techsupporter

> That's how much better Spotify is.

I think the situation here is that your sentence can be finished with "...for me." It's closer to an opinion or preference than a fact.

I have been a Spotify user for a very long time, but I left for Apple Music because I wanted different features than Spotify was willing to give. Apple Music lets me edit the metadata for tracks, easily upload my own music that lives right alongside the tracks from the streaming service, and has discovery and categorization algorithms that, in my opinion, are better for me.

I am now with Apple Music where you are with Spotify: I would pay triple to keep the service going as it is now because it is great for me. I have no desire for exclusive content or add-ons like audiobooks or integrated podcasts. Give me the jukebox in the sky where I can insert my own CD and vinyl albums and I am very content.

Spatial Audio and lossless are nice add-ons to have, though.

At each WorldCon, host committees of science fiction groups from cities put up bids to host the WorldCon to be held two years hence. In 2021, Chengdu and Manitoba had committees on the roster. WorldCon voters chose Chengdu.

The problem is one of effective power: do you tell people who live in these regimes, "sorry, you cannot participate in this culture because your government is bad." How much pull do they have to change things, especially this sort of thing? Or do you say "you can participate, but only at a lower tier." Either way is going to put some people into an out-group. Maybe that's the right thing to do--paradox of tolerance, for instance--for the rest of the people in the group or culture. Maybe it isn't.

I know it would hurt pretty badly to be a science fiction enthusiast in China, perhaps even someone who really does not like what their government does, and not be able to participate. On the other hand, it hurts to be potentially on the list for your work's most prestigious honor, only to be "disqualified" because you "might" have written about something that isn't permitted in the host country you couldn't have predicted.

> Those who call for elimination of cars are privileged enough to live in Seattle and don't seem to recognize other's do not live in Seattle (or commute to Seattle from where most public transportation is not effective, viable, or possible).

I believe you fail to recognize that a lot of people who don't drive don't live in Seattle. Whether or not someone drives is not always by their choice. I have friends who are physically incapable of driving, yet because drivers tend to outvote and outweigh non-drivers politically, those friends are denied the transit service they would really like to have. And even when it is by choice, nothing says that Yakima or Spokane or Port Angeles can't have transit; most of them do!

I live in Seattle. My wife and I were born here and we will hopefully die and be buried here. It is our home. I have lived through decades of transit that would make a New Yorker howl in peril. It was not so long ago that our idea of a frequent bus route was every half hour, and the light rail (that began running after both of my children were born) stopped in downtown and at 11pm.

Seattle residents aren't a monolithic bloc but, generally, our push for fewer cars is because cars, and especially those cars driven in from places that do have quality transit to reach the city, cause a lot of problems for people outside of those cars. I really, really want to make it to retirement without being run over by someone driving into town who's late for a sporting event.

> Yet, it isn't viable for the vast majority of Washingtonians.

Not driving can be viable! It is viable, if not as convenient, in places you wouldn't think and might even consider are "too rural" or "too spread out." The fact remains, there are a lot of us in Washington who don't drive and, bluntly, I don't appreciate us being insulted or accused of having an excess of privilege or living in a bubble.

There may well come a day when you are not physically able to drive and I wish very much for you to have a robust transit and sidewalk and low-speed city setup that enables you to have independence and access throughout all of your days.

> You full well know public transportation isn’t a viable option.

I do not know this. I have over a thousand taps of my ORCA card in 2023. My wife has more. We have been as far north as Bellingham and as far south as Portland on transit. We attended the wedding of a friend's kid in Yakima by riding transit to Issaquah and taking Greyhound from there.

I don't appreciate being told that my actual, lived experience "isn't viable", especially when I know several other people who do it just the same as me. Not all of us can or want to drive. This is even more true as people get older.

> And you’re fully aware that commutes of >30 minutes are not uncommon, in part die to how unaffordable the greater Puget Sound

According to AAA, the annual cost of owning a car is $12,000. We don't spend that money, so we can afford to live closer-in where transit is better. I am not here to judge people who choose to move far away but I haven't done it and I won't. But even if I did, I could just move to where I already have acquaintances in Lynnwood or Redmond or Renton or Burien and take the bus just the same as I do today.

