cseleborg

String theory has, however, been successfully applied to oranges. Here in Germany, these are now routinely sold in nets, made of some sort of string. QED

Should we send them a warning? Maybe they haven't spotted it yet? It's our junk after all...

I agree. I'm writing a desktop app based on a web stack and I'm agonizing over tiny details in how tabbing should work and how the arrow keys should interact with lists etc. I don't know if my UI is any good, but I know that good UI takes a tremendous amount of attention to detail.

But we'll all be dead one day! It's a compelling idea that if something happens to me and I lose touch with all my relatives, there might still be someone at my funeral.

This is interesting because it highlights the trust we've always placed in real-looking images. It brings real-looking images down to the same level as text.

It's always been possible to write fake news. We've never had to add disclaimers at the top of textual content, e.g. "This text is made to sound like it describes real events, but contains invented and/or inaccurate facts." We feel the need to add this to video because until now, if it looked real, it probably was (of course, "creative" editing has existed for a long time, but that's still comparatively easy to spot).

It's the end of a media era, really.

> I agree with this. We recently removed all tracking (eg google analytics) from our homepage because we didn't want to have a cookie banner. The result: everything is going fine. Turns out we didn't need the tracking at all. Should've done it way sooner.

Thank you. The industry needs more such testimonies showing that letting go of tracking is okay and won't sink the ship.

There are a bazillion unclear laws all over the world. It's common practice, really, to formulate things a little bit generally, and let practitioners (lawyers and courts) figure out the details.

In this case, the unclear point is around the notion of "legitimate interest". I guess something like fraud prevention can be thought of legitimate interest. But ad companies just said, "well, we make money out of tracking the hell out of users, so it's in our legitimate interest to keep doing it, and never mind that the whole point of the law was explicitly to rein in our industry's nasty behaviour."

So now law practitioners how to hash out amongst themselves what "legitimate interest" actually means in 2024, and this of course can change in 2034, so you write the law to not have to be updated every time the tech industry invents new ways of being naughty.

> The law is reason people think "Look, Why take a chance?" and build crap like cookie banners in.

Really, no. Not being willing to let go of user tracking, and now realizing that it's against the law if you get it wrong, is why people think "Look, why take a chance?" and grasp for shitty dark patterns to cover their asses.

My business did not track its customers online and had no banner. Period.

More interestingly, that article says:

> We are also committing that going forward, we will only use cookies that are required for us to serve GitHub.com.

A few pixels further down, on the cookie banner:

> We use optional cookies to improve your experience on our websites and to display personalized advertising based on your online activity.

I guess now we finally have a rule-of-thumb figure for what "going forward" means: 3-4 years, tops.

This is very puzzling to me: How can such a small object generate enough gravity to retain a moon orbiting it with such a small radius (see the embedded animation lower down in the article)? The asteroid is only 790 meters in diameter, which is the size of a small hill. I'm no physicist, but maybe someone can whip up some calculations to show how this might be possible at all?

Cool service! This, though, may prove to be a weakness of your business model. Having to sign up creates friction (I won't), which may lose you potential paying customers. What else could you be doing to give people a real feel for how well this works? Maybe a gallery of prompts and the respective results?

I'm not contesting the legitimacy of YT fighting ad blockers. I'm merely pointing out that the claim here is that they are doing so using illegal means (by using what can be legally seen as spyware without the user's consent, which is illegal in the EU, according to the plaintiff).

In other words, the issue is not that YT fights back, it's how they do it.

That's not the issue here. The issue is that YT is (arguably) using illegal measures to enforce their own rights. Just because someone infringes on your rights doesn't make it legal for you to infringe back on theirs.

There was a joke like that, it went something like: "Quitting smoking is so easy, I've done it so many times already!"

Back when I was writing a software synth for fun (and also for getting hired in the audio industry), I found the book DAFX to be very helpful. It describes basic algorithms for doing digital audio, though not the state of the art.

I recently landed on beeline's website (GPS navigation devices for motorbikes and bicycles). For bicycles, the tagline was "Simplify your ride".

