_dan

Ah, yes. It's actually both - the subject at the top is Arial, but the body is Helvetica.

Th.. that announcement is in Arial... (Edit: and Helvetica)

Don't Aeropresses still come with paper filters? Mine did..

In the b2b world it's basically impossible to improve password policies. Most of the onerous examples only exist because some other entity (a customer, insurance company, parent company, etc) has demanded them. The problem is that the demand isn't being made by security professionals, it's being made by risk management people who are only interested in a simple way to mitigate risk - it's simply much easier for them to reach for an obvious and easily testable policy with character counts, expiry, no autocomplete, etc.

Even if you manage to convince one of them to accept something a little more forward-thinking and less user-hostile, it's only a matter of time before Big Customer X comes along with their antiquated requirements and you have to choose between doing what they want or losing that business.

To each their own, bit this is what it boils down to for me: I trust Mozilla's intentions more than I trust Brave's.

There's no telling when Brave are going to decide it's time to monetize and start compromising themselves and their users.

Is that Tom Scott as in Tom Scott?

Perhaps put the wait time on the homepage - If I'd known you were running at an 8 hour delay I wouldn't have added to it!

It is in fact the opposite of disintegrating - they only just got legs!

Nostalgia hit me hard reading/watching that.

It’s pretty straightforward and no secret. All those “share on Facebook” widgets you used to see everywhere are also tracking users. Since they’re embedded into basically every site ever, and each hit to the widget goes to facebook.com (so your browser helpfully sends their cookie along with it), that means Facebook knows who you are and what sites you visit without your consent or intervention, and uses that to sell targeted ads. They even have a profile on you even if you don’t use Facebook.

It’s changed a bit recently with GDPR, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and some third party cookie privacy stuff so it’s a bit less insidious now, but it’s still pretty bad.

"3 cup" = 1 cup, "8 cup" = 3 cups

I've worked with Perl for many years and still actively develop for it at work.

IF you deliberately ignore some of the crufty parts of the language (ie you follow "Modern Perl") it's... ok. Perfectly possible to write good code with it if you understand the quirks, but you have to be strict to avoid the stereotypical "line noise", and not everyone is. Some parts are legitimately awesome though: Moose, for example, is a fantastic OO model that I wish was usable in other languages (although you do pay for it with long load times).

However, the ecosystem and community have been struggling to keep up with the rest of the world for a while now, and where you used to be able to assume that CPAN would yield something useful for most tasks, that's becoming increasingly untrue, and a lot of projects are now abandoned.

I still reach for it for small things, but I wouldn't start a large project with Perl now, I don't think.

I successfully fixed an Xbox 360 with the dreaded RROD with Percussive Maintenance: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PercussiveMainte...

Send "heyyyy" to 20 random contacts.

I have no words for how dumb/brilliant that is.

Tell everyone there's a problem. Immediately. Make sure they understand that "working harder" isn't going to fix it.

Reset everything. Massively reduce the scope of the project and make sure everyone knows that's what you're doing and to expect to see something being delivered soon, but that it will be a small and simple component intended to get something out there.

Deliver the smallest useful thing you possibly can as quickly as you can, and show everyone,

Once you've delivered a few parts get a bit of momentum, get everyone together and hash out a slightly bigger next step.

I don't understand why they don't sell it for a few bucks a sachet in a simple point-of-sale display or via the internet. I'm waaaay more willing to buy one when I need it than have to shell out for a big multipack of stuff that has a limited shelf life..

I have a Sonos setup in my house, it's connected to Spotify Premium (as I suspect most Sonos systems are). I recently added a Sonos/Alexa hybrid thing because I liked the idea of being able to play whatever I fancied while cooking.

"Alexa play <whatever> in the kitchen from spotify"

No other combination of words works. I'm not sure why it needs me to say "kitchen", all my Sonos systems are connected together, but if I say anything else it'll either play on just the one speaker or not work at all. I'm not sure why I must say "from spotify", but apparently I do or it ends up playing some random radio station from some other service.

I find things like this quite the mouthful:

"Alexa play Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath in the kitchen from spotify"

..and with a statement so complicated it often misunderstands and starts doing something random.

I would MUCH prefer a simple voice based API. Attempting to understand conversational speech properly rarely seems to work effectively and often just ends up with users memorising a command just to get it to understand.

I have one more: Bit-rot resistance. If you've ever tried to work on an MSWord document that's been around the houses a bit and had lots of work on it by different people (using different versions of different applications), with font choices and colours and formatting changing on a whim, you'll know they can degrade over time and become cumbersome to edit.

Those are generally edge-cases, though. That evolve in situations where there is little competition, and room for a little evolutionary inefficiency.

Although it's perfectly possible that dinosaurs were effectively massive birds of paradise with ridiculous mating accoutrements...

Recently I've seen a lot of Amazon packages where the item is in one corner of the box, held up against the outer box by some thick scrunched-up paper. That could easily be lazy packers, but I see it frequently enough that if it is to give a 2" gap, they're missing a QC step somehwhere..

True, but is it something you actually want to accept?

Very cool. It's a little bit like playing World of Goo..

If you're on a budget, Astraweb are nearly as good as GigaNews, but way cheaper, particularly with this discount: http://www.news.astraweb.com/specials/kleverig-11.multicards...

I've often wondered why these companies don't install a non-IE browser as a primary browser, leaving IE6 on the system, then using HTAs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496%28VS.85%29....) with IE6 to deliver their intranet stuff.

Because you have to hit the server initially. While you could totally serve some JS, JSON data and a small HTML wrapper to kickstart the client-side code, just generating the page is a lot simpler and typically more efficient.

Then you have all the problems of a purely client-side application (dealing with deep-linking, bookmarks, back buttons, users with exotic browsers, search engines, etc). That stuff can all be dealt with, but all dramatically increases the complexity. Your "Hello World" quickly becomes complex and unwieldy.

I personally think the right way is probably a templating engine that can work either client- or server-side so you can generate whatever you need wherever you are.

Yeah, I know (hence "kinda"), didn't seem like the time or place to go on about Perl's quirks, though ;)

Very nice.

It kinda feels like it ends before it gets past the stuff I could guess from knowing my way around other scripting languages, but I'm guessing it's a work-in-progress. It'd probably benefit from even a brief "Why Lua?" discussion, though.

It's very pretty, but I'd consider getting rid of the text-shadow on code examples.

(Minor point, but: # as a length operator isn't entirely unique to Lua, Perl has $#foo to return the length [kinda] of the array @foo).

It's a great idea, and the snacks they send are varied and interesting. But they're really not "meals", and it's far too easy to scarf an entire box.

I found myself eating normally PLUS whatever they sent, which kinda defeated the purpose for me.

(Their website is stunningly good, though)

He's right, and it's a cool feature. But the fact that it's sitting right next to the useless (from a user's point of view) black blob of the IR sensor kinda spoils the effect.