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zerkten

1,420 karma · joined August 5, 2016

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zerkten··on Apple has not destroyed Steve Jobs' vision for iPad
A problem is that these device variations now overlap. Originally when Apple was selling a lifestyle there was a clear choice between available options. The current options often force you into a decision about buying up which affects typical consumers the most.

I have a 2018 iPad Pro which I use for Lightroom amongst other things. I'd like to replace it with something new as I need OS support long term and it'll be a fine device to use with our bike trainer. The current iPad Air blows it out of the water, except for the screen downgrade.

Do I suck it up and save some money, or go with the latest iPad Pro? There is a lot more thinking involved than there used to be. It's much more challenging for regular consumers because the iPad pricing ceiling has been pushed higher on top of accessory considerations. This pattern repeats across the lines because it's known to generate more revenue.

zerkten··on Pricing Pages – A Curated Gallery of Pricing Page Designs
A lot of this comes down to A/B testing. Once people have found a solution that converts some number of customers, it's hard to take risks. There are alternative designs, but it's safest to just go with what is known. In some cases, the familiarity is helpful for users, but there is no denying that it can be boring. These are the unfortunate constraints that many talented people have to work in.
zerkten··on Vibe code is legacy code
>> It was crazy just how fast it was exploited.

People underestimate the speed, but also the number of pivots that advanced attackers will make. Sure, these kinds of problems are easy to exploit, but with major organizations that employ reasonable defenses, the attackers will pivot through 50+ exploits/machines/layers to get to the target(s). This can take place over weeks or months.

zerkten··on A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab (2006)
Blogging on personal blogs was somewhat condoned back then. There was a period when MS was really encouraging personal blogs and then they pulled back from this to focus on blogs hosted on their platform.

Channel 9 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_9_(Microsoft)) was taking off and they were doing video all around their campus. It was a real look behind the curtain and probably an element of the foundation for their adoption of open source.

zerkten··on Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction
>> For example one of the last things I experienced was one of the electricians needed to get a cable through the concrete upper floor, and just couldn't do the calculations on where to drill and ended up drilling into the middle of the wall instead of right next to it.

The exact same problem exists for small manufacturers in the US. There are lot of people who believe they should have jobs in skilled trades and check some boxes but are missing fundamentals.

zerkten··on Win, lose, or draw: trends in English football match results
I think what you are observing is for it to be more valuable to own any part of the Premier League. The top clubs were spoken for long ago in terms of ownership, so anyone looking for a piece of the pie needs to pick clubs lower down. When picking a club, you want one that has stability.

Eventually you get people having to invest in riskier clubs, like Leeds United, who don't quite have traction as they float in and out of the Premier League. This is still viewed as more valuable than other European leagues.

There are factors like ownership rules, limits on tickets prices, and politics in other leagues which make it less attractive for external entities to buy in. Therefore, there is less value in owning a smaller piece of it.

As with the Super League you'll get a lot of resistance from the clubs and authorities when there is a threat to some of the big clubs. They know that when things start changing, investment will come to some of the smaller and less successful clubs which will change the dynamics. Everyone knows that it'll change many elements of the game and people are rightly protective when they can be.

zerkten··on Win, lose, or draw: trends in English football match results
I feel exactly the same way. Scoring, or high scoring draws along with metrics like attempted shots would be an interesting element to look at. A team like Manchester United where there is data for long periods of droughts and success show how some of these metrics go through the floor in what fans would identify as bad times (there are so many poor-quality draws since Ferguson left.)

I found it particularly interesting that someone from the UK (as the author appears to be) suggested that draws might be boring. In my personal experience, that tends to be a North American phenomenon (not that others don't or can't express that feeling).

On a related note, Cricket draws can be epic. There are many examples like https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2009/dec/06/michael-athert....

zerkten··on At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
It might not be fully clear to the reader, but many of these Post Office franchises are co-located with a Spar, or other shop. People have to go to the Post Office (IME to a greater extent than here in the US where I now live) and they then shop for other items. Obviously, other businesses tend to cluster around as well.

There are situations where franchisees don't offer other services. These folks tend to be older and for most of the life of the franchise haven't had the need for additional income earlier in the life of the franchise. They don't have the energy and don't want to take on the risk of expanding now. When they retire, they'll probably close up shop as their children have other jobs.

The rural Post Office where I grew up in the 80s and 90s was accessible to a wide area just off the main road. It served a wider area than the current one. The Postmistress' family also farmed. When that closed the natural place to setup was in the closes village because that was projected to grow in population. That development would result in the old Post Office building being knocked down to make way for a dual carriageway. Eventually a few more Post Office franchises appeared with their shops in that part of the county.

People can read more at https://runapostoffice.co.uk/.

zerkten··on Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
It's incredible that this is only arriving in 2025.
zerkten··on Web3 Onboarding Was a Flop – and Thank Goodness
Web 3.0 was a synonym for the Semantic Web (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web), but the term was taken over by crypto folks as it dropped off after the mid-2000s.
zerkten··on What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?
You can be sensitive to both, and good institutions have a duty to check instructors who go strongly in a single direction. I think the point is only to exclude the crutch in contexts where it affects learning. Being prepared for work is only one element of education. Its weight varies by course, institution, and many other factors.

