iterance

I would hope that it is clear from context that I mean purchasing pre-prepared meals is expensive.

Restrictions on SNAP are tricky business. You can't ask someone on SNAP to spend time preparing food. Prepared meals are expensive, often not accessible, and sometimes difficult to prepare for people with certain disabilities. It might seem strange, but I have known people, very poor people, who rely on "foods in bar and drink form" out of necessity. I have known poor people for whom eating fruit is physically challenging.

SNAP changes like this may be better on a population health level, to be sure. On this I have no evidence. But each restriction placed on food for people living in destitution may mean some people go hungry. (And this excludes issues of caloric density.) I would like to see better data, but sadly, there is none.

One can say "they probably had data to support it" about virtually any decision. It is not really a defense from critique. It may have been deliberate, but it still feels wrong and bad.

The fact is, most of the systems people use in their day do day that behave the way described simply require no mastery whatsoever. If your product, service, or device is locked behind learning a new skill, any skill, that will inherently limit the possible size of the audience. Far more than most realize. We can rail against this reality, but it is unforgiving. The average person who is struggling to put food on the table only has so many hours in the week to spare to stick it to the man by learning a new operating system.

Cold take: honestly, just let users learn how to use your software. Put all your options in a consistent location in menus or whatever - it's fine. Yes, it might take them a little bit. No, they won't use every feature. Do make it as easy to learn as possible. Don't alienate the user with UI that changes under their feet.

Is "learning" now a synonym of "friction" in the product and design world? I gather this from many modern thinkpieces. If I am wrong, I would like to see an example of this kind of UI that actually feels both learnable and seamless. Clarity, predictability, learnability, reliability, interoperability, are all sacrificed on this altar.

> The explosive popularity of AI code generation shows users crave more control and flexibility.

I don't see how this follows.

The chart with lines and circles is quite thought-leadershipful. I do not perceive meaning in it, however (lines are jagged/bad, circles are smooth/good?).

Thankfully, we do not have to judge a blog post by its ability to pass muster in technical interviews. :)

I will at least remark that adding a new error to an enum is not a breaking change if they are marked #[non_exhaustive]. The compiler then guarantees that all match statements on the enum contain a generic case.

However, I wouldn't recommend it. Breakage over errors is not necessarily a bad thing. If you need to change the API for your errors, and downstreams are required to have generic cases, they will be forced to silently accept new error types without at least checking what those new error types are for. This is disadvantageous in a number of significant cases.

Interesting. I'd love to learn more about the problem class.

The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch of the fight, but an important one to the many who support government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to say they have a stake in who sees what.

I'll admit this may be naive, but I don't see the problem based on your description. Split each step into its own private function, pass the context by reference / as a struct, unit test each function to ensure its behavior is correct. Write one public orchestrator function which calls each step in the appropriate sequence and test that, too. Pull logic into helper functions whenever necessary, that's fine.

I do not work in finance, but I've written some exceptionally complex business logic this way. With a single public orchestrator function you can just leave the private functions in place next to it. Readability and testability are enhanced by chunking out each step and making logic obvious. Obviously this is a little reductive, but what am I missing?

I think you maybe just don't like it?

Correctness is a poor way to distinguish between human-authored and AI-generated content. Even if it's right, which I doubt (can humans not make wrong statements?), it doesn't do anything to help someone who doesn't know much about what they're searching.

We have horoscopes and quantum computing. The existence of one is no shame on the other.

Your fact checking was not successful: there is no typical background expressed in counts. Background count rates vary globally by significant amounts, but importantly, they vary by device. Some devices may get a measly 10-20 counts per minute in a background, next to another device that could get 500. It also matters what kind of radiation the device is configured to detect.

At any rate 300 is widely recognizable as not an alarming value for a typical contamination detector in a typical configuration, but the report is likely slightly deficient because it does not specify how the measurement was taken. However, even if we accept 100 as the background CPM value, 300 on 100 does not represent significant contamination in a typical environment (but does imply some occurred).

Back up a second. You've missed an important question. What do you WANT out of your time in this life? Where do you actually want to be in ten years, or twenty? $150k p/a is not an answer, or at least not a very good one. You clearly have means enough to start businesses, so a lot of non-conventional doors are open to you. Why do any of it?

This does not demonstrate a sound understanding of how the public domain works, why copyright lengths have been extended so ferociously over the last century (it's shareholders who want this), nor the impact it has both on creative process and public conversation.

This is a highly complex question about how legal systems, companies, and individual creatives come in conflict, and cannot be summarized as a positive creative constraint / means to celebrate their works.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. Built a tape drive and bootloader to load programs off it & everything...

This will almost certainly go down as one of the worst mistakes in recent tech history. You can't tell 40+% of your commerical customer base "We could absolutely allow you to use your current computer with our new operating system! We just didn't want to. Sucks to be you, I guess." and not expect consequences for your public image and consumer confidence.

Five essential questions of democracy (Tony Benn):

    “What power have you got?”

    “Where did you get it from?”

    “In whose interests do you use it?”

    “To whom are you accountable?”

    “How do we get rid of you?”

His observation is that the last question fundamentally defines a democracy - not the ability for the people to give someone power, but to dispose of that power via accepted protocols. It is also the reason people with power so commonly hate democracy: properly answered, these questions limit their use of that power, and threaten to remove their access to it completely.

Most people can buy an opinel and be happy for decades. You don't need anything fancy for a general purpose knife. $50 max, and that's if you're feeling like getting something special.

Expensive steels are, by and large, incremental progress over cheaper knife steels, provided it got an appropriate heat treatment and has good edge geometry. In almost no applications will an end consumer notice the difference.

“Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere)..." - Balzac

Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.

While it's OK if this truly is what you need, be mindful that you're not making a decision you'll come to regret. There is no shame in crying at a funeral. Helping each other through death is one of life's innate obligations. One of the few things we have no choice but to do as humans is die.

That seems like a risk, but not a validation method, unless you are feeling particularly bold.

In context I wouldn't assume so. An opt-in experience assumes someone has provided proactive, affirmative consent. An opt-out experience assumes no such consent.

By saying "opt-in by default," author is making the subtle point that positive, affirmative consent is assumed - not just that the features are literally on by default.

I have to wonder whether they are tracking changes in consumer confidence. Subjectively, I have noticed a significant drop in confidence from my peers. I do not know whether my experience generalizes, but if it does, they are playing with fire.

I don't think this is a "fear sells" issue. Arsenic green is remarkably toxic. In the 19th century, the toxicity just wasn't known or recognized as serious. Now, we know better. Medical diagrams from the time period show hand injuries on people who worked with arsenic compounds regularly (deep sores that won't heal, e.g.)

How on earth did you come to the conclusion that this person is "affiliated with Israel"? Surely not because their username is Moshe, right?

I do not think you are aware that most people's process of writing good poetry is quite involved. It's okay not to understand, but be cautious about implying that another person's artistic work could be done in a spare hour here or there between coursework. It is disrespectful to the hard work of the written word.

If the purpose of the exemption were only to reduce the labor cost of importation, some other scheme (such as prohibiting the importation of cheap goods entirely) would be far more effective. Several other options would be at least equally effective. Factors besides labor are clearly also considered.

In your view, what are the factors in addition to customs labor costs that were weighed in 2016 the choice to increase the de minimis exemption? I'm curious, because you seem to feel very strongly that global economic integration is not one of them.