throwdecro

Is there a "Kessler syndrome" analogue for the internet, where failures beget failures until it's just an impenetrable cloud of fail, forever?

Oh did they recently change "toots" to "posts"? Maybe that barrier to wider adoption is out of the way now.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

> you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself.

Having a representation of itself doesn't mean it has an awareness of itself.

But "toots" has connotations of flatulence.

That's not a bad question. I find I use it for basically all my code editing nowadays, but I don't know why. I think it's just "smooth enough" and feels consistent even as you use it for a variety of different languages. It's innovative in some subtle way.

I wonder if the price is being supported by people opening accounts in COMP hoping to get free money from the next mistake.

> Can you imagine an piece of IKEA furniture being used daily and lasting for >40 years?

Yeah. IKEA's not bad.

> sometimes he was just a...

Why qualify it with "sometimes"? I think it's safe to assume that the way a person behaves in private, among their peers, shows more about their essential character than how they behave when doing public relations.

The Schmidt and Jobs on display in the email are the essential Schmidt and Jobs. The admirable qualities are the stage show.

I actually check the laws in a US State before moving there just to make sure it this type of intellectual property grab is not allowed. By rights any jurisdiction that allows this should have zero people producing intellectual property, but there's so much friction in moving elsewhere for most people that companies can push it and get away with it.

I guess the $23M fee was something that the market could bear.

Is there an "uncanny reliability" range where increasing reliability on the part of a service provider makes things worse, by being so close to 100% reliable that any failure is a shock?

Maybe it's better to go with cheaper services that fail more often, thus keeping customers in good practice for how to deal with it.

Yeah, it's really unconscientious to have a system where the stakes are so high behave so unpredictably. People make important decisions based on how things are supposed to work. Whatever the "correct" parameters for immigration are, the system really should behave predictably.

How much of this does an end-user need to think about? It seems very complicated.

What isn't?

I think it's something you can make for free, and sell for money. I don't think anyone "gets" the whole thing; I'd be shocked if anyone selling these things was also a collector. You either get the money or you give the money.

As a slight aside, I prefer to shut down and be sure that things are shut down. It really bothered me when Mac laptops started turning on just because the lid was open.

It makes it impossible to confirm the laptop is truly off, because opening it to check turns it on. This was especially annoying during my "boarding a plane" ritual where I check everything is right before settling in.

A plan for enforcement isn't really a prerequisite for regulation. It's especially not a prerequisite when there's no limit to the regulator's capacity to investigate and escalate penalties, should existing measures fall short.

It looks like there is a section called "Smart features and personalization" in the GMail settings (not the general Google account settings; specifically the GMail settings) under the General tab.

It indicates that "Gmail, Chat, and Meet may use my email, chat, and video content to personalize my experience and provide smart features. If I opt out, such features will be turned off."

It's strange that this major privacy setting is buried specifically in the GMail section and not mentioned in the main Google account Privacy Checkup. I never knew it existed.

> Isn't this controlled by the "Gmail smart features" setting...

I just went through the Google's "Privacy Checkup" and it wasn't clear to me where this setting is.

Also is the Takeout from 2019, or are there purchases from 2019 in a current Takeout? What specifically are you looking at in the screenshot?

> Do you all not not feel that the browser is ya know the user's agent?

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, depends on what the browser developers want.

That said, there is something dubious with how ad blockers take an author's written content, "liberate" it from the ads that pay the author's bills, and make it available for free.

I sense Brave is trying to solve that problem, but everything I've read about it seems weird.

(Separately I see nothing dubious about tracking protection. I wish tracking were less inseparable from the advertising; I'm perfectly willing to see ads as long as I'm not being shadow profiled).

> Swift has way too man shorthand syntaxes. It feels nice from a language design perspective but when teaching Swift, you can see how confusing it is for the students.

100% agree. As a late adopter of Swift, I spent a lot of time looking at code that was so stingy with information that it was challenging to even formulate a Google-able question from it.

> I do think that Brave would be 100% in the clear (same with any browser or extension) to "MiTM", modify, or refuse to display any part of any web page.

Taken literally this would mean that browsers would be allowed to re-write, either actively or by deleting sections, the actual content of articles. Surely there has to be some expectation that what a person publishes on the internet will be faithfully represented? And if faithful representation of the original is respected for the writing, why shouldn't it be respected for the writer's business/advertising arrangements?

Scrubs may be playing to play, and competitors may be playing to win, but only griefers are setting their own terms.

> Homebuyers will make purchasing decision based on their monthly mortgage payments, instead of the home price.

Which is crazy, right? People max out their "borrowing power" at low interest rates and take on huge loans, without considering that the declining interest rates that fueled past appreciation don't have much room left to move down, and that they'll be underwater on that huge loan if interest rates go up* and the value of the property declines.

*EDIT: To be clear, I mean interest rates on new loans being higher than they were before, not that the loan is variable-rate.

Real-world success is generally a matter of luck no matter what the incentives are. You can't make your cancer research pan out, you can only do it diligently and find out later if it was the right direction. You can definitely screw it up. But you can't make it work without a bit of luck.

If people can't keep their luck-based gains, no one has any real reason to try anything unusual. Everyone would be chasing the puck instead of skating to the open ice hoping to catch a break. Society would stagnate.

Is ssh-agent even worth the trouble?

I agree. There's value in people getting angry enough that they prefer to attack as hard as they can, instead of getting the best outcome for themselves.

> That deal "avoids costly litigation"

I guess it would be worse if this were criminal litigation and not civil litigation, but it's still kind of incredible to see such a naked admission that if you can outspend the attorney general's office, you'll get special treatment.

> I’ve built a functional MVP and got it in the hands of demo users thru TestFlight

Well done!

I definitely wanted them to fail, and I'm relieved that they did. If they'd succeeded there might have been an onslaught of additional clowns you'd have to filter out when looking for work.