lnanek2

I bought the founder's edition Stadia hardware and I'm thrilled with what I got out of it, personally. I got a free game system for years since they are giving everyone refunds. Played several AAA games I had no access to otherwise. Still going to have the, now free, Chromecast Ultra 4k with ethernet cable power adapter afterward too. It works fine even if I don't pair Stadia controllers with it.

This Ubisoft initiative to transfer licenses to PC is actually worthless to me since my PC doesn't have a GPU capable of playing games anyway and I have no intention to buy one.

> On the Left, opposition to the West’s support for Ukraine isn’t difficult to explain. Leftist figures such as Corbyn, Noam Chomsky, and Australian journalist John Pilger generally view the United States (and the West in general) as the main engine of evil in the world

Maybe it's written from a European view point? Their left is so extreme that to them, the American left is considered center, isn't it? So our left's support of the war is being called center?

Not super interested in GMO or not myself, but knowing where beef comes from seems important. Outbreaks of mad cow disease tend to be confined to certain countries, so it's valuable to be able to know your meat isn't coming from one of those if you don't want to get a prion disease.

Meanwhile it's valuable for corporations to hide where the meat comes from since such a country might sell their beef considerably cheaper to offload it despite the disease. So it's one of those cases where the corporate interests (profit) are against the individual interests (not getting a prion disease) and having government step in and mandate country of origin labeling would be valuable.

I think the US tends to be less strict about meat anyway, though. Our grocery stores still package beef in carbon monoxide to make it look red even though other countries have decided that makes the meat look misleadingly fresher than it really is, for example.

As a mobile developer I generally see WEBP getting served to Android devices and HEIC to Apple devices. Is there any advantage to JPEG XL over those?

If our app supported older iOS devices, maybe JPEG would be needed as a fallback, but it seems like JPEG XL wouldn't be compatible with old devices anyway, right?

I bought a Yaris as my first car to go as cheap as possible. Even electrics were more expensive despite the tax breaks. My Dad felt like a new one would break down less than a used one too which is why we avoided used.

Yaris worked well in general. I'm not surprised it's popular with college kids. It was pretty bothersome, though, how at the lowest trim level they even disabled things like cruise control. I'm three times older than any college kid and it made my ankle ache on long drives.

I used to feel that way, then noticed my friend driving a Tesla. He had this neat use for the LCD that showed a map of where all the cars around him was as output from the sensors. Yes, theoretically, on a traditional car you can adjust the mirrors so you have no blind spot and check them all religiously before lane changes and the like - but I still felt he had more awareness of who was in what lane than someone in a traditional car would have.

I kind of like how my BMW X3 looks like a spaceship, personally. Especially all the lights at night like in the door handles. Maybe someday we'll have the fairings of all cars 3D printed at the factory and customizable to taste when ordering, though, so we can make simpler looking ones too!

Most likely true, but that doesn't mean it is useless. Adherents to the split universe religi...er...theory might be more content with their lives, experience less anxiety, etc..

At least where I work, the only thing project managers care about is releasing the next big feature for their resume or next promo packet. Making it work well or be well tested is very low on the priorities. In fact, if you time budget that in as an engineer, they'll find someone else to implement it who will estimate half the time.

Why wouldn't it? Bright light and dark light causes your pupils to dilate differently, right? That's muscles actuated by input from the retina. Focusing is also about shaping the eye using muscles. It would actually be kind of weird if retina input wasn't used to shape the eyes.

My wife works as a language teacher and I noticed a big difference when she started doing an adventure game like this with one of her young boy students. The kid went from accidentally turning off his web cam a lot, pretending audio isn't working, not looking at the video call at all, etc. to actually being engaged and wanting to answer the next question to earn more points he could then spend on equipment to defeat the next "monster" in the game. Be they robots or man eating plants or whatever and then win the treasure at the end. She would just draw the monsters and the treasure and the equipment in colored marker in a notebook she showed the student each step, but it was still very motivating to him. Seems like this app takes a lot of the work out of the parent/teacher side.

You can always setup some named pipes. E.g.:

mkfifo named_pipe

echo "Hi" > named_pipe &

cat named_pipe

I used to do this in bash scripts to keep them cleaner and the lines simpler.

Personally, I save TikTok for each night when I sit on a reclining bicycle in the gym and exercise for an hour or two. I've stolen the weight routine from Flywheel so it isn't all legs either.

I do watch some Chinese lessons and electronics repair and cooking recipes and finance tips on there as well as the lighter content, though, so it isn't all pure entertainment.

Since the author prefers walking, maybe another option would be to put Twitter and TikTok just on an iPad and mount it to a treadmill.

Not only that, many laptops and tablets nowadays use microphone arrays, not just one - so get better quality from that. Also there's no time lag. Half the people dialing into meetings in airpods at my company have a very noticeable delay for their audio to come out when they start speaking. It's difficult to not accidentally interrupt them.

Not super surprising. I get constant flak from management just for pointing out bugs in other team's components and offering fixes, due to the negative optics, and it sounds like the author was not only organizing employees to jointly negotiate wages internally, but also talking to the press.

Tech company employees outside the marketing department are generally preferred to not say anything publicly at all. I've helped author a couple official engineering blog posts, but those always go through lawyers and marketing before release. Lots of companies like Google also hire very expensive consultancies to prevent unionizing as well. So she set herself up to battle a company that just needed a legal excuse to get rid of her at that point.

> At the end of my tenure, I was isolated, had my Slack messages surveilled and used against me, learned that Apple had access to my personal iMessages, and received several reports of requests to disparage me and my statements

Hopefully she learned a bit. She complained a lot about her Slack conversations being surveilled, but you should always assume your employer is screen capturing your computer, recording your microphone, keeping your web cam on without your knowledge, and possibly sending your emails and other communications to your manager for reference or even approval before passing them on to the intended recipients. I've seen all these things and been asked to help set some of them up. You've usually given up any right to them not happening on a work computer at some point during new employee onboarding if not sooner.

