username223

Because Google has A/B tested their ad badges to be subtle enough that most people miss them.

I wouldn't call it "malicious," but way more than 50% of what you download is stuff you don't want. For example, a random NY Times op-ed has 6730 characters of text, bur just the initial request is 454kb, so 98.5% of what you downloaded is overhead. Some of that is formatting markup, but probably 95% of it is junk. And that's just the initial request, which in turn pulls in the images, tracking scripts, and ads. In the end, probably 99% of what you downloaded to read those 6730 characters is stuff you didn't want.

I haven't noticed anything outside the usual merger of spam lists that goes along with corporate consolidation. Don't bother with their "unsubscribe" links, which are just signals that they've found an active address. Just route their traffic directly to trash.

IME the things advertised on podcasts are the same ones advertised on late-night TV and the Home Shopping Network back in the day. Unregulated supplements, mattresses, other Shopping Networks, and... apparently VPNs? Podcast advertisers are filling the bottom of the barrel, and hearing something advertised on a podcast mostly tells me that its sellers are shady and/or desperate.

I don't know about "mainly for the ads," but I did enjoy them in the early 90s. Moore's Law was going full steam, and hard drives, RAM, and processors were all just barely fast enough to run the latest cool games. Every month you'd see ads for computers, components, and peripherals that were better in ways that really mattered. Computer Shopper was a phone-book-sized candy catalog.

I don't play leading-edge games anymore, so personal computers have been plenty fast for me for years. But I wouldn't mind reading Byte with 50% tasteful, non-creepy ads.

That's pretty hacky, but still clever.

Out of curiosity, I recently wrote a little Elisp function to compute the "markup overhead" on a typical NY Times article, i.e. the number of characters in the main HTML page versus the number in a text rendering of it. It turns out that the page is 98.5% overhead. That doesn't even count the pointless images, ads, and tracking scripts that would also get pulled in by a normal browser. Including those, loading a simple 1000-word article probably incurs well over 99% overhead. Wow!

The original Perl docs are some of the best, with a nice balance of motivating "here's how to accomplish what you want" examples, and comprehensive reference material. It has grown flabby in newer versions, but parts of the original material remain.

App Library is a perfect demonstration of the adage that "Artificial Intelligence isn't." Mine has Audible, Clock, Settings, and Contacts in the first box, Craigslist, WhatsApp, something I don't recognize, and a folder of crap I don't use in the second, DDG, the App Store, Calculator, and another folder of crap in the third... Why would I ever use this?

EDIT: If it were marginally "intelligent," it would have a box for "listening to stuff" (Podcasts, Music, Audible, ...), "reading stuff" (DDG, Safari, Books, ...), "scheduling" (Calendar, Reminders, ...), etc. But I don't need AI constantly figuring these things out. I can put those apps in folders or known places on my home screen once, and never have to worry about them wandering around because an AI was trying to be helpful.

From Apple's support documentation (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/find-your-apps-in-app...): "The apps in App Library are organized in categories intelligently, based on how you use your apps. You can add apps in App Library to the Home Screen, but you can’t move them to another category in App Library." So I can't even make it less useless. Great.

> …it’s me isn’t it? This sounds like old man yells at cloud speak.

Not just you. Other than the automatic OCR of chunks of text in the camera, I can't think of a major feature in the last few years' iOS updates that I have enjoyed and regularly used. Apple used to produce surprisingly stable and snappy software on an OS that didn't have protected memory and ran on a toaster (Mac OS <= 9). Now it produces crashy trash on a teraflops machine with an MMU.

How about if, instead of making buttons harder to identify, Apple fixed the Podcasts app to take fewer than five seconds to load the "downloaded episodes" list? Or to hang and crash less often? Or to not randomly require an internet connection to play downloaded episodes? Or to make the "Listen Now" thing less of an opaque AI-driven roulette wheel of uselessness?

The use of "enslaved person" here is pretty laughable given the origin of "slave" as "Slav," because people liked to capture and sell Slavs hundreds of years ago (https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave). Also interesting that the Slavic word for "slave" is the origin of the word "robot."

So true! Area codes (and first three digits) used to indicate where you were. Now, more often than not, they indicate where you bought your first cell phone, i.e. where you lived around the year 2000 for us oldsters.

Haha! I remember latching onto school buses and other large vehicles at stoplights when I was younger. Stay close enough, and you could get sucked along at incredible speeds. It was interesting how some drivers would get super-pissed, while others would think "hey, that's awesome!" and help you stay attached.

Riding in a pack is a whole different experience, though. You have to be hyper-aware and -predictable in your lines, but the feeling of cruising along at over 20 MPH on a flat, aided only by your fellow cyclists, is something special.

> parents who frankly just don’t give a shit

They exist. What are you going to do with their children? Teachers are the people who have to answer that question.