It is pretty straightforward. My wife and I live in a condominium unit just east of the University District. We take the bus or walk everywhere. I'm sad the Safeway has closed, but we have easy bus access to groceries at QFC, the massive Magnuson Park, the smaller Matthews Beach park, and a short hop to the train.

I am fortunate to be able to work from home most days. I work for a medical group and we have doctor's offices across the city and King County. I can reach all but one by a one or two bus trip when I need to go, which is rare. We have friends who have moved up to Everett and it's a two bus trip to go all of the way from Magnuson Park to downtown Everett.

The only "hard" trip is to go see one of our kids who has since moved to Tacoma. We try to time it when the Sounder is running (a few mid-day trips would be great) or take Cascades if we feel like splurging.

Why is it condescending? I can't drive or at least I can't do it very well. But before that, my spouse and I had long since sold our car.

To me, it is more condescending to insist that a car is a basic life necessity. It demeans those of us who live without one.

I live in one of the "any other states" (Washington) without a car quite comfortably. A lot of us can't or don't drive. It's nice to not have to put up with car insurance companies.

I think this is apt commentary on the state of the commercial Internet as it exists today and I'm happy to vouch for yo--[See More]

> to Barnes and noble, grab a coffee, and plant myself on the bench in the periodical section to pour through every page of the latest 2600, desperately trying to commit to my memory as much as possible

I still go to my local Barnes & Noble, the last one remaining in Seattle, to get my 2600 (and a coffee!) every quarter. Why B&N? No other bookstore in the city sells 2600, at least not reliably.

It's been a quarterly ritual for quite some time, even though I could just get a "lifetime" subscription and have more Hacker Quarterly pages to read than I could do in an actual lifetime. I still enjoy going and getting a paper magazine and reading spill about central offices and script code injection.

> So I built without code inspections.

Building code and its associated inspections aren't, primarily, for you. They're for the people around you and the people who come after you.

You might be the greatest builder on the planet. I, as the tenant or owner who lives in the structure after you, have no way of knowing that absent you following the process that says a separate entity confirmed that you built a safe structure.

I, as your neighbor two parcels down, have no way of knowing that you did or didn't build a building that is likely to burn down and take half of the area with it.

To head off what I'm sure is the inevitable reply along the lines of "I will live in this house until I die" and/or "there is no one around me for the next 100 miles", that's fine, but those are situations that can change. Code, and having the inspection, confirms that you did what society asked of you to keep the rest of us safe.

(Is the building code and its associated inspections fallible? Absolutely. But deliberately flaunting them because you just didn't have time is similarly not an excuse.)

Nobody wants to raise prices but everybody wants more money. In the past week, I've seen under the line mandatory fees from a pet grooming service ($5.99 required "materials fee"), a large apartment operator ("technology package fee" to have mandatory access to the resident portal), and a bookstore ($2 order handling charge).

Hiding the actual cost with sneaky fees is getting out of hand and I have zero sympathy for "oh the poor merchants" or "showing the proper price is too hard." They made the decision to impose the fees, they can make the decision to put them in the price where they belong.

> And, as a particular thing which could help unlock that: if one cares a lot about the experience of people at the socioeconomic margins, one should perhaps spend less time fulminating about greedy capitalists and spend more time reading Requests For Public Comment by relatively obscure parts of the administrative state.

For what it's worth, there are a staggering number of people doing political advocacy who follow these sorts of things. The main problem is, unless you are inside that system, there is no (scalable) way to know which relatively obscure parts are about to do something that you want to comment on. And, as patio11 wrote out, it's a massive system that has been layered on top of layers.

Part of the reason why spend "time fulminating about greedy capitalists" is because those "greedy capitalists" are the ones inside the system. Hell, a good amount of time, advocates are having to spend time pushing back against "greedy capitalists" because the status quo is already known and understood, but a change would cost money even if it is beneficial so the change must be opposed.

What advocacy could really use is more people who have this deep understanding and can write out lengthy articles like this explaining all of the ins-and-outs to come along with the advocates as a guide. The problem is, the economic and cultural incentives don't work like that.

