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jeffrogers

88 karma · joined October 17, 2012

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jeffrogers··on REO Trucks I4 4WD Pickup Truck Starts at $21,500
Makes sense to me... the Toyota mini trucks of the 80s/90s were super useful and Tacomas are basically full-sized and not as efficient.
jeffrogers··on Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
Well, there is no great way to import nicely formatted text into Notes, not even with Shortcuts. Respect to Gruber, but if Apple supports Markdown in Notes, it wouldn't be the worst thing.
jeffrogers··on IRS Free File is now available for the 2024 filing season
So I assume these "trusted partners", who aren't charging for the service, are somehow in the data collection racket?
jeffrogers··on Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians
Is this article confusing correlation with causation? What about a tall/blunt hood, but not lengthy... has that been tested? Is there anything about where and how these vehicles are used that factors in? Has driver training maintained quality over the years? In theory, I understand the incremental loss of visibility, with longer, taller hoods, but this article just seems lazy. I hope the underlying research is actually better.
jeffrogers··on John Warnock has died
Looking at Adobe's website, you'd never know it...
jeffrogers··on Why EVs Aren't a Climate Change Panacea
Even factoring in probable range increases and advances in charging tech, it will still be necessary to incrementally, if not fully, charge EVs in public. One thing that doesn’t seem to occur to our elected officials… there is nowhere near enough real estate to charge that many vehicles around town.
jeffrogers··on Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
Some portion of the vision and spray tech was invented long ago by Patchen Selective Spray Systems. At some point, I believe John Deere bought the company.
jeffrogers··on Since becoming Meta, Facebook’s parent company has lost $650B in market value
That's something like 13 Twitters. This Metaverse thing must be good.
jeffrogers··on Folding bicycle small enough to fit in hand luggage
Gonna stick with my Brompton.
jeffrogers··on Notes apps are where ideas go to die, and that’s good
Also worth noting that almost no effort has been made by the folks making note taking apps to help people make better use of their entries. Sure, they've implemented things like gallery views, filters, and tagging, but these are all passive and require the user to seek out the information. Why not active features like an API that makes code snippets available in my IDE, a feature that surfaces recipe recommendations from my collection, or how about automatically organizing my receipts by month and offering an expense summary report? There are a ton of features that could be made to help people better access and use the notes they make.
jeffrogers··on Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
There have been attempts at this (e.g. the hResume microformat) and you can use schema.org schemas to build one up, but beyond picking up basic data like name, address, telephone number, etc... parsing resumes is challenging. People's experience doesn't always fit nice and neatly into the fields the schemas imagine and the incentive to game such systems also leads to irregular data.
jeffrogers··on Using AI to Animate Children’s Drawings
Yes, true. I should have chosen my words more carefully. While the technology is better in a number of ways and the result is incrementally better in this specific application, the incrementally better result is arguably not worth the technical lengths and costs it took to get it. And what is not redeemable is the enticement, see here: https://imgur.com/vCyJgRE
jeffrogers··on Using AI to Animate Children’s Drawings
They just keep coming for the kids.

This isn't even redeemable from a technical perspective as Disney has been doing this same thing on their cruise ships -in the Animator's Palate dining hall- for at least a decade.

