Yeah, I don't see why we need to play games - just say no. It's a normal human instinct to want to please others and say yes, but it can be short sighted as you will need to tell them that, no, you didn't finish that strategic project because you went to a lot of meetings..
If buying a lottery ticket is a good idea, isn’t buying two better? How about spending everything you have on lottery tickets? Odds are the upside for you is still much larger than the downside. Maybe you’re saying that buying a single lottery ticket improves your odds of winning the lotto so much (infinitely many times in fact) that you just need one. There are a lot of lotteries in the world so.. get one of each? Also, how often should you buy one? One a week? One an hour? Maybe once a lifetime is enough, which is what I personally recommend.
It’s almost like there is another variable that determines if this is a dumb idea, and it almost always is. Maybe those math professors are on to something after all.
> Not as shady as the fact that Chrome by default sends your entire browsing history to Google for analysis.
Citation needed. Are you saying that, as I click around the site here, Google knows what comments threads I'm interested in?
Edit: I think they're talking about the History sync, which does indeed by default send Google every link you visit, but only if you explicitly enable it. We should get access to this data and leak porn preferences of every senator. That ought to get the laws changed quickly.
Exactly, there should be a multi-year lockout period where the CEOs cannot sell their stock. If the potential hires don't like it, well, cry me a river. Plenty of people would still take the job, especially if they are interested in building a long-term company.
Something else that isn't often mentioned is that NAT requires keeping track of connection state on the router and anyone that writes code knows that state is the devil. That's state for every connection and for every device on the network. A perfectly implemented NAT router with unlimited memory is just as reliable as an IPv6 router that just forwards packets. In reality, the consumer grade devices have 16MB or so of memory and fall far short of this ideal.
> Some parts of the U.S. have more homes for middle-income buyers than the national average, according to the National Association of Realtors’ recent analysis.
Turning off Javascript on the Economist website also shows the full article. I'm using uBlock for this. Besides the paywalls, I find that turning off JS improves the user experience on the vast majority of news sites.
Interesting, I actually think that the indexing and the infrastructure part of building a search engine is much easier now than it was in the early 2000s. It's the ranking that's the hard part. PageRank helped put Google on the map and they've battled the hordes of low-ethics SEO practitioners ever since. I think it's generally agreed that PageRank wouldn't cut it today.
I tried Kagi as the default search engine for a few days and realized just how many little things Google does that I prefer, but never noticed until now. Not strictly related to search results, but things like converting units (Kagi has this, but it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same), shopping results, the QA answers, etc. It's a ton of work to implement all that. For now I switched back, but I'll keep an eye out.
The fact that not being able to unsubscribe from marketing emails counts as gangster capitalism for you.. well.. that must mean things are pretty good.
Reading these comments, if the world ended and the people here were left with a cow, half would starve to death and the other half would get sick. It’s just crazy to me that what was common knowledge a few generations ago is just gone.
Yes, milk breeds bacteria like crazy. It’s exponential growth too so it’s bound to go bad and when it does, it happens quickly. But if you had to drink fresh milk that was still warm, you’d be fine. Mostly.
On a related note, have you noticed how every cuisine is based on a) what is available locally and b) the best way to preserve it?
Ah, great to know that the merchants have another tool to take whatever money they feel entitled to from my account based on nothing more than "but we really really want to!" My first introduction to credit cards, when I was a kid, was via some.. uh.. shared CC numbers online. I couldn't believe how insecure the whole system was. Were people just that naive back in the day?
Everyone's pretty skeptical here, but I think something like this is the way forward. Not based on Reddit or HN, of course, but based on the same principle, namely, user curation. It's argued that Google was so successful at first with PageRank because at the time it was common for users to have personal web pages that had long lists of curated links to other websites. That signal has gone down the toilet, but why can't we just skip the middleman and get people to rank sites they think are interesting by, you know, upvoting them or something like that. We need collaborative filtering for content aggregation.
What Google needs is to do is start taking explicit user feedback. If I click on something and it's a major waste of time, I want to be able to tell Google to never show me this result or the whole domain. Why can't I do this? They are happy to hoover all of my data in the name of "personalization", but there's zero way I can personalize the results myself without resorting to insecure 3rd party extensions.
It's not wrong, but it's not the whole story. Why would these typically small countries bordering Russia want to join a military alliance in the first place? It's because of the experience with their large autocratic and unstable neighbor and they are, of course, once again proven right.
