I’m 53 now, and could easily draw a map of the 2 houses that I lived in as a kid between 5 and 18 years old, along with most of the 10 or so houses I’ve lived in as an adult (a couple were very short term as a young adult, and I’m kind of vague on the exact layouts).

Before 3 years old I don’t remember much, a couple of vague things that could just be from pictures of me in those houses, rather than real memories. I kind of remember some of the house from 4 - 5 years old.

I’ve been in the POS business for 25 years, and deal with the credit card side a lot.

A very large part of this is POS companies often have a relationship with the credit card processor (or are owned by a processor), and make a lot of money from the processing fees. The higher the fee on the processing account, the more they make.

So they convince the merchant (restaurant or store) that they can have a free system by passing the cost to the customer. Often times they are just waiving the monthly subscription fee, but some will also give the merchant free hardware as well (with a multi year contract).

Then they jack up the fees on the processing side: Since the merchant no longer has to pay the 2.5% - 3% fee that they were paying before, they allow the credit card / POS company to charge them 3% - 4%, and then pass it to the customer.

A couple of states currently disallow it (NY or NJ, and one more IIRC). In those places you’re more likely to find cash discounting in place.

Yea, the 2012 build was a 3770k with 16 gb ram, multiple SSDs, a GTX680, etc. So it was a pretty fast machine back in the day.

I upgraded the video card and SSD drives several times, just didn’t have the budget to replace it all at once for a long time.

Minus the case and video card, I have an entire 3rd gen i7 machine sitting in a box that would actually make a pretty good machine for a lot of different uses.

Same … I hadn’t upgraded since 2012, and had some extra cash, so rebuilt in August. Feeling pretty lucky to have done it then, and really glad I went ahead and put 64GB RAM in it.

So much this. I actually pulled all of our servers from Azure and went back to a regular provider. Way cheaper as well.

I feel much of this, especially the installer situation right now.

I’ve setup and maintained a number of Linux servers from scratch, and I’m used to installing / updating / maintaining server software (via bash / SSH), but desktop kills me.

I didn’t think my Windows setup would be that crazy to get working, but VMWare Workstation, and Splashtop have both been killers (and good triple monitor support to some degree). Steam has been 50/50 for games for me, but I’m running an older NVidia card, so that’s probably my issue.

I started with Open Suse, and liked the OS quite well, but could never get past the errors installing and configuring VMWare (I develop in Windows inside a couple of VMWare images, and will for the next decade at least), so fast / stable VMWare support is key to moving off of Windows.

I also couldn’t get Splashtop running: I need remote access to my machine when outside of the house, and to client machines quite often, so need two different apps installed. There’s also no LogMeIn desktop app for Linux, so that becomes very painful (one of our dealers uses LMI instead of Splashtop).

After a week of that, I paved the disk and loaded Kubuntu, figuring that the better support for those packages would help. I did manage to get VMWare and Splashtop Business installed but everything feels unstable, and there have been lots of issues (third monitor is often black, had to disable 3d acceleration in VMWare, Solarr never seems to see my mouse, can’t browse shared NTFS drives), and have to re-sign VMWare modules every time the OS updates.

I’ve been using Windows for decades, largely without any issue, and would like to move, but it’s been problematic enough for me to put the entire thing on pause, knowing that I’m going to have to start all over again and burn several more days trying to get a base setup working.

You might see if “Shop and Deliver” orders are available in your area (Should be under “Preferences” in the app). We tend to do more shopping than food orders, and tend to make more in our area (and there’s no waiting for shitty restaurants). If I could turn off food delivery and just do shopping I would.

It can be smaller trips like Walgreens or CVS , lots of Dollar General, and even larger stores (with larger orders) like Target, Food Lion, or Aldi.

And when they’re not stealing tips, they’re paying the lowest base on good tipping orders.

15 mile delivery with a really good tip? … $2 base pay.

We were driving somewhere and suddenly decided to order some chicken on the way home (figured it would be done when we got there and we wouldn’t have to wait).

They required an app: my wife downloaded it, set up an account, picked the store that was on the way home (but not closest to where we were) and put the order into the app, only to have it fail sending it to the location.

Several times.

By the third try we were in the parking lot and I just went in and ordered.

I default to Subscribed/New, but many of the subs I was in on Reddit don’t have active communities here, so I only see a handful of new posts a day. A couple of times a week I switch to All/Hot or All/Active as a way to find new communities, or just see what’s going on outside of my tiny bubble.

I’m sure it’s a mixed bag, with plenty of small companies jumping in.

I own a very small company, but I also write a lot of our code, and we’re not touching anything “AI”. Not in our code, not in our products, not in any system we can keep it out of: We just migrated our last server from Azure a couple of weeks ago, we’re dumping MS Office this year, and starting the long slow migration from Windows desktop to Linux as an option for our customers (we’ve long been Linux on our servers, but have a lot of desktop software that needs to stay on the desktop).

But it’s everywhere. I had a call from our phone system vendor a couple of weeks ago. He kept trying to sell me their new AI call attendant, and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t subject our customers to that BS. It’s been forced into our accounting software, billing software, cloud backup, everywhere you look it’s there now.