Quiet here
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wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 00:35 last edited by
I’ve wondered if hotels cost themselves money by charging so much for that crap instead of just charging appropriately and getting higher volume.
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wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 00:52 last edited by
Yeah. I regularly buy outside water when I can. I’ll bet if you did a study you’d see more reasonable prices when there’s a CVS or something nearby the hotel.
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wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 01:09 last edited by Renauda 2 Sept 2025, 01:20
@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
I’m hydrating at $9 a bottle.
Fucking hotels.
I normally just use the ice machine down the hall and/or water from the tap. In North America and Hawaii that is. Elsewhere, always bottled or boiled water.
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Yeah. I regularly buy outside water when I can. I’ll bet if you did a study you’d see more reasonable prices when there’s a CVS or something nearby the hotel.
wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 01:33 last edited by@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
Yeah. I regularly buy outside water when I can. I’ll bet if you did a study you’d see more reasonable prices when there’s a CVS or something nearby the hotel.
I was a little shocked at the hotel bar in Manhattan. I could walk out the door and down 100 feet and be at multiple bars that charged relatively normal prices for drinks. But the hotel bar wanted $25 for a glass of rail whiskey.
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@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
I’m hydrating at $9 a bottle.
Fucking hotels.
I normally just use the ice machine down the hall and/or water from the tap. In North America and Hawaii that is. Elsewhere, always bottled or boiled water.
wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 01:37 last edited by@Renauda said in Quiet here:
@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
I’m hydrating at $9 a bottle.
Fucking hotels.
I normally just use the ice machine down the hall and/or water from the tap. In North America and Hawaii that is. Elsewhere, always bottled or boiled water.
Yeah but when you’re sick enough you’ll pay $9 not to do that.
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wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 02:11 last edited by
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Took my first Calc 2 midterm this morning, in my all-online class. They have interesting systems these days. First they have a "biometric" ID system where you show your driver license to the webcam, then use your mouse to "sign" a password. You repeat that signature a few times, and then they make you provide that password before the exam. You have to use a special "lockdown" browser which takes your whole screen and prevents you from opening any other windows. Before the test, you sweep your room with the webcam to establish you don't have cheat sheets on the walls. Then you keep the webcam trained on your face for the whole test. There was a two hour time limit and it was brutal. 19 mostly non-trivial questions, so I didn't have time to ponder. Either you are perfectly fluid with the techniques, or you are toast. Filled up five sides of 8x11 paper. I got through all of the questions, but I know I missed at least one due to haste. Hopefully that's the only one I missed, but I am not betting on it. It will be interesting to see the curve. The online grade system gives you a grade distribution, like where the quartile cutoffs are.
wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 02:21 last edited by@Horace said in Quiet here:
They have interesting systems these days.
That is a challenge.
It seems like there must be some holes in that system.
They need some of those glasses like Tom Cruise has where the guy in the truck can see everything that Tom sees.
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@Renauda said in Quiet here:
@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
I’m hydrating at $9 a bottle.
Fucking hotels.
I normally just use the ice machine down the hall and/or water from the tap. In North America and Hawaii that is. Elsewhere, always bottled or boiled water.
Yeah but when you’re sick enough you’ll pay $9 not to do that.
wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 02:27 last edited by Renauda 2 Sept 2025, 06:16@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
@Renauda said in Quiet here:
@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
I’m hydrating at $9 a bottle.
Fucking hotels.
I normally just use the ice machine down the hall and/or water from the tap. In North America and Hawaii that is. Elsewhere, always bottled or boiled water.
Yeah but when you’re sick enough you’ll pay $9 not to do that.
True enough. I recall being there in a hotel on at least one occasion at the end of a trade show.
Came down with an influenza that flattened me for at least four days. I lived on room service deliveries of French Onion Soup and black bread and carafes of coffee. Luckily it was one of the better western managed hotels in Moscow at the time. No way though I could travel and had to rebook a flight to Cyprus leaving me with only one day to spare on my 3 year multi-entry visa before expiration. At the time I had to go to Cyprus to get my multi entry visa extended for at least another 90 days at which I time would go back to Canada and, among other things, get a new visa.
I recall it all very well because during those fever ridden down days in the hotel room, that right wing terrorist and nutter, Timothy McVeigh, bombed Oklahoma City.
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wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 02:40 last edited by jon-nyc 2 Sept 2025, 02:41
I was driving from central CT to central Jersey to be the best man in a friend’s wedding when that happened. It happened early in the drive and I listened to live coverage on NPR the whole day.
