bipson

For Apple Laptops, more like 7-8, at least in the old days.

Typically you would only replace them when they (gradually) became annoyingly slow for daily use.

Agreed, I had to upgrade all of of my PowerBooks/MacBooks at some point with RAM and larger HDDs/SSDs.

And my last Apple Laptop is from 2012 and I learned that Apple now drops support by the OS considerably earlier than in the old days (i.e. unecesarily early, most 8-10 year old MacBooks would be perfectly fine for daily use, but now unsafe) - at least that was my impression.

And installing Linux on them is always a mixed bag (fans, trackpad, etc.), even though it sure is better with Intel Macs.

Interestingly enough, there are drastic differences written in law regarding this. In some countries, you are in fact allowed to keep purchased stolen goods, if they were bought in good faith. While in other countries, you as the buyer can be in serious trouble, even if you couldn't know if it was stolen and at least need to prove that you were misled and did everything you could to prove ownership.

I guess you were arguing morally, just pointing out this isn't legally true everywhere.

"I can't agree with you"

"I cannot continue this relationship"

"I can't kill this guy"

"I just can't eat meat anymore"

"I cannot continue like this"

These are all examples where someone clearly could for physical reasons, but they can't for other reasons they are bound to, whatever these reasons are.

Maybe I was using too much understatement:

The kind of marketing is not only "aggressive", it is overly aggressive IMHO. It is vilifying, demonizing.

You can do aggressive marketing all you want, but in my eyes when arguments become hyperbolic, they get less and less believable.

The way they write their piece, FLoC is the worst thing that has ever happened, worse than everything that came before (how on earth is this worse than strictly personalized cookies all over the place?!) and only DDG and their extension can save you.

I don't know man. I was really happy about DDG existing and making an effort (although I am not a user).

But they now clearly shifted from a "Noble Actor" to a "Competitor" with this aggressive marketing. I don't appreciate these marketing campaigns that are directed at the competition. I never liked the "I'm a Mac"-campaigns, nor the all the "Bing"-fearmongering.

It signals to me that you're not a fighter for a noble cause, letting the product speak for itself, but actually in for yourself in the first place. I'm rather turned off by this.

There are different "paths" with different environments (parents).

I had plenty of time, and my parents were rather open regarding hobbies/extracurricular activities.

But they soon had "given up" on making me do thigs, caused by me quitting everything that wasn't novel and dismissing their "inputs". My father is also a generalist, and was never keen on getting focused on single skills (he has some mad skills on some fields though, e.g. swimming, and that took quite some time and effort).

And although we were not poor, my father thought that hobbies don't have to be expensive, quite the opposite for kid's hobbies in fact (but we had our fair share of expensive hobbies and gear: snowboarding and bikes and unicycles and sailing and what not).

But most prominently, being a kid of the eighties, and dur to my parents working with "IT-People" in their job, they thought computers were not at all a desirable past time for a kid/teenager (despite my very urgent interest). A waste of time, either toy or nerd-tool. Somewhat what people previously thought of books.

So my biggest interest (programming) was always something I was myself dismissing and even avoiding for a few very important years, and I spent most of my time as a teenager in front of a TV, gaming or partying/meeting with friends outdoors.

I could have spent that time... differently, and I am not blaming anyone, not my parents and not me. I had a good time, but I might have appreciated a little guidance/company.

I just want to say I know why I was not a mad hacker at 17 - small details in paths are waiting everywhere, and there are more exceptions than rules.

And what happens if trains become significantly larger than segments.

Trains cannot occupy a whole track from China to Vienna for themselves, right? You need bypasses, stops, segments, etc.

Edit: typo

Except that it is simply not true - the world is not that simple.

There are several incentives at play for a doctor.

Obviously there are different fields, and dental is slightly weird compared to the others, but first of all, doctors are trained to help and learn cures.

A doctor that keeps you sick instead of healthy is quickly out of a job (or out of patients, if you prefer). There are other doctors you know, and there is word-of-mouth, and ratings etc. There is no world-wide conspiracy of dental workers to keep you from getting a specific cure. Aka: Game Theory.

And an easy way to get rid of this would be if the doctors would be paid to keep you healthy:

So you pay as long as you are healthy, e.g. a valuable work-force. Hmmm, I wonder if you could just use income tax to fuel this...? Oh, we just invented universal health care, didn't we?

Not just a professional in the field, he works for the company that got the assignment.

This also frustrated me when I was using OS X and Linux in parallel when I was using an identical Apple keyboard on both - really messes with your muscle memory. As long as I did not use an external keyboard on my MacBook I was fine.

