coryfklein

No, it's industry standard to operate at a deficit to gain userbase and subscriptions. They're certainly prioritizing shipping product right now over reducing COGS, but you can bet that if they're successful in the short-term that in a couple years they'll be able to significantly reduce cost per search.

It's new software, features are always prioritized over cost efficency at the beginning when pressure to ship product overrides all.

Right? A lot depends on how much power these individuals have. If the folks running the petition hold a lot of sway in engineering then the petition could have a real impact; even if it's just forcing the leadership to pay more attention to folks working at the ground level.

On the other hand, if you're some random dude in the IT department with very little influence or stock ownership, and with little reason to believe the host of engineering and product is going to stand up behind you, then yeah I'd say the time spent organizing an effort like this is much better spent "shopping elsewhere".

Ditto. We do this at my company today, but it's done as part of a culture of trust and openness. (Which culture – I might add – is one of the biggest reasons I'm still there.) And it doesn't displace 1:1s where my manager can talk in person about how I'm doing either. Why wouldn't my manager want to know if I'm happy at work? This seems like one of the most basic things your manager would want to know, and often enough to use a tool to automatically share this regularly.

And if you manager had been regularly checking in with how you are feeling then this would have been... worse? I suspect that, given a manager with as poor people skills as yours has, your manager initiating the contact and asking you instead of you going to your manager may have instead made all the difference.

I tried Songs of Syx a few weeks ago and, coming from a background that includes Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, SimCity 2000, Cities Skylines, and Oxygen Not Included, I thought Syx was kinda meh. The novel thing about it that was cool is that it seemed to mix Dward Fortress with SimCity in a completely novel way where you see the individual "sims" or "dwarfs" but they are cattle not pets and the thing you're building is a city.

In the end, the city-building aspect quickly became rote for me, I find the direct overhead view disorienting and unnatural, and the game didn't have a lasting hook that pulled me in (opposite of Factorio, which maybe had TOO MUCH of that).

I always thought the hjkl movement for constructing walls and floors was very cool and vim-esque. But then the fact that you can't build a wall with more than 10 segments at a time ended up being one of the most trying aspects of the game for me, where I loved focusing on building a 3-tier outer castle wall with fortifications on the outside with steps going up and down on the inside and my army patrolling along it's border.

Agreed, a vote would hardly bring much extra information here.

I'd love to see data behind this question, but yes I believe that there is significant variation in the required intelligence to perform the highly various professions that the human race engages in. And I would claim – in all the humility I can muster speaking as a programmer myself – that the average programming job does inherently have a higher bar for intelligence than the average other profession.

It would be very wrong indeed to extrapolate from this information that one should TREAT individuals differently based on their choice of profession! Even if we knew for certain that the Brick Laying profession only consisted of the 1% most intelligent individuals and Data Entry Specialists the lowest 1%, treating individuals with these professions differently from a policy or cultural perspective would, in my opinion, be a great injustice.

My biggest impediment to downsizing my cell phone: maps and navigation. In my vehicle I need to have at least a moderately sized screen in order to navigate safely. And the device needs to have mobile internet access.

How do folks who are downsizing their cell phones work around this? Do you use a non-phone GPS in your car? Do you keep a larger cell phone around for "when you need it"?

Let's say my vehicle is stolen, and police find a vehicle at my neighbor's house with the identical make, model, and year but with the VIN sanded off. And this neighbor just so happens to operate a shipping company that specializes in shipping vehicles out of the country, but has never been convicted of anything criminal.

How would you say we should handle this scenario? We have a good reason to believe that the property is actually mine, and also that if it is not seized soon then it will be lost forever. (Since, as we all know, court rulings happen on much longer time scales.)

If you have an overly aggressive civil forfeiture law then the police can seize things when they shouldn't. But if you have none, then don't you hamstring law enforcement unnecessarily, and instead provide greater incentive for crime?

Uhh Zoom is not going to erase the improved color balance and bokeh. Although I'll agree with you when it comes to the author's claim about fine-grained facial details being improved by the camera; those you'll almost certainly lose over Zoom compression.

The human brain processes and identifies images much MUCH faster than text. The prototypical figure cited is 60,000x faster. I don't know the source for that figure, but it makes inherent sense that the human eye can visually identify the shape of a juicy edible fruit much faster than it can read an english word.

> any variation of technology is not going to help from distractions until and unless you excercise discipline and restraint

There's definitely a feedback cycle here though. Swap your dazzling iPhone 14 Pro Max for an iPhone 4S and then change the display to greyscale and see just how fast this technological solution reduces your levels of distraction.

Of course as you say it alone isn't a panacea: doing that is painful. But live with the pain long enough, and you've now used technology as a crutch to change your brain to expect the distraction less.

Here are some other technological solutions that I have found helpful:

* News Feed Eradicator: a browser plugin that hides those algorithmic news feeds that are the cocaine of the internet

* Unhook - Remove YouTube Recommended Videos: removes the sidebar on YouTube

* Podcasts - Even if you "already know" all the psychological tricks the world is pulling on you, your brain is programmable and if you simply listen and re-listen to Tristan Harris on a regular basis this imprints these lessons into your head. That, in turn, provides a well of motivation that can be used when the lure of addiction presents itself.

I'm sorry, I am really confused. Didn't we get "the first picture of the black hole at the center of our galaxy" like 2-3 years ago? I definitely remember seeing a nearly identical photo, and lots of press coverage about a particularly young woman who was closely involved in the project. What that something different?

> I think the best thing we could do is encourage people to buy fewer things that are better quality.

