lakechfoma

I'm pretty over maintaining Linux on my laptop, Windows 10 in general, and most hardware coming from the "PC" side of the market. I'm also looking to get into iOS development.

What do I buy? I'm thinking the cheapest Air. I don't want to drop twice that for something that seems so reviled that they must update it soon. But can I do iOS dev on an Air? Are refurbed previous gen MBPs good quality for the price?

Do I wait till September and cross my fingers for an improved next gen that isn't $200 more expensive?

Ah that's true. I haven't really ventured farther out from Manhattan than the G. Lots more city out there.

A little OT but what is it called when a rail system is setup purely to ferry people to and from the heart of the city?

Philadelphia is the same way. New York on the other hand is more of a spaghetti mess. I wonder if that interconnection does things for the city too, like encourage growth in more areas.

I wouldn't bother clicking on this link if I knew it was the state. So no, I'm not tired of everyone playing editor because it benefits me in the end.

I also don't agree that such threads drown the conversation. Often they're buried. Sometimes they are a healthy part of the conversation itself. Sometimes there's a passive aggressive argument about whether or not the conversation is healthy and hey maybe even that's healthy!

Ah sorry I kind of skimmed the article realizing I listened to him about this book on Fresh Air and assumed that statement was more general since it's possible with psilocybin (and I guess psychedelic trips in general).

RTFA and you know what making an assumption and all that...

Depends on where you're walking and who you are with, and of course dose but that can be hard to control. In the right setting, it can be a great idea.

I would argue that such an effect is seen more at high doses and rarely at that. If your setting is a nice woodsie stroll then you can probably safely lay on the ground and watch the leaves until the moment passes. What's interesting is you'll suddenly realize your ability to move and have striking appreciation and respect for that, and that can stay with you forever. You'll also have just spent 20 minutes with the bugs and watching the trees and have strong feelings about all of that. All sorts of thoughts and perspectives you've built up over decades of life shattered. It's a great idea to see where the experience leads you.

That said, if you are dosing high enough that you expect wild effects in general, you probably shouldn't be in a setting where temporary paralysis is going to be an issue. Yeah it would be an issue to have to lay down on a sidewalk in a populated area, but so would heavy visuals and associated strange thought processes and perspectives in that setting. You don't want to talk to a stranger on high doses, and definitely not the police or an EMT.

edit: At doses that could cause paralysis, there will likely be debilitating sensory perception and cognitive processes in general, like synesthesia and your vision turning into a recursive zoom tunnel of over saturated hues, not understanding or abiding by some social constructs and speaking in metaphors that make a lot of sense to you and no one else.

I wonder about this with news sites that are increasingly going paywalled. Do they also turn the tracking or even ads entirely off, or do we just pay money to be tracked now?

How is moo related to political correctness? Doesn't it just ask if you've mooed today? That's an innocent joke that you never need to stumble upon.

Joking about social/religious/political topics in deep technical docs is something else entirely, unless I'm missing something about moo.

Is there research on how effective the Google/FB model is compared to content based? I wonder if fine grained tracking is even all that more powerful. Regardless, there must be diminishing returns and I wouldn't be surprised if we're there now.

Ha ok that's true. Ad breaks are long, superimposed ads exist, and sponsored content is a thing. Maybe "less intrusive" or even "predictable" is better language. I'm thinking of moments where you're scrolling and you get a pop-up that you can barely figure out how to close. You go to click a link and the page moves, whether by accident or not, because of an ad loading there. Autoplay ads (and other videos) that make me instaclose, etc. TV is at least predictable.

I get that it's a race to the bottom, but lets redefine the bottom I guess. I'm afraid that as publishers react to the public being anti ads, we'll all forget the reasons ads became such an issue. We'll get more paywalls where self regulated respectable advertising may suffice.

Maybe that model won't work for some reason, I'd like to see some publishers talking about it though! It's either full on the google/fb tracking train or expensive monthly paywall.

Why can't we have content based ads that are non-intrusive like television and old print media? Yeah they still interject in the middle of content, but not with the same level of deceit as what some ads and sponsored links do on web media.

I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malware. I even miss advertising because I'm not exposed to things I might otherwise be interested in, but I won't accept it in the current form.

Is content based advertising such an ineffective thing that we _need_ individually targeted advertising powered by trackers?

Anyone that does a search for shoes on Google gets ads for shoe retailers. Anyone going to Gizmodo gets the same ads for tech gadgets, maybe even refined by article. Etc, like the pre-internet days.

Maybe you think the ads are irrelevant and want the "better experience" that Google and FB profess, then you get to opt-in to tracking for refined ads. Maybe we can even have fine grained controls over the data/advertising such that we can control our privacy or that one weird search we did doesn't stalk us for months/years later.

edit: I would be so ok with this business model that as long as the content based ads of a given website respect my attention and security I would actually whitelist that website.

Not with single packet authentication from fwknop

http://www.cipherdyne.org/fwknop/docs/fwknop-tutorial.html#w...

Of course such a summary can't say "project is stable and boring, doesn't need work" but more often than not I am looking for something that should have plenty of momentum, or I find something that looks half baked and I want to quickly understand whether development effort is slowing down or speeding up.

This is update is incredible, it looks like a massive jump into modern relevancy. Excited to try it this weekend.

One thing I might have to raise in the GIMP community is what's the deal with sliders on brush-like tools? Very cumbersome to use by default, and I don't know if there's any way to change their behavior. Anyone have thoughts here?

