closetohome

> talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc.

Growing up in the era of peak Slashdot it was hard not to view politics through the lens of technology. There were politicians trying to take away my games, and restrict my speech, and put me in jail for downloading MP3s. Fighting those battles through the years has definitely formed my political views.

I'm not clear if this is a list of suggested SEO tasks, or if it's just a shared checklist (that can be populated with suggested SEO tasks). If the former, it would be nice to see some examples, and I'm not sure why I would need to register to see it. If it's the latter, the site doesn't do a great job of selling the value of such a service.

I think the asset generation part is often wildly underestimated. Art is hard - commercial art can be harder. Sure you can buy assets, but then you need to be an art director - which is also hard. And the cost can get out of control very quickly.

I'm not sure I follow the distinction between Steam going away (and having to pirate your games) and Stadia going away (and having to pirate your games).

This is going to sound ridiculous, but ecommerce? Between the .com crash, and a few high-profile failures like Kozmo, Outpost, and Pets.com, there was definitely an era of skepticism about the whole idea. Also keep in mind Amazon didn't show a profit for the first 10-15 (?) years. They had a decent reason for it (reinvesting it all back into the business) but they took a lot of criticism for it.

Two is one, one is none.

My old boss was very disturbed when we explained to him that our small business with one IT guy can't really defend against state-level actors who are intent on getting into our systems.

I'm still not sure why he was worried about that.

I get how this probably reduces spam a little, but it's another one of those things like capchas that can be a massive impediment for legitimate users, but barely a speedbump for actual spammers.

It's awfully hard to establish any kind of online presence without a mobile phone number these days. Google used to have the option to get a confirmation code by voice if you couldn't receive texts, but they discontinued it, and nobody will accept a Google Voice (or most VOIP really) number as valid.

If you ever want to get a feel for how truly not-free the Internet is, try browsing through a VPN for a few days. Lots of stuff doesn't load, period. And you'll get constant "we've detected suspicious behavior from your IP" warnings, followed by endless capchas.

> it would probably behoove them to increase their joy by ridding themselves of whatever it was they typically leave behind

That's some wisdom right there.

Reminds me of a helpdesk job I had back when Windows 98 was the standard. Before the display settings had that handy confirmation countdown, it was surprisingly easy to set your display to something the monitor couldn't handle, leaving you with no way of seeing what was on the screen to change it back. Eventually I memorized the series of keystrokes required to get into display properties and reduce the resolution, which usually fixed the problem.

Being able to share AirTags via a family iCloud account seems to be a pretty commonly requested feature. It does seem a little silly that I can track every device attached to the account but not AirTags.

A long time ago I was headed to a photo shoot with the owner of a Ford GT40. As we cruised along he commented that it was the perfect road trip vehicle. Being young and a chronic over-packer and over-preparer, I asked how that was possible, as its total storage consisted of a glovebox and a cupholder. He said "all you need is a pair of sunglasses and a credit card!"

Which in retrospect was a bit of guy-who-can-afford-a-GT40 privilege, but it also changed my philosophy of travel. The stuff you need to survive can be obtained cheaply and easily. The joy of travel comes from what you leave behind.

Their contractor talked them into building it without a fixed budget. That's a pretty good financial incentive to just say "can do!" to every suggestion the owner makes.

Also most airliners follow fairly standard routes between cities. Starlink satellites, by nature, have to be evenly distributed.

Each one is also visible from a larger patch of ground because it's 300 miles farther away than a plane.

Interruptions are a good theory, but it seems unlikely they would have people use their own phones for the experiment, as that would introduce as many variables as there are participants. I would think they just hand everyone a 'clean' phone with no apps on it.

I'd love to see the difference between someone reading a phone-sized piece of paper, a phone, a non-touch LCD that only shows a block of text, and a similarly sized e-ink screen.

> improving the user experience was clearly not their priority

Basically. Reddit's updates are meant to drive ad engagement. The redesign makes it harder to browse without identifying yourself (requiring an account to see comments, making your online status visible by default). Pushing people to their app just means they can have unblockable ads and better analytics.

Clearly it's working, as 70-something percent of their traffic comes from apps now, and their advertising revenue has become significant enough to start talking about going public.

This is of course a cycle we've seen repeatedly with internet communities -- indie > popular > fully monetized.

There are at least a couple of rotary wing UAVs like the K-Max and Fire Scout that are just retrofitted conventional airframes. So in a way it's almost like the technology skipped manned flight and was put directly into unmanned aircraft first. Perhaps we'll see some of it trickle back down as it becomes a more proven technology.

Personally I think the form that "jet packs" will eventually take is just an electric multicopter that you strap into somehow.

It's almost as though repeatedly raising prices increases revenue at the cost of subscriber numbers. Wild.

I find this muddied even more by the shortcut for "start a new sentence" being a double space on mobile keyboards. Seems like a habit I'd pick up even if I'd learned to type on a phone.

Yeah it's integration of OCR and a lightweight CMS that also conveniently rolls together fees for hosting and GPT3.

I was a little surprised that the paper part is used only for plain text. It would sort of make sense to have at least a few formatting and layout features.

A conservative investor who doesn't believe in passive/index investing.

If he'd bought BABA stock outright instead of optioning it, he'd have $200,000 right now instead of $0.

Failure rate isn't the only metric that affects customer satisfaction. If the product works better than any of its competition, but has a 10% rate of complete failure (which is insanely high for a retail product), you're still going to have 90% customer satisfaction.

I use it for the same thing, though most videos seem to fall into one of three categories:

-Millions of views, 99% liked

-Videos without ridiculous view counts, where the like/dislike ratio actually helps

-Brigaded with dislikes

Thanks, I'd never really thought about eye surgery before and now am deathly afraid of literally every aspect of it.

Google discontinued the "read you a number over a landline" feature a little while back and only supports texting now.

I think this speaks to my issue. Facebook is far too ban-happy and obsessed with verifiable identity for me to ever be comfortable associating it with an expensive piece of hardware.

Walmart is Amazon's biggest competitor in online sales with ~7% market share to Amazon's ~40%.

You'd think Google breaks into your house, uploads your data, and deletes the originals.

Think of cloud accounts like any other form of backup. Two is one, one is none.

Hard drives die, cloud services come and go. No backup is forever.