sambeau

Steve Jobs was not a marketing guy. If anything, he was a designer. His technical knowledge was also way beyond most CEOs. He designed his presentations with a high attention to detail just like he designed his products, product ranges and companies. If you watch any one of the many interviews he gave you'll see that he can talk off-the-cuff, in depth on all kinds of subjects. And, unlike many modern CEOs, he pauses to think before opening his mouth.

Self driving cars, where you have to supervise and occasionally have to reign in from going off the path, are essentially faster horses.

So they are finally here.

Yes, The Scott Trust.

You can read more about it here:

https://www.theguardian.com/the-scott-trust

C. Elegant can suffer from depression, exhibiting some behaviours similar to humans with depression.

Here in the U.K. at least, vitamins are added to many of the basic foods: like breakfast cereal and bread.

Putting aspirin in the water would be incredibly dangerous: brain bleeds and stomach ulcers would quickly knock out any other health benefits.

I like to take it one step further.

Which country would you choose if you had to be poor?

I’d probably choose Cuba.

He had a PR team. It all started to go wrong after he fired his PR team.

Sometimes I'm glad that artificial sweeteners taste incredibly bitter to me

(in mice)

And while I’m at it:

https://libro.fm/

for audiobooks.

Can I take this opportunity to recommend the lovely http://bookshop.org and http://uk.bookshop.org

If I make an MP3 of a song or a JPEG of an artwork I cannot use them to reproduce the exact content, but I will still have violated the artist’s copyright.

That’s not journalism, that’s something else. There used to be fact checkers and editors used to have to verify the sources. I realise that the press barons no longer have any integrity, but it certainly used to be the rule.

The tradition of journalists using anonymous sources doesn’t mean they use anonymous sources, it means that they know who the source is, considers them reliable, but agrees not to name them. Usually they require multiple independent sources.

Unknown sources on the internet are usually not reliable. Anonymous sources should not be trusted, even when there are more than one saying the same thing. Bots and deliberate misinformation abound.

This is not a hill you should die on as it’s a hill that can greatly harm democratic society.

Here in the U.K., where so many of these stupid rules and customs originate, dress codes have always been a way to exclude the ‘wrong sort’. Which, is usually working class and poor people.

I love this page in your docs:

https://ghostty.org/docs/about

Clear, friendly, modest, respectful and with the right balance of detail vs overview.

Congratulations on your launch.

Love the graphics!

My mum brushes her teeth standing on one leg to keep herself young.

You are correct.

Dickens didn’t write ‘novels’, he wrote ‘serials’, which are a subtly different thing: they were not composed in one sitting, rather in instalments.

The question is, of course, were they conceived and planned as a single entity and in advance. The answer to that is… complicated. But, mostly, no too.

Here’s an article about his method:

https://www.dickensnotes.com/introduction/general/

Much as there’s debate whether you can consider a collection of comics with a single story arc a ‘graphic novel’, we can debate whether a Dicken’s serial published over 18 months is a ‘serial novel’ when republished in a single volume.

In my opinion, they both are or they both are not—and I personally tend towards ‘are’.

It's refreshing to see this labeled as a "step toward".

I had to write code at university in literate style back in the early 1990s

This smells to me of a team overthinking something so much that they land on something unintuitive. It smells of "over-fitting" — a solution way too specific when something general and flexible is needed.

Pressing shift three times is clever… but way too clever. Even if you stick a giant popup saying "hit shift three times to quickly exit" I'm not sure anyone in a panic will remember—loads of people don't even know which key is shift, especially when there's three buttons on a keyboard that look the same and only two are the same. I've come across people who always use shift-lock and did't realise you could use shift for anything. I'd be interested to know what UX tests they actually did, and who with.

If I was going down the press a key three times, I would have gone with pressing any key three times apart from the number keys (plus an info box when you enter the page—"hit any key 3 times to quickly exit to the weather"). Most people, I'm sure, would mash the spacebar in a panic but if they missed then it would still work.

What I would have preferred to test would be 'mashing'/chording — pressing more than one non-modifier key at the same time, so a user could just smash a load of keys at the same time in a panic.

Going to the Weather page is a great idea, though.

If your software is free and the maintainers aren't getting paid then a few Easter eggs are a small price to pay.

Colin was being paid, of course, but not primarily for maintaining man.

Having said that, I once worked at a company (incidentally one where Colin worked, though after he'd left to join Ubuntu) where a developer added a line to the T&Cs that meant that a user granted their soul to the company. The intention was to check if the execs/legals checked the T&Cs like they promised to. They did not. Many souls were captured.

My parents bought an iPad recently, intending to share it. They were dumfounded that it could only have one account and amazed that no-one had pointed it out to them when they went to buy it. It's now my Dad's iPad, which is a shame for my Mum.

Does this mean I could have got them a free Apple Business Manager account and given them two accounts? I assume it's not that simple, despite ABM being free?

I'd be interested to hear exactly what it is that Thomas Piketty has done that makes you call him notorious.

Piketty's writing is deep and profound. It is well-researched. It makes sense. It has had a real effect on my own thinking. It has been widely acclaimed by The New York Times, The Economist, The Financial Times, The New Yorker, …

The criticism I've seen of Piketty are typically shallow and hand-wavy, usually by people who have clearly done no more than skim-read the introduction to Capital. Capital is a giant 500+ page book—every claim it makes is backed up by extraordinary detail.

Piketty's main claim is simple: the world economy is completely unbalanced, bringing misery to most of its inhabitance. He explains how this imbalance is the result of Global Capitalism running amok without any checks or balances. Would anyone sane disagree with this premise in a world about to see its first trillionaire?

Modern economic thinking is dominated by economists who seem to wilfully misunderstand how capitalism is failing humanity and damaging the planet. They seem scared to point out the obvious fact that in a world of trillionaires expecting interest on their capital, their capital will bleed the world dry.

Maybe you should read Capital before you dismiss one of the most influential thinkers of the past few decades.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics … unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon

This passes both tests.

The issue isn't current electricity use—it's current power use and most power used isn't electricity (by a factor of 4-5x).

Especially, because most energy used is currently not electricity:it fossil fuels. We need 4x for a zero-carbon grid and to be secure we need over a week's stored electricity: 10s of TWh. The plan for the UK grid has 50 Two in it. Will people really postpone charging their car for a week if they hit a cold still week in January?

To secure the grid in a zero-carbon world, we need to supply 4-5x as much electricity and be able to run without renewable generation for over a week.