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wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 02:46 last edited by
Luke’s godmother’s mother was in the building. She didn’t die in the blast, but 6 months later from all the shit she inhaled.
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@Horace said in Quiet here:
They have interesting systems these days.
That is a challenge.
It seems like there must be some holes in that system.
They need some of those glasses like Tom Cruise has where the guy in the truck can see everything that Tom sees.
wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 03:15 last edited by@Copper said in Quiet here:
@Horace said in Quiet here:
They have interesting systems these days.
That is a challenge.
It seems like there must be some holes in that system.
They need some of those glasses like Tom Cruise has where the guy in the truck can see everything that Tom sees.
Oh, it would be easy to cheat, even with their precautions. I am sure some students do. Could just flip the keyboard and monitor to a hidden laptop, and use online tools to solve the integrals and derivatives. They provide the whole step by step solution, not just an answer, so the scratch paper will still look good. The webcam can't see your monitor.
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I don’t know. I haven’t tested for anything. Cough, fever, sniffles.
The boy had something similar S-Tue, but I flew out Tuesday and this hit me Friday afternoon. He was Covid negative.
wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 03:41 last edited by@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
I don’t know. I haven’t tested for anything. Cough, fever, sniffles.
Same symptoms here. I'll do the Covid test tomorrow.
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Luke’s godmother’s mother was in the building. She didn’t die in the blast, but 6 months later from all the shit she inhaled.
wrote on 9 Feb 2025, 04:11 last edited by Mik 2 Sept 2025, 04:12@LuFins-Dad said in Quiet here:
Luke’s godmother’s mother was in the building. She didn’t die in the blast, but 6 months later from all the shit she inhaled.
I vividly remember driving thru Indiana the day McVeigh was executed. AMF.
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Took my first Calc 2 midterm this morning, in my all-online class. They have interesting systems these days. First they have a "biometric" ID system where you show your driver license to the webcam, then use your mouse to "sign" a password. You repeat that signature a few times, and then they make you provide that password before the exam. You have to use a special "lockdown" browser which takes your whole screen and prevents you from opening any other windows. Before the test, you sweep your room with the webcam to establish you don't have cheat sheets on the walls. Then you keep the webcam trained on your face for the whole test. There was a two hour time limit and it was brutal. 19 mostly non-trivial questions, so I didn't have time to ponder. Either you are perfectly fluid with the techniques, or you are toast. Filled up five sides of 8x11 paper. I got through all of the questions, but I know I missed at least one due to haste. Hopefully that's the only one I missed, but I am not betting on it. It will be interesting to see the curve. The online grade system gives you a grade distribution, like where the quartile cutoffs are.
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@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
I don’t know. I haven’t tested for anything. Cough, fever, sniffles.
Same symptoms here. I'll do the Covid test tomorrow.
wrote on 10 Feb 2025, 20:27 last edited by@kluurs said in Quiet here:
@jon-nyc said in Quiet here:
I don’t know. I haven’t tested for anything. Cough, fever, sniffles.
Same symptoms here. I'll do the Covid test tomorrow.
And? I was Covid negative last night.
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wrote on 12 Feb 2025, 14:39 last edited by
Good news and bad news about my test score. I got a 95, because the professor is reasonable with the partial credit. In a five point problem, if you made a calculator error at the final step, you only lose one point. This is how I scraped by with the 95. Bad news is that the whole class did well, with a median score of 89, so the time limit apparently wasn't an issue for very many people. I'll have to recalibrate how fast I go on these exams.
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Good news and bad news about my test score. I got a 95, because the professor is reasonable with the partial credit. In a five point problem, if you made a calculator error at the final step, you only lose one point. This is how I scraped by with the 95. Bad news is that the whole class did well, with a median score of 89, so the time limit apparently wasn't an issue for very many people. I'll have to recalibrate how fast I go on these exams.
wrote on 12 Feb 2025, 18:42 last edited by@Horace said in Quiet here:
if you made a calculator error at the final step, you only lose one point. This is how I scraped by with the 95.
That is good. It proves that you know "how" to do the problem. That is more important than getting the right answer buy not understanding how you got it.
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wrote on 12 Feb 2025, 20:28 last edited by jon-nyc 2 Dec 2025, 20:31
Just curious, Horace, how does o3-mini do on that test? Or any other reasoning model?