I strongly disagree. I feel like involving my smartphone into any activity that existed in 1990 (like jogging, or riding a bike) tends to make things more complicated, not less. When I go for a jog wanting to listen to podcasts, battery status, headphones, Bluetooth and playlist ordering are additional complexities that, at the very minimum, add additional steps to the process and, at worst, require several minutes of problem-solving before I can get started.

In my experience, involving a smartphone can, but rarely does, make things simpler.

A friend of mine told me that the microphone on two different Fairphones broke from mounting them on their rather high-end mountain bike's handlebar (he realized it must be the handlebar after the second breakage.)

Wait... You're talking about Git, right? Brilliant idea! You could sign a pull request, and once it's signed, you can then merge the businesses. But how do you show a diff of the signature? And what if it's not for a corporate merger?

In many cases, we should look at a civilization's institutions rather than at its individuals to judge its degree of "advancement". Institutions are often much closer to the ideals of a society than its people.

For example, in many countries, people are quick to suspect someone, whereas the judicial system sees a defendant as innocent until proven guilty. (Imperfectly, of course, but better than what people do.)

(Edit: typo)

Yes, I find that I not only can't easily recall what my own experience as a kid was like, I also reproduce a lot of my parents' behaviors.

That doesn't prove anything. What it does clearly prove, though, is that the Earth is flat. Think about it: have you ever successfully landed with a parachute on a spherical object like a soccer ball or large marble? See?

> s/he has been failing up until the previous day and is already giving public advice about how to do it better?

This was my thought exactly. The internet is full of articles along those lines: I've been doing this new routine for 2 days, here are 8 pieces of advice for you.

I recognize the enthusiasm for sharing new discoveries, and it can be inspiring, I just wish those who did would be generally less prescriptive about it.

I guess the principle "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" will be more relevant than ever from now on.

Go always felt like a fairly low-level approach to web-development. I'd love for it to see a higher-level, more-batteries-included framework as a viable alternative make it to mainstream. Here's me wishing good luck to the Pushup team.

No, unscrupulous adtech businesses have ruined the internet. I had a business website that would not track users, and thus needed no cookie banner. If more business owners (especially the large ones) would stay away from shady practices they know full well their own children would object to, I'd say the web would still be a fine place today.

Actually, it's a bit more nuanced than that, because merely by using the #1 analytics solution, even without shady practices on your part, you already put your visitors' data at risk. Other example: embeds. I used Vimeo rather than YouTube to embed videos, using their rather honest do-not-track option, but went the extra mile and disabled localStorage for them, to ensure no data whatsoever was left. So almost all business owners need to actively want to protect their users' privacy, but this is a consequence of a few big players' explicit choices. See above.

[edit: style]

But small structures are the norm, or at least very common, aren't they? There are plenty of established, small to medium businesses out there. Someone for whom this is important can certainly find a job like that within one of those.

One of my fears is that Google will shut down my account because some algorithm of theirs says so, and since there is no customer support to appeal to, I'd lose my primary inbox. That would be catastrophic enough, but I'd also potentially lose access to all other accounts that use that email address for recovery or to send login links/passwords. So one of my next to-dos is to set up an email on a domain I own for these critical recovery scenarios.

I would suggest evaluating this for yourself.

Good luck!

I agree with the sentiment, but if a personal blog tracks users and sends data on them to someone else, as with GA, then it absolutely needs a privacy policy.

Thanks for posting this. The issue I have here is that I would need to spend hours researching whether wrapping a single kind of produce is OK or not. It's a science!

Another example: is it better to buy the non-organic, locally produced apple or the organic apple that comes from Argentina? (I'm in Europe).

In the store, I need simple heuristics to make my decisions. My heuristics:

- Is there plastic? -> Pass

- Is it produce from far away? -> Pass, mostly

- Is it non-organic? -> Pass, if there's an organic alternative.

And yeah, sometimes it's a decision between the produce that's organic but wrapped in plastic and that which is conventional but without wrapping and grown locally. That's a head-scratcher every time.

Germany exports most of its plastic waste. China stopped importing it a few years ago, so now it gets bought up by African countries. I think your assumptions about a functioning waste system do not apply to most developed countries I know, unfortunately.