MajorBee

I have a slightly more cynical take on why Spotify pushes niche bands and music so much (in fact, I can’t even remember the last time I saw an “established” band in my Discover Weekly playlist) — Spotify doesn’t have to pay out that much per listen for these niche bands, while having, say, Beyoncé or Drake pop up on millions of subscribers’ weekly playlist would eat in their margins.

There is a meme out there in the wild (or at least, I think there is a meme) that many reviewers would simply approve PRs blindly leaving a LGTM (looks good to me) comment when their internal monologue is closer to "...I have no idea what's going on here and I'm too afraid to ask at this point". I suppose it could also be sheer laziness of not wanting to parse many lines of new code, especially if you're in a situation where you don't have a 100% tight understanding of the codebase (as I have been in many a times).

There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, cities like this around the developing world. I'd wager the majority of the world's population lives in almost-there-but-if-only cities. Certainly all of India, and a fair chunk of China.

Can't say I agree with you. Off the top of my head, I couldn't remember what the symbol for xor was (since it hasn't come up once in many years of my programming), but I certainly do know what the word xor stands for.

True, that would certainly be not as worse and downright illegal as charging. It still seems very slimy, though -- why are you storing my CC details when I never actually made a purchase on your site?

I think the key difference is how the eyes are “reanimated” in the deepfakes. Rendering realistic eyes (with that trademark “spark of life”) has always been a challenge in real life emulating CGI, but now these new clips kind of capture the spark in the actors eyes much better. Luke Skywalker's eyes in the original clip kind of look dead plastic, the kind you’d find in real-time gameplay (not to mention this nose also looks like the product of bad rhinoplasty). The deepfake does this much better, in my opinion.

Elsewhere in this thread, someone posted a similar comparison clip about The Irishman and the difference is even more pronounced there. De Niro’s eyes actually look the age they’re supposed to be in that scene. The original scene had two key problems, in my option; one, they decided not to touch the eye and focused on smoothening the skin (I assume this is because of the technical limitations of doing the deaging in painstaking CGI); two, and this is a little more of a mystery, is that they thought they could get away with using De Niro’s current 80 year old voice on a character that is supposed to be 35 (ages are ballpark numbers). The raspy voice of an old man is just not something you expect out of a supposedly much younger and healthier man. They should have just gotten a voice actor who could do a convincing impression of De Niro in the 70s and dubbbed him in.

They could very well store your card information even if they don't fraudulently charge you outright. They could even legitimize this action under the guise of server-side credit card number validation.

It's interesting (to me) that Model S/X units are only about 1% of all vehicles produced/delivered. Makes sense since those cars are much more expensive than Model 3/Y, but still.

Wouldn't you still have to pay property taxes (in money) on that homestead?

I can only assume YouTube views such ads as merely part of their recommendation engine and, thus, quite different from "third party" adverts.

Why do you think it was ever a bad idea? From the Airbnb wikipedia page, it seems apparent that, right from the beginning, the plan was to tap into the market of people who liked the idea of playing a professional Host but did not have the capital or desire to run a full fledged hotel/BnB; some of the margin gained by these lower costs of operating could be passed on to guests, thereby attracting them to the service.

However, HOWEVER, there are/were some gigantic risks Airbnb was taking, I will agree with you on that -- the risk of people staying at random strangers' houses and the wide spectrum of horrifying experiences that can lead to. There's an excellent Bloomberg article that does a deep dive into Airbnb's somewhat-shady "Trust and Safety team"[1][2].

The point I'm trying to make is that although the idea came with certain inherent risks, skillful execution can mitigate those risks significantly. Similar risks were also attached to Uber's idea of random strangers offering rides to people, and those risks were somewhat mitigated as well.

[1] archive.md link: https://archive.md/nyBFY

[2] original article link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-15/airbnb-sp...

If your "ideas man" has fully committed to doing all the sales/marketing and the dance of raising capital, leaving you to work on the product, I think that's a very fair division of labour. After all, a finished product is almost as worthless as an unexecuted idea if no one ever actually purchases or uses said product. I say almost because, in theory, your product could have enough "obvious" value on its own that you could just sell it to another company and exit comfortably.

I looked into this because I was intrigued, turns out convicted felons in the good ol' United States are not allowed to purchase/wear/own body armor [1] (barring explicit exceptions).

I wonder what the rationale behind this federal law is. Does wearing/purchasing armor indicate that you, convicted felon, are simply up to no good once again? Is it one of those "you don't need ~~privacy~~ armor if you don't have anything to hide" things?

[1] https://www.shotstop.net/resources-1/2020/9/8/is-it-legal-to...

Well, if your company is in the ass-wiping business...

A variation of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect?

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

Relevant snippet from the Wiki article on the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit:

"The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft had abused monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers in its handling of operating system and web browser integration. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling them is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of IE. It was further alleged that this restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera), since it typically took a while to download or purchase such software at a store. Underlying these disputes were questions over whether Microsoft had manipulated its application programming interfaces to favor IE over third-party web browsers, Microsoft's conduct in forming restrictive licensing agreements with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and Microsoft's intent in its course of conduct."

