cjpearson

The same way people are replacing C++ on a language without a standard library

Every couple days I get a pretty blatant spam email in my inbox. It's frustrating that gmail's spam filter doesn't catch these, especially since I recall it working better in the past. But I'm not going to turn off the filter because it still catches dozens of spam emails a day.

Showing that a system has flaws doesn't necessarily prove that a system is useless. You have to look at the overall impact. In cases where you have an imperfect but useful system (such as most government regulation and enforcement) finding vulnerabilities is an important part of improving the system. A police department which only catches some murderers should work on catching more criminals rather than deciding it's hopeless and we might as well make homicide legal.

I remember it being pretty good circa 2012 or so. The API docs generally told me what I needed to know and there were some helpful in-depth technical notes. Did they lose something in the redesign or Swift migration?

Not all non-profits are doomed. It's natural that the biggest companies will be the ones who have growth and profit as their primary goal.

But there are still plenty of mission-focused technology non-profits out there. Many of which have lasted decades. For example: Linux Foundation, Internet Archive, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Free Software Foundation, and Python Software Foundation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm also disappointed in the direction and actions of big tech, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss the non-profit foundations. They aren't worth a trillion dollars, however they are still doing good and important work.

The protestors were not a very vocal minority, but representative of the majority opinion. At the time well over 80% of Germans wanted an end to nuclear power. (Although now following the Ukraine invasion and rising energy costs the opposition has significantly softened.)

In a democratic system it is simply difficult to maintain such extremely unpopular positions. Governments which do so don't last long. Merkel flip-flopped and maintained her Chancellorship.

Perhaps we're reading gp's comment differently. I don't think he's telling your friend she should be wearing this Vacheron Constantin (or any luxury watch) instead of her Apple watch. He's rather defending its achievement in engineering and craftsmanship despite everything it does being trivial for a smart watch. I read it as appreciation rather than a sales pitch.

I wouldn't say that's the opposite conclusion. Plenty of people have switched from mechanical or quartz watches to Apple watches for their daily wear. But a decade from now the watches in the jewelry drawer will have retained their value more than the watch that's on her wrist today.

Of course there's nothing wrong with wearing a smart watch. For practical purposes they are better in every way. They just have a different lifetime. It's a similar situation with cars. Some like the constant maintenance that a 60 year old car requires, others want a Toyota that will reliably get them to work, and others want a sports car with engine that can go three times as fast as they'll ever drive.

Also, I think the cheap product winning is pretty typical. CDs replaced vinyl records and were then replaced by music streaming. Few people buy cameras now that smartphones exist. And these mechanical watches were already replaced for the most part decades ago by quartz watches.

Despite the existence of more practical alternatives, there are people who still like to buy grandfather clocks, vinyl records and mechanical watches. They are certainly in the minority and you won't find a grandfather clock or record player in every home, but there is a market there.

(I kind of hate to be that guy, but if there were batteries inside, those weren't Swiss mechanical movements)

It's simply a description of the style of the watch. Just as most people wearing a bomber jacket aren't flying B-52s, and most trench coat wearers aren't fighting in trenches, most dive watch wearers aren't diving. They are still useful terms, despite their relative professions moving on to newer tech.

While there were certainly many Nazi sympathizers, one should not extrapolate the desire to stay out of the war as widespread support for Germany.

Popular opinion was generally against the third reich. In 1936 there was an ultimately unsuccessful effort to boycott the Berlin Olympics and in 1938 94% of Americans disapproved of Germany's antisemitic policies. [0][1]

When the war started, opinion varied depending on the question. When asked about directly entering the war most were indeed against it. However, if asked simply about supporting England, France and Poland, Americans were strongly in favor. They supported providing humanitarian and military aid and rejecting any of Germany's territorial claims. [2] The more complicated question was if America should continue supporting England even if that risked involvement in the war. In early 1940 about 35% were in favor, rising to 70% by Autumn 1941. [3]

[0]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-moveme...

[1]: https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/to...

[2]: https://news.gallup.com/vault/265865/gallup-vault-opinion-st...

[3]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/72361

For what it's worth Gumroad left VC land several years ago.

https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting

It's all additive so each new feature does indeed add complexity, but my impression is that it's often the older features and all their quirks which are the most difficult to implement. Adding a few math functions is much easier than ensuring compatibility with CSS2 floats.

One of Matt Levine's common refrains is "Insider trading is not about fairness, it is about theft." There are always market participants with different levels of information. The problem occurs when you misappropriate confidential information you were entrusted with for personal gain.

Yes, it is largely a fiction. For private universities (the ones typically with the high sticker prices) 16% paid the full amount in 2019-2020. For public schools the number is 26%. [0]

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ignore-the-sticker-price-...

The sticker price arms race will continue until the incentives change. Having an absurdly high listed tuition price is simply effective advertising, even if almost nobody actually pays that price. Surely the most expensive colleges must be the best.

Colleges know that outside of a few suckers, few will pay the full price even if they have the money. So they offer massive discounts to get you to sign. To help seal the deal, they will market the discount as something special for you based on your "merit". "Normally we charge $75k, but since you're so awesome we can give you a $30k merit scholarship." Sounds like you're getting a great deal as long as you don't find out that the actual average charged tuition is $35k and you're actually the one getting milked.