It seems my muscle memory is application dependent, i.e. I never hit ^C when I intend to copy in a terminal. On the other hand I might hit Ctrl+Shift+C on browsers once in a while if I am switching context a lot... ;)

Unfortunately this requires X11 anyway :(

I don't understand the article on many levels... Is it supposed to be hyperbole?

- Flatulence is not "you rotting from the inside"

- I have friends that have (had) night-shifts back-to-back to a regular shift, and were on-call for for several nights a month. They never failed to answer the phone. They worked as the on-call doctor for a whole station in a clinic, not answering or not listening would have been disastrous! They admitted to be "zombies" but they were functional.

I'm not saying that this doesn't sound like hell, and I seriously am glad I never accepted a job with on-call duties, but this form of hyperbole rubs me the wrong way.

There are several issues in real life if you live in a society where it is the norm.

The very least when you have kids and their teachers or any official you encounter assume that the parents have the same name as the kids. (This can't be your kid!)

We know a couple where she had hyphenated surnames. Almost always confused the officials, colleagues and friends when they lived in Switzerland.

We decided against my wife not changing her name, since it was not worth the troubles.

The vector approach is just as flexible in my understanding.

UK clearly has enough Data on AstraZeneca in "old people" by now and AstraZeneca will most certainly be cleared for 65+ any day now.

This is simply not true as stated. Further, BioNTech/Pfizer has also show to have reduced efficacy.

The study that all these "simplified" horror-stories in the press are based upon is not giving the full picture.

- The timing cannot show how good the effects possibly are (we know that vector-vaccines take longer to create a sufficient protection) - The sample is tiny - It only talks about mild and semi-severe cases. Nothing in the study about severe cases (there were none in both groups)

AstraZeneca has a huge PR-Problem. Since they were running this in cooperation with research (Oxford), a lot of smaller results were published early, which was taken up by the press out-of-context, simplified further and further when going down the ladder to the boulevard-press.

Further, Germany had at least one politician state ridiculous numbers (8% efficacy above age 65 or 75) since he misunderstood something (only 8% of the participants were in this group) and simply had no idea what he was talking about.

And now it is too late, you can't kill these false-hoods once they circle.

Actually AstraZeneca has some nice properties the mRNA vaccines have not, e.g. etter T-Cell response.

ADA is quite good at this.

But not every problem (i.e. the Algorithm for the problem) can be divided easily without any coordination (i.e. communication) between the chunks. This overhead can quickly become significant.

There is a reason why desktop software (particularly the computationally intensive) is having a hard time exploiting multi-core benefits (besides the programming language and habits in general).

Well, the contract with the EU included the UK factory(ies) as a (potential?) supplier to the EU.

UK signed the contracts slightly earlier and jump-started the programme by issuing an emergency approval a few weeks earlier than the regular approval by the EMA.

And above all, it seems despite all efforts of coordination and treaties (COVAX), almost all players (except Norway) are playing the auction game and hoarding.

This is a global pandemic and these "selfish" actions will have global effects :(

I have recurring cold sores next to my right eye. I had it in my eye as a kid as well. I could go blind any time I have it in my eye again. No joke - not exaggerating.

I got it very early as a kid, and kids are bad at not touching their face, so I most certainly moved it from my nose to my eye at some point.

I can also get it on my nose, in my nose, my lips, forehead. So far.

My kid is now almost 3, we were very careful, but he got it a few months ago, had it 3 times in the last three weeks. It destroys our life. We have a 6 month old, it could be life threatening for the little one if they just touch. And even if only mild, explain to a 6 month old he should not scratch his patch off his face...

And for me, this is the main Issue:

belief

People are flaming and screaming about their beliefs, demonizing systemd, Wayland and what-not with FUD, baseless arguments and non-arguments, because they "believe" these things are bad and must die.

If I want to talk about what runs on my workstation as if it was religion, I install Temple OS.

If I want a modern (and basically following sane/safe architecture decisions) display protocol, I run Wayland.

The linked post is just one thing: superfluous. It helps no-one, a waste of energy and time for everyone involved.

You're onto something, keep on thinking about it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Flight_2904

Please excuse the snark, but there is more to flight safety than a Hacker's "AI's the best"-mentality. We actually have a lot of experience gathered from accidents and non-accidents how these systems should behave in a general sense, and "overriding pilot-input" has proven not to be a good idea.

The discussion above was about details and UX.

Yes, and the environment (political, societal) you live in might change. People think something like the (East-Germany) Stasi-State is impossible where they live, but it isn't. You don't have to look far to see societies and governments that make people regret their actions/opinions of the past.

You might get reprimanded (e.g. not being able to find employment) because you suddenly live in a society that hates cabbage, and one time, years ago, you said something very extreme about cabbage...

This is what most people fail to understand.

Every discussion about "privacy rights" and journalists is unfortunately even more abstract to them, because they never lived in a world where this stuff happens or has any importance to them (i.e. they don't see it).

