Slippery_John

I'm really disappointed that they're re-introducing the random encounters system. Let's Go was such a breath of fresh air with being able to see them walking about. I would often find myself hurrying off somewhere but stopping because I saw a pokemon running about that I hadn't caught yet.

I have tons of podcasts set to auto-download new episodes, and the file sizes on episodes can get pretty big. On my old 32gb phone I was constantly having to go through and prune podcasts as I don't auto-delete them since I'll often re-listen.

Extensions: uBlock, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, DDG Privacy Essentials, HTTPS Everywhere, and most importantly Containers

I try to keep as many sites as possible into relevant containers. Facebook and Google get their own containers just for them (there are additional addons which will handle this for you as getting all of Google siloed off is cumbersome otherwise).

I also make use of the built in tracker blocking, blocking all third party cookie use entirely. There's also an option to resist fingerprinting that I enable, which does a ton of things [1]

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting

I like looking at YAML when it doesn't use any of the insane YAML features. Even so I'm not convinced it should be used (at least not as widely as it is) for one big reason: it can be truncated almost anywhere and still be valid. This causes way more issues than you might think. JSON has no such issue - the only case I can think of where you can truncate JSON into valid JSON is if your JSON is just a number.

> More than 10 years ago we founded Spotify to give consumers something they couldn’t get

And now they're planning to take away something consumers have. I have little doubt that they'll succeed in turning what is currently an open ecosystem where users have choice into a closed system of fiefdoms like video streaming is increasingly becoming.

Spotify is a bad podcast app. In no particular order:

* There seems to be an inconsistent restriction in the number of episodes you can see. Daily podcasts suffer particularly from this.

* I need three gestures just to get to podcasts on their app, and then more to start digging into genres.

* Available podcasts seem to be curated - the selection is very small.

* There are no ratings

* There is no way to see what's trending, or it is non-obvious

* Downloading is locked behind a paywall, which is a big deal for a medium where individual episodes can be several hundred megabytes

* Subscribing is an afterthought. Three interactions to see what's new in a podcast I'm subscribed to.

In summation: terrible discoverability, slim selection, cumbersome ui, and basic features missing or locked behind a paywall.

I, for one, do not welcome our new overlords.

Same. I switched recently after an increasing distaste for how Google makes money and have been fairly blown away by how much better privacy is on iOS. Nearly every app that has asked for permissions has explained exactly what they're used for. I don't know if that's required, but it certainly seems prevalent. Then I can do things like only give the app permission to location data when I'm actively using it. These settings aren't buried - they are in your face when the permissions are requested.

Some parts of the walled garden are annoying - having to go to the browser to buy Kindle books for example - but I think the tradeoffs of the Apple ecosystem are more than worth the benefits.

The most useful visual programming tools I've seen have either been hyper specific to their use cases or relatively thin abstractions over a workflow engine. IBM's BPM is basically the latter, and iirc it would let you drop in a node with a skeleton function that you'd implement yourself. Very useful for non-technical people, but maybe not what you'd use if you're a software shop.

I've taken similar steps, though have not gone so far as to set up a vpn block to all google ips. I do have as much fingerprinting and privacy protection as possible enabled in Firefox though. I find the worst experience is captcha, it will no longer give me free passes and I regularly have to sit there for several minutes providing training data that they reject. It's to the point where I just avoid sites that require it. Newegg is a particularly egregious offender as they seem to require a very high degree of certainty.

Hopefully this is easy to disable

The Living Computer Museum is one of the coolest museums I've ever been to. Computers from as far back as the 60's mainframes kept in working order, and freely usable by the public (though you do have to reserve time on the mainframes iirc). The first time I went there I spent hours programming on a paper terminal, which was just beyond cool to a kid who grew up in the 90s. If you're ever in the Seattle area, definitely don't miss this place.

I would imagine this doesn't use any MongoDB code, or else the SSPL license would brutalize them. That said, I would be surprised if the experience is much worse.

Does that even apply? This is api-compatible, but doesn't appear to be using any actual MongoDB code.

I believe that was PonziCoin

This is really cool! I learned to program on something like this - an irobot create. I can see this being a big hit for universities seeking to teach ML in fun ways.

The questions and candidate answers themselves are also heavily biased. The survey is clearly not intended to be an unbiased scientific poll.

Words are defined by their usage. A vanishingly small number of people use the term image macro, and in my experience that has mostly been for pedantry.

Some detergent makers actually do sell refill bags that use far less plastic. There's also been a resurgence of milkmen in London and some other places, where you leave out your empty bottles and get a refill. While there aren't milkpeople where I live, there are a few places where I can pay a deposit on a glass bottle and then exchange it for a full bottle whenever I need.

It's not widespread by any means, but it is happening.

Unrelated, but GitLab has a pretty slick cookie notice. Tells you exactly what they're doing and lets you opt out of non-essentials.

It's hard. I used to answer regularly, but it's draining to have to sort through a flood of bad questions. Rather than turning into a jerk, I just gave up answering. I feel like the cross-section of people with lots of domain knowledge and people who have the personality to let them gracefully triage questions for extended periods is tiny.

Potential conflict of interest since IMDB is owned by Amazon.

Well yeah. I had a kidney stone earlier this year. Pain so bad I couldn't move or think. Went to the hospital in an ambulance and ended up paying nearly $3k for the ride. First round they thought it was muscle spasms, so when I inevitably had to go back again I got an uber. The only reason I wouldn't take that option again is if I was bleeding / puking / doing something that would make a mess in the car.

"It's time to return control of the internet to the engineers" (not precise quote).

Like the engineers that created the internet who are protesting this vote?

I was happily surprised a while back when I started using WSL, but there are a few things that I still miss:

* tabs * splitting a pane * a default font with a high unicode coverage * better theme support (the current system is clunky)

That's not a comparable metric. That is only going by a single quarter instead of the whole year, which is important when you factor in the holidays at the end of the year. Last year Amazon's revenue was around 136 billion and it had around 341k employees, so the revenue per employee was around $400k

Echo lets you choose from a small list of names. I've got one that responds to "computer" for instance.

As always I recommend people practice Chaos Engineering [0] to minimize the impact of such events. Even if the complexity of cross-region failover is to expensive, having some sort of graceful failure is preferable to simply dying. Netflix's Simian Army [1] toolset is particularly useful here, though I don't see an OSS version of Chaos Kong (which simulates the failure of an entire region) sadly.

[0]: http://principlesofchaos.org/ [1]: https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy/wiki

Unlikely. One of the requirements is daily direct flights to/from Seattle. Indy does technically have that but it's exactly 1 flight with poor timing for business considerations. They list a few other destinations as must-have nonstop flights, but I'm not sure how good those are. They're also putting a lot of stress on public transit, which is pretty abysmal in Indiana. They also don't want to sacrifice on some of their values surrounding renewable energy, recycling, composting, etc. I lived in Indiana for over 10 years and can't say I've ever seen a compost bin at a restaurant, and can count on one hand the number of places with recycling bins (for public use anyway, most places would recycle their boxes at least).

That said, moving some place in the midwest would be very interesting. Amazon has a lot of employees that are from those areas, so if they want to start moving teams it would probably not be too hard.

Legendary

Not just an affiliated developer, one of the developers of the python SDK. It's in an official aws repo too (awslabs).

I don't think your steps would be all that simpler on GCP unless you're running off app engine.