Well, I guess after years of all the good Todo apps being Mac/iOS, this serves us right! It sounds way interesting, though. I'll have to boot a VM to try this out.
2,175 karma · joined August 2, 2012
We know that when people read lines of text, they pay a lot of attention to the beginning and the end and comparatively less attention to the middle. One result is that lines with common prefixes tend to blur together. To get around this, you want the reader to encounter the unique portion of the line ASAP, which makes it desirable that any kind of necessary prefix be brief.
Upshot is you want the function signature to be what you see as you scan down the left side of the page, so it does make sense to keep the function keyword particularly concise.
My first programming languages were BASIC, 6809E assembly, and BASIC09. C would be there too but it required a second disk drive for the standard library and I didn’t have one.
Good thing the games mostly sucked on that platform. If they’d been any better I might not have learned to program.
Since mine tend to be domain-specific though, I do wonder if I wouldn't need either a more generalized model or a very specialized keyword list.
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/california-court-appeal...
Kind of a shame, because it was my first thought too--losing the accessibility team and then removing all the accessible clients definitely won't make Musk many friends among disability advocates.
Without samples and sequencing being the primary production technique, suddenly real instrumentation and organic musicality became the thing. Hip hop started building on covered riffs and musical passages more than straight up samples (I’m guessing the licensing was easier).
That also gave us Check Your Head from Beasties, as the follow up to the pioneer sample-laden album Paul’s Boutique, where they famously played their own instruments again and became even more popular. The Native Tongues scene also gave us Prince Paul/Dr. Octagon, which gave us Deltron 3030 and Dan the Automator, which gave us Gorillaz, which…
There really was a lot I suspect would’ve gone quite differently without that court case.
As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I also really wish we'd gotten the explosion of almost completely sample-based music we were starting to see with bands like the Beastie Boys, the KLF, and Pop Will Eat Itself. The Biz Markie sampling case basically shitcanned an entire nascent subgenre.
The end result was a compromise that still funneled some degree of money into the labels, with the artists getting an equally raw deal as before proportionally speaking--but now with a micro share of your $10/mo to Spotify or wherever instead of their share of $10+ for a single album.
I'm not saying the prior business model was sustainable (at least ethically) but at the end of the day, "if you can't beat them, join them" is still one hell of a compromise to make.
(Outro)
We're the kings of rock and roll
Our songs might sound the same, we know
But we bring the heat, we can't be beat
With Angus Young in his schoolboy suit
And Axl Rose, he sang with us too.
Pretty cool stuff.
Not sure if I'm strictly a victim of effective marketing, or if they flipped places in the last however many years, or what, but it's interesting to see your post and the replies that imply I've got it backwards.
I have not tried Home Assistant, no, but I'm keeping an eye on what happens with Matter. If I were able to consolidate the interaction to a neutral third party that could control the other stuff I already have, I'd love to do that.
I also jumped into a personal O'Reilly Safari subscription way back when the price wasn't as high as it is now, and I've kept that grandfathered subscription up as well.
I think between the two, it ends up being a bit less than $500 a year. That's not very much at all against a tech salary, and the O'Reilly sub actually has been quietly useful for work projects now and again too.
My basic take is 1) A builder should have their own set of tools whether they hew wood or numbers (and not everything fits neatly into Visual Studio Code, though I probably use that as much or more than Jetbrains); and 2) if I ever do manage to squeeze out a profitable side project in CA, I want my argument that I'm not using my employer's resources in any way shape or form to be very very solid.
In CA, who owns the resources is the difference in who owns that product. For the same reason, I always buy my own cell phone and pay my own cell phone plan, even if a corporate phone is otherwise forced on me, and always own my own laptop as well for any personal development that comes up.
It's a touch on the paranoid side, I guess, but I just feel better knowing I can be as independent as I want to be with my tech stack. With my own tech library to lean on, a nearly universal set of build tools licensed specifically to me, and my own devices for communication and development, I feel very comfortable that there's no implied shared resource argument that can be made.
I also like being able to sequence the set of several lighting, audio, and video operations that sets my theater room up for various uses. I like being able to quickly check the house temp and tweak the thermostat from the other side of the house. And I like being able to turn whole rooms on and off at once, or to set their light dimness and color for my use of the moment without getting up or fiddling with my phone, etc.