jeffrogers··on Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation
Right. Prior to social media, people were vetted many ways and in every context in which they gained an audience. (e.g. earned standing in social settings and community groups, promotions at work, editors of one sort or another when publishing to a group, etc) Audiences grew incrementally as people earned their audience. Social media removed all that vetting and it inverted the criteria to grow an audience. Sensationalism was rewarded over thoughtfulness. So one of the most important tools we've always relied on to judge information was removed. Hard to believe, as intelligent as these folks at Facebook/Meta are said to be, that they don't understand this. Feels disingenuous.
jeffrogers··on The Greedy Doctor Problem
Maybe start by actually hiring a doctor, a person you can form a relationship with, rather than a health care system/company. The doctor may charge high fees, but their behavior is more likely to be bound by the relationship, and societal expectations around decency and respect between people. This dynamic does not exist between companies (read health care systems) and the people they supposedly serve, but both internal and external corporate incentives -however well meaning or small when considered alone- come together to extract as much money as possible.
jeffrogers··on Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media
Those are different. In those cases content is sent to the intended recipients. Whether they see it or not is up to the receivers. In the case of some social media platforms, the platforms decide who should be sent the content, regardless of the sender’s intent.
jeffrogers··on Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media
Well, however someone might consider feeds, we don’t have the ability to truly take control of them. At least in the case of Facebook, they mostly decide what we see and they very deliberately make the case that they are not a media company like the magazines. They are claiming they are not editorializing because the machines are making the decisions. (Albeit with instructions from their engineers.)
jeffrogers··on Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media
If you were making the choice as to which friends you wanted to hear from or updates you wanted to receive from you're friends, then I take you point. When someone else, or their algorithm, makes these decisions that is something else and it may actually veer into censorship.
jeffrogers··on Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media
What do you call it when you make a post that you assume your friends can see and only some are presented your post?
jeffrogers··on ‎Amplosion: Redirect AMP Links on the App Store
Man, I just want a t-shirt with the app icon artwork on it...
jeffrogers··on Andreessen Pulls a Bezos
I dunno. Andreessen’s service layer may make sense for some startups in some industries, but for other companies a check from the likes of Tiger might be better. And how far down the road will those services become rent?
jeffrogers··on FCC Temporary Waiver Permits Higher Symbol Rate Data for Hurricane Ida Traffic
Hoping municipalities around the country note that the amateur radio programs they've been depreciating over the last decade actually have a role to play in emergencies like major hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes.
jeffrogers··on Economic costs of war
Whatever the number, the privacy costs and the downstream implications are significantly higher. Who knows where that will all end...
jeffrogers··on Why we should end the data economy
“They generate profits by compiling a profile of you from your data trail and then selling it to the highest bidder”

Connecting another dot on this point: The creation and widespread use of such profiles -which are not merely comprised of data, but are summary conclusions about people- may well make the U.S. into a genuinely caste society. Without rules regarding things like data aging, publicly accessible profile monitoring, and bad data correction… and when to provide some sort rehabilitation method, people will eventually become just a collection of their mistakes and forced into one bucket or another.

We need something akin to the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a set of laws that provide better guide-rails for when data can be collected, by who, for what purpose, when it can be sold or used for a purpose other than why it was first collected, etc.

jeffrogers··on There’s no place for expensive laptops with 8GB of RAM anymore
Bought the same machine for my daughter in a sort of emergency situation. I thought I’d be returning it and ordering a higher spec machine, but never did. She plays games, runs Discord, has browser tabs open, watches YouTube, edits her own videos, etc all without any issues. And the battery is crazy good. I’m actually a little dumbfounded. It seems Apple has found a good formula for entry level machines in the new MacBook Air.
jeffrogers··on Warren Buffett is right, inflation is running rampant
Well, housing prices are moving up faster than appraisers can keep track of in Silicon Valley. That’s for real.
jeffrogers··on QUIC and HTTP/3 Support Now in Firefox Nightly and Beta
Are the QUIC HTTP/3 Connection Migration IDs an end run around limitations with cookies, ad blockers, MAC spoofing, and other forms of anti-tracking measures? My understanding is that these IDs survive network switching, sessions, etc.
jeffrogers··on Apple works with China but not the FBI (2016)
Sure, but regardless of how they justify what they do I only care that their domestic actions are consistent with US laws, traditions, and expectations.
jeffrogers··on Apple works with China but not the FBI (2016)
Hmm. My first thought is that this is not China. We have different expectations here and ones that sometimes run counter to the conveniences US law enforcement would like to have. Whatever happens in China, my expectations are that our goverment should work differently here and Apple should as well.
jeffrogers··on Arrow v1.0: After 8 years, even better dates and times for Python
What's the best .js equivalent?
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