toxican

Why wouldn't they though? Astroturfing gets around adblockers entirely and reaches those who are ad-adverse because they don't necessarily realize it's an ad. It's nothing new either, it's just the internet equivalent of sitcoms having name brand products visible (and "coincidentally" turned turned so the logo faces the camera) during the show or "I, Robot" having "retro" chucks featured prominently (although obviously way more subtle than that).

My assumption is that McDonalds pays advertising companies to put ads together and distribute them. Why wouldn't they throw a couple hundred bucks at a few low-key ads in a few reddit posts. Doesn't take that many people to buy McDonalds before it pays for itself.

Busted how though? It's not like McDonalds, for example, would use a Mc-branded account to post random things to reddit with clearly visible McDonald cups or whatever. They'd use some throwaway account or buy an established account and buy upvotes to target that account's post. Reddit has no way to punish them for that. Maybe the reddit users find out and get pissed, but the site has no attention span and they'll forget and move on in a week.

But the best kind of ad is the kind the enduser doesn't realize is an ad. Not to mention that cross-posting happens all the time so your "ad" can make it all over the site for a day or so. And if it goes viral enough on reddit, it'll inevitably be picked up by a multitude of websites built around leaching content from reddit. Obviously there's no guarantee that it'll work any given time, but try it enough over a span of time and I can see how it would be more effective than traditional advertisements.

It's why Facebook ads look identical to posts at a glance. If you don't know it's an ad, you're more likely to click it, share it, like it, etc.

I would really hope that something as critical as aviation instruments have the capacity to be updated to account for this and that it's been treated like a mini-Y2K with lots of fixes made ahead of time. But I guess we'll see...

What's more likely? The iPhone has some hidden, subtle responsibility for the death of Steampunk -or- something niche like Steampunk found mainstream success, over saturated the pop culture market, then fizzled away back to something niche again?

It's like someone picked two topics out of a hat (iPhone, Steampunk) and was tasked with writing an article about them. iPhones (and smartphones in general) were definitely a cultural phenomenon, but there's literally nothing tangible connecting them to Steampunk aside from the author's shallow, fluffed up wordsmithing.

Wild Wild West was a bad movie, but I think the whole steampunk aspect of it was really interesting and well done. Not-Will-Smith's decked out spy train car was really cool. The steam-powered spider mech was a little hokey in retrospect, but still kinda awesome in its own way.

For small projects, large files, or one-off files, it's Sublime for me. For work on my existing/massive project at work, it's phpStorm. For everything else it's usually VSCode.

I made the switch to vanilla JS from jQuery a year or so ago and it's great to see how jQuery (and other libs) pushed vanilla in certain directions. But I'll always miss $('#element') vs getElementById('element') and similar shortcuts.

I don't think "nerd" holds the negative connotation it once did. All these ultra-wealthy silicon valley types, the abundance of tech in our daily lives, etc. have shaved away the edges on that term, imo. I certainly don't take offense to being a called a nerd, at least.

They admitted to encountering the literal definition of UFO -- "Unidentified Flying Object", which in no way at all proves or even suggests alien activity. If you want to get annoyed with the media, direct it at them convincing people that "UFO" = aliens

You reminded me of this story I read a while back about how an indoor pot farm was identified because the heat from the grow lights melted the snow on the roof and apparently in the Netherlands that was enough to get a warrant - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/netherland...

While looking for that story, I came across a wiki article about a similar story in the US, although the police there used thermal imaging to identify the farm from outside the home. That was ruled that constitutes a search w/o a warrant in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States I would suspect observing suspiciously melted roof snow in the US wouldn't violate the law like using thermal imaging would.

I don't know German law, but I could see how that could get you a search warrant if Dutch and American law are any indication.

Well I guess we should just give up and not try to do it better this time!

Who says it has to be people with ties to the tech giants? You don't need to suckle at Google's teat to understand the underlying technology and advise on it. And introducing an enforced ban on lobbying for x years (ideally forever, imo) after their government employment ends would help curb corruption.