Further, there are likely situations where the participants avail of AI to different extents based on how they feel about the situation (cf. different degrees of doping in athletics), and students will sometimes be limited by their means in use of AI tools.

zerkten··on Show HN: Ikuyo a Travel Planning Web Application
Interesting app. Planning, expenses, and keeping people on track during the trip are some ways I'd think about using the app. TripIt is what we use for the latter. All things get recorded there starting with flights that bookend the trip. That's particularly low friction to get going. You know what you need to fill in next whether it's transport or accommodation.

Your app seems to appeal to the planner type of personality making it too high friction for me. I like to plan trips, but this approach is just way too heavyweight. If I was to suggest an approach that might augment what you have while being structured to an extent (I don't love the shared doc approach) is to allow someone to sketch an itinerary on a map. Then zoom to each general location and do searches for known things to add. Also allow the option to search for general things like restaurants in the vicinity. Bringing in this Google Maps-esque approach would help me.

zerkten··on Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
I've done the same with Windows, but I had a unique bug with Storage Spaces and did some debugging to identify driver issues to include with the report. I guess the reason it was fixed was because there was similar feedback without the debugging on the Windows Feedback app and because the blast radius was small. It was just one .sys file, but even then Storage Spaces is relatively contained.

Compare that to any GUI-related issue. Almost every surface has some kind of unsupported/unexpected hooking or reliance on unchanging elements because some company has built a tool that integrates. They've then sold this to Fortune 500s who explode if Windows blows up their tool. This makes the startup cost for fixing many things very expensive.

If you report issues related to higher profile/usage functionality then you are less likely to get traction because:

* They know about the issue already, but it's a really hard to fix for some reason which may not be obvious to you. All stakeholders are not equal in the decision process hence compatibility concerns win in some situations.

* Even if they decide to fix it, a huge amount of effort has to go into scheduling the fix in a release. Some authority may agree to go fix it and everyone is excited. That's just the start of a painful process to implement and test the fix.

zerkten··on Show HN: W++ – A Python-style scripting language for .NET with NuGet support
Does this start up quickly on the first execution? IronPython and other languages have problems with JIT resulting in minor delays to execution which are frustrating for quick scripts. There was a change in IronPython to interpret and not JIT on the first run to avoid this delay. Anything you use to remove JIT delays for quick scripts will increase the likelihood of adoption. Running JIT on repeat runs is a beneficial feature so you don't want to kill it entirely.

As others have stated, the use of semicolons while stating this is "like Python" is weird. Use language which avoids the direct Python comparison. It seems like your language is intended to be succinct. Just state that because it'll avoid negative reactions. I'm a C# and Python dev, so I'd rather you avoided this in-between state.

Killing semicolons and braces to embrace indentation would be my preference for a scripting language that is intended to appeal to my Python-side. If the intention is to appeal purely to C# devs, then don't mention Python at all because they often jump to "indentation, ugh" without considering your language.

zerkten··on Show HN: Oliphaunt – A native Mastodon client for macOS
Why is a separate process necessary here?
zerkten··on My stackoverflow question was closed so here's a blog post about CoreWCF
I had 15k reputation score at one time on SO. It recently dropped down to due to people deleting their accounts. There are review queues which appear on the top nav incentivizing power users with enough rep to go in and take action like closing requests.

Having met many SO power users in group settings over the years, I feel that there is very little tolerance for questions that require effort to understand. If it's a simple question posed by a non-English speaker that needs some thought, then it doesn't belong (but that's why comments were introduced later.) The same goes for a deeper technical question where the author gets it all out but doesn't take the time to structure or format it. The volume of behavior like this differs based on the type of question and experts prepared to weigh in.

This gets compounded by the up and comers on the reputation scale. They get their special powers and see this BOFH close behavior and replicate it. Over time it starts to become the norm. I had the ability to vote for reopens and these same people would argue about why this was a bad idea. They weren't prepared to admit they were wrong and felt they were doing God's work by ridding the site of poor questions when some of us even had the ability to make edits to clarify them.

I just opened the site after some time away. At the top, pushing the question list below the fold, are: Reputation, Badge Progress, and Watched Tags blocks. The Interesting Posts for You question feed is below that and I have to go see how that is constructed. I only ever wanted the firehose of new questions with my tags highlighted.

EDIT: The behavior I noted above is yet example of why I always want to know how a job candidate deals with ambiguity. In my experience, this has a massive impact on the ability to work independently, not piss off colleagues/clients/customers, and make good decisions.

zerkten··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
I think you need to add that many more developers, or even teams of developers, are building these apps. They have their own fiefdoms and it's less common for devs to have a complete understanding of the code base.

Over time decisions are made independently by devs/teams which cause the code bases to get out of alignment with a performant design. This is exacerbated by the growth pressure. It's then really hard for someone to come in and optimize top to bottom because there is everything from a bug to a design problem. Remediation has significant overhead, so only things around the edges are touched.

