You've got to be the person with the idea. I'm currently doing that. I spent the past year working on a frustrating project where everybody else did everything wrong, so now I'm building it on my own, hoping to sell it to them. (No idea if that will work)

I haven't seen the livestream, but I just heard that they intend to have their AI automatically change your passwords on websites if it considers them insecure, which sounds to me like the worst idea for AI so far, and that bar is high.

The better use case would be to make AI cancel that damn subscription that lets you jump through 20 dark pattern questions and then tells you to call customer support.

And you end up with a new subscription the LLM was tricked into accepting

Great news: I was able to score you 10% off the next 12 months on your subscription!

I would definitely like an AI that helps me avoid dark patterns and enshitification. Is there a browser that automatically solves annoying captchas for you?

You have to manually start the change, it doesn't do it continuously.

For the vast majority of services, even if this action fails and the wrong password is saved (!?) you're still just a "forgot password" click away.

If it’s so easy, why use AI to do it?

Because it’s easy, but not enjoyable.

It's essentially impossible to write a traditional program that can go through the full process of logging in and changing a password autonomously, without writing fragile site-specific procedures.

By contrast, an LLM can do it easily.

And if something breaks, and something will break - it's Software+Apple, their support will talk to you for 3 hours very professionally, giving you the scenic route of everything IT support has done in last 300 years and then they will schedule another call, apparently with an expert, on which you will be told to reboot your devices (yeah, all of them), and next stop will be asking you to reinstall your devices clean, of course they will remind you to backup data and how iCloud plans can help. After all that you will be asked to go to a support centre and drop your laptop there (that is, if your device is still under warranty).

> if it considers them insecure

But that's all of them though?

While more readable code is certainly nice, this article ignores the major advantage of XSLT being XML: you can use XSLT to generate XSLT.

And while that sounds like just a funny gimmick, it has real practical applications:

If you've got a CMS that generates HTML from XML documents, you can write the XSLT for that by hand of course. But if there are common patterns that most sites use (menus, for example), while different customers use their own custom document format, it would be really nice if you could generate that XSLT from the data model definition. Long ago I've worked on a CMS that did exactly that.

> The schedule times are more of a guideline: "You know you'll eventually get there, because there are one or two trains per hour in the big cities." If a train is canceled, you simply take the next one – ticket inspectors are used to this because the system adapts too.

That's a fine attitude when your trains run every 10 minutes, like intercities between Amsterdam and Utrecht do, but not when it's only once an hour.

I don't think there's any station in Netherland that doesn't have at least one train per hour.

I've had a train from Essen to Düsseldorf get cancelled at the end of Spiel! In Essen. Thousands of people had to get to Düsseldorf to catch the last ICE there. The replacement bus wasn't going to make it. I ended up paying a fortune for a taxi. And then the ICE arrived at a different platform than announced.

There's nothing about the German train system that's even remotely acceptable. It's not funny enough to call it a joke. It's a tragedy.

What happened? I visited Germany in 2008, and back then you could set your watch by the trains.

Lack of funding, postponement of maintenance, degraded infrastructure. And now too much bureaucracy to get it fixed.

They privatized it. Now all what matters are profits and salaries of the executive board.

This is the answer. They thought they could get away with it. And from what I understand, they nearly did, because the original victim couldn't afford the risk of a lengthy and expensive lawsuit.

But you're not. The head of corporate is someone who thought he could get away with this. And almost did, until Reckless Ben showed up.

but ... they did get away with it? based on the blog post, it ends with the store closure? (which I don't understand why)

If you search for "Bricks and minifigs", every result apart from their main website is about this controversy. One of the values of a franchise is the branding; at least for the forseeable future, this will be a negative value. For a company that serves a small niche community, this seems like suicide.

It seems they closed the store rather than give back the lego. That seems like a win of sorts, because I'm sure it hurts B&M to some degree, but it's not getting the stolen lego back.

I've now also seen part 2, in which the amount of police harassment that B&M seems to be able to bring to bear is absolutely disgusting.

Do they have any evidence of those claims? So far, all evidence seems to be against them.

The original franchisee claims to have lost their life savings in that move. I have no idea how exactly that happened. Their story really sounds like something from Russia back when western investors had their company simply taken from them by someone well-connected.

It sounds like the original franchisee doesn’t want to admit that they were losing a lot of money already. Only someone really desperate would take on a $200K lego collection and only collect a 10% consignment fee. It would also explain the corporate “takeover” if they were already behind on paying their franchise fees or whatever they might have owed to corporate.

That being said, it’s not illegal to be a bad business person, and none of that excuses the subsequent behavior by BAM corporate or the new franchise owner.

* The store's consignment fee was 35%

* They had sold about half of the consigned inventory

* The old franchise owner said they had a job offer outside the country

* Said franchise owner was current on a restructured fee schedule that, they allege, was the direct result of corporate bungling the transfer of accounts from the franchise owner previous to them

I definitely heard 10% first and only later 35%. For some reason the videos don't have transcripts and the Gemini AI isn't available, so I can't try to search for it. But I'm 100% sure that 10% was the figure mentioned first (maybe I misunderstood and it was just being used as an example). If the real figure is 35%, then I retract any comments about them making a bad business deal.

From what I understand, the original franchisee wanted to sell the store because they wanted to leave the US (for "political reasons"; I suspect they don't want to live in Trumpland anymore, but that's pure speculation). The way it appears, the moment they announced that desire to sell, B&M corporate showed up to take control of the shop. And the consignment.

I saw an analysis from a lawyer who said that there are situations where a creditor can claim consignment items, but that it didn't apply here.

Because they didn't file for bankruptcy.

If you have no shelf space, of course you can refuse the consignment. And this was a really big one, but the shop was initially very happy with it. Advertised widely with it. Brought in more shelves to display it all. From what I understand, it was a very large part of what was for sale in that shop.