4,136 karma · joined July 31, 2013
I just tried, and it's great! I had forgotten that search could be so snappy and simple. The more likely outcome, unfortunately, is that Google would adjust its UA-sniffing to serve the same 2019 bloat to "Firefox."
We've already been down that road with heroin, and it wasn't pretty: http://www.businessinsider.com/yes-bayer-promoted-heroin-for...
For some version of "lost." It lost to $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MOMENT for web development, but Perl is still a great text-munging and glue language, and I'll bet I'm not the only one using it for that. It didn't take over the world, but I'll bet that most people interact with a bit of Perl every day.
I agree that Rust is syntactically insane. Worse, while a Shell-and-C programmer would have some intuition about Perl syntax, a C++ programmer will almost start from scratch in Rust.
This could be fixed with a bit of courage. Firefox could use "Firefox", Safari "Safari," etc. UA sniffing and UA strings are completely absurd at this point, and need to go away.
> - List of Plugins
JavaScript should not see this, especially not their versions.
The last three are harder to avoid for "responsive" web design. One attribute you didn't mention was the font list. There is no good reason for JavaScript to be able to see this. The model should be that the page requests a font, and the browser uses either that or its best try at a substitute.
If you start selling it, or make it a business, then it becomes everyone's problem, and government should step in. If/when weed is legalized nationally, the big tobacco companies (plus a few others) will smell money, take over the market, and advertise like crazy; then we'll have to set some limits.
Drugs have to be regulated on a case-by-case basis. Caffeine is available to anyone and untaxed. Alcohol is only available to those over 21, and taxed. Tobacco, 18 and heavily taxed. Opium? I'm not comfortable with selling opium becoming a legal business model. Like most things in life, drug legalization is a compromise.
Wow... Thats cormac mccarthy level bleak but at least honest and I hope not to live in the world your labor may bring into being.
EdTech is mostly just a scam to siphon public school money to private companies. I'd rather just lobby my school district to pay teachers more.
A few years ago, a friend gave me his old mid-level Samsung phone for free. It was a piece of garbage, and I hated using it, but I put up with it until it died. Afterwards, I looked around for something decent that wasn't too expensive, and settled on a refurbished iPhone SE. It cost a couple hundred dollars, and still works just fine. It doesn't have all of the latest bells and whistles, but it's good enough, and actually fits in my pocket.
I'm not against ad-supported businesses, but I'll bet Google would have made plenty of money off plain old search ads, probably enough to make Gmail free for everyone. If not, they could have charged a few bucks a month, or shown untargeted ads. In any case, they wouldn't have had an enormous database of PII, just waiting to be hacked or mined in more malicious ways when the ad bubble pops (e.g. credit reports, insurance).
> There's no "right" thing to work on.
Really[1]? We're paying hucksters 5-10x what we're paying teachers now. If that's what the market demands, then the market is twisted.
[1] http://www.metrolyrics.com/wernher-von-braun-lyrics-tom-lehr...
That's the saddest part. A lot of talented people could be working on important problems, but instead they're trying to make people click on ads a tenth of a percent more, so they will buy Crest slightly more often than Colgate.
I guess it's no worse than going into finance: just another way for someone with talent and ambition to make a boatload of money while providing almost no value to society (and sometimes negative value). Still, one could hope that talented people would sacrifice a bit of lucre to do some good. The inventors of Arpanet don't have rocket companies, but I bet they're living comfortably.
As for the rest, I find it refreshing that the NYT and Guardian are "bleeping" fewer quotes. I don't think the paper itself should start working blue, but if someone swears in an interview, you should print what they said.
EDIT: Oh, I hadn't read that particular article. It doesn't bother me much, but profanity is a crutch. I'm fine with it in day-to-day conversation and blog posts, but a professional writer using it in an opinion piece is lazy.
I never would have thought that the Pythons were inspired by medieval meme culture...
Do you know a number on the difference between targeted and untargeted search (not display) ads? If I search for "instant pot," I'm probably looking to buy an instant pot. How much does knowing my entire search and browsing history help the advertiser? I'm sure Google has these numbers, and equally sure they aren't sharing.
It looks like there may be big differences for display ads (2-3x?), but for search?
I saw (fenced-in) goats trimming grass in the Berkeley Hills as far back as 2000. I'm sure people were doing it long before then.
> why isn't this done more often
Possibly because it's hard to make sure than none of the goats escape, breed, and wreak havoc on the native species. Eradicating invasive species can be unbelievably expensive and brutal (e.g. helicopters and machine guns), even on small islands. Hopefully they've embedded GPS trackers in all of their goats, but I still suspect that they're taking chances.
EDIT (because I'm apparently "posting too fast"): Yes, dogs traditionally do this in Europe, the States, and other places. I just thought it was interesting that llamas can also do it, since they aren't carnivores. The details of why they do it are also interesting.
Beavers were being air-dropped, and there are movies of it:
Wow, I didn't realize it had become so efficient, but I shouldn't be surprised. I never really understood the value in hosting non-public software in the public, and if it's open source, it shouldn't be getting anywhere near secrets that can be used to extract money from its developers.
I remember thinking, back when it became trendy for people to upload their personal dotfiles to Github, that it would be a source of endless suffering. Who knows what information you're leaking in your ".profile" or ".bashrc"? Is that risk justified by the dubious benefit of storing your dotfiles on the internet for everyone to see, forever?
What else would you expect for auto-updating software that relies on the internet to work? It's a monoculture attached to a firehose of disease.
This is exactly the same as "pushing out a security fix to all users," except it apparently wasn't intentional. You can't have one without the other.
If you want something to print beautifully, you take the time to put the figures and pictures exactly where you think they fit. If you want something to be read with arbitrary text sizes, you hope they'll show up somewhere near the relevant text. Treating a book as an ebook, or vice versa, will always be a compromise.
And then they added JavaScript to it:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.html
No, it's just plain immoral, not to mention short-sighted. American primary and secondary schools are also squeezing their teachers, by hiring Filipinos on J-1 visas, just like tech companies do with H-1Bs.
It's a bit like like making room in your fridge by pushing everything back, then adding new stuff. It works for awhile, but eventually leaves you with a mess of spoiled milk and rotten vegetables in the back. You can only strip-mine a hill for so long before it's gone.
Most of us posting here will die of old age before things really get ugly. It's our children or grandchildren who will suffer.
> The Journal says that paying users would "reward the kind of genuine interaction that Facebook, beset by bots and hate speech, has been trying to encourage." But it's not clear how these payments would discourage bots or hate speech. To the contrary, botmakers would inevitably ramp up their efforts to generate fake traffic with bots in order to earn Facebook's cryptocurrency.
So they're either lying or stupid; probably the former, since they're an ad company, and have years of experience with "click fraud."
Then one is left to wonder why it makes sense to have a centralized cryptocurrency, instead of just a database. I imagine there are tax and regulatory advantages versus just being honest and becoming a payment processor. No chargebacks, for example.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/report-facebook-...
Climate change is a "solved" problem, but the solution isn't something I would want to live through.