Schattenbaer

Seems to be a visibility-only change to a small cohort of users.

Tangentially, I've often wanted a third button, call it "disinterested".

This would just tell YouTube not to recommend more of the same for me, without adjusting the ratio of votes up or down.

There are many videos I don't actively dislike (I might not have any strong feelings) I just don't want YouTube to recommend more cats with laugh tracks after I click a some link in our #random Slack channel.

I was a (20% share) co-founder of a successful(ly bootstrapped) company in the telecomms space 14 years ago.

When the company was +-10 years old and quite successful a European investment firm came along and started discussions to acquire a share in the company.

I've been thinking of exiting at that point already (wanted to relocate my family to another country) so it was a very fortunate happenstance; I discussed it with my colleagues before and this was my chance, and I was taking it.

After a 9 month handover and training my replacement period I sold all my shares, took my family on holiday, and went completely off-grid for just over 8 weeks.

By off-grid I mean we went to a place with no internet, no phone, a single solar panel powering a few LED lights, a gas digester powering the stovetop, oven, and fridge, solar-heated water, and lots of open space and a sea breeze at night.

After 10 years of working at least from 8h00 to 19h00 weekdays and a few hours every weekend it was jarring. The first three weeks was a mental shock; it felt like my brain was almost "clogged" and not forming thoughts properly, almost like your ears feel when getting water in them.

Reaching for your phone only to have it do nothing stimulating because there is no signal was really difficult to get used to - but it highlighted how often I used gadgetry to pep my energy levels.

By the third week we did start getting into the rhythm a bit more: going to farmers to buy food very early morning, attending a nearby town's Saturday morning market for other bits and bobs, walking to the various neighbours to chat etc.

Our day was fairly full and structured, e.g. we'd have the kids gather wood early mornings, then walk to the beach (about 4km walk), spend some time there, come back, shower outside, prep food, do a late afternoon walk (mostly to a neighbouring farm or two), chat days away.

We had another burst of under-stimulation/restlessness around 6 weeks, and we started driving to a nearby library to get some books for a little more mental engagement. Around the 8th week we started craving "normal" living a little, missing the extended family, and more, so decided our time off the grid was done.

We hired a houseboat, spent a few nights on it, and then slowly drove a rambling 2000km back home over 6 days.

If you can find a place devoid of cell service and internet I can recommend it - and I still am very cognizant of how easy it is to use phones / laptops / etc to lose hours of your life every day.

I also think my addiction to technical stimulation was related to the constant stream of novel content - I felt less like reaching for a device after I internalized that it doesn't have something new that I can consume.

Using these devices mainly for creating rather than consuming is less problematic, and less addictive (for me at least) and I still try to focus on creating rather than consuming content when I use my digital devices. Fully aware of the irony of posting that sentence in a social site ;)

Pity they didn't mention Dune. Not the best film, nor a big role for him, but for young me it was still a wonderful experience to watch this. He replaced the imagined book version of Kynes forever in my head. Peace.

One of my family members has only one hand, the left.

They would love to have a camera on hand to capture spontaneous moments around their young children. But choosing a smartphone is a compromise between buying a low-level phone that is small enough to be operated with one hand, normally leaving you with a terrible camera, or one with a decent(-ish) camera that is a pain/impossible to use day to day due to the screen size.

BTW just using a camera on a smartphone with one hand is no joke; the trigger buttons generally assume a right-handed or two-handed hold. You can test this by operating your phone with your right hand held behind your back.

I'd love to see more UI designs that take into account that some people have non-standard configurations.

Yeah saw that too, it takes a bit of fiddling to get the right search term, try:

https://anvaka.github.io/city-roads/?q=City%20of%20Cape%20To...

I can't remember exactly as I haven't made beer in years and sold all my books and equipment - but - I think it was _Uncorking the Past_ by Patrick Mcgovern.

It could also have been John Palmer's _How to Brew_ too - I remember the author goes into super interesting detail about metallurgy and similar topics.

Those interested in (one of) the methods used to determine the origin of archeological finds might find Neutron Activation Analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation_analysis) interesting.

Basically, fire neutrons into your item, and then look at how it [edit: radioactively] decays to determine the constituent chemical elements.

My one beer-brewing book mentioned that they can trace some pot sherds to a specific region of a specific river using this method. Very cool.

There used to be a joke along the lines of "In Europe people think a 100 miles is a long distance. In the States people think a 100 years is a long time".

I'm reminded of the Florentine Camerata[1] here. They were a group of intellectuals that met at Giovanni de' Bardi's house during the second half of the 1500s, and their discussions of music (amongst other things) led to the development of opera.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florentine_Camerata

I have also seen switch statements used (abused?) to do a similar thing. Since a switch executes the first statement that is equivalent to the control expression you can pass true as the control expression, e.g.:

  switch(true) {
    cond1: return 1;
    cond2 && cond3: return 10;
    //etc
  }

Not sure I'd recommend it but it works in a few languages :)

Elixir has cond that does this nicely without resorting to strange switch statements:

https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/case-cond-and-if.htm...

If by "hamper" you mean "(generally ineffectually) attempt to curb specific unlawful unethical behaviours by said companies" then, yes, I agree.

OT but how does a site like this, selling premium items (all in the over $500 range), think it's a good idea to have a email signup popover dialog hide the actual content?

It's expected for the likes of Buzzfeed and similar clickbait-y sites, but it's a tacky tactic that detracts from the overall premium feel here.