Look at it this way:

I never used WhatsApp. Friends and even businesses I dealt with always asked me if I had it, and why I didn't, and I was apologetic, but firm. Of course I was left out of oh-so-many groups and discussions in the past years, but I was never going to install or use that, I don't trust Facebook regarding privacy the tiniest bit and I think they always lied regarding which data they use and how.

Now I suddenly have so many people appearing on Signal, my wife was asked by their friends: "Hey, you weren't on WhatsApp, but I am now on Signal, so would you consider talking there?".

I admit, I did not push anyone anywhere, not even my wife. I'm past being an "influencer" and having to deal with "... but you told me to use this?!" - particularly my wife.

But just referring to the "network effect" and continue doing something you are uncomfortable with is being complicit IMO. You can control what you do, and do the right thing.

Oh, you haven't been following Austrian politics in the last 10 years it seems.

- Parties says x in elections, that doesn't mean they will do x.

- Some parties/politicians will use every possible way to force public stations to suit their needs - regardless of what people think. Most people will never know - they just consume TV, radio or tabloids and believe everything they hear/read.

- If you don't institutionalize independence, it is gone.

- People in Germany and even more so in Austria have no idea how valuable public stations are. In Austria in particular it is a growing trend to criticize and even ridicule public stations - and this sentiment was gladly picked up and fueled by populists. They regularly demand that ORF is defunded - simply because they cannot control their unfavorable reporting on them - and they would like to. They were in the last government and they put "their guys" in every possible position to ensure control. They are still there and undermining the principles from within, trying to slowly destroy the ORF as a whole - either from incompetence or malice, who knows?

Unfortunately the only demographic that really kept watching Austrian stations is pensioners, and sports fans (the amount of skiing tournaments on our main station in winter is ridiculous).

Everyone else often had cable or SAT, which gave you all the German and also Swiss networks, particularly the private ones, where the program is aimed at different demographics (also possible because of vastly larger pockets: German ad market >> Austrian ad market)

At least ORF tried to modernize its image, but do you want to lose your main demographic as well? Can you compete (financially) with German private TV and pay TV? Not to mention Netflix, Disney+, etc? There is not really a way out.

So were stuck with Skiing, Austrian Soccer, Tatort and Gaming show clones. At least there is a lot of cooperation/joint shopping with German and Swiss (public) stations.

The self-created German content could be worse though. Tatort can be quite nice, it is not aiming to be CSI - and that can be a good thing.

Hm, at least in Austria and Germany the government cannot simply change the TV license fee "just because". Of course they ultimately can, but it is not that easy.

It still makes a huge difference if money is distributed through the hands of the government, or dedicated 1:1.

Only considering that:

- some recipes can be very finicky regarding ratios,

- e.g. different flour types can vary quite drastically in density

- you can e.g. easily reduce the volume of a flour batch by at least 15% by pouring differently (or simply bumping the container a few times)

going by volume alone still works for most recipes and is quite frankly as easy as it gets.

Going by weight alone also is not entirely scientific though (e.g. moisture of raw ingredients is usually not exact/controlled). And flour can behave differently, based on batch or type, even if you get the weight perfectly right.

So most bakers have their recipes "dialed in", i.e. they have a feel for the right texture, how the dough behaves, how to adjust resting times, etc.

Which is kind of sad, isn't it?

Doesn't that mean that a lot of people will never be on the receiving end just because they did not win the teacher-lottery (arguably the chance of getting such a teacher is rather slim)?

Shouldn't our systems be more robust? (Not talking about normalizing these effects down, but creating a better environment for everyone, using these effects en masse)

Hm, it says updated February 2019?

But I also use this app for QR-codes, since I was never able to find an alternative. The vast permissions required make me nervous every time I install it... Good to know it is on F-Droid as well, built from a source tarball, so should be OK [1]?

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.google.zxing.client.andr...

Potential worth != real money in the bank.

Also, seen from the other side: They made a contract offering 40% in four years (conditionally) - most importantly only relevant when the company/idea survive that long and are thus profitable/worth something. Why should they suddenly pay this (or a meaningful fraction?) out after one year? Or give an "outsider" 40%, which will most certainly be difficult to explain to future investors?

A good webcam, in my opinion, is a device that provides a decent sound quality (from the article).

Ehm, sure about that metric? Should a webcam not primarily offer good video? And why not having good audio by means of an external microphone in addition to a decent camera?

If that's the primary metric, the rest of the article is flawed.

IMHO the best setup has a dedicated camera and at least one dedicated microphone (Most people streaming use microphones or headsets, don't they? Same for radio-show/podcast hosts.).

Doesn't mean that a webcam can't have a decent microphone, but if you are going the custom route...