I especially like the routine that does a sunrise wake on my bedroom lights; turns off my brown noise machine a minute before my alarm since sometimes that will peacefully wake me without having to hear the beep; chatters jokes, news, etc, incessantly at me in the morning once I dismiss my alarm to make sure I actually get up; then automatically shifts into whole-house Sirius XM to play hard rock as I start my day.
And say what you want, I like being able to ask the thing over my shoulder what my office fan 5 feet behind me is set to and change that while coding and still looking at the screen, rather than stopping, screwing around with a cheap remote control and trying to see a little LCD from across the room. Like I said, I'm ADHD. If I stop to do that, who knows when I get back on task again.
I agree for simple "turn on a switch" tasks they're way overkill, but for actual automation (and perhaps accommodation) these devices are useful, especially once you start replacing ALL your environmental devices with controllable ones. It's more a question as to whether you can leverage the automation.
It's like every lesson about not disrupting GUI flow with modal banners, and about creating shortcuts and other accelerated paths for advanced users was forgotten in VUI. At best you get a one-size-fits-all brief mode that usually isn't very brief, and doesn't reward learning so doesn't increase engagement.
VUI vendors also plainly have no clue how to enable discovery without either fucking up your home screen with some ugly "things you can do" list or being annoying about volunteering stuff when responding to your commands. It's as if they might need to *gasp* document their features instead because voice devices aren't web apps you can just fiddle with.
The net result is I actually get way more frustrated with these devices now that I'm super-experienced with the tech, not less. That's the wrong direction.
I cannot imagine actually shopping with one, mind you.
I have a number of Alexa and Siri (and Ring and Nest, for that matter) devices -and- I'm aware of the far-field microphones -and- I'm aware of the surveillance potential, -and- I have chosen not to care. That's in no small part because the options for monitoring me go further than that, and they will be used if someone has that much interest. So I'm not going to limit my own convenience just to make it trivially harder for someone to do something they're unlikely to do anyway.
As far as being a guest in such a house, like most other places you don't personally own or control, I think that's something you either just have to roll with, or choose not to come by--for your own sensibilities. If you were my guest and told me you cared, I'm sure we'd just stick to the back yard, but that would be because you have a strong preference, not because I'm somehow "wrong."
To be clear, I would not expect you to agree with my stance at all, but if you actually told me to my face I was somehow breaking a social standard that only exists for a very niche set of people, or implied whatsoever that I was doing it out of naivete, I think that would be very offensive. I hope that is not something you really do in real life.
And no, in ten years of having a house full of microphones and various security geek friends in and out, nobody has ever told me the same. That's because it's fairly normal nowadays (and damned near unavoidable with some devices such as, for example, your phone or tablet, or your console's game controller, or your TV's remote control) to have a single one, and once there's a single one you may as well have as many as you need.
If anything, I think them consolidating to Alexa, Google, and Apple is probably a good thing. For awhile there, we were starting get microphones in all the individual devices too, and then you really have no control.
We’re one of the few states with both implied-contract and bad-faith codified as explicit exceptions to at-will, and we’re significantly more likely to resolve in favor of the employee than in most states because we actually mean them.
The only question is whether naysayers (usually management or people parroting what management said) convince employees that we’re strictly at-will and have no options if terminated, when we are not and often most certainly do.
Do you think the corporate expense of going through motions of PIPs for a month—and risking quiet quitting or even disgruntled employee retaliation in the meantime—would be a thing if they didn’t have to cover their own butts or risk a lawsuit they’d actually conceivably lose?
In states without these protections they generally just fire you. And I’m not even going to get into the protected class aspect where CA has many nuances, and “no reason” becomes awfully tricky to defend if challenged by the vast majority of workers who do fall within one.
So yes, realistically an employer needs a reason to safely fire you in CA.
That’s almost always quietly recognized and accommodated at our level via either a reason or a significant payoff out the door in exchange for a waiver of liability. We can sue the crap out of them and quite feasibly win if they don’t.
It’s only at the lowest level jobs where this gets completely ignored. That’s largely because employers are confident the min-wage folks aren’t going to sue them, same reason poor people get illegal leases around here that never get challenged.
Second, I never actually said we had special protection in my original post.