> The more eggs you have in one basket, the more likely the basket is to break

This. Use Yahoo for your email, Verizon for your phone number, Dropbox for your backups, Facebook for your socials… It doesn’t matter which you choose, but fragment your digital life. When one part goes bad, it won’t infect the others.

I want to like this, because lots of outdoor gear from reputable companies makes me wonder if they even test it, and markups are something like 4x (2x from China to wholesale, 2x wholesale to retail). But first you need to buy a sewing machine, and then there are the materials. You will be paying small-volume prices for a dozen or so items before you make something like a pack.

Have you ever thought to build your own piece of furniture, gone to Home Depot for the parts, and come out thinking you could have just bought one pre-made for about the same cost? Unless you have specialized needs and some free time, it usually isn’t worth it.

> Like most people, I'm not jetting over to London to have lunch and sign a deal and heading home to sleep in my own bed.

Thank you for enlightening me. As someone nowhere near rich enough for this to be relevant, my upper bound for pleasant W-E transatlantic flight is being able to sleep. Shortening that sleep seems like a loss. But if you have a private jet on call, you can skip connecting flights, airport security, schedules, and all the things that actually make flying slow and miserable. I guess this company is aiming at the people who don’t quite have that kind of money.

Hmm… a personal website that has taken many hours over the past twelve years, a handful of abandoned Free Software projects, …

These things were and are valuable to some people, but I find “marketing” them somewhere between tiresome and repugnant, so I don’t.

I’m on board with corruption for the greater good. Giving Joe Manchin $1 billion and a yacht would be a bargain.

I’d go for historically very uncommon. fsync() meant “write RAM buffers to hard drive,” and if that failed, you were in a world of hurt, and should probably shut down while doing the least amount of additional harm. With NFS, the situation probably changed to “keep trying for a bit, but don’t do anything dramatic.”

As an American, I’m fascinated by your precise description of accents. We have plenty of our own, but we don’t categorize them that precisely. For example, I can usually distinguish between West Texas and North Carolina, but I probably couldn’t explain the difference.

> I find it easy to add type annotations where you want - but it's not needed that often.

That has been my experience as well: among optionally-typed languages, Julia is pretty good at inference, and at telling you why it gave up. This is critical when dealing with a language with a Sufficiently Smart Compiler that takes some convincing to do what you want.

If the article interests you, this reference is also worth your time:

https://tobydriscoll.net/blog/matlab-vs.-julia-vs.-python/

Good point, but you kind of miss the point. Some sports, like road cycling, have been all but reduced to one variable (how many W/kg can you produce?). Turning yourself into the world’s best road cyclist is a grim slog at the border of overtraining and starvation. Even more complex ones require serious dedication and sacrifice.

But at that point they’re jobs or obsessions. They’re something you do because you must, not because you enjoy it.

Min-maxing is a reliable way to suck the fun out of most things for me, too. Way back in High School my friends and I would get together and play bridge. We were certainly competitive, and became decent players, but it was as much about the trash-talking and socializing as about who won or lost.

Later I took a course with an ACBL life master, and learned the complex and completely artificial bidding systems and other ways to communicate every possible bit of information through quirky and limited channels. I guess some people find that fun, but to me it was mechanical and WORK. The game was less of a game.

Less pessimistic than 5-10 years ago, but that’s not saying much. Carbon-free energy sources like solar and wind will soon be cheaper than fossil fuels if they aren’t already, so greed will push us rapidly in the right direction. Unfortunately the climate is a big ship, and we have been steering it toward warming for a long time. Things will get much worse before they stabilize, particularly for the poor and for most species other than humans. Drought, famine, migration, war, and xenophobia might even get bad enough to temporarily make our population decline.

I’m glad I’m not the only one seeing these problems. App flushes have felt more aggressive and arbitrary, and apps are hit and miss for remembering state. Podcasts seems to be one of the worst for me, relaunching into the useless “listen now” state, or just hanging for 10 seconds before crashing. Apple really needs to spend a year just squashing bugs.

It may be hard to believe until you see it, but a nontrivial number of people are perceptive enough to know that attention-seeking gets them what they want, but not calculating enough to disguise it.

So true. Developers work for free on stuff that scratches their itches, so we have a wealth of free text editors and shells. On the other hand, you have to pay for a decent word processor, because the people who can write one don’t use one enough to be driven to work on it.

Yep. Facebook Messenger isn’t E2E encrypted by default, it takes a bit of digging to make it that way, and Facebook obeys warrants for unencrypted messages. This may be important if you’re doing something recently made illegal.

This was a big red flag for me, too. There’s a reason the term “bike-shedding” exists among developers.

You want to keep the bikes dry, and what color you paint the shed, or whether you call the paint “tan” or “beige,” matters not at all. Labeling people who disagree with you about the paint color as “bullies,” and fighting them to the death, is profoundly useless. Just ask yourself what really matters, and let the rest go.