The old cylindrical mac pros had a similar trick where the case had a magnet in it and the computer itself had a detector for it. So if you ever wanted to turn it on without the case to see the diagnostic lights, you had to know where to put a magnet to fool the sensor.

Salary differences are huge, though. I recently got an offer for a $100k perm. raise + relocation benefit on top of that to move to Mountain View - and I'm not in a cheap city. My current company as well, if you move somewhere cheaper in the current remote work environment, they cut your salary.

Don't see how ships to trade is a red herring. First Google result for "Black Death rats ships":

> The Black Death was also carried by rats on merchant ships through the trade routes of Europe. It struck Europe in 1347, when 12 ships docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Subsequently called “death ships”, those on board were either dead or sick

Parent is using an example of a case where we know trade by ships helped cause the plague to spread, so is similar to how obese people have worse covid outcomes. No one is really going to go on a platform and attack trade by ships, though, just like in modern times no one is allowed to discriminate against the obese.

There's a lot of full spectrum lighting options out there since they are used for some other reasons (treating seasonal depression, etc.). Personally, I like this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003XDIPNA

A lot of the products require you to sit right next to or put your face right next to them. Think like a makeup vanity. Instead, with that one, I can just set it up right next to my bedside/desk/wherever I'm going to sit on my laptop for the next 16 hours.

Isn't there a population shift, though? The users who will install an extension for this have different tastes than the users who won't, so you can't assume the like-dislike ratio for the population who will matches the population who won't.

As an American, I totally feel the same. But working with some of my European counterparts, they can just totally disappear for a month or two when they vacation, like into a black hole. They just take vacations more seriously. If one of them was a decider for a hiring decision, we definitely wouldn't hear back from them until after. Not anything good or bad about it, it's just a different culture.

I can't, but at least the article did add a paragraph claiming designers can: " Does it matter? Quite often, shadows are incredibly sensitive to opacity changes, and many shadows use values from around 5% to 20%. That means there’s only 15 or so steps in the usable range, and single step jumps can be quite noticeable. This is not the most pressing issue in the design tools we use, but it is a real problem. "

> if the smart home system was just a bit off in predicting a human’s preference, the human and AI developed misaligned behaviors. “This led to more time spent by the individual changing temperature and activities than without the smart home system—the opposite of the smart home objective

This definitely happens to me. My clothes dryer is "smart" which means it refuses to just run for a fixed time and has some sort of smart detection of when to stop. It doesn't work well. Instead I have to run it several times before the clothes are actually dry. There's also no easy way to set it to a fixed time long enough. You have to mess around with the dial, long press another button, hit another button over 12 times - then that works for one load and it goes back to default "smart" settings.

I was expecting a horror story about some leet code problem. It's been 5 years since I last interviewed, but I always memorized how to write the common sort algorithms ahead of time first. Having to write merge sort in C doesn't really feel like a big ask. I don't know, maybe I'm old fashioned. Even if we pretend people don't spend months training on leetcode before interviews nowadays, surely sorting algorithms are still taught in basic data structures classes, right?

> So contrary to the traditional employer/employees balance of power, there is also a employees/employees thing going on here.

We have that on my team at work too. About 10% of the people on the team prefer to work in office, but they always caveat that with, "but I don't want to come into an empty office." Meaning being, that want the rest of the team in the office too.

It was an enjoyable read for me back as a kid even though I knew little history. It's pretty strong on the wish fulfillment end of things. E.g. big bad ass Americans go back in time and are better than everyone else. That sort of thing can still be fun, though, if you need to relax.

Would we be nice if they'd fix wifi terms of service pages first before layering on yet another security screen. Every time I go to the gym or mail room it's a five minute battle with Chrome to let me see my apartment complex's terms of use screen so I can access the internet. Our building doesn't get good cellular data service inside.

Yes, I'm sure I want to see the terms of use page, Chrome. No, I don't need to be an advanced user to know that. Actually I do since you only let me get redirected to it if I know to type an http site you haven't seen first instead of an https one...

Maybe it is being investigated and you don't know. For both drivers, your responsibility begins and ends with getting a police report done and informing the insurance companies, then they'll fight it out. If they think they can go after Tesla, instead of one of them paying, they will. You aren't going to hear about it regardless.

He seems kind of spoiled to me. My apartment has two windows. The one in the bedroom is always closed because my wife works the night shift and needs to sleep during the day. The other window always has the shades drawn because I'm too lazy to put on clothes and don't want to bother my neighbors with kids when I get up at 6:30AM each morning and do my VR boxing practice in the living room.

Pretty sure plenty of college students would be OK with the false window shown in the article for reduced cost. The ones that want the outside rooms with windows could pay more. Upgrade the false window to a free OLED TV and students would probably pick interior over that for the same price. Plenty of office buildings have windows that don't open, and college kids with windows that do open tend to throw TVs and the like out of them, so I doubt exterior rooms with windows would even have openable ones with a building that tall.

Are you sure you aren't living in a techie bubble? Oculus consistently tops the best selling headsets list at amazon cnet, PCMag, etc.. The only non-developers I know with headsets all have Oculus or more rarely PSVR. Maybe they aren't cutting edge, but everyday people can't afford cutting edge anyway.

They burned a lot of developer cred. by going back on the promise not to require Facebook login with Oculus, but the public at large has no knowledge of that. All the public knows is that it's decent hardware for a super low price compared to the competitors, it doesn't require a PC, and it's what most of their friends with a headset are using.

Can't really call having the most popular headset not succeeding, even if it is probably subsidized with their massive ads money making machine.