> policy makers need to be realistic and acknowledge that most people have no idea how to eat without branded processed foods, fast food convenience, etc. The cultural traditions that made simple foods practical have been lost from many families

There's also that how we live has drastically changed since the 70s and 80s as well. These assumptions about how we eat were underpinned by the idea that there would be an adult at home, someone who had time to do the planning/thinking about, preparation, and implementation of eating with these "basic foods".

Now, with every adult in a household often working outside the house--and, as you get lower in income, spending more hours doing so--the processed foods and fast food offerings are the only way to get calories in a time-efficient way.

Your point about never-learned recipes is a good one because there are time-efficient ways to prepare food at home but that also implies needed equipment and skill, sometimes passed down from a previous generation, sometimes bought with money that people don't have. But there's little that can compare, timewise, with "just throw it in the microwave for 5 minutes" or "just grab something from a logo foodservice place on the way home". I think people intuitively understand this but there are trade-offs to be made in the moment.

Sometimes it is incompetence; someone flags a certain thing as the wrong classification and it comes out of the wrong bucket.

But I think it's more than that, here. The settlement covers almost the height of when Uber and Lyft were desperately trying to undercut everyone else in the market--taxis, public transit, taking a bike, scooter-share, anything--and keeping these out of view of the customer helps a lot in that effort by making the price look lower.

> The Uber settlement fund is for people who "drove for Uber between November 10, 2014, and May 22, 2017, and had deductions taken for New York sales tax and Black Car Fund fees." The Lyft fund is for people who drove for Lyft between October 11, 2015, and July 31, 2017, and had the same kinds of deductions.

By my mind, it's in the same vein as businesses (everyone from Comcast to that small restaurant on the corner) that list one price in big numbers but tack on surcharges at the end. Obscuring the true price should be more illegal than it is.

The underlying account still works so you could do an ACH transfer out to another account if you like.

> You just have to go up to the counter and ask. You have to show ID, just like you do for liquor (and, because purchases of psuedoephedrine are rate-limited, they're going to log your purchase)

Up to the counter and ask...when the counter is open that is increasingly a problem as pharmacies close and hours are limited (the two nearest me close at 6pm, right at the end of working hours).

Show ID...that the pharmacist will accept (not all of us drive or have a driver license).

Rate-limited...at a quantity too low for a household that has a sinus infection running around.

So, no, it's not already easy. Canadians can go into a Costco and buy as much as they like and apparently it's not an entire nation of Walter Whites up there so what makes us so special?

And this means we're going to have an easier time buying the stuff that works...right?

...right?

I agree that government records should be open and are good for transparency. The problem comes when people don't realize that something they're doing would put all of the personal information they've submitted into the public record, or when it's required to do this to access a service.

In Washington, and Seattle specifically, doing something as simple as reserving a park space or signing up for a constituent newsletter means a public record has been created. Data brokers and people who want to "just reach out for a simple conversation" and political parties routinely make grabs for this data to populate mailing lists and the like.

That's annoying and shouldn't be a function of public records laws. We exempt utility billing records, even when the utility is owned by a city, and library card data and so on. Asking for a service from the government should be wholly exempt.

> My team was forced to relocate some of the folks from CA, TX, NY, and UT to Seattle.

Meanwhile, our genius of a Mayor is crowing about how "vibrant" downtown is without mentioning any of the consequences like housing getting even more expensive and being on foot or bike is even more dangerous and public transit reliability taking a nosedive.

This is working out so great; he's gonna get reelected for life by the downtown chamber of commerce just for convincing Amazon that WFH is silly.

They might make the gigantic too-big-to-fail banks want to turn away from lower-profit customers but credit unions are absolutely a thing. In my area, several credit unions offer payment accounts--with debit cards and without a monthly fee--for people who have had accounts closed due to overdraft or who have an ITIN instead of a SSN.

I'm not really moved by "if we don't let the TBTF banks charge whatever they want, they might not like us". We have not-for-profit institutions and community-focused banks for a reason. At bottom, we should introduce postal banking like a lot of over countries to get ourselves out of this reliance on those banks.

Today in niche requests:

Does anyone have pointers to streaming electronic music (ideally trance / progressive trance, upbeat synthwave[0], or house) that has absolutely no vocals?

