errantspark

That's all well and good if you trust other people. FWIW this guy allows you to download his app, and it's open source and a very impressive achievement. In general though, I'd much prefer having an old version of an app that works (I'm still using Max 2016 or something) than the joy of waking up one day and have things be worse than they were before. All the things you mentioned in my view are a small price to pay for peace of mind that you're not beholden to someone else's whims. (See the story about Oculus currently on the front page)

Ahahah, I dropped in here to share this little tidbit too. Looks like you beat me to it. I figure it's been long enough that I can share some war stories.

I was in the car w/ the founders on the way to Hacker Dojo when they got the news that they'd been accepted into YC. At this point much of their tech demo had been built by some kid they'd hooked up with at the Dojo. One time I remember one of the founders was on the phone with his mom trying to get more time out of him. I never saw the technology deliver on any promises but I was probably like 22 at the time and I was stoked to get to play with depth cameras and AR goggles at all. I helped them film some tech demos and build some jigs to take footage through the googles. It's through Meta that I met Steves Mann and Feiner. I had a few great conversations with them at the time, and later it also made me realize that brilliant people who you deeply respect can make some really dumb bets too.

The best way to describe Meta is "store brand Magic Leap". Huge gap between what they had and what they were selling, and never enough focus to put in the hard work to narrow it, or the humility to admit that they overpromised. They did eventually pay me, though I think some friends of mine were not so lucky. I would say it was mostly incompetence and not malice. I think the founders truly believed many of the lies they told and it was easy to get caught up in that energy. Working with them and hanging out in their general orbit at ChezJJ and the Hacker Dojo was probably the most HBO's Silicon Valley experience of my life and I'm deeply grateful for it.

Autoplaying (without the possibility of sound) is a feature, It's a huge aesthetic boon to the web. GIF is an entirely different conceptual flavor to video. It's good precisely because people almost never fuck with the fact that it autoplays.

Sort of unrelated, but for those that don't know, on Android you can download NewPipe off f-droid, or just grab the APK off github. It's a user-centric youtube client. I don't know if there's an equivalent on iOS but it's much much better than the site or the app on android.

I wouldn't care about the expense if they made a good product. The problem is when it comes to my notes if I don't control where the data is then it can't possibly be a good product.

I have a PinePhone and I've been running Manjaro on it for a couple weeks. It's terrible and it's also the only phone I've been truly excited about, well ever.

I managed to watch some TV shows on it the other day! It's really cool stuff having a phone that's actually a proper little computer. The power management is terrible, the front camera doesn't have drivers, it's near impossible to do things that seem trivial (play an audiobook at 2x speed) without resorting to the command line. It often ends up in states that need a reboot. It's extremely rough around the edges but I can use it to post on HN while walking around Mountain View, so it's a huge step toward something real exciting.

:) Seriously, I love the thing.

Not OP, and I'm not sure I advocate for drawing such hard lines, but I hold a similar enough view that perhaps this will be of interest to you.

I do harbor similar opinions about people who have previously or currently worked for the government, or any organization that behaves in a way inconsistent with my ethical framework. I strive to see things as close to the shade of gray that they really are and act accordingly.

I more or less believe in free will and thus the responsibility for one's actions is one's own. The world is complicated and actions must be viewed in context. My opinion of someone who works for Google as a lead on their ad-tech will be worse than someone who works for Google X or someone who's on their first job out of college. My opinion will improve drastically if they leave Google on ethical grounds, or show remorse for their time there as an ex-Googler.

I think that on the surface level there are things big tech does are positive for society but the second and third order effects are frightening and negative in ways that are hard to bound. There's no way I can see to disentangle that from your personal responsibility for your actions that serve to advance their aims.

Nice to see some personal responsibility! :) I feel like one really needs to take a deontological view on things like this. Much like voting, every person who quits their job, refuses to hire an applicant or build a feature on ethical grounds moves society a step in the right direction. Don't forget about your personal agency, if you work in SV you probably have TONS AND TONS of it.

