We need to stop writing “X buys Y”, and start writing “Y sold to X”. Big co’s aren’t some boogeyman that can buy whatever they want, individuals and small companies are selling out, and by pretending they’re blameless we normalize it. This extension wasn’t taken over, it sold out. Like LastPass, Private Internet Access, WhatsApp, Figma, Dark Sky, Wunderlist, the list goes on. All decided that, actually, they care less about their mission, users’ experience, and users’ trust than they do a pile of cash. And that’s not necessarily horrible or even wrong, but what is wrong is for us to not even withdraw our trust from people who have sold it. Or for us to withdraw equally from those who don’t.
I think it makes sense if you think about it. “Max” is pretty objective, it means the highest limit of something, so that’s the most powerful. “Ultra” isn’t very clear, but we know it’s lower than Max and higher than “not ultra”, so it’s in the middle. Since both “max” and “ultra” imply something not just better but larger, we can conclude that the plain M2 is the version targeted at more power efficient devices. Finally, Pro stands out as the only modifier clearly unrelated to computing performance, so it must have to do with “professional” features, like ECC RAM and MDM.
Safari is the fastest browser, the most standards compliant browser, and regularly updated, the only similarity to IE6 is it’s buggy. Chrome, on the other hand, followed IE’s whole playbook: leverage a platform monopoly to push the browser, then leverage browser monopoly to undermine standards, coercing devs into dropping support for the competition.
I visited this and thought it was very cool. A few random comments:
- It’s underlaid by a dense sprawl of machinery the size of a football field, which is constantly working to create and maintain the above biomes.
- The “lungs” are auditorium-sized rooms with a ceiling that’s free to rise and fall as air pressure changes due to temperature, reducing stress on the structure. You can walk up inside it, with air rushing past you in the connecting tunnel.
- There’s a library at the top of a short tower, maybe two stories. We were told the crew didn’t use it because food and oxygen deprivation kept them too weak to climb the stairs.
- Golf cart sized air vents create what really gets subconsciously recognized as natural wind, not artificial blowing. It was so pleasant that I’ve become determined to replicate it in my home someday.
- There wasn’t a predecessor, “biosphere 1” refers to Earth.
The point of the of course very different hammer example was that it’s the same contract and it’s a perfectly moral contract: give money, receive a thing, and that’s it. You seem to be arguing that they should keep doing things for you because they can and it benefits you, and I agree that they can and it benefits you, but it’s also at a cost to them, which I don’t think they have a moral obligation to pay unless that was part of the sale to you.
Maybe communication is a root issue here. I think both of us could agree that they should make sure people know before buying whether they’ll be getting updates, and for how long.
You buy a hammer, they make a better hammer, you still have your old hammer, and that’s a “switcharoo trick”?
Lifetime licenses always mean the thing you’re buying, not all its future updates. Affinity just did the same thing, came out with a paid 2.0. I think it should be that way, all “free {x} for life” deals end with you getting the absolute minimum that’s arguably {x}.
Besides, Pro is actually a huge remake and expansion. I’d guess only 10% of its code came from the predecessor, compared to 90% for normal big updates like Affinity 2, and 99.99% for Photoshop.
I’d expect it to be mediocre quality, not an outright scam. Legitimate businesses don’t randomly decide to run a scam, so the fact that Mont Blanc did it here makes me strongly suspect we’re just not seeing how they do it elsewhere. Maybe you like their products, but are you familiar enough with the competition to know that you shouldn’t be getting more or paying less?
I hadn’t heard the back story for this and tried searching it. DuckDuckGo returned generic
logo design advice, Google and Bing returned a bunch of results about a similar but different story, Kagi got it in the first result. This was with a very lazy query, just copy-pasting part of the comment, but still telling, I think.
1. Google can lock you out, but it’s ok because 1% of users have a workaround,
2. You will lose access, but it’s ok because you won’t if you didn’t use this product,
3. Google can log in as you, but it’s ok because we should trust them not to, and
4. We’ve got no recourse, but it’s ok because we were probably helpless anyway?
Companies may get away with this for other products, but the bar is way higher for security products. There are real solutions, or at least ameliorations, and it’d be unsafe to use the product without ensuring they’re there.
308 is the right way to do it, 301 is the old and slightly buggy way. Specifically, 301 lets a POST get redirected as either a GET or a POST, “for historical reasons”, while 308 guarantees no changes. 308 is not exactly edgy, either, it’s been supported by every browser since 2015.
So when it’s Google doing this it’s evil, but when it’s Apple, it’s ok if it a feature uses it, or if some nation wanted it, or if somebody else did it too?
I do think that a lot of these are hard problems to truly tackle, I was just commenting on this cognitive dissonance where people say things like “iCloud user data is private”, while in fact iCloud user data is this huge trove of very personal information that’s not private, and we don’t act like those ideas are in conflict.
Besides, Apple’s not doing the most they can within the confines of user wishes and local law. Neither one requires using dark patterns to ensure that 95% of users have privacy turned off. They’re also tracking every interaction for ad purposes on the App Store. I’m not trying to call them an evil boogeyman, but I think they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too: have users buy more because they think it’s private, while not disadvantaging themselves or pissing off local regimes by actually preventing data access in the majority of cases.
iCloud user data that’s not end-to-end encrypted: name, home address, work address, who you talk to and when, where you go and when, what you buy and when…
iCloud user data that’s not end-to-end encrypted unless you find and change multiple different settings that few people know about: files, photos, notes, texts, full copies of laptop’s and phone’s storage…
I’d take a bet that 99% of the time Apple or a local regime wants to read iCloud user data, they can.
