Shacklz

> who get paid to flash products in front of their users without disclosing that they're being paid.

Which is why it's not just ethically wrong but also illegal in many countries. Why the US allowing such behavior is beyond me.

Except that it doesn't. You still need someone to put up and maintain ATMs, apps, exchange-sites etc. that allow for quick and easy transfer and exchange of bitcoin. People think this is all easy until things go wrong: Who do you appeal to if you get scammed? What do you do if you pay someone online with bitcoin who then just doesn't deliver what you've ordered? Who do you call if someone attached some kind of skimmer to a bitcoin ATM?

Don't get me wrong, there's so much wrong with the current banking system, and I really hope someone or something manages to disrupt it, but Bitcoin is no solution to that.

I'm a customer for more than a year and never had any noticeable outages-issues so far. A few times, I encountered issues in their UI, but I'm also using the beta-version so that's to be expected.

FYI, there's also an awesome unofficial open-source Electron client for ProtonMail, ElectronMail: https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail I prefer a standalone client but still like their GUI over thunderbird et al; ElectronMail fills this gap perfectly

> Morally, raising mink for fur is equal to eating meat or consuming dairy products.

Meat and dairy products feed humans, which is a necessity (that, in our day and age, may or may not be achieved by other means while still maintaining a healthy diet), while fur is a luxury product - by no means necessary. It isn't even a byproduct, the fur is the sole reasons the minks are killed.

I can't even fathom how you can see these two things in the same light, morally.

That the mink industry still existed in this day and age in a country such as Denmark was in my opinion a complete travesty to begin with. Having all these animals in ridiculously small cages just for the sake of their fur - the cruelty is appalling.

As cruel as Corona itself is - it did bring a few good things, killing the Mink industry was definitely one of them in my opinion.

> Now that our news channels, like Fox News, and CNN, spend more time talking about their opinions of the news rather than what occurred

This is why a lot of countries have state-sponsored media with an obligation to report objectively, but without the pressure to be profitable. With news anchors and journalists that can build up trust and integrity over decades, without the need to sensationalize everything for the sake of viewer numbers. Obviously not a silver bullet either; if there are government officials breathing down their necks instead of shareholders it's probably not much of an improvement, but if enough independence can be maintained it seems to definitely help keeping the discussion civilized.

I share most of your sentiments, I really do. In a perfect universe, we'd all be using fully e2e-encrypted messaging systems. But:

> The only decision people need to make is centralized or decentralized system.

They already have this choice; Matrix and others exist for quite some time already. Yet it is evidently clear that your average citizen will flock to whatever messenger is the easiest to use and is already used by their friends/family. Security/privacy are second thoughts at best, if at all; and even if it were important, grasping the different implications of all the available options isn't exactly easy either.

And since we can probably agree that the vast majority of folks already "fail" to make the right choice in this regard, I'd much rather have a regulated, government-controlled messenger than some company like Facebook. The former is accountable to its citizens, the latter to its shareholders - if I have to pick my poison, the choice is clear.

In essence I agree with you, but let's not forget that in most countries, the government has already complete (albeit strongly regulated) control and access to postal services and everything that is sent through them, and I think most citizens (me included) are okay with that as well.

Furthermore; I'd much rather have the government spying in my stuff than Facebook selling my data to the highest bidder; at least if that were my only two choices.

Not sure if the Dunning-Kruger effect can be applied to everything (such as: humour, grammar, etc., as listed in the article), but I think pretty much everyone who has played any kind of video game (Dota, LoL, Star Craft, CS:GO, etc.) in a competitive "try-hard" environment for long enough will assure you that the Dunning-Krueger effect is indeed real.

"It's not my fault for losing this; I am clearly better than the team/oponents if it weren't for bad teammates/cheese tactics/meta abuse/lags/etc" is a mindset a lot of players have even if all evidence points to the contrary (~50% winrate in average in matches with players of similar ranking etc.).

In fact, I struggled quite some time with this myself - acknowledging and understanding one's own shittiness is one of the very first steps of actual improvement, and that's usually easier said than done, at least for me personally.

The same happened to me; one of my liked bands apparently released an album; it then turns out that it was some other band that just happened to have the same name. Seems they compare band-names instead of some unique-ids; no idea how they thought this would be a good idea.

Couldn't agree more. Spotify is one of those products that I sort of almost can't live without but yet it's painful how bad they have become in the last couple of years. Instead of improving the service and customer experience, it only got worse (if I had the chance to straight up use an outdated client from a couple of years ago, I would!).