I listened to a lot of no-vocal electronica back in the 80s but I can't find anywhere to stream it now, even just as a long playlist on Apple Music or Spotify, without a vocal track being dropped in. Vocals are fine but I like non-vocal/just-electronics tracks upbeat music as ambient or to listen to while zoning out.

I emailed SomaFM and di.fm to ask and they have one stream apiece that mostly fits the bill but maybe there are others out there?

0 - Upbeat because I know about "lofi beats to study by" and that's a bit too slow for what I'm after. :)

The person you're replying to is meaning how savings accounts work in the US. You put money in them and let it sit, earning interest. Changing savings account banks is quite easy.

Checking (or "demand") accounts work like you describe and people are slower to switch them for that reason.

And to add on a little, ASL is like any other language in that it has regional dialects. It's why many people introduce themselves with their name and where they learned to sign.

One of the more common examples from teachers is the sign for SLOW. On the west coast, we sign it as the flat palm being pulled slowly back along the extended non-dominant arm. But in the south and parts of the east, it is signed as the Y sign, thumb against the cheek, being tilted forward.

The way you fix this casually is to ask the other person to finger spell or mime what they meant. I can't see AI being able to do that well for a while but maybe..?

I'm not sure I understand; why would automatic interpretation reduce the incentive to learn ASL?

I learned ASL, as a hearing person, to be able to communicate with deaf friends anywhere and with my (hearing) spouse and other friends in noisy or large places. It's also a hedge against my future potential hearing loss from tinnitus.

Automatic interpreting wouldn't solve any of those and neither it nor automated captions take the place of human-understood interpreting. I think putting ASL in something like VR where it is more visible to the hearing world might broaden its reach?

> the Sad Story of Henry

My local PBS station showed Thomas the Tank Engine on almost infinite loop and so I came into the show in kind of the middle as a kid. I didn't know why Henry was so "bad" at his job and all of that, only that he was cranky and didn't seem to like everybody else that much.

Then this episode aired and my mother says I cried for two days over how Henry had been treated. (It didn't help that I was what was commonly called "a quiet child" and got picked on a lot for not wanting to play with other kids or just "being weird", something I think a lot of HN can relate to.) It wasn't long after that I stopped watching Thomas.

Years later, my kid picked up watching the show and learned how to record it on his TiVo. I made sure we watched that episode together.

> Our ISPs had metered traffic (traffic that went out to that external monopoly)

I remember hitting FTP sites that would check to see if you were in Australia or New Zealand and would bounce you out if you weren't. Some of the earliest form of "geolocation". A popular Linux or w4r3z release would drop and you'd always know you were in for a long night when only the .au servers were replying...and turning away your login.

It reminds me of the joke poem:

"A host is a host from coast to coast,

and nobody talks to a host that's close,

unless the host that isn't close

is busy, hung, or dead."

> but also said that due to a high rate of identity theft they are refusing to do anything without the person there.

This is the part of processes that annoys me the most. A company or agency will publish the rules they want people to follow, then there's a 30% chance that when I go to follow them, I will be denied because of an unpublished rule or an exception like this of "oh, well we're just not doing that right now."

The whole point of the USPS policies on being able to confirm a relationship is to avoid identity theft. If the policy is no longer going to be used then remove it! Or, better yet, update it.

> Federal documents don't have authenticated addresses.

I wonder why that matters. If I am provably who I say I am, why is the address important?

Also, not specifically for you, but generally what about states that don't reissue IDs when someone moves? (I suppose their answer to that is "get an updated ID and try again".)

The recent version of it is from Spider-Man 2, I believe. The snooty usher says to Peter, who's raced to get to a theatre show performed by Mary Jane, that "no one will be seated after the doors are closed; it helps maintain the illusion." Our poor hero, of course, has been off Doing Good Deeds and as a result his double-life has yet again foiled his chance to win MJ's affections.

The law itself is broadly available (there are other cases going on about "reported" law which is the compendium put together by private editors), but they reference technical standards that aren't.

For example, a hypothetical RCW 94.50.691 in Washington might read "all paving stones sold for use in residential koi pond construction shall conform to American Impervious Surface Standards Body Standard Code 72-67-243". It's that last part that would be copyrighted by a private body and only available for sale at $47,542 per license.