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homosaur

1,923 karma · joined August 2, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/homosaur; my proof: https://keybase.io/homosaur/sigs/78Wktz12kaMdfpIa3Yo4x7-byQr6b1tAz0moLFT1Vc4 ]

paulg.dev @the_homosaur github.com/homosaur

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homosaur··on Third Party Sellers Need To Rethink The Amazon FBA Program
Basically yes. Civil law between companies is first and foremost a welfare system for legal folks and a club to beat people with. If you don't have the money to pay, you can't play, you simply lose. This unfortunately is the case with most criminal law as well.

When people scream and scream and scream about tort reform in the US, this sort of stuff is mostly what they're talking about. There are a wealth of lawsuits filed every year which have no reasonable basis that do nothing but make lawyers rich.

homosaur··on Introducing Moto G: An Exceptional Phone At An Exceptional Price
No it was not running Gingerbread, the first thing I did was hack it. It was running Cyanogen based on Ice Cream Sandwich.

I would not be surprised by the fact that it was poorly designed, and it's the main reason I will did not nor will not consider another Motorola phone in the future.

homosaur··on Google wins book-scanning case: judge finds “fair use,” cites many benefits
Microsoft did do it, they found no profit in it and quit. Google is still not making the full text of books available, although I'd guess long term that would be the smart move for authors. You'd go straight from search to purchasing an ebook in a click.
homosaur··on Introducing Moto G: An Exceptional Phone At An Exceptional Price
Tell that to my garbage Motorola Photon which had a graphics chip
homosaur··on Introducing Moto G: An Exceptional Phone At An Exceptional Price
Who needs a 4 core device? Android users.

Try getting an Android 4 device with 4 cores and 2 cores and compare them. The performance difference is stark. The 2 core devices feel very sluggish on Android 4.

homosaur··on Introducing Moto G: An Exceptional Phone At An Exceptional Price
I don't think customers soured on HTC because their phones weren't awesome but because of their shoddy support and updates. The HTC One is the best phone I've owned since their Nexus One (probably the best phone I EVER owned) but they are laggards in getting software updates out. They're smart enough now not to set deadlines they'll break but not setting deadlines is maybe not a great solution to the problem long term.
homosaur··on Introducing Moto G: An Exceptional Phone At An Exceptional Price
My guess is if that's the case, and this device will be widespread and popular overseas, they will specifically target it.
homosaur··on End of Inception decoded [video]
I feel that is largely Nolan's intent, that Cobb has chosen experience over memory and guilt whether that experience is truly real or not.
homosaur··on End of Inception decoded [video]
I appreciate that sentiment. The Matrix is certainly interesting, but it's one of those things high schoolers use as a jumping off point and it is very trite and cliche. It's a lot like Ayn Rand actually, it's not that it's objectively worthless, but it's Twinkie pop philosophy that people are exhausted grading papers of.
homosaur··on End of Inception decoded [video]
Memento was literally a mystery film, and unless you kind of know which context clues to look for you're not really going to figure out what's going on until the end. Inception had a lot of mystery to it in terms of what's real and what's not, but in the end the mysterious portion of it is not really the point of the movie. We're not really presented with the question of what's real as the core mystery to be solved. The fact that Nolan doesn't actually reveal anything at the end aside from the context clues mentioned in the video and in the article posted at the top of the comments and his remarks after that "it doesn't really matter whether or not Cobb is in a dream" lead me to believe a lot of it is more of a character study of that man rather than an overarching sci-fi type world. The journey is not really to decide whether or not Cobb is living in the dream world but more so whether he is at peace either way.

I do agree with your general assertion that Momento is a more coherent film and I think that is largely due to the scope and scale of those respective films' budgets.

homosaur··on Jenkin developers accidentally do "git push --force" to over 150 repos on github
Let the programmer who hasn't done something dumb with a Git repo cast the first stone. I know I'm guilty as can be and surely I'm going to transgress in the future. It does kind of show a little bit of a need for a more formal permissions system for Git. Most organizations have something like this in place as policy but that doesn't prevent mistakes.
homosaur··on Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years
Oh I actually haven't looked at the app, I was just talking about embedded video. I'm sure you're right about that, Android clients tend to lag way behind.
homosaur··on Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years
This used to be true, but what issues are you having with mobile? Since Android support was added, I've had few issues with it.
homosaur··on Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years
According to Vimeo's guidelines, you just can't upload gameplay videos. It says specifically you can upload first party videos but need to mark them to avoid deletion. With the huge community of video gamers on YouTube, I don't even get why you'd want to put that video on Vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/help/guidelines

homosaur··on Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years
I'm not sure you can have both high quality content and a zero barrier to entry. I actually think YT does an okay job surfacing some decent content for folks on the homepage, especially when you're logged in. I seem to anecdotally find the "related" sidebar more useful in recent times as well.
homosaur··on Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years
Yeah you are right on about that. I always wondered why they aren't more friendly to their own content for nonusers because they're very friendly to discovery when you're logged in.

