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mfarris

148 karma · joined April 15, 2010

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mfarris··on Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
That's a misconception. Prices are not the same across stores.

I live in Los Angeles. Many times I've shopped at the TJ's in Silver Lake and one of the TJ's in Pasadena on the same day. Most prices are the same, but on many items the Silver Lake store is consistently 5-10% higher.

I've also shopped in midwestern TJ's and noted that the prices were generally lower than LA.

Products differ significantly, too. Items with the exact same name and packaging can be totally different regionally. For example, "Sonoma Chicken Salad" used to be a favorite of mine here in California. The Iowa version was disgusting, with roughly twice the mayonnaise, fewer nuts and grapes, and 3x the sugar.

mfarris··on My next Mac might be the last
Yes, good call on tabs.
mfarris··on My next Mac might be the last
I regularly use a 10.4 Tiger machine for music and graphic projects and it is a breath of fresh air compared to where MacOS is today. My daily drivers are Mavericks/Mojave/Mojave but recently got an M1 iMac with Monterey. Nothing about Mojave-->Monterey feels like an improvement.

Aside from high-DPI, I'd be pressed to think of a single Mac interface convention or element that is better today than 2005. Many are a lot worse.

mfarris··on Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in a tiny expensive package (2012)
I'm extremely careful with my Macbook magsafe charging cables. But in ten years I've had three fray into uselessness.

My current cable has black electrical tape at both the charger block and connector ends. No matter how carefully one loops these things before putting them in a bag, the rubbery material eventually abrades and cracks.

In contrast, I used Powerbooks for 15+ years and never had a single cable go bad.

mfarris··on A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities
J.K. Rowling has stated her love of transpeople and her wish to see them be fully accepted members of society. She has differences of opinion about the best political approach to achieving equality.

Because she makes a rational, temperate argument that you do not like, you "wouldn't waste spit on her in hell."

Which of you is the more hateful?

mfarris··on The 20th anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube
I still use 10.4 on a 2005 PowerMac several times a week for various creative projects.

The ease of use is so much higher than recent MacOS versions it's not even funny.

mfarris··on Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning
The poor vastly outnumber the rich, so what point are you making exactly?
mfarris··on Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard.

Apple was early in supporting the standard. Windows, Android, others have followed. More to come.

When venting one's spleen, it's best to be at least a tiny bit correct.

mfarris··on The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May
Unemployment benefits are taxable income.
mfarris··on Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes
You might find it useful to read articles before indulging your urge to sarcasm: one of the novels discussed is by Joanna Russ (female). Another is by Samuel Delaney (African-American).

Oh, the name of the two-volume series is "American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s". Maybe the specifics of criteria -- "America," "1960s" -- influenced the choices?

mfarris··on Fired Netflix executive sues, alleging pregnancy discrimination
The article isn't misleading at all. She is a company executive.

Female executives getting fired for pregnancy is not unusual in the entertainment industry. It's disgusting, but not unusual. And HR is always eager to help the scumbag boss cover it up.

mfarris··on Apple to Close Stores in Eastern District of Texas to Fight Patent Trolls
Dozens if not hundreds of articles have been written about corruption around patent trolling in the Eastern District of Texas.

You have everything you need to seek those articles out. Asking others to do simple tasks for you indicates a desire to waste their time. It could fairly be interpreted as... trolling.

mfarris··on The Curse of the Honeycrisp Apple
Here in Los Angeles your typical store has 6-10 varieties of apple, almost all of them painfully similar.

Braeburn, Jazz, Fuji, Honeycrisp, Gala, Ambrosia, Jonagold, Envy... these are all the same basic apple: overly sweet, hard/dense, not a lot of taste outside sugar. Envy apples are the yellow version of the same thing. Pink Ladies are marginally better.

If anyone knows an LA area market where I can escape the tyranny of obnoxiously "crisp" sugar bombs in favor of Cortlands, McIntosh, Jonathan, or anything out of the ordinary... do tell.

If the Granny Smith wasn't available I don't know what I'd do.

mfarris··on The Curse of the Honeycrisp Apple
I grew up in Michigan and love Cortlands above all others.

I can't find them in Los Angeles.

mfarris··on Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System
"Fleet" is longstanding car industry lingo. Not something Tesla dreamed up to keep you under their boot.

Source: Father worked in car industry. All of my neighbors, too. Pretty much everyone I knew and then, eventually, me... albeit tangentially.

mfarris··on Removing Bad Actors on Facebook
No.

US security agencies have been clear that Russian intelligence interfered in our election to support Trump.

Putin admitted just two weeks ago that he wanted Trump to win.

