Our eldest daughter loves airliners and wanted a model of a particular type of plane earlier this year that we could only find as a Cobi model. I've always been a bit wary of Lego-alikes (principally because all of the ones that I saw growing up in the 80s and 90s were kind of crappy), but have no complaints with the quality of Cobi models - excellent instructions too. The cost was probably half, or less, of what a Lego equivalent - if there'd been one available - would have been as well.
Cobi's range of aircraft models is much broader than Lego as well so if you have a loved one who's into "Lego" and planes, they're a real winner. We've just bought our daughter another one of their aircraft models for Christmas.
We got some Cobi set on a ferry cruise a few years back (Cobi 69120 Viking Line) and while kinda neat looking the tolerances/design made it hard to snap in and the decal placement (over edges) really made it a build-once model sadly.
At least there wasn't an horrid chemical smell as when we opened some Chinese figures off Ali-Express (soldier minifigs).
Cobi is more of a model-building company. Their brick-builds are meant to resemble the real-deal just as a plastic model would. Lego (especially Lego Technic) goes deliberately more for a brick-style appearance. Cobi thus creates a lot of custom molded parts to avoid the brick-style look and more of a real-world approximation. I don't think they market creativity, or B-models/custom builds with their products.
It’s pretty clear that @Aurornis is talking about people they know personally. They literally mention that they’re talking about people they grew up with.
Whereas you are talking about a completely different group of people: Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk are the survivorship bias set.
You’re talking at cross purposes with the person you’re responding to.
> Still not as bad as when Jason Manford finished a show, turned up at the Village Hotel in Bournemouth, and because he checked in late, they'd given his room to someone else.
This isn't quite what happened.
He turned up before the show to check in, and found that the hotel had been overbooked and that his room had been sold to someone else as a result, so he was forced to share a room with members of his team.
(Now that's not to say that this isn't a shitty practice and that it shouldn't happen: the hotel were absolutely in the wrong, it's just that they were wrong in a different way to what you suggested - but your bigger point is well made.)
It's funny. I objectively know that 9MB of RAM is tiny by modern standards and, indeed, has been tiny for decades now. My friend's dad got a PC with 32MB of RAM in 1996, or maybe early 1997, to put it into perspective.
But I can still look at a screenshot of Workbench 1.3 running on an Amiga 500 displaying "8831544 free memory" and it feels like an absolute ocean of RAM for that machine and that time and, most importantly, for the software that was available in that era.
Back in the early 90s I used to, with 1MB of RAM, code, play games, make music, do word processing, create graphics with both DPaint III (or was it IV?), and create vector drawings with a CAD package, create spreadsheets, create fractal landscapes with Vista, not to mention a ton of other stuff as well.
It is crazy to think of how much you could do with so little back in the day. But even this was a massive step change compared to the 8-bit machines I'd been using up to that point. These I'd mostly used for programming and games (although I did do a bit of word processing on BBC machines, and a teeny tiny amount of spreadsheet stuff). I did have a light gun for my ZX Spectrum but, boy, was it tedious graphics with (although I did do it), as compared to DPaint.
Yeah, for me there's something about the sound of the power supply, CPU and (sometimes) graphics card fans, coupled with the ticking of an old school hard disk that takes me right back to the nineties.
I know spinning disks were a thing for a lot longer than that, and were still pretty commonly used up into the 2010s, but they were in general much quieter than hard drives from the 90s.
Spoken like someone who has never used Deltek Maconomy. Teams is really bad but not Deltek Maconomy bad. Nothing else I’ve used is.
That being said, in the last job where I used it regularly, Teams was responsible for 100% of the blue screens I regularly experienced. Dell laptop and some quirk of interaction between Teams video calls, NVidia graphics drivers, and WiFi drivers than no update ever fixed. Very frustrating.
Even discounting this, and despite everyone bleating on about its (very real) flaws, ChatGPT and other LLMs do quite a good job of proofreading and suggesting improvements to written English text[0]. I find it works best if you keep them on quite a tight leash but it's certainly within the compass of their capabilities to take badly written English and turn it into well written English, and even adopting a particular style to do so.
[0] Performance in other languages... well, I suspect it's still going to be quite variable, which is another valid criticism that has been levelled at the more popular mainstream models over the past year or two.
Sadly it would never work for the British Isles, that much I can guarantee you. Our weather resists all forms of prediction found to be reliable elsewhere, and I doubt AI enhancements over the next few years will make much of a dent in the problem.
I’ve tried all manner of weather services and none of them really do a really good job of any level of forecasting. They do however excel at supplying me with information I can get just by looking out the window.
Our eldest daughter loves airliners and wanted a model of a particular type of plane earlier this year that we could only find as a Cobi model. I've always been a bit wary of Lego-alikes (principally because all of the ones that I saw growing up in the 80s and 90s were kind of crappy), but have no complaints with the quality of Cobi models - excellent instructions too. The cost was probably half, or less, of what a Lego equivalent - if there'd been one available - would have been as well.
Cobi's range of aircraft models is much broader than Lego as well so if you have a loved one who's into "Lego" and planes, they're a real winner. We've just bought our daughter another one of their aircraft models for Christmas.