Looks like a lot of people here agree with this and have similar frustrations which makes me wonder - surely some of the developers working on these apps dogfood their own work, if not for any other reason than it's just very popular. The presence of these issues means that they can't fix them. Why?
I mean, I've seen this happen where developers legitimately want to fix little annoyances in the UI, but they can't. I think the reason why is a combination of two things. First, a mature product has to handle a ton of different scenarios making it a major PITA to change anything. If it's not a quick fix, it has to go trough the normal product process which brings me to the second reason - the product managers don't get evaluated based on how usable something is, rather it's some sort of an engagement metric. As long as the watched minutes go up, nobody cares if people are throwing their remotes in rage. So this is on product leadership, but maybe they just need better metrics, like a rage button on the remote.
I like this take. There's a book called "Games people play" by E. Berne that changed how I think about things like this. It talks about how people on a biological level need to interact with others and how they'll unconsciously repeat a script (game) with predictable roles and results to accomplish that. The main insight is that these games don't necessarily need to have a positive outcome - people still get something out of it. So it gets repeated, to the puzzlement of any observers and sometimes even the participants.
I'm a on Mac, but it's interesting that you have the same issue on an entirely different system. Clearly we haven't figured out how to reliably have audio devices popping in and out of existence, all while playing music.
If you know any bluetooth headsets that don't have similar quirks to what the post talks about, let me know, because otherwise I'm thinking this is Bluetooth and it wont get better until we ditch it.
Quirks of Bose AE2 that I'm dealing with:
1) Switching to the low fidelity Bluetooth headset mode when the mic is activated. Why does this still exist? I'd be happier if they just didn't add a mic if they can't support better quality audio.
2) The headset nominally supports connecting to two devices, except there's no mixing. One channel is primary and will override the other. Annoying when you're on a meeting on a laptop and a notification arrives on your phone and the audio cuts out to play the notification tone.
3) To add, sometimes Apple devices just play silence? Meaning, the secondary device will get muted and it will take a minute for you to figure out why it's not playing. There's no user control over this primary/secondary aspect.
4) Oh, yes, I use three devices daily which results in a lot of manual switching.
5) The devices or the headphones don't always automatically connect for some reason. It's not clear either if it's from me manually switching them or what..
6) Endless issues with Spotify "Failing to play song" when the audio output switches.
7) Not bluetooth, but this headset gives the "Low power, charge me!" chime when the battery is low, even when plugged in and charging.
There's something to be said about the benefits of having a serialization boundary between parts of the code that's a natural consequence of microservices, but it's something that could be employed in a monolith just as well. Then if at any point you actually need to split out a module into its own process or machine, it would be trivial to do.
They stimulate activity in a precisely chosen part of the brain. There is no inverse. They could stimulate a different part. In fact, they use the motor cortex to calibrate the stimulation level to be the lowest that produces any involuntary movement. I imagine it must be interesting for the subjects.
Oh, I'm ashamed to admit that I don't really know what NFTs are, but I was thinking of something along the lines of Patreon. I use it and like it, but it's still a third party that both sides need to sign up with so not everyone's on it and it's not available everywhere due to the limits imposed by traditional banking, among other things. A third party can still host the content and mediate access and charge fees for the service, but it should be working for the creator and not the other way around.
Why pays the advertiser? More often than not it's me and you when we buy something online, even if we never click on ads. Advertisement is just another cost of doing business and it's built into the price. I can't imagine paying for content via all these middlemen would be more efficient than paying for it directly. That said, what's different is who's doing the paying and I suspect that a small minority of users are paying for everyone.
So you'd rather choose privacy invading ads just because it's technically not a paywall? I'll take microtransactions every time. In fact, I'll argue that the current state of the internet can be directly attributed to content producer's inability to directly monetize their work so they have had to find an indirect way to get paid.
Information can be copied almost for free, but it still takes a fixed amount of work to produce even one copy of something. It is better to sell more copies at a fraction of the price assuming the revenue ends up the same because more value is created in the world. Unfortunately you can't charge people low enough amounts via the current financial system as they're not interested in innovation. So we are stuck with ads.
To the proponents of the "efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems" I want to ask - why can't I pay $0.10 to a random paywalled site to access a single article?