Generalized unrest was one goal. Electing Trump, however difficult that might have seemed, was another.

mfarris··on New York City Launches First Blockchain Initiatives
Ah, so "blockchain" is a Libertarian Trojan horse that will obviate government. Man, "blockchain" can do ANYTHING.

"voluntary smart contracts"... more buzzwords that sound great but mean nothing. What's so smart about contracts that lose hundreds of millions of dollars because someone put a semicolon in the wrong place? I'm not volunteering for that.

Can't wait for the first time the soon-to-be-obsolete government has to "fork" the Social Security "blockchain" because a few $$$BILLION "went missing" when some 25-year-old, third-tier programmer/consultant screwed up the "smart" contract. Oops.

mfarris··on New York City Launches First Blockchain Initiatives
That is an awful lot of words to say "Hey anybody got any ideas how to make 'blockchain' useful to people not interested in bilking cryptocurrency speculators? Sure, we've got homeless on the streets but ALSO $200 million burning a hole in our city's pockets, and saying 'blockchain' is much cooler than 'hunger' or 'poverty' or 'infrastructure.' Ooh look, blockchain!"

Please somebody suggest an even remotely plausible way that "blockchain" could possibly improve "turn-around times for government services."

mfarris··on Global Debt Hits Record $233T
Mild to moderate inflation is usually considered useful in paying back debt, as the constant dollar value of the debt decreases.

Even with the low inflation we've had over the last 20 years, if you borrowed $1000 in 1997 with 0% interest and wanted to pay it back now, the 1000 "2018 dollars" you'd pay would only be "worth" 655 "1997 dollars".

The real danger is in deflation, which causes the constant dollar value of the debt to grow.

mfarris··on The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious (2014)
YES. I grew up eating Cortlands in the midwest. Have never found one in the LA area.
mfarris··on A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system
Counterpoint: this tool pegged my 8-year-old as 13 (and she looks younger than her age) and me as 56... well into the double-digit error zone.

Someone recently thought I was 30. People aren't any better than computers.

mfarris··on The web sucks if you have a slow connection
UX guy here. I've always kept performance in mind. One of my pet phrases is that speed is part of design.

I've gotten a lot of blank stares.

That's why more designers don't bother: decision makers usually respond only to look/flashiness/branding.

mfarris··on Amazon Go
His personal feeling and experience of going to stores is "anecdotal evidence"?

Where is your three-year, peer-reviewed study into the emotional motives of shoppers? After all, you flatly stated that "The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise."

Since you seem to be a very serious, data-minded person: CITATION PLEASE.

mfarris··on Nestle says it will cut sugar in chocolate by 40%
Here's one:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/abs/nature13...

There's lots more, but your ability to google is every bit as good as mine.

Folks skeptical of artificial sweeteners are not anti-science morons. Man-made climate change is real, vaccines are one of the great accomplishments of civilization, and the science is promising but not fully settled on GMOs.

Consuming artificial sweeteners is almost certainly healthier than consuming the sugar they replace, but that doesn't actually make them _healthy_.

mfarris··on Microsoft Solitaire Collection
One method: navigate to the file in the Mac OS Finder, right-click on the icon, choose "Show Package Contents" from the contextual menu.
mfarris··on Uber’s Ad-Toting Drones Are Heckling Drivers Stuck in Traffic
Counterintuitive counterpoint from just a couple days ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/why-last-second-lane-me...

Summary: last-second zipper merging is actually better in many circumstances.

mfarris··on Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
FYI, the post was written by Tim Carmody, who is guest-blogging on Kottke.org this week.
mfarris··on Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
The iPad doesn't come with a BT keyboard, but there are quite a few keyboard/cover combos available. It's not something that you have to "schlepp around inconveniently":

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31747_7-20091329-243/keyboardin...

mfarris··on There is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format.
You're getting two entirely different things mixed up.

192 kHz is the sample rate. 192,000 slices per second. It does not refer to the audible sound spectrum.

20 kHz in speakers refers to the cycles per second of the audible waveform. Normal human hearing rage is 20 hz - 20 kHz. For most people, it's less than that.

A speaker can certainly play back music sampled 192,000 times per second. Most of them can't play tones that are higher pitched than 20 kHz, which is fine because mostly only dogs can hear up there anyway.

mfarris··on Apple Reveals Siri Voice Interface: The “Intelligent Assistant”
Have you been out in public lately? I don't think anybody is embarrassed by anything anymore.

With a phone, voice control is a real improvement over thumbing a wee li'l keyboard.

And exposing your personal affairs to everyone within earshot is now just another way to demonstrate your importance.

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