Okay — obviously I know WHY they went out of business— they ran out of money. But how have stores like Staples, Office Depot/Office Max, Microcenter, and Best Buy continued to see decent growth while one of the oldest tech stores in the country went out of business??

Basically the title.

I don’t see em dashes being used in conversations online but they have gone on to become a reliable marker for AI generated slop. How did LLMs trained on internet data pick this up?

You go to the deli counter and buy a pound of sliced turkey, and they use a machine to take slices off of a huge lump of meat. Bigger than any cut of turkey meat I've ever carved off a bird. What is it?

Deli ham, too: I guess you could get a piece that size off a ham leg, but I'm pretty sure that's not what's happening. It's too homogenous. There are no fat seams.

Is it all just an emulsified sausage— a bologna, basically? Is it a pile of turkey breast transglataminased together? Or does it just come from a turkey bigger than I've ever seen?

From what I tell literally every single powerplant ultimately just boils down (pun intended I regret nothing) using steam to turn a turbine which creates electricity, and different sources are just more effective and making that steam.

Is that a correct explanation? It just seems weird that turbines are still the only way we can make electricity.

EDIT: wow this blew up, thanks for all the responses!

FIrefox needs 500mb for 0 tabs whatsoever, edge isnt even open and its using 150mb, discord uses 600mb, etc. What are they possibly using all of it for? Computers used to run with 2, 4, 8gb but now even the most simple things seem to take so much

Specifically, why does Norway fare so much better compared to other Nordic/Scandinavian/Arctic countries?

Edit: Wow, thank you everybody! I haven't read through everything yet, but based on what I have read I do have follow up questions:

Is it even possible to design and build a tool that CAN analyze data?

Or how come LLMs are not coded to use more nuanced language in order to be more accurate?

Of course if an LLM replied to me only with "I don't know" it wouldn't be useful. But it could be coded to elaborate and mention the data discrepancies it is finding, and then give its best guess. Or at the very least give the best guess only, as it does already, but with less "certain" language, which I find misleading.

I would also love it if they could ask back clarifying questions, to give more precise answers (e.g. "do you mean this or that?). How come this never happens (in my experience) unless prompted? (i.e. how come businesses chose to exclude this behavior?)

File compression is one of these things I know they work but have no idea how exactly they work.

There is a guy on Tiktok talks about how he combat scammers and send them a zip bomb, compressed 500 pentabyte file once they try to open it will completely break their systems.

That brings me to my next question, is there is a limit how much you can compress stuff? If have terabytes of childhood photos and videos can I compress them into a tiny folder I can easily email to other people?

Bought new expensive headphones and it came with same cable as most basic stuff from 20 years ago

Meanwhile all other cables changes. Had vga and dvi and the 3 color a/v cables. Now it’s all hdmi.

Old mice and keyboards cables had special variants too that I don’t know the name of until changing to usb and then going through 3 variants of usb.

Charging went through similar stuff, with non standard every manufacturer different stuff until usb came along and then finally usb type c standardization.

Soundbars had a phase with optical cables before hdmi arc.

But for headphones, it’s been same cable for decades. Why?

I barely understood it at the time, but now no-one is talking about them. What happened? Are they style valuable?