To draw parallels between that lawsuit and this discussion:

1. I guess the download effort of Slack isn't really a concern anymore. And while I have no idea of the feature parity between the free versions of Teams and Slack, the free versions of both apps should probably be sufficient for casual users (i.e. the inertia of entering payment information is not a concern).

2. I have no idea if Microsoft has added any secret sauce to Windows 11 that would make Teams run better on Windows owing to tighter in-house integration. But if this is true, and Slack (or other competitors) won't be able to use this to boost their own performances as much, I suspect this could be a big deal.

Neither iOS nor MacOS are dominant in their respective categories. You can argue that the right metric to look at is market share by revenue and not by devices sold, and iOS does increase its footprint significantly at 42% of global smartphone revenue [1] (cementing itself as the single largest player), but still, arguably, not monopoly levels. I couldn't find a similar figure for the Desktop OS market, only (what I assume) is for devices currently running [2]. Sidenote: I think it's interesting to note that Windows market share has been steadily declining over the years, from a peak of ~91% a mere 8 years ago to around 76% in 2020.

Given this, by bundling a chat/productivity application (that has nothing to do with the OS product that Microsoft is selling), Microsoft is using its huge leverage in one category (OS) to increase its market share in another unrelated category (chat apps). This matches one of the conditions for US anti-trust action [3], and could even match the predatory pricing [uncited, hard to prove] condition (Microsoft bundling Teams for free indicates the cost of Teams is being absorbed by the Windows or some other business unit).

[1] https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2021/04/apples-....

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

[3] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/antitrust-law.as...

Personally, I have found FaceTime to struggle with sketchy connections; WhatsApp video calls do much better there. Video quality of FaceTime (when you have a sufficiently good connection) blows everything else out of the water, though.

> scofflaws

Learned a new word today! One who scoffs at laws can be called, quite appropriately, a "scofflaw".

Not to mention if you uttered something even vaguely socialist/communist sounding a few decades ago, you would be fired from your All-American job, be socially ostracized, and have the FBI on your tail before you can say "Stalin is bad".

You wouldn't pay to use Twitter in its current form with its low-brow unmoderated discourse (and neither would I), but would you consider paying for an "improved" version of Twitter? Not saying Twitter Blue is that, but perhaps the promise of getting a Better Twitter can you give you pause for thought and a reach for your wallet?

The experiment of directly paid social media is worth trying out, in my opinion. I know paying a few bucks a month won't necessarily get you out of the privacy/ad-tech spiderweb, but if it get us a more robust control over what our social feed looks like, I think that alone makes it worth it.

> Mr Mosseri said there had been a "polarised" reaction from creators - accounts which make money through brand partnerships and advertising on the platform - but that the new feature didn’t affect revenues.

Considering how many people make a living directly or indirectly on Instagram and/or other social media platforms, I wonder what shape the opposition will take to these steadily growing measures of user "protection". I understand Instagram/Facebook, at the end of the day, will not take actions that will harm their expected growth or revenue, however, that does not mean influencers won't get shafted in some way.

> Yes. A single service, with a single bill, that makes available every movie, TV show, or album ever produced. That's it. If you can provide this you can have my money.

For this, don’t expect to get this kind of service for 10 or 20 bucks a month; be prepared to shell out at least $100 or even more. Would you be willing to do that? How many people would be willing to do that?

I think it's fair to make a distinction between "deleting data" and "erasing the past".

You're not entirely wrong, but why make it even more obnoxious and entrenched?

I can see this kind of stuff useful for applying for jobs in the (traditionally) "creative" fields; a well crafted TikTok can show the recruiter a sense of the applicant's editing skills, taste in art/music, and general presentation skills, after all. For a cookie-cutter desk job? Not sure what gap this fills that isn't already occupied by the venerable Curriculum "Resume" Vitae.

Does it do anyone any favours by pretending that these countries are not "poor, small, and non-western"? I suppose you can replace "poor" with "developing", but it's a fine balancing act between unfaithful stereotyping and patronizing epithets.

Presumably this would result in a flood of "free" apps that are nothing more than facades for scams (e.g. a fun personality/quiz app -- look ma, no ads! -- that makes you reveal your secret questions and answers).

Maintaining the integrity of an app store is a very non-trivial task, and building an entry barrier in the form of developer fees is one way of doing it. Not saying this is the only solution or even a particularly good one, but every solution will have its share of unintended consequences and exploited armor chinks. Making dev accounts free for no-ads would be an interesting experiment, though. I'd support it for science!

If I may add to your distinction between "job" and "career" -- a career can be thought of what a person ultimately decides their economic contribution to society over the course of their life is going to be. While full-time parenting is usually not counted as a career, raising the next generation certainly seems like a very critical economic contribution (among others). To this end, there are movements to recognize this contribution by paying the stay-at-home parent (usually the mother) some form of "salary" to not only fully legitimize the role of parenthood in a society that values contributions by money earned, but also to make them more independent and therefore confident by not making them fully financially dependent upon the earning spouse.

Isn't the difference between "fraud" and "incorrectly filling out documents" basically intent? And intent is hard to prove or disprove.

I am 100% sure this is way worse on reddit, that paradise of armchair experts.