The fun thing is, my company has jumped on the agile train a while back (nothing wrong with that per se in my opinion), and Spotify was always that cool example "where agile works". Well, no idea what they're doing, but if their KPIs mainly consist of how bad of a UX they get away with, they for sure are very successfully improving their product.

It constantly forgets which episodes of a podcast I've already listened to, or where exactly I've stopped when in the middle of an episode. Their support for downloaded songs at this point seems to be almost non-existent (I stopped using spotify offline quite some time ago as it became too much of an annoyance). If a song I liked is not available anymore but is then available again, I have to like it again. It still can't differentiate between studio and live versions of songs which I would like to filter out (I hope someone corrects me that I'm just too dumb to find the right button). I once got an email that one of the bands I liked released a new album - but it was a band with an identical name (and never heard of before!); apparently, they send out mails by matching band names instead of some unique IDs (no idea how that passed any kind of review; must've been some mashed-together 11-hour release).

... the list could go on and on. The thing is; I really want Spotify to be good, it's what made me stop pirating music, it was just way more convenient. It still is, but it could be so much more, especially given all the cash they're rolling in.

I heard a talk once from some guy working for a company who analyzes this data (it had something to do with transportation of people; where it would be most efficient to have a new bus route and such), some of the regulations are actually rather interesting (Europe). E.g., location-specific data is not allowed to be sold if the amount of data points is below a given threshold, to avoid de-anonymization scenarios such as the one you have mentioned. Granted, I have no idea how well the regulations actually work, but it did sound as if quite a bit of thought went into it.

Thinking about this, I wonder if companies providing smartphone apps with invasive tracking are upheld to the same standards...

Found this to be extremely helpful for PR-reviews; I have sometimes difficulties when writing sentences in order to not come across too harsh/snarky/negative etc., but with GIFs/pictures, it's easy to involve some humor while still bringing the point across.

What do you mean with "check the backend"? You can e.g. do assertions on HTTP-responses coming from the backend - is this what you head in mind?

If you want to test the backend on its own, I personally would recommend using a different framework than cypress (or a different framework than the one being used for frontend e2e testing in general). Otherwise you risk that people conflate these two things and start "testing the backend" in e2e-tests for the frontend, which are super slow.

I found their idea about defining commands very odd, but when we ignored these entirely and just went with the good old page pattern, the tests became very tame again. All the cypress-internals are done in small methods within page-objects, the tests contain only the abstract page-object-methods.

But yes, when we tried to run with the patterns they advertise, the tests became indeed hard to write and read; maybe we did it all wrong but it's at least consistent with the experience expressed by you and others in the thread here.

It drives engagement which likely leads to overall more add views and clicks? "Doom scrolling" and such is something that keeps people on the site for longer which is probably one of their most important metrics

> Si vis pacem, para bellum. "If you want peace, prepare for war"

This quote is so out of date, really. Humanity progressed so far just in the last couple of decades, but we're still supposed to prepare ourselves to smash each others heads in like we're some brutish barbarians? At some point, we should start acting like civilized adults and solve our conflicts by discussion, not by smashing each others head in.

The things you mentioned with regards to skills and such - you're right, but you don't need to have training on the weapon and such. The army teaches you ultimately death and destruction; everything else is just a means to that end. After all, if it truly were about the skills you mentioned, we could just have an obligatory boy scout camp instead and learn all the stuff without the barbaric parts, no?

As a Swiss - yup, it's just for show & nostalgia. In my opinion, it will take another 20-30 years of wasted money for this charade until the cold-war-era folks start to become a minority; then we can finally dump our armed boy scout camp.

> mostly based on some outdated views on the role of the army

And this is where we differ - I think _your_ opinion is outdated ;) The services that you listed mostly do not require an "army", what exactly is camouflage gear & combat training good for with regards to helping with covid-related tasks (or any other "Katastrophenhilfe"-related endeavour)?

The "Swiss army knife" metaphor is exactly what I so despise about the Swiss army; it's their excuse for essentially being an eternal "Pfadilager" for adults. Actual participation in conflicts mentioned by GP aren't an option anyway thanks to Switzerland's neutrality.

Luckily, it seems the trend is clearly in my opinion's favor, as was evident once again with the results of the last referendum on fighter jets - the pro-army-folks are a dying breed, it is just a matter of time until the 'Wehrpflicht' is finally abolished (I estimate it takes another ~20 years or so until the cold war era generation starts to become a minority), and when that happens, it's just a matter of time until the rest of the army gets to boot too, as all the nostalgia-driven sentiments towards it will not exist anymore (currently, put 10 Swiss men in a room, and it will take at most half an hour until their army experience becomes a topic).