I think it doesn't get used as much though because they will pull content if you're just posting videos of your friend doing cartwheels or something. There is a higher barrier to entry but they also only want very high quality HD or serious commercial or educational content.

I wonder whether they aren't more forward about discovery to save on bandwidth money.

homosaur··on Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years
I don't think G+ has much to do with it, more the self-moderation, but I will say the commenting on YT has improved significantly in the last few months.

That of course means we've moved from "abysmal" to "shitty" but hey, progress is progress.

homosaur··on Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years
uh, you mean like Vimeo?
homosaur··on How Can the New York Times Endorse an Agreement the Public Can't Read?
Just so ya'll know, the main crux of this deal for the US is that they're going to be a major natural gas supplier to the United States of Europe to cut off Russia from it. This is part of the reason Russia has probably been to supportive of Snowden, which would normally be a bad idea politically, because they're trying to mess up the US/EU relationship. Natural gas is going to unfortunately be the way forward for awhile in all the post-Fukushima paranoia/propaganda cycle.
homosaur··on All around the world, labour is losing out to capital
So the entirety of English society helped pay to make Rowling incredibly wealthy. That seems like a pretty massive concentration of wealth for little benefit to society as a whole aside from some nice pablum to digest.
homosaur··on Few successful entrepreneurs blog
Why is this treated like some insight? People who are running big successful companies are too busy to do a lot of stuff, blogging just yet another thing.
homosaur··on Jekyll Data Files
I wonder if the reason you were having trouble with Liquid is that you were using it incorrectly. It's definitely meant to be secure over simple. Was the issue you were having a bug or did you find a way to fix the encoding?
homosaur··on Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)
OHHHHHHH bootable. I'd never actually tried that as I've always installed in a VM. Now that makes sense as to why the Mac version wouldn't work when I tried it in a VM.
homosaur··on Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)
Can someone explain to me what's different about the Mac and PC versions of 64 bit Ubuntu? I've seen these Mac versions show up lately but what's in them? I can't find the data clearly on the website. Is it just different drivers and defaults?
homosaur··on Inside 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki's $99 DNA Revolution
I think this company is interesting but am disturbed by every time I read an article about them, they just laugh off privacy concerns.

It's not 2013 I'm worried about with someone accessing this data, it's 2023.

Says Andy Page: "I view this as a tidal wave of inevitable data and a trend in the marketplace. The technology is available; the price point is decreasing. There are so many organizations and engineers and companies that are focused on this."

Of course you see it as a trend, or at least your pocketbook depends on it being one. The fact that he isn't responding with all the robust steps they do to protect data leads me to believe there's not enough concern at this company for privacy to trust them. Maybe that's okay when it's yet another SV social bullcrap site, but for medicine? Nah.

homosaur··on Why I Stopped Writing Recommendation Letters for Teach for America
As someone who took enough history classes to ALMOST get to major reqs while an undergrad, I agree with you about class difficulty. There was actually very little difference in the difficulty of a 100 and a 400 class. The difference was in depth. Your 100 would be a European History class while your 400 would be about Postwar Germany. I loved history so I was biased toward enjoyment but I can see how those who had little background in history having real difficulty.

There's another side to that--the cool thing about history as a major was that the dept. structure was flatter. It was basically about doing interesting research. You could take 600 level classes with your TAs if you thought you could hang with them in reading. Definitely not the case in the more skill based fields.

Research, of course, is a skill, which is probably what they ought to be teaching more of in 100 level classes. Most kids when they get to college have not been asked to say, write a paper only from primary sources.

homosaur··on Why I Stopped Writing Recommendation Letters for Teach for America
I was taking education classes late in college considering what's known as an alternative certification, which is actually quite similar in structure for TfA, the difference being of course is that the teachers are TRAINED IN EDUCATION.

I had a late class and overlapping the end was a TfA class next door for people who were currently teaching. We did some joint work occasionally and I could almost always at least hear what was going on in their sessions. It was far more like going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting than a class. Students basically sat and traded horrible stories every day for at least half the class or more. There was very little instruction in proper discipline. I'd say 25% were not visibly overwhelmed by their teaching jobs and almost all of them were involved with education or they were psych majors who had been heavily involved in schools.

homosaur··on A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress
I'd actually rather see a hardcore nice CMS in something like Laravel, which is fairly similar to Rails. I don't think Rails is a non-starter but I'd like to see something that's LAMP friendly due to the ease and availability to beginners, students, and the generally broke.
homosaur··on A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress
There's no doubt whatsoever in my mind that WP's popularity is joined at the hip with the availability of cheapo LAMP hosting.
homosaur··on A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress
Well it'll definitely have to be self-hosted and open source. It's a nonstarter to have to work in a particular ecosystem off the bat for me. I don't know what setup I'll want to be running in 10 years.
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