seieste

I've been moving towards putting documents in a virtual folder and zipping them -- you can still use your own extension and the end consumer is none the wiser.

This seems to be how Microsoft handles docx and pptx files.

> Interest compounds geometrically and wages grow linearly.

That doesn't seem right -- wages should grow with inflation.

Maybe there's a difference between the growth rates of the two, but I don't see how wAge grows linearly.

It doesn't matter if the stock market is "reverting to the mean" if we don't know what the mean is supposed to be.

Chrome is the fastest browser for YouTube because Google intentionally made it slow on other browsers. So, sometimes this speed is just the result of monopolistic actions.

What sort of optics did you feel weren't covered by your physics courses?

That's something you hear from people who have already achieved some success. But when you're trying to make enough money to live comfortable and also want to have a social life, it IS an optimization problem.

1. Deliberate practice is different than merely putting in hours. So 5,000 of difficult practice could build skills more than 10,000 of mindless repetition.

2. "10,000 hours" is a necessary, not sufficient, condition. Further, some fields (like chess) can enable expert performance with fewer hours than other fields (like history) due to the difference in skills required.

Some fields are very small, and some authors only focus on one small part of a field.

So, high citation count isn't always a direct indicator of quality.

> “Obviously, there are laws to protect people’s privacy and we are respectful of all those laws,” Hartman said. “We also understand the importance of operating in an ethical way as it relates to further protecting people’s privacy.”

They are tracking my car and thus my movement. If this is deployed 24/7, they can recreate every location I visit.

How is this respecting my privacy?

How is Raven's matrices biased?

Or you live outside the Silicon Valley bubble.

The user experience doesn’t matter that much, because the primary target of Windows is businesses, governments, etc. who buy in bulk and can be persuaded by Microsoft sales teams.

Considering that Mac systems (the only alternative with support for Excel and Word) are so much more expensive than comparable Windows systems, and it’s clear why companies use Windows.

And that doesn’t even take into account that most consumers are entirely unaware of the privacy implications of telemetry and online accounts.

So, Microsoft can just get away with this kind of stuff.

November 16, 2017

Remember when Munich ditched Windows? It only lasted a few years before Microsoft successfully won them back by offering steep discounts and moving their headquarters to Munich.

One has to wonder whether history will repeat itself.

https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/

Don’t do this if you’re an American—it’s illegal to bribe anywhere in the world.

Google’s argument is that the audio they store is non-private and non-personally identifiable. So this statement doesn’t make sense:

> We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data.

Isn’t the whole point that the audio is supposed to be innocuous? “Hey google, play Coldplay” or “Hey google, play Taylor Swift.” If that’s the only audio that Google stores, then there should be no problem with leaking it to the press.

But it isn’t, which is what the translator was trying to show in the first place!

If you go into the bathroom of a restaurant and see cockroaches, would you feel comforted by management telling you to give them time, because they will definitely get rid of them and to not be too worried that they haven't already gotten rid of them?

The question is not “Will it be fixed?” but “Why is it there In the first place?” Given that the app makes a request to zipow.com to download the new installer, the auto-reinstallation is not a bug or an issue, but an intentional and anti-consumer design decision.

Kim Jong Un was educated in Switzerland, which has a very strong democratic environment, yet it didn’t change about how he ran North Korea.

David Epstein's book "Range" offers a different view of expert performance -- that it doesn't work very well in domains with ambiguity (such as a hidden state), or when a variety of skills are required.

In other words, expert performance applies to piano and chess very well, but a diversity of backgrounds is more important for things like management or R&D more broadly.

At least with corn and soy futures there is an asset with intrinsic value and some unpredictability due to weather / disease / yield / etc.

In contrast, Bitcoin is only valuable because people assume others find it valuable. That seems like a currency, but most currencies have lower volatility and are used by a whole lot more people.

So, bitcoin trading really doesn’t make any sense to me.

Why does everyone think there is?

The issue is that “fairness” has many dimensions. Representation is one of them, but so is racial fairness (e.g. you can’t split districts to deemphasize one race’s vote) and compactness (you shouldn’t make thin slices geographically to see read the vote.) When you have these two competing values, and some maps do better on one dimension while others are better on the other, how do you properly weigh them?

My understanding of the ruling is not that it’s ok to be fair, but that at this point we can’t even balance all the dimensions of fairness to get a single measure.

There are government services, such as the USPTO, that rely on Google reCAPTCHA. The new reCAPTCHA has made it difficult for me to access documents, and sometimes they think that I'm a bot and thus deny me access entirely.

Does the government realize the consequences of this? Both that it pushes users to use Chromium-based browsers, and that they're helping to solidify a company that already has a near monopoly in the browser space?

Further, this quote is very creepy:

> To make this risk-score system work accurately, website administrators are supposed to embed reCaptcha v3 code on all of the pages of their website, not just on forms or log-in pages.

With AMP, Google Ads, and reCAPTCHA, Google now has access to pretty much everything that people do on the web.

Yesterday I went to book a hotel and Priceline had a room for $129, which was $20 cheaper than Expedia or any other site.

Curious, I clicked on it and went to the Priceline site, and watched as a JavaScript animation “rolled” the price from $129 to $149 and alerted me that someone just got the last room. Obviously the whole thing was fake. (Why would they implement such an animation, and how likely is it that someone got the room in those two seconds?)

At this point, it’s not even nudging or dark patterns but just straight out fraud.

Both Murdoch and Hearst ran publishing entities, whereas Google and other social media sites claim to be neutral platforms. This distinction is important because certain protections given to neutral platforms don’t necessarily apply to publishers. (For instance, Reddit can’t be held accountable for libel posted on their site by someone else since they’re just a platform. )

Go to a Reddit AMP page? Can’t upvote the post or comments or see your messages.

Go to a wordpress AMP site? Can’t comment or access many comments.

A lot of features aren’t present in AMP, so often I don’t want the AMP version. Sure, at some point AMP can implement all those things, but eventually AMP just becomes a parallel HTML standard, when the only speed benefit comes from caching. It makes no sense to anyone but Google.

AMP is slower for me because I have to press on my screen twice to get to the actual page I wanted to go to.

Hence AMP requires at least 0.5s between the time I click on a Google link and get to my real destination?

There were reports that some TV’s will automatically connect to any unsecured WiFi.

You don't need the Target app to be tracked by Target, since the tracking beacon code can be in any number of unrelated apps (weather, news, games, etc.)