Bond is the embodiment of white male privilege. (I suppose you could add handsome and straight privilege as well.) A well-dressed, handsome, white male with an abundance of confidence can easily gain access to many places without a second glance. Along with seducing women who have information, this is one of his main investigative strategies.

Unfortunately, women and people of color often don't have the same advantages and in some places are completely locked out. This makes it more difficult to change than someone like Leiter, Moneypenny or M who are much more flexible characters.

While it would still be possible to make a Bond without these attributes (they can still drink martinis, shoot bad guys and make quips) it would be a drastic change to the character.

I suppose the other perspective is that if Bond is primarily intended to be a personification of Britain, perhaps it's right that the character looks representative of Britain.

Never Say Never Again probably shouldn't be used as an example of "the franchise". It wasn't produced by Eon or the Broccoli family as someone else owned the rights to that particular story.

Bond doesn't really have a deep canon. They long ago moved on from the source material, and the first 20 movies were connected only in the loosest sense. For Craig's movies they tried to make a cross-movie continuity, but it didn't really work and required some retconning.

But the movies do have a unique sort of character and consistency that is widely believed to be due to one family running the show for 60+ years. I'm not sure that be replicated with a data-driven, committee-based approach. I also believe it was Broccoli's veto power that prevented over-saturation, and direct-to-streaming releases.

My guess is it will be closer to Star Wars than Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time. Some of the movies may be "good" and some may be "bad", but they'll be missing that bit that made them special.

Props to Bloomberg for contributing too. I've noticed that they have sponsored the development of CSS Grid and other features in Chromium.

And a soccer player runs 1/20th of what a marathoner does. Kipchoge would smoke Messi in a long-distance race. And I don't think Messi would get a hit off of Gerrit Cole, or have a snowball's chance in hell of stopping JJ Watt.

No love for _The Spy Who Loved Me_? Maybe Dalton isn't your favorite Bond, but his entries are at least par for the course rather than a serious plunge.

I'd agree that the last 25 years has given us a lot of duds and _Casino Royale_ is the main exception. However, I think it's more likely that Purvis and Wade are the issue here, as the 1977-1997 era showed that Eon could make a decent original Bond.

Along with cost, the biggest issue is still local opposition, right? Is there any plan to solve that?

I'm not a parent, but I see why someone might want to always know exactly where there child is and invest in anything which might improve their safety.

On the other hand, raising children without GPS surveillance seemed to work pretty well for many years. Is saying something like "Put on your timex and be back home by 6." no longer feasible? (Or if you want be even more old school "by sundown".)

The comparison is a great example of the "show don't tell" cliche that English teachers love.

Most people use the "suite of related products" definition of monorepo, but some companies like Google and Meta have a single company-wide repository. It's unfortunate that the two distinct strategies have the same name.

It's an easy way to increase the user count and claim growth. Since the link is to StackExchange, it may be relevant that they are now dealing with a huge spike in users who do not actively participate and probably unintentionally created an account.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/402813/user-activat...

Most competitions will only allow runners to use publicly available shoes. The idea being that if you want the best shoes you still need to spend a couple hundred dollars, but you don't need the research team or megacorp to make a custom shoe for you.

Any high level athlete wills try to optimize their equipment and baseball is no exception here. They've tweaked sizes, weight and wood types in bats to try and gain a performance advantage. Maple bats were non-existent until the late 90s and now are now used by the vast majority. The axe-handled bat has also become popular in recent years.

Balls are chosen by the league rather than the players, but these have changed too in recent years. It's not clear if these changes were accidental, or intentionally designed to increase scoring.

Of course none of these equipment adjustments are going to turn your beer league slugger into Babe Ruth, but they're probably in that same ~4% improvement ballpark that super shoes offer.

I don't like ads either, but what is the alternative? Since content costs money to produce and host, there must be a revenue source somewhere. Is the solution paywalls?

Personally, I'm fine paying for some ad-free content. But Mozilla wants much of the internet to be free (as in free beer) and open, so an internet which replaces all advertising with paywalls is not their vision. Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers.

I'd love for their to be another driver, but so far nobody has come with a broadly applicable revenue model other that paying for content or viewing ads. Suggesting that "just delete advertising" without providing an alternative is feasible is patently false and everything that follows is compromised.

Perhaps one day we will live in a post-capitalist utopia, but in the meantime making online advertising less shitty would be nice.

You could compose a message using multiple words in the text. It does mean your vocabulary is limited and jargon terms may not be available, but with some cleverness you can probably get your message across. If the exact spelling of a message is necessary, you could also design your cipher to use the first letter of the word instead.

Thanks for sharing!

I'm seconding the "incredibly fun" comment, but I would keep the occasional big numbers. It probably took me an hour to finish the game and I wouldn't want to slow it down further. The little extra bit of randomness/luck it adds is nice too.

When it comes to the UI, I was a bit confused about how the gameover and piece removal works. I guess if there are no legal moves it removes a piece?

Also, the multiple move mechanic where the last piece to move is automatically preselected sometimes tripped me up a few times and caused me to accidentally downgrade a piece.