I’m not saying one shouldn’t endeavor to terminate spammers immediately, but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t matter if you do, because as soon as you terminate the account, another one’s gonna be spun up immediately with another fake identity. The only thing that would change that would be the exact kind of heavy-handed identity-verification BS that most of us don’t really care for. And even then, it will only change it slightly. Spammers will be paying people in the third world $20 to use their passport to sign up for a cloud hosting account so they can spam for a few days.
I definitely love this approach IRL. I think the closest you can get is watching what users try when they’re unfamiliar with the application. Sadly, it seems like actual user testing is rarer now than ever.
“UX Designers” seem to worship at the Jony Ive/Alan Dye altar of minimalism and “airiness” and tell anyone who will listen that every type of user, for every type of task, gets “overwhelmed” if you give them ‘too many choices,’ so instead of natural direct paths that people would have chosen, modern software is more like a series of white rooms with exactly three exits each, and the exits are labeled with an icon when they’re labeled at all (many are impossible to label because they’re swipe gestures), and other exits only appear when you step near them (the hover nonsense).
From an outsider standpoint it all seems so insane. The water is there — the way we do it in the world I know isn’t to have, say, Czechs slaughter Germans for decades until they get to the sea, in this case they made a deal to be part of a common market which makes it simple. But even in the absence of the EU etc. I still think they’d (at least in this century) negotiate for access to a convenient railroad, offer to pay to expand a port so both sides profit, etc.
I’m in this camp as well. I can’t stand the anti-intellectual trend, but the cultural elites in America got high on their own supply and just untethered themselves from reality, while our economic elites betrayed everyone by changing the economy into a machine that only benefits some people with college degrees while tricking another giant swath into buying useless degrees on credit. It’s more anti-elitism going on than anti-intellectualism. And they brought it on themselves. They should have offered something better.
All of us foreign colonialists would much prefer countries to be run by competent adults. There’s far more wealth to be gotten by trading with a state that functions properly, like say, Australia or even India where plenty of corruption exists but is kept in check… compared to the circus that is countries ruled by warring clans and outright 100% corruption like the worst cases in Africa.
I’m a lot less worried about corruption in a country that has real elections. Trump is corrupt. He is exceptionally corrupt. But he won’t be President forever. If we elect Trump Jr. or something, well, that’s on us.
In Africa, the winner of elections is usually known up front because they’re not real. One clan/party rules until another one stages a successful bloody coup, and repeat on a 1/5/10/20 year cycle depending on the country.
The swf player was definitely smaller, through some miracle — I remember marveling at how quick it was to install it the first time, and I’m pretty sure that’s a big reason Flash became so ubiquitous that you could just blindly assume its presence by 2002 or so - the install was small even for dial-up, and required like one click.
But compared to the average internet user’s connection speed or their consumed bandwidth at this time, 10MB is probably smaller. We just don’t put it in a plugin today because the browser cache can handle that just fine, and because it means the code is more sandboxed, and that if it needs updates, managing that is easy for the game publisher to do.
I agree, hilarious check. Someone realized that the set of browsers you probably don’t want to support today, and the Flash supporting browsers … the Venn diagram is actually a circle
Wow. Except for what appears to be a stateless gearshift (Not that that isn’t standard-issue these days), A+. Look at all those physical switches and knobs, whose location I would learn to use with zero looking away from the road needed in a few weeks.
Yup. Idk about how it was 10 years ago but the whole weird conceit of ChromeOS where it “only has a browser” seems like it’s not delivering on one of the main points I thought it was useful for, which is resource efficiency.
I don’t think school districts have the necessary thousands of highly-paid lawyers it would take to scare Google. Schools might join a class-action and get 20% credits for the 2 years of lost support, towards their next purchase, which Google will make sure is a little bit more expensive. The schools aren’t going to switch to Macs that cost literally 2x and are more fragile.
Besides, I’d be shocked if any Chromebook lasts 8 years in a school! Kids literally stick metal in the ports to fry them on purpose, and drop and throw them, etc.
Not saying Google is good, just that they don’t care about this and have no business need to care.
They’ve already got the necessary lawyers to negotiate the class action settlement and to send checks for a portion of the purchase price to every class member, and they calculated that this would still save them money vs. whatever the alternative was.
Agree from a branding standpoint. Idk what a googlebook is or is going to be, but if it’s kneecapped the same way Chromebook, Android, and “iPad OS” are, it’s never going to be a real competitor.
And by this I mean being captive to App Store/Play Store, the weird “everything has to be inside Chrome” thing of Chromebook, the obtuse window-management contortions of iPad, etc. People expect to be able to install software of their choice on a real computer. I already have a smartphone. I don’t need a second giant one with a keyboard.