I would LOVE to do this, but I have absolutely no idea how to identify quality. Is the $50 t-shirt at Macy's actually going to last me longer than the $10 that looks identical at The Gap?

Since I don't even know, I usually end up taking the $10 safer choice.

If you didn't watch the entire video, I highly recommend it. What a beautiful style of story-telling; I was expecting a quick explanation of what kaketsugi is, but instead I got so much more. It was an inspiring look at the relationship between a mother and father, and between people and their clothes, and it was utterly heartwarming.

FYI, in the year 2020 renewables produced 33% and fossil fuels fulfilled 40% of California's total energy budget in 2020, and this 97% figure – while impressive – is not representative of typical energy production [0].

[0] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

Now I'm really curious what the cost of a modern U.S. soldier is. Recruitment and acquisition, training, outfitting, salary, food, etc. And if you build a tank once then you can park it in a warehouse nearly in perpetuity, whereas I expect humans require much more upkeep to retain skills and replace from turnover.

I'm guessing the total lifetime cost of a trained soldier is less than $8.9M but I wouldn't be suprised to find that the figures are comparable in the end.

The main reason cheap drones are effective is because they come from fast-moving consumer product lines instead of the slow-moving monolithic military industrial complex side.

There is nothing fundamentally indefensible about drone swarms, the complex just hasn't had enough time to react. You can bet that, if it doesn't already exist in secret somewhere in the US, there are many teams actively working on tank-mounted drone laser defense systems.

I suspect that drones have been hard to target until now because they have a unique air signature far different from all previous air targets, not because they are fundamentally more "invisible" than a Predator or a helicopter. Given their unique shape, movement, noise, and radio profile, a CS grad could certainly cobble together a drone target acquisition system using some consumer-level optic systems combined with a radio antenna, radar, and microphone array.

And as we all know, quadcopter drones are exceedingly fragile and most of their profile is millimeter-thin plastic blades. Once you have the ability target them, you'd only need a moderately powered laser to completely disable them.

Oof, that is just so painful to read. You have my sympathy, friend.

If you attach a time zone, then at least some won't need to do a conversion in their heads.

If you just use UTC, then EVERYONE has to do some conversion in their heads.

(Unless some participants happen to live at the prime meridian, in which case using UTC as "the timezone" is equally as good.)

Personally, this makes me so happy. I have wanted this for so long now.

Professionally I'm already groaning inside; it looks like 2023 will be the year of "DST-related bugs being exposed in our product".

The Wire[0] is a very interesting portrait into the challenges involved in managing drug crime in a city. I'm not a cop so I can't say how far the realism extends, but the show seems to try pretty hard to be grounded in reality as opposed to – say – CSI.

[0] https://www.hbo.com/the-wire

My personal speculation: some other power(s) outside of Ukraine are responsible for using their soft power to handicap the Russian Air Force, whether via hacking or via a secretive-yet-direct physical intervention within Russia.

The "non-news" of Russia Air Force not showing up was not naturally getting coverage in the news, and now DoD figures are making public statements in order to point it out, raise awareness, and poke Putin in the side. Meanwhile, every delay in action from the Russian Air Force weighs heavily in favor of Ukraine.

In this way, major adversaries to Russia that are unable to get directly involved for fear of escalation are still able to place their hands on the scales via more indirect means. Even though there is not official treaty requiring Russian adversaries to intervene, it is often still in their best national defense interests to limit Russia's expansionist tendencies in whatever way they can.

It is all a continuation of major world powers fighting wars by proxy; the dominant pattern of war-fighting after nuclear proliferation became a thing.

Viewing videos hosted directly on YouTube servers where they share them openly and without restriction is hardly analogous to pirating video games.

But even so, YouTube videos are categorically different from video games in that merely by watching them once you consume their value. For video games one presumably may read reviews, play at a friend's house, etc before deciding to spend money on them.

Your Patreon counter-argument presupposes a conclusion though; that the creators deserve anything in the first place. For content I'm not willing to pay for, and which is offered to me for free, creators do not by default deserve any greater than $0!

It is up to them to convince folks to pay them for their content, and if they choose to host their content on YouTube they have made their own decision. Not all creators probably know that YouTube will offer their content for free without any advertisement-supported content, but that's their problem. There are video hosting options which do indeed require folks to pay for access, but YouTube is not that.

And as a side note, I'm a living counter-example to your $0 example, as I have myself donated to creators that published free content on YouTube in hopes that they will continue to produce it.

> a rapid exit at unprecedented speed from the oil economy, in favor of renewables.

In the United States alone we would have to *sextuple* our renewable energy sources just to make up for our usage of fossil fuels. That is not something any country can do "rapidly", and even if it became a primary focus it would consume a significant portion of our GDP for years on end and be the largest infrastructure project the US has ever engaged in.

It seems almost ludicrous to categorize such a reaction as a "retaliation".

For the active participants, yes. I'm not so sure this applies to the ruling class though.

> There are already hundreds of civilian casualties... This is not like Crimea.

For those curious about the numbers, there were 2 soldiers and 1 civilian killed in the annexation of Crimea[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru...

Can anyone explain why Putin wants Ukraine so badly? Is it natural resources, geography, or simply a "the country must grow" mindset?

But why, when YouTube has chosen to provide the content ad-free?

If I see content I appreciate and then – for whatever reason – decide I'd like to support the creator, I'll probably just donate to their Patreon where they'll actually see most of the money I send their way.

If I pay for YouTube Premium and then I watch a video that wastes my time, I definitely do not want to send money to that creator but Premium will unavoidably do just that.