And you know what? It'll be for the better of the world, and Switzerland especially. Finally, we will be able to say "We do not participate in this barbarian head smashing anymore, we're civilized folks"; someone needs to make the start and Switzerland is in the best position to do so. We're already not participating anyway; but we're still training generation after generation to do so; and this needs to stop eventually. My hope is that this will be the case in the next 20-30 years or so, I wouldn't mind if it was earlier ;)

While such stories and the pictures posted here are rather interesting, as a Swiss, I also find it at the same time quite depressing. The Swiss army is a bottomless barrel when it comes to funding; always requiring & demanding money, while preparing for scenarios that were maybe somewhat plausible during the height of the cold war but are nowadays obviously antiquated, plain for anyone to see who doesn't wear the nostalgia-tinged glasses.

It provides cool pictures such as the ones posted here and some nice stories, but apart from that - the billions currently going to the army could be used so much better.

The difference between a legit businessperson getting into the trade and an existing criminal is that one has the protection of the state/police etc. and the other does not.

One could argue the same about the illegal bootleggers during the prohibition - might have taken a while to get rid of the criminal elements, but it did work out in the end, not?

Because the idea of UBI is that it's universal basic income, which keeps you fed and a roof over your head and other such basic things. I heavily doubt that the mentioned 30-40% of the population are okay to live with the bare minimum without having any interest in doing something to change that; that's only possible if your actual income allows for more than that, which seems to be the case in the Saudi States.

A very interesting read, and yet... I'm always getting depressed from reading such stories of folks working in finance.

So many smart people, so many working hours, for what? Making tons of money without improving society one single bit. Yes, it's how the system works, no, I don't blame people for taking advantage of it, but I find it still depressing.

I was at first very disappointed to read Ueli Maurer's name in the article; I attended quite a few of his lectures. According to the interview with him on the "Rundschau" (unfortunately in Swiss German), he hasn't known about anything and was certain himself that Omnisec didn't have anything to do with the NSA. However, I still struggle to see what exactly his involvement was with them - he was a "Berater" (consultant), but says that he didn't really have any insight into the algorithms etc. and couldn't have possibly known about their issues; so what exactly did he do for them, just sell his name?

I really appreciated him as a prof (even though he was known to be a complete hard ass when it came to exams with high bars to pass) and would be surprised if anything turned up that would question his integrity further; still, it does leave a bit of a bad taste after all his preaching...

And as a Swiss, this is a complete fiasco. That the issue with Crypto AG didn't send a few heads in the NDB rolling was an absolute disgrace, they didn't even pretend to be humbled by this or anything of that sort. And now another such story emerges, and while I do hope that we finally see some action now, I wouldn't be surprised if nothing happened again.

I still trust it to not sell my data to the highest bidder for marketing purposes and such.

The NSA and other state agents may or may not be capable of reading my emails, but I don't think they would care about anything I write/receive and for sure won't sell/publish it because of the risk of the world knowing about their possibilities. It's still opposed to my interest in privacy, but the main thing I care about is my life not being an open book on the internet for everyone to see (or even just marketers), and ProtonMail sells that to me as a business model, which I still believe in.

Paul Bloom had a brilliant TED-Talk on the matter, you might find it interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPicL1AWrs8

Did you ever try to use the playstation platform (network? store? whatever they call it) in the browser?

It's absolutely atrocious; I don't think this has much to do with them using webtechnology, it's just an atrocious heap of spaghetti (and probably, guessing from the weird settings syncing and authentication, an architectural nightmare).

The ball of mud would roll faster if it were written in C++, for sure, but it would still be a ball of mud.

> I don't understand how someone can work longer hours unwillingly when it's entirely in your control.

I have that situation, but without the 'unwilling' part. In the office, I have often the situation "Gosh, I'd love to finish this, but if I don't catch the next train I have to wait another half hour for the next one", which automatically makes me stop work at fixed times.

Sure, I could also just stop at the same time at home, but ultimately I always end up working longer hours. Same in the morning; having to catch a train is really something that forces me to hit certain timings; when working from home, staying in bed just a little longer doesn't make me miss any trains.

It's a silly problem and could easily be overcome with enough willpower, but it requires the willpower where otherwise there are already external factors in place that soft-force me to start/stop work.

That just seems so... wrong.

Why can't we just talk and discuss with each other like normal human beings? Why do we have to result to all this deceiving, tricking, spying each other?

Why can't we just act... nice?

Guess I'm just too naive for this world.

> Most of it gets burnt or pyrolysed for heating and electricity.

Well, at least it doesn't get shipped around the world to then be dumped into the ocean...