There’s many ways to do this. Saving the disk state is one, I believe that’s what the other person suggested - essentially stores the disk as an image which then you use for future vms as your jumping off point. This is also essentially how workstations are deployed at companies. (Essentially being the key word). Cloud providers have different names for this too, in AWS this is called their AMI.

Another option is Ansible, which essentially handles deploying a VM by running your scripts for you. I haven’t played too much with this, and I doubt it works with VirtualBox, but it’s something you may want to look into, it would definitely uplevel your skills.

Thirdly is dependent on what you actually use your VM for, you haven’t given your use cases but this is one of the reasons containerization became such a thing - because when running an app we mostly don’t care about the underlying system. It may be worth it to learn about docker.

Thanks, I’ll be sure to check it out

Ah CompUSA, that takes me back. God I completely empathize with this. I don’t know how many times I thought “I am a service provider, the service you sell, without me those services you sell are worthless. That is literally the value prop” Not everyone needs to be sales

What a lame thing to be proud of

Because most of these places have <1% non Christians in their communities. Anything else is scary

Oh god, I worked there 5 full years (over a decade ago now). They absolutely push you to hock that stupid card. They won’t outright say you have to, but they’ll sure make sure you feel it if you aren’t. When I did sales it was constant metrics of how many cards you got out. They didn’t even care of purchases were on the cards. I was literally told it was better for a spouse to get a second card than it was for a purchase to be put on an existing card.

When I switched to be a repair agent at geek squad where I had no time in front of customers I was still given shit daily for not getting cards. I asked how, how and when am I supposed to pitch cards? “Well, when you tell them their computer is broken”. I was like 95% of the time it’s covered by a warranty or something already purchased if it reaches me, and on the off chance it’s not, they’re going to just buy a new one more than likely. Then a salesman will get the credit. Zero awareness of how that side of the business worked.

It was awful. Literally told that I should offer that card with APRs higher than 24% to people who were trying to save money and not spend a lot “so they can have their dreams” or so “their son or daughter can have that dream college laptop”. I had people ask me for it who I know shouldn’t have taken out a credit card and who did anyway. It made me sick.

Best buy gets a kickback from Citi (at least at the time it was Citi) for every application.

Right? They completely neutered the rewardzone/my best buy points system. It used to be worth something. Now my amex gives me way better points and I’m not locked into one store either.

I wanted to watch it just for Melissa Fumero, did anyone else watch it? Did it hold up? There was no way I was going to tune in once a week to watch it, was just going to do it over an afternoon

The silver lining for me is that they at least closed out story lines that were set up in previous titles. The blight, the origins of the chantry and maker, they ended and I feel resolved now.

I wish it had come in, as he said “a different game”, but at least I don’t have burning questions longing for a new game. Dragon age is over, the stories are done. It’s not the game I hoped for, but they closed everything out at least rather than “guess you’ll have to wait for the next one!”

I guess it’s true. This is the way Thedas ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Okay but for real if anyone here is still using dryer sheets, stop, and go get some dryer balls. Way way better, they last forever so you don’t need to keep using them, and they fluff up everything. I’ve had the same ones for 6 years or so now

Interesting, places that many cultures and beliefs are coming led heavily oppose it, while states that are majority WASPs are for it.

Interesting that simply being around people of other beliefs can change your way of thinking.

Hm the beams and cables tell me NY subway, but no third rail, and the platform is short. No license plate but that jeep looks north American. Underground like NJT? LIRR? Anyone have any ideas?

We continue down the “our investors are demanding AI and we don’t know where to put it” track. Truly what is the point? They’re your messages, you already read them

Oh I forgot solo, I honestly liked solo. It was a decently fun room and she is good in it.

Oh god that trainwreck. Emilia Clarke too. How was she danyerys and then… Nothing

I worked at a company who hired 2 completely separate marking firms to determine if they should rebrand. 6 months and millions spent finally the big day arrived. We had an all hands to announce their findings and… We are keeping the name! No change, people understand our brand and messaging! The marketing team was happy and back patted themselves.

We payed many millions of dollars for them to tell us to not change anything.

I will never understand marketing or why it’s needed

I mean, can’t you just cordon off the hot room and deal with it in the fall? My family did that, I will do it with our master sometimes. If it’s too hot home just can’t cool everything effectively, so I just close the door to our master and we camp out in the living room on extremely hot days. Uses less power and there’s really no real loss.

Is there a site like this for other refurbished items beyond storage? More cases, tam, cpus?

That’s the nuance of AI that anyone who has done any actual work with ML has known for decades now. ML is amazing. It’s not perfect. It’s actually pretty far from perfect. So you should never ever use it as a solo check, but it can be great for a double check.

Such as with cancer. AI can be a wonderful choice to detecting a melanoma, if used correctly. Such as:

• a doctor has already cleared a mole, but if you want to know if it warrants a second opinion by another doctor. You could have the model to have a confidence of say, 80% sure that the first doctor is correct in that it is fine.

• if you do not have access to a doctor immediately, it can be a fine check, again only to a certain percentage. Say that in this case in the future you are worried but cannot access a doctor easily. A patient could snap a photo and in this case a very high confidence rating would say that it is probably fine, with a disclaimer that it is just an AI model and if it changes or you are still worried, get it checked.

Unfortunately, all of that nuance in that it is all just probabilities is completely lost on both the creators of all of these AI tools, and the risks are not actually passed to the users so blind trust is the number one problem.

We see it here with police too. “It said it’s them”. No, it only said to a specific confidence that it might be them. That’s a very different thing. You should never use it to find someone, only to verify someone.

I actually really like how airport security implemented it because it’s actually using it well. Here’s an ID, it has a photo of a person. Compare it to the photo taken there in person, and it should verify to a very high confidence that they are the same person. If in doubt, there’s a human there to also verify it. That’s good ML usage.

Yeah with their “everything is an Xbox” nonsense it’s pretty clear they want to focus on the platform, marketplace where you buy games. Playing them is kind of second. I’m sure they’ll still have something, but it’s going to be more geared towards cloud streaming, pc, handhelds, and “play where you want” so they can just do the digital side. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get partners like Asus to build boxes now.