Fast forward a couple of years and you have a code base that devs struggle to evolve and add features to as well as keep performant. The causes are many and we come to the same one whether we complain about performance or maintainability. You probably don't feel this way, but Stripe and other premier engineering companies are way ahead of others in terms of their practices when you compare with the average situation developers are facing.

Independent mobile development is often where I see most attention to performance these days. The situation for these devs is a little bit closer to what existed in the nineties. They have a bigger span of control and performance is something they feel directly so are incentivized to ensure it's great.

zerkten··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
>> they don't support system calls to dialog windows.

It's a little unclear what you mean exactly. Do you want the browsing experience changed for the system's file open/save dialogs? i.e. a third-party file explorer opens instead with all of it's features.

zerkten··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
Have you tried xplorer²? I only know about it because I was into Windows programming using the WTL eons ago.
zerkten··on Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?
Product managers will decide to show the thumbnail in situations because it results in more click throughs. In many cases they'll have done their research to know that many customers take steps to restrict what they share (think profitable but conservative companies) but will choose to show the thumbnails anyway.

Some customers will push back and have enough leverage to get an exception, but the default answer will be that this can't be disabled. You'll have some sales engineer challenged about the product behavior as part of an RFP and they'll try to convince you that nothing is leaked while knowing the financial opportunity would be much larger with these customers, if there was more concern for the customer.

zerkten··on Global, distributed and backwards compatible CVE alternative launched by CERT
I was asking myself the same thing. Is the "CIRCL - Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg" a partner organisation to CERT? I don't follow this very closely, but it felt like there was some kind of global network. I'd be curious if there was a continuity plan of some sort. There is also https://cert.europa.eu/ which might be used interchangeably.
zerkten··on Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees
The Bat! is a Windows client that focused on those things to a large extent. However, the fact that RitLabs are based on Moldova gives me pause. It did have MAPI support, so it was somewhat workable in company situations which used Outlook.
zerkten··on Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks
A problem is that the proposed audience are individuals who struggle with options. Giving them more options doesn't help them. Enabling a power user mode with user creation, voting, etc. would be valuable for others. I suspect template sharing in some situations is problematic because getting great results for an audience can have text which some will find objectionable.
zerkten··on New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder
Are tech companies really the ones lobbying hardest for policy changes? I suspect other industries are the ones pushing harder with fallout for tech.
zerkten··on Schools reviving shop class
The same applies to firing ranges, scuba diving, etc. too. I'm not from the US but have some firearms experience before moving here. When I was learning shop from my father, or how to handle firearms the core messaging was very similar. Everything you said about the situational awareness and intuition aligns with my experience.

There are many people who can do the main activity (shoot down a range that is clear), but can't setup safely, or muzzle sweep folks when they're asked to step away. These are the really critical situations where you need to be ready to safely do the activity or safely transition to the next thing (which might have its own unique dangers.)

zerkten··on Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown
Thanks! I have to grapple with some markdown across multiple repos and this'll be a helpful tool in the toolchest.
zerkten··on Sweden Investigates New Cable Break Under Baltic Sea
Wouldn't it be simpler to run dummy detection lines in parallel or through certain tracks to identify negligent activity? Critical cables get hit but it's hard to investigate and take action because the vessels are flagged in the Cook Islands etc. (Lawfare had a recent podcast on this.) It's not bad luck when there is some systematic behavior detected, but that data is hard to collection. Drones are cool but there is a huge area to cover reliably and often stay undetected by the adversary.
zerkten··on Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
It's therapy for a lot of people. The act of organizing helps them deal with information. That act of organizing and storing can help with recall for me but not as much as writing something down on paper does. The number of times people pull info out of these systems is questionable.

An argument people use is that these systems help you later in life. I find these systems really hard to adopt and also find it difficult to work with people who expose these systems outwardly.

zerkten··on Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
Agree. The benefit of posts like these is that someone has documented their system and iterated on it. You can then steal ideas that work for you.

As a not very organized person, and having struggled with getting personal systems running, guides like this help quite a bit. I've only improved by taking bits that stick for me (https://www.hanselman.com/blog/one-email-rule-have-a-separat...). Anytime I tried a whole system, it failed to get going at all causing me more stress.

zerkten··on A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate
They don't want to throw away the extensions and ecosystem. Let's say Jython, or some other modern implementation became the successor. All of the extensions need to be updated (frequently rewritten) to be compatible with and exploit the characteristics of that platform.

It was expected that extension maintainers would respond negatively to this. In many cases it presents a decision: do I port this to the new platform, or move away from Python completely? You have to remember, the impactful decisions leading us down this path were closer to 2008 than today when dropping Python or making it the second option to help people migrate, would have been viable for a lot of these extensions. There was also a lot of potential for people to follow a fork of the traditional CPython interpreter.

There were no great options because there are many variables to consider. Perf is only one of them. Pushing ahead only on perf is hard when it's unclear if it'll actually impact people in the way they think it will when they can't characterize their actual perf problem beyond "GIL bad".

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