> technically capable to do the job

Colloquially known as "nerds"

My kneejerk reaction is that the Google of 2008, even 2012, isn't the same Google of 2019. Maybe that's political bias talking.

All the same, not crazy about politicians and corporations being so cozy, regardless of affiliation.

@temporal

Have you seen the prices for VGA cables, cat5, etc. at Walmart, best buy, etc.? They absolutely will jack the price up because they know the only people who buy that stuff there are ignorant or too desperate to wait for shipping.

Okay so two things cause the sound of the mechanical keyboard. The switch itself, and the bottom of the key hitting the are beneath the keys (called bottoming out, I believe). You can buy rubber rings that quiet out the bottoming out issue, but as for the switch sounds, red or black cherrymx switches are quietest.

If you want to cheaply try out mechanical keyboarding, I'd recommend the brand Redragon on Amazon. They've got a few options and they're in the $25-$50 range. I've had my K552 for almost two years now and I don't have any complaints. I program and game on it daily.

RP servers are a blast. Even if you don't RP, the RP community makes for a much friendlier and livelier server than non-RP ones do, imo. But do try RP! It's a lot of fun and very challenging at times.

I'm really excited to play Classic and I'm worried about this. Everyone talks about how difficult Vanilla was, but there was also substantially less well-organized information about min/maxxing, boss fights, strategies, etc. The info existed, but it was messy, scattered, and a lot of folks didn't even know it existed. In 2019 WoW-focused YouTube channels and Twitch streams are a dime a dozen, there are quite a few sites focused on min/maxxing, and we've also got past experiences to make Classic substantially easier/smoother than Vanilla was.

But like I said, I'm worried about that. So I'm trying to avoid as much info about Classic as I can. I pre-registered my character based off of my first main character in WoW, rather than what's raid-viable. I aim to avoid guides and stay the hell away from easy-mode addons (Quest Helper, DBM, etc.). I want to recapture as much of my original experience as I can.

Right because destroying small town businesses, unethical employee treatment, etc. didn't push folks away, but a fire at a walmart somewhere in the country will.

Seems pretentious as hell, to be honest.

I'm inclined to agree with Lewis over Pegg here. There is no reality where all adults set aside all "trivial" things to focus entirely on social issues, injustices, etc. That's just not how the world works. People can do multiple things. I can collect funkopops and care about social issues. I can build/collect Lego sets and care about injustices. The beauty of adulthood is the freedom to choose what you want to do (well, mostly).

If you put those "childish" things ahead of more important things, yeah that's a problem. But collecting something that brings you joy isn't inherently dangerous.

Ha, that's a good point. I never could really get into using RSS feeds for whatever reason. It's possible I'd lose interest in this approach to media consumption for similar reason (whatever they are).

> You mean like a browser?

I can see this being a nice alternative to a few browser options for checking the latest across multiple sites. Pinned tabs, "Open All" bookmark folder, loose tabs, etc. Not ideal, imo, so having them all in one place and unified under a single UI might be kind of nice.

Can't really speak to the UI though since this is unfortunately macOS only :(

It's built on Electron and still no native Linux client. There's a web version, but you can't join meetings or screenshare. There are 3rd party wrappers for the web version that enable meetings, but you still can't screenshare.

At the very least their web version needs to have parity with the desktop application. It's 2019, browsers can handle voice chat and screensharing!

I just want to know who thought it was a good idea to return results with zero context around them and no way to jump to that point in a conversation. Right now the best you can do is search to find a date, then scroll up until you hit that date (which takes forever, since it lazy loads the convo one "screen" at a time)

I suppose you could point a webcam at the whiteboard, although there are a lot of options out there for online collaboration. We use MS stuff at work and multiple people can live-edit Word, One Note, etc. docs for example.

While I wouldn't put it past Google to do something nefarious to make this happen, I have noticed they like to take super bleeding edge features and run with them before they're standard, simply because they can. Could be the result of that.

I struggle to think of a less applicable situation for that quote.

Of course it is. It didn't go away because you don't use it.