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inapis

958 karma · joined January 25, 2015

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inapis··on Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
As someone else stated, you consume in a slow manner. The library is built up over time.
inapis··on Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
I did but those files are not immune to Apple Music's licensing issues or bugs. If the track was matched and not uploaded, then those albums can still be greyed out when they are pulled from the catalog. And iTunes match still is not accurate. A lot of times tracks in one album are matched to individual singles on apple music.
inapis··on Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
I abandoned my music library after I went to Apple Music. But 5 years later I'm going back. The licensing issues and split albums OP mentioned have basically annoyed the hell out of me. Quite a lot of old music from my childhood is basically gone for good from Apple Music/Spotify. I have a smart playlist which basically lists all tracks which are no longer available on Apple Music and it has a 7 day playtime. Quite a good chunk of my library is basically greyed out and when these albums return they are basically messed up, if not outright replaced with other versions.

The reliability and simplicity of my own music library can't come back soon enough. I'll still keep AM and Spotify for discovering new music though.

inapis··on Products purchased at Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged
Starting this year, you can get AppleCare+ which covers accidental damage in India. The normal AppleCare is discontinued.
inapis··on Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
The latest Vmware Fusion has a free license for personal use.
inapis··on An update to storage policies across your Google Account
Google has a slightly different problem. It has trained users into believing that shit should be free (and maybe supported by advertising) and over the years it has accumulated a significant chunk of users who either wholly believe in that mindset or are simply unable to pay for xyz reasons. Of course, people are going to raise hell when they start charging for something that was free for a decade. Google sowed the seeds on this one.
inapis··on Indian developer jailed for making unauthorized train ticket booking app
IRCTC is infrequently buggy (no more than an average website). They might not have optimised for poor connections and thats where most people's buggy experience is.

It is generally fast except between 10am-12pm every day (i.e. when the tatkal systems open) and that is what frustrates most people. When called out on these issues, IRCTC has consistently refused to add capacity to deal with the demand between 10am-12pm. You are correct that this could be solved by using quotas and reservations but they haven't done that. My only guess is that it is for political/bureaucratic reasons. It's easier to blame capacity issues than tell the reality.

>reserved a certain proportion of the tickets for rural users

This already happens. There are quotas of different kinds.

P.S. You know what? You are actually right. There's no technical reason for this to be the way it is. They are using that explanation as a cover for a political or legal problem or by occam's razor, they probably have a fixed budget (and not allowed to use on-demand services like AWS) and the govt won't approve the budget necessary to solve the capacity issues between 10am-12pm.

inapis··on Indian developer jailed for making unauthorized train ticket booking app
Tickets are non-transferable but bribery is still a thing, especially where demand far outstrips the supply.

Second, fake IDs are easy to make.

Third, it's impractical to enforce on the ground. Indian Railways is relatively open access compared to airlines. On average, trains begin boarding 15-30 mins prior to departure and have a very high number of passengers. With an avg of 16 coaches per rake, with each coach having 60-100 passengers, each train is carrying 960-1600 passengers. Some trains are even longer and most trains are over capacity because 2nd sitting has no reservation and people just pile on as far as there is room in the coach. It's pretty impractical to verify tickets of 1000+ people along with their ids. If you are departing out of a major city, its usual for TTEs to verify tickets after 2-3 hours (and after smaller stations have been crossed.)

Tickets have been hogged and scalped for a long time in India. I'm the first in my family who has no concept of bribing or buying scalped tickets or engaging an "agent." Everyone of the previous generation has plenty of stories about their experiences before. There is still a long way to go to improve access but I will also not deny that there has been a significant improvement compared to my parents experience.

inapis··on Indian developer jailed for making unauthorized train ticket booking app
> Fair access is not provided by the official website. When one clicks "Book" and then suddenly get an Internal Server Error in network logs (while UI shows in-progress icon) or gets logged out - where is Fair Access? If Railways gave 10 Rs for each such failure, they will go bankrupt within 2 hours. First-come-first-serve does not mean fair access when they can't fix their technical problems.