I haven't used Photoshop in a long time, like 10 years and I'm sure that version was out-of-date already being a public school computer. I had used GIMP before using Photoshop. Given that context, I remember Photoshop to be significantly more user friendly than GIMP is even today.

Where did you find it to be more intuitive? I'm thinking big features like iWarp vs Liquify (which is now addressed as well as similar tools, sweet) and then basic things like the default brushes are horrendous (the pepper is funny but really?) and the scale slider for editing tools is absurdly weird to use. Depending on where you click there are like 3 things that might happen and on a brush or brush-like tool 75% of the slider scale is larger than the image dimensions thus useless. I end up struggling with that slider _a lot_. Not to discredit GIMP, I've been happily using it for more than half my life, but I'm genuinely curious what parts of it you think are more intuitive than Photoshop?

Also I feel like SO discourages any kind of personality showing, which in turn makes the place feel like it is occupied by a legion of "Zuckerbots". Not exactly an inclusive place for people who are proud of their identity and that identity strongly differs from "young cis hetero white male".

Well said. I didn't understand this at all until the post yesterday "Walking While Black". Essays like that and comments like this are eye openers and should be spread wide to people of privilege. Perspective is powerful

Read the comment from mistersquid https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16935683 to understand the point

I also work with some of the big ones and their customers and partners. I don't understand how case studies like that are shown and believed without question, and not just in blockchain but other tech or processes too. Baffles me, really disappoints me. In college I expected high up business people to be discerning and no-bs but they will buy anything without thinking critically about the pitch! I don't understand it.

Have you tried this in a more text based article? I was reading through something lengthy last night and I thought these pop ups were a lifesaver. They're like a TL;DR, you can avoid the context switch of actually clicking through. Sometimes even just the picture was enough to go "oh ok!".

Also personally I'm prone to going down a wikipedia rabbit hole and if last night was any indication, I think these popups will help stop that.

Sounds like you hit an edge case. Personally in that situation of a list of links I would just move the cursor outside the list. For me at least a minor change in behavior in some edge cases is worth what is otherwise a really awesome new feature.

To your question: yes it is. You may find it convenient, but it is definitely manipulating as well. And it really depends on where you see that clothing. Is it on the "buy" page? Ok maybe not so bad. Is it on an advertisement in a flashlight app on your phone after you last googled for something similar on your laptop? Is that still just a convenience, or have we entered territory that is creepy for you yet?

Marketing and advertising has not been tracking all of us _as individuals_ for more than the last couple of decades. How could they possibly have done this in the previous eras of dumb broadcasting and dumb print media? Newspapers can't follow you around in department stores to see what you like and target future ads to _you_ as an individual. They can advertise in places that make more sense, e.g. kids toys on a kids TV channel.

So yes this is new and yes this is manipulation, and this isn't the only way it has to be. We can still have convenience and better advertising without the mass tracking of individuals. But as long as we have people defending the current status quo as you have here, then nothing will change.

I know...the number of underhanded partisan questioning or advertising from these senators was sad.

It sounded like no one even proofread and edited their questions or lines of reasoning. There should be a panel of non-partisan people, not even experts, taking the dumb out of their questions before they engage. It was a waste of time. Even some strong questions and ideas were shutdown because they couldn't formulate it, and then the internet turned it into another way to laugh at congress.

Maybe there needs to be an old-lawyer to SME translator doing the talking too. This person questions a SME on behalf of the senators and they can speak up or seek clarification when needed. Proofread questions and competent speech.

I wonder two things though. 1) would their operating costs be lower if their infrastructure wasn't designed around this user tracking and advertising model? 2) regardless of the answer to number #1 but especially if that answer is yes, do they _need_ an ARPU of $27 to get by? Could they survive on $10? (of course I recognize not everyone can pay that, it's a privilege etc)

Yeah I understand the goal of capitalist companies is to endlessly print more money for the shareholders and the promise of ever better advertising enables FB to keep pulling in the dough. But maybe something like social media shouldn't operate in that context.

I think he was trying to get at something here though: can you run a business that is free for some people and isn't ad based? To which I think the answer could be nuanced. Maybe a large enough population pays $4/month and can thus subsidize some part of the population that doesn't have that privilege. Note I'm not actually advocating that, just saying I want to give the guy a benefit of the doubt that he was trying to move the conversation somewhere new and creative.

I think a lot of these questions have been like that, but ultimately the senators couldn't figure out how to phrase what they were getting at and both sides floundered to understand what was going on.

edit: as an example was another senator, "mr funny guy", who was trying to ask if facebook tracks how people use other apps or devices, I'm still not sure, even when they aren't logged in or something. I saw 3 possible questions that he was trying to ask and they all would have been good but I don't think either of them understood what he was asking so they went back and forth uselessly. Could have been some hard hitting commentary on the bundling of permissions, or the bundling of fb with a phone, or the ability for fb to track other app usage, or the ability of fb to track users on websites even when not logged in. oh well.

This makes me wish I had to do more grunt work in Excel.

Wow I haven't seen your name in years, I had forgotten! I just want to thank you for having an incredible blog and visualization tools. sortvis.org was frequently a resource I used to learn sorting and then later as a tutor I shared it with other students to help them learn. I've shared sortvis and the posts you did on hilbert curves with young curious family members to inspire them, and it always did! So thank you!

And Brendans blog has been more recently inspiring and educational, seeing you guys chatting on HN is too cool. Thank you both for the awesome and freely accessible material.

I find Netflix doesn't recommend anything based on my behavior at all anymore. Now literally the first 5 or so rows of content on the home page is a random spattering of "originals". But they definitely do select the title image based on my past behavior. So not helpful