I remember it very differently. I remember remarkably good reliability, to the point that HN would regularly laud GitHub for “doing it right” by investing heavily in infrastructure and reliability and being “boring”. I remember some GitHub leader or founder affirming that sentiment, that they’ve always felt their value proposition depends greatly on reliability. I remember it didn’t change as soon as MS took over, but a year or so later, and that for the first few years of diminishing reliability people would always point fingers at the MS takeover.
I think you’re looking for a lux meter. Precision is far rougher than single photons, but good enough for any human-scale use. It’s what you’d use for things like calibrating indoor lighting, quantifying the difference between a sunny day and moonlit night, or testing flashlights. Last I checked a good basic one was under $40.
This “every single pixel” stuff reminds me of how many people will work at a tube of toothpaste for a minute just to squeeze out one more drop. It’s not really about getting more toothpaste, because you could easily just buy more. It’s also not really about getting the most toothpaste for your money, because you’re likely not also focusing on cheap tubes, bulk buys, etc. It’s certainly not about getting the most toothpaste for your time. It’s loss aversion: because you believe you should have this thing, you’re willing to accept a much higher cost to obtain it. Similarly, people doing this “every single pixel” thing aren’t necessarily also getting the biggest screens or the thinnest bezels, it’s about it feeling “wrong” to not use these particular pixels.
The problem goes away if you mentally reframe: you don’t have a 16.1″ screen with a piece missing, you have a 15.6″-ish screen, the same size as before the notch, and also a horizontal strip above it that’s only good for sensors, the menu bar, and extended backgrounds.
Interesting, reading GPT output with an expectation of human quality made its shortcomings a lot more obvious to me. Thank you for that experience. In particular, it stood out that significant parts are an oddly direct regurgitation of input text, suggesting they didn’t undergo translation into abstract form then back to text, and that it doesn’t pick out interesting or unexpected things to respond to, instead coming up with some comment on many parts of the input like it’s a checklist.
I believe Google’s data would reflect number of people hanging out inside more than number of customers passing through, since a customer that stays 10x as long has 10x the impact on average number of people inside the building. 11-6 sounds right for times the seating area is most full, but I’d imagine the biggest rush of in-and-out customers is just before work hours. Fortunately, there’s a Starbucks near me that I happen to know has had its lobby closed for a year or two due to a high crime rate, and Google’s data for it does indeed show a strong peak from 7 to 10.
In my country it’s not illegal when you punch somebody in the face, but we have another deterrent that works very well. If you punch somebody in the face, then he pulls out his wallet and gives you $50, then presents his face for you to punch again if you’d like. Once you stop punching, he gives you $100. So you see, assailants quickly learn that face punching is an action of grave consequence and loss, and the fact that everybody here is punching each other in the face all the time is probably because of something else.
It comes from the way lower class Americans are treated. The hardship that might be ahead for some otherwise extremely rich and privileged people is actually far less than befalls tens of millions of lower class Americans every single day, and choosing a “move fast and break things” bank is actually a far less “unfair” reason than, say, the circumstances of your birth. The vicious, lifelong message from mainstream society to those most in need has always been “nobody owes anybody anything, that would be socialism”. That’s why those people are angry to see people far better off receive help just because “not doing it would be unfair and hurt them”.
Oh man, I didn’t know other people did this, I invented it in my friend group. Never in proper writing, only texting. To me it conveys a tone that other punctuation can’t replicate. For example:
Ok.. - Ok, but I’m unsure about this
Ok - Ok
Ok… - Ok, but I’m sad or resigned about this, and I want you to address that
Ok…? - I don’t know where you’re going with this, explain yourself
Even writing “Ok, but I’m unsure about this” isn’t the same, because that calls more attention to your hesitation. If you don’t use “..”, your only alternative is to spend a minute basically doing translation work between inflected English and monotone English, maybe arriving at something like “Ok, I’ll try”, or more likely just give up and communicate in lower fidelity.
Sure there is, you just need to look at the evolution of language, not DNA. The common ancestor is a meal eaten by the Earl of Sandwich in the 1760s, “salt beef between two slices of toasted bread”.
Wanting yourself, not others, to decide what you say is not disingenuous at all, that’s what free speech is.
I do think there’s a problem with economic and government pressure causing individual speech decisions to coalesce into emergent extralegal censorship, but surely just revoking free speech isn’t the way to fix that.
I’ve had good luck splitting the difference by writing custom, dependency-free build scripts. You never get this accelerated code rot when you depend only on a mainstream language, it’s pretty trivial to implement a primitive version of bundling, inlining, macros, etc, and being primitive is far less limiting when you’re developing your build script hand-in-hand with your code.
Some things can’t be done like this, like TypeScript, for which I keep it to a minimum, look for stability, and often include a full copy in revision control.
I agree Telegram is a worse choice for security, but I think it’s important to know specific differences and not just simplify to “not secure”, because that approach’s flip side - believing simply that “Signal is good and secure” - leads to mistakes like applying the law of defaults only to Telegram, not Signal.