I am not sure if you know the history of IRCTC and why it is slow (at times. Things have vastly improved in the last decade). People have asked this many a times and their explanation does make some sense, that if IRCTC is super fast and efficient, then people with cash to spare/with computers and good internet access will hog all the tickets, denying people in rural areas a fair opportunity to purchase tickets. That is still probably true in 2020, because a good chunk of Indians in rural areas either do not have good internet connectivity, lack digital means of payment or are simply flummoxed by the online process.

From your perspective, IRCTC is not fair access because the servers slow down but from the govt perspective, fair access is not limited to only IRCTC users. There might be an argument that railways has a low capacity overall and that there is a long way to go for efficiency improvements etc but given my experience over last 12 years, the experience has improved drastically. Wait times have gone down considerably on a lot of trains, you no longer have to plan your travel 6 months in advance, you can buy tatkal tickets without paying scalpers etc. In 2018 I could even book tickets (from home) on a train which had already departed from its source station (my departure point was halfway between the origin and destination) and people around me did not believe that this was possible.

inapis··on GFXBench: Apple M1
My memory is hazy on this but I did come across an explanation for this behaviour. At mismatched resolutions or fractional scaling (and mismatched resolutions are effectively fractional scaling) macOS renders the entire display to a virtual canvas first. This effectively requires the dGPU.

Your best bet is to run external displays at the MBPs resolutions and because that is not possible/ideal you are left with choices of running at 1080p/4k/5k. macOS no longer renders crisp on 1080p so 3840x2160 is the last remaining widely available and affordable choice while 5K is still very expensive.

inapis··on About iSH’s pending removal from the App Store
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273247

This has driven me insane in 10.15.7. If my ISP has intermittent connectivity, macOS starts beach balling. To prevent this I have to shut off internet.

The catch?

Shutting down the network requires suffering through multiple beach balls. Every single mouse click or key press invokes a beach ball. Everything goes away the moment internet is connected.

inapis··on I Hate My MacBook
You can. Cmd+J will let you choose defaults system wide. This will be overruled if there are local settings manually selected for a specific folder.

If you want to force system wide view settings in finder, delete all DS_Store files and then do the thing with cmd+j

inapis··on YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
I don't think language has got anything to do with it. It's more about the instincts. I'm purely talking in terms of probabilities but the odds of a C# programmer coming with an enterprise background are high. As such they bring certain instincts with them which are very useful in enterprise but not useful at all in startups. At worst, those instincts might do more damage than good.

So it's more of background/instincts things than language. C# technically has nothing which makes it a bad choice for startups.

inapis··on Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
If those devices will have 4-5 years worth of use, then I think most people would be fine with the purchase. 4-5 years already does require upgrading for either performance or quality of life features.
inapis··on Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers
This really kills discovery. Seeing an upfront price without the ability to trial the app really dissuades the user. On top of it, refunds are tedious to obtain and you can do it only so many times.
inapis··on Apple Plans to Announce Move to Its Own Mac Chips at WWDC
This transition would be fun to watch. Mac has a huge legacy, enormous amounts of apps and sometimes it is embedded deeply in a lot of workflows that it would be very challenging to displace. Unlike the PowerPC -> Intel transition, this time round, Apple has the iOS ecosystem to tap into.

We'll probably still have 4-5 years before the Intel Macs are completely abandoned but then this is Apple we are talking about. For all intents and purposes, they might cut the umbilical cord in 6 months.

Adobe is probably the only company which can delay the complete transition for some time.

Edit - removed the line about electron. As others have pointed out, electron already runs on ARM.

inapis··on Apple crushes one-man repair shop in Norway’s Supreme Court
Not necessarily. This trivial stuff can blow up into big things for society. This unavailability of spare parts translates into a lot of devices ending up in the landfill. That is an unmitigated environmental disaster. Free markets will not solve this problem without govt intervention.

The economic costs are not the only costs in a capitalist society. The other costs just don’t show up on the paper.

P.S and I’ll argue that smartphones are necessary in today’s world. They are the primary form of computing, communication and fulfilling bureaucratic work for large sections of the population on the planet. In India, you’ll have a tough time in life if you don’t have a smartphone. You can survive? Yes. But it will be a PITA to communicate with others, deal with govt, banking or utilities etc

inapis··on Do I need to go to university?
>In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now.

Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degree is your only way to a better life. You may not learn anything in college but you need that fuckin' piece of paper just for the bureaucratic formalities. A very talented friend of mine was denied the US visa probably because of lack of a bachelor degree.

inapis··on macOS Catalina 10.15.5
This destroys battery. You do need to charge and discharge the battery frequently.
inapis··on I won’t buy ebooks anymore
It solves part of the problem but quickly imposes a tragedy of the commons. These sub-10$ services pay peanuts to the creators. In order to make any meaningful money you have to have millions or hundreds of millions of views. To reach that scale you have to create something appetising to the masses which frequently entails clichés and sub-standard work. I do hear plenty of songs, movies, books rehashing the same old things following a cookie cutter approach.

I do remember reading a twitter thread of creator who sold books and earned a six figure income when a youtube creator chimed in and reported earning less than $300 for more than million views. Not an apples to apples comparison but you quickly see how youtube/spotify would actually create market pressures which discourage people from creating works of cultural and social significance.

In such a world, books like GEB and Piketty’s Capital would never see the light of the day.

inapis··on Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
If you sign into multiple google accounts in the same browser window, then those accounts are linked behind the scenes. You do not have to explicitly link them together. There are plenty of stories on reddit of devs whose company accounts got into trouble because their personal account was in trouble.
inapis··on IBM to cut thousands of jobs as coronavirus plays out
Huh. I always thought body shop would refer to companies who hire at scale. Indians call them MRCs - Mass Recruitment companies.

IBM/TCS/Infosys/Wipro/Cognizant are consultancy shops which are some examples of MRCs. They generally hire at scale - like 10,000 people in one go or scooping up a whole college’s batch. Thats how they have also been able to keep a freshers salary static at 3-5 LPA (~4k-6.5k USD) for 13 years now.

inapis··on Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
This is something with your configuration. OOB VSCode will immediately show you the file but disable tokenization and certain other features. I regularly open JSON files upto 10 MB in size without any problem. You probably have plugins which impede this process.
inapis··on Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google
You really can’t compete against free. A large number of people use Google properties because they are free. Existence of a free product will pretty much decimate a large number of business models. Give it enough time and these companies will create gravity wells that start distorting society. Google’s network effects are so strong that as a consumer or a producer you cannot run away from them.

Want to use your own email server? Not going to be a piece of cake and good luck if gmail decides against you. Want to use firefox? Gmail and youtube really will move heaven and earth to make you use chrome. Want to preserve your privacy in any meaningful way? Good luck because rest of the society decided to hand over everything to Google and its free counterparts.

These companies gravity wells are so strong that they reduce meaningful choices to a consumer. In fact, give them enough time and they’ll coerce the market to behave in a particular way.

As of now, to operate as a business on the internet, you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook. You’ll have a tough time ignoring Google. Across the entire planet.

There’s no doubt that Google’s work has a lot of benefits to humanity. But that is not a license to ignore the dark side of the coin.

inapis··on Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google
As a non-american, it baffles me that even justices are divided into conservative or liberals.

Just why? What’s the history here?

inapis··on React Native for Windows and Mac
At least Kubernetes won’t be in trouble since its no longer under the aegis of Google. CNCF is now the maintainer.
inapis··on The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
Plenty if you are willing to learn. People are creating exceptional stuff on the internet. From blogs, youtube, instagram to SaaS and apps, the content to learn all of this is available easily.

It does not work for literally everyone from the country but the people I'm talking about can definitely travel on this path.

inapis··on The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
> I am skeptical about this. Unless you can actively demonstrate competence (select few) you are not going to be favoured against someone with real degrees in the pile of resumes.

That's why I said, if you are willing to let go of the traditional path. If you have to compete against a pile of resume, you are near or on the traditional path.

Employment doesn't necessarily mean you have to be working for a company.

inapis··on The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
Nope. Legit college whose students went onto excellent post graduate programs in US and Europe. 700 in a graduating class is chump change in India. Plenty of colleges whose annual batches are that size.

I never said they had trouble finding jobs. You jumped the gun. I said they were not happy with choosing computer science as a career.

inapis··on The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
Yes. A lot of universities were found to be fake and shut down. Though it has been a couple of years since I've heard anything more about it.
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