I said we had (among) the best protections, and that we provide the model for most other protective laws of this type in the USA. And I said it in the context that we were the high water mark for protection and even then the OP’s conjecture wouldn’t necessarily fall under it.
Think that’s all easily verifiable on your part. Not sure what else you think you’re disputing there.
They don't break (current) US laws in terms of being a pyramid--not going to get into their history of fraud, racketeering, etc, which isn't an FTC concern.
Anyway, I know you're basically making a "this cause is more important than that cause " argument, but of course a stricter stance specifically re: being anti-competitive wouldn't touch them at all. They don't lead a market in anything anymore.
What I realistically would expect this to bring down, if anything, is the walled gardens, where they exist on devices that have become so central to our lives that this amounts to broadly restricting what goods or services you're able to consume. The wording of what they released seems very specifically crafted to highlight walled gardens and similar concepts, at least where there's arbitrary action in the name of rent taking happening as well.
I suspect this--along with the anti-competitive payment system decision from the Epic case--is the shot across the bow for Apple and Google to either loosen up on iOS and Android (and very specifically, App Store and Play Store) or be targeted.
That'd be good enough for me, for now. I don't like MLMs either, and this may be a first world problem, but it's a daily one I face.
I probably made the mistake of speaking a little too specifically for the US situation, though. Here, the criteria are (modulo nuance) roughly what I said for the FTC to care.
https://workplacerightslaw.com/library/retaliation/construct...
My take:
The TL;DR is that it's just equivalent to getting fired. If you can prove you got shuffled out the door via constructive dismissal for reasons it's illegal to fire people for, then it's illegal. If at-will would've applied anyway, it's just a jerk move. Mostly it means you still get unemployment and can still sue for wrongful termination, even though you technically resigned.
What I suspect might be more of an issue, at least in CA, is that our at-will law has a "good faith" clause that basically implies you can't fire someone for a reason that would broadly be considered unethical in the context of an employer-employee business relationship. The classic example is canning someone just before they get their commissions purely to save yourself of the cost of paying them. My guess is that's one reason why Facebook, for example, is giving all their employees the mid-November vest even if they got fired first.
Constructively dismissing someone out the door probably takes away a lot of argument that you were acting in good faith.
If they promised these people that they could work remote and they invested in property then get forced to move, I actually wonder if it could open up the company to promissory estoppel (i.e., I had a financial loss based on a reasonable promise you broke, and now I want to recover).
The times I've heard about that cause in the past were exactly for situations where you moved for a job, then the job was rescinded. At the very least, that angle probably wouldn't look great in court during a wrongful termination suit.
(IANAL either, but since I work in CA I try to stay reasonably informed of the laws that affect me.)
Amway's not the best example, since they actually sell real goods and because Amway's sellers' best customers have almost always been the sellers themselves. In other words, many sellers used it as a way to buy goods at "wholesale" and never really had any intention of reselling them. At one point, I think that was even part of the Amway pitch, particularly at the time they were inexplicably popular for their (expensive and therefore in theory a better deal discounted) water treatment products.
I don't think there's a price advantage there compared to Costco or online, though--much of what made Amway fade into the background starting in the mid 90s.
So too Stella Dot, Mary Kay, Cutco/Vector, probably Herbalife and even Transamerica, etc. They sell real stuff, whether or not the pricing makes sense, and you can technically turn a profit on it, whether or not the market is really there, so they're not technically considered a pyramid scheme in the scam/illegal sense.
Now, I'm not saying they're good ideas--at all--and they absolutely operate on hype and pipe dream every bit as much as those awful timeshare presentations. They have the same exponential market saturation issue as any pyramid scheme and the same diminishing returns--but they are generally not considered fraudulent, just obnoxious.
The really awful pyramid schemes mostly just sell "new seller kits" to prospective targets that teach them how to sell "new seller kits" to their targets, have no real product or way to make a profit, and the entire rollup is those kits and other overhead fees. They're the financial equivalent of a chain letter.
I'm pretty sure those do get action taken against them if they're identified. The biggest problem there is most are pretty small, take a bunch of people's money, then burn out once it's all rolled to the top ranks who founded the scheme and new marks aren't easy to find.
I hadn't realized there was prior art to look at or potentially clone by mistake. I wonder how old this pattern is.
Thanks for showing me!