soles will harden and then crack and fall apart when being worn. ECCO used to get a lot of angry feedback from customers that bought expensive dress shoes only to wear to a wedding once a year, and they fell apart after only having been worn 2-4 times. You are best owning 2-4 pairs of shoes that you rotate through day to day, this will extend the life of all of them longer, so you will spend less overall (but need to start by buying multiple pairs). I would get pairs from different companies so you can compare how long they last and which you find are most comfortable for your feet. Some other companies that are in the same price and quality range as ECCO would be Cole Haan, Clarks, Timberland and Rockport. One of them might fit you much better then Vans or ECCO or whatever.

Finally, a good fit is key. If the shoe is too small, or just not the right shape for your foot, then whatever part of the shoe your foot is pushing against will wear out much faster then the rest of the shoe. This is actually a problem I have with ECCO’s personally. My feet are wide just behind my toes, and my shoes always fail right there where my foot is stretching the leather more then elsewhere, earlier then they would if they fit me better. Seeing how I was getting free and/or deeply discounted shoes, I was ok with this.

Shoe manufacturers use a form called a “last” when they manufacture shoes, the last determines the shape and fit of the shoe. Different companies have different lasts based on their own research and goals for fit and the kinds of customers they’re targeting. It may be that Van’s uses a last shape that doesn’t match up with your foot shape very well. Perhaps ECCO's will fit you well, perhaps not at all.

If you’re in the US, ECCO runs sales every other month or so when the already on-sale shoes will be discounted another 30-40% (I just looked and they're having one now...). You can pick up a pair for $100-150 pretty easily. Usually around holidays at a minimum. Keep an eye out on their website, and get a pair pretty cheap during a sale. Or, check out of there is an outlet near you, the outlets have legitimately low prices, especially on the clearance wall, though usually those shoes are also ugly AF which is how they end up there.

Anyone has questions about shoe production or ECCO, I’d be happy to answer. They make pretty good shoes and run their own, non sweatshop factories, so I do recommended the shoes. Their US office is run by a few complete idiots though so I don’t recommend working there.

Based on the earnest way in which it was asked, I don't think the employee asking knew that the manager wasn't supposed to be doing that - they thought it was a legitimate incentive approved by the company.

As far as I know the company didn't try going after the manager about it, but it's possible I wouldn't have known about that. I only know the above because I was working in that room re-configuring some tech stuff that needed to be fixed ASAP, while the meeting was happening.

Worked for a shoe retailer where the head office was attached to the distribution center (DC) for the US.

The CFO fired the long-time and very popular DC manager. The rounded up the DC staff in our large meeting room with the CFO and the director of HR to discuss the change in management in the DC. The DC staff were already unhappy because they all liked the manager very much. After the spiel from CFO and HR, one of the DC staff asked if they would still be getting double time for all overtime. HR director, confused, asked what he meant. He explained the DC director would go and modify their timecards so they would get paid double for overtime instead of time and a half.

The HR director, without putting any thought into their answer or the consequences, immediately stated that would be ending immediately.

The DC damn near went on strike right there. Several of them left over the next few weeks, and the ones who didn't leave worked much slower and were unavailable for overtime work. They ended up requiring all of us office staff to work 4-8 hours a week in the DC for a few months while they unfucked everything.

As well, EV’s lose very little of their energy to heat or other losses between the battery and wheels unlike ICE vehicles. The result is drag plays a more significant percentage of where the energy is “going”, so the impact of higher speeds on range is greater then it is for ICE vehicles.

Just to be clear, he absolutely wasn’t going hiking but to some sort of BDSM event.

Respectfully, did you read the article? They’re talking about NFC increasing the range from ~5mm to 30mm. It’s not about competing with Bluetooth use cases, it’s about an improvement in the user experience with contactless payments and door access, etc.

I think it’s a valid question. I think there is value in allowing separate communities, but it makes discovery harder.

It would be nice to see a way of creating meta lists with one click signup functionality, so curated lists can be created.

And/or the ability for communities to be able to link perhaps? So they become functionally one community, but with the ability to split remaining in the individual admins control.

Based on your played games you would probably all enjoy World of Warships. It’s F2P, possible to play and enjoy without spending money (though of course spending money does allow you to get more stuff), has deep gameplay and large learning curve but matches are all less then 20 minutes.

The game is probably CPU bound not GPU bound, based on past bethesda games. If that is the case, decreasing the resolution will not necessarily increase the frame rate a proportional amount.

I think battle royale in general was the halo killer.

Both because Fortnite and Apex Legends have I think occupied the attention of Halo's traditional playerbase and age range, and because the Halo dev team spent some time chasing the battle royale format and wasted time and energy on that during infinite's development, IIRC.

I believe that is correct.

P.S - I have a subscription to WaPo that allows me to "gift" ten articles a month. I'm curious if the gift URL I used only allows one or a few people to access it, or if it opens the article up to everyone that uses the link.

Can a few people comment to tell me if that link bypassed the paywall to the article for them?

Not quite the case.

When a user on instance B subscribes to a community on instance A, instance A begins to send in real-time the posts and comments of that community to B, which keeps a local copy of that community.

If instance B has 10 active users subscribed to that community on A, they’re all loading it from instance B. The end result is instance A only had to share each piece of content once with instance B, and instance B further shares it with the ten local subscribers, reducing the load on instance A.

The only exception is when instance B only has a single subscriber to instance A’s community, in which case replicating the entirely of the community is more work then that user just browsing it directly on instance A.

Tl;dr it’s most efficient for a large Lenny instance if most of its active users are on other instances.

If a large corp wants to do what you’re suggesting, they don’t need to launch a big announced project.

They can spin up a federated instance with just one user and no references to who owns it, then have patsy accounts on other instances subscribe to their instance and get all the data they want sent to their semi secret instance.

It would be very difficult to identify this in a large, healthy federation with tons of users and lots of small personal instances.

Post it on relevant Reddit threads?

In the US, with slander and libel, there are two standards.

If someone is a public figure, they need to show actual damages in order to be successful, this is the scenario you're describing.

If you are not a public figure, then you can sue for slander or libel without needing to show actual damages, just harm to your reputation or similar.

So the answer on that turns on whether Christian Selig is a public figure or not - I do not know the answer to that question.

Super cool approach. I wouldn't have guessed it would be that effective if someone had explained it to me without the data.

I'm curious how easy it is to "defeat". If you take an AI generated text that is successfully identified with high confidence and superficially edit it to include something an LLM wouldn't usually generate (like a few spelling errors), is that enough to push the text out of high confidence?

I ask because I work in higher ed, and have been sitting on the sidelines watching the chaos. My understanding is that there's probably no way to automate LLM detection to a high enough certainty for it to be used in an academic setting as cheat detection, the false positives are way too high.

It’s not quite identical but sniper elite 5 may scratch the itch for you.

Thank you for the answer.

Any suggestions on further reading?

Not sure then, sorry :/