If they want to actually compete they should put their weight behind a real Linux distribution that works normally. Totally OK to add all the custom features they want, like running Android apps. But just don’t make it so weird.
(And no, developer-mode side loading doesn’t change any of that.)
The best thing about all character-based applications I've ever used is the keyboard buffer. Even if you're using a TUI on a system that has a slow backend, it almost always blocked the thread and didn't consume from the buffer during waits, so if you knew the sequence of keys was "Total, F1, 1, Enter, Enter, Tab, 2125551234, F10, 1, Enter" you could just enter all those keystrokes as fast as you could and the system would eventually catch up with you, meanwhile you were bagging a purchase or counting out the cash, whatever.
The GUI also has lag - especially in the era of web-technologies-bloat, more lag than ever - but whether touchscreen or mouse there can't be a buffer, so each lag requires you to stare waiting for the next UI to be drawn.
> Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.
Somehow I think I failed to think very deeply about this very important link! The twin happenings of the elimination of any retail career that pays a living wage, and the availability of GUIs and especially touch-screen GUIs happened simultaneously over a couple of decades, and the touch-screen dummy interface naturally won out. Not just because training that used to take two days for the 'green-screen' system I learned in 2001 now takes 15 minutes of instruction (and even that training is rather redundant for anyone over 95 IQ) -- also because the massive differential in productivity of an expert vs. new cashier/teller/pharmacy tech/etc. only even manifests if people are on the job long enough to become expert. And they're really not anymore.
Kinda why I prefer self-checkout. Even though the UI is firmly in "dummy" territory and I have to use a touch screen, I've used the current iteration of the self-checkout software more transactions than most cashiers I meet at Target, since they seem to have been there about 2 weeks on average.
For many years ending around, a Bloomberg BusinessWeek paper magazine subscription was an incredible bargain. It was often possible (through tons of discount magazine sites) to get it for like $25 a year or less, and you could link that subscription online to get access to a lot of Bloomberg.com articles. Far from Terminal access of course, but I still really enjoyed the in-depth journalism and analysis. Around 2020 or so they pulled it off that type of distribution, now it's $100 a year and doesn't come with any online access other than the magazine articles themselves. And the full subscription to digital is $400 a year. It's priced just high enough to make it hard to justify for those who aren't real finance professionals. I really miss Bloomberg since the hard paywall went up.
UI designers who were trained in the currently-popular paradigm would be at a complete loss to design such things. "Swipe left from the home screen, tap the nothingness on the screen to reveal the controls overlay, find the ••• in one corner of the screen, tap "More" in the 3-item menu, and then tap 'Bond Quote' in the modal dialog that takes over the entire screen." Keyboard shortcuts? "Hmm... interesting idea. Never thought of that. We might add those in a V2."
Or perhaps this is proof that the "right-wing US government" isn't pure corruption and evil? They probably put out a bid and Google won it.
Trump is a corrupt idiot at the most petty level, he'd sell ad space on the White House napkins for $1 each if he could figure out a way to, but not everything the Executive Branch does is a joke.
To pile on, they have even shown they don't even know the difference between 'searching' and 'accepting as correct the output of a braindead, cut-rate AI model' - as proven by the success of "AI Overview." People need all the help they can get.
> people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
Meh, the kind of person who would accept bot output without even reading its sources are already trusting the world's dumbest model, Google's "AI Overview" by searching and reading that instead of clicking any results. If we can get even some of them to start out at america.gov instead of google.com for those questions, it's likely going to be far higher quality due to using a better model and having been trained, I assume, to only answer using knowledge from a .gov primary source rather than guessing based on vibes, or on jokes once seen on Reddit, as AI Overview tends to.
The one thing that sticks out here the most is how little interest regular people from competing powers have in hostility toward other nations' people. And it makes perfect sense. I detest Putin, I distrust the CPC, etc. but recognize that effectively all Russians and Chinese people are just like me, share most of the same values, and want the exact same things.
Idk, I get it. Even as someone who hated being a teen, I’m glad that I can, with maturity, see the positives of that time period. We miss being young because we miss having so many potential options in life, having simpler feelings and opinions, and having so little actual responsibility. Like, for those of us over 40, doing homework for an hour or two a day felt like sadism and like so much pressure. But as an adult who has to figure out how to pay for rent and bills, and has to work all day most weeks of the year, I wouldn’t mind if the expectations of me were limited to learning lots of stuff for 3 seasons a year.
> Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later.
Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.
Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.
The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.