Not exactly, but ageism is probably a welcome externality. The value of leetcode is mostly in helping hiring-people wash their hands of some responsibility.

"You must beware of shadows."

page 109 of The Little Schemer

I've definitely got my money's worth from this one, there are a lot of interesting emergent qualities in the game and the map has a lot of secrets scattered around it for you to discover. This game took up my evening for a few weeks when I first got it, so well worth the money in my book. I still come back to it from time to time as it's under pretty active development.

I really enjoyed testing the limits of the engine and using the wand system to craft interesting physics things.

I have no actual experience with a belt-bed printer so this is pure speculation. I would absolutely believe adhesion/warping etc would be harder to control with a belt, but I also bet it's still within the scope of the usual 3D printer tweaking necessary to get good output. I imagine there are some exciting uses for this sort of printer.

I'm imagining a 100mm x 100mm x belt or so sized printer, for the sorts of custom tchotchke applications that hobbyist 3D printers get used for these days it seems like a good fit. It's maybe easier to make one for each of your friends with something like that vs a Makerbot or Prusa. I bet repeatability in part quality would also be slightly easier to dial in vs printing multiple across a full bed.

It would also be useful for more serious applications. There are plenty of situations where you want many small parts to just come off a conveyor belt after you hit print on your CAD file. Articulated cable guides and fasteners, wing ribs, connectors for extrusions.

Sure it's no revolution, but there are projects I would definitely be more excited to take on if I could automatically manufacture a lot of small parts. I interpret this as a step in that direction. That's appealing.

It's minimally a fire hazard and it's very handy to have when you know what you're doing.

Yep. Not just music companies too, patents are just as bad. That shit ought to expire after a decade tops, everyone would be better off.

Yes they should be expected to pay for that, it's your time that you can't use for whatever you want because now you have to spend it getting to work. I think it would have to be limited to something reasonable, but yes, unequivocally your employer should be on the hook for that. I believe I should be paid for the imposition on my time.

I also think that forcing hourly people to take a 30 minute unpaid lunch needs to be fixed, I absolutely hated the one job I've had where this was enforced. I would have much rather just worked a straight 8 hours so I wasn't robbed of 30 minutes of my life every day.

Both of these are hard to fix and I don't know how to implement it, but they definitely should be.

I use an eGPU, so I have a 4x instead of a 16x PCIe 3.0 link with a 1080Ti and even that doesn't make much difference, some games blit/do more system <-> gpu transfers than others (APEX, I'm lookin at you) and there's a noticeable perf impact for the most part it's negligible. I wouldn't worry at all about PCIe 3.0 vs 4.0.

It's finee, compared to the multitude of other problems facing humanity this one is so so small and solvable, it feels like an HoA complaint. It's like demanding that your housemate who likes to talk on the phone at night keep your schedule rather than putting in some earplugs. People love to get mad.

Medium is so chock full of anti-features this doesn't surprise me at all. I often find myself hunting for an archive link to read some article because I'm past my free article limit. It's absurd that I have to sign up for Medium to read some random blogger's article.

I miss the days where it felt like software was trying to make my life easier, nowadays my experience is mostly characterized by a constant struggle to avoid being taken advantage of.

We don't need usury. I'm confident we could figure out how to make things work without it.

I love flying. For the first three weeks or so of consistently playing I would get pretty motion sick after about 30 minutes of playtime and near throwing up after 45. That's usually when I would stop and then I'd spend another half hour or so walking around the neighborhood to give me something to concentrate on other than the awful nausea.

Then one day I was flying, and then I was flying and then I was still flying 4 hours later with no sickness. It hasn't come back since.

I've been clocking in 10+ hours/wk dogfighting in VR with a decent HOTAS setup since quarantine. You're absolutely right about how fun it is. No other VR experience has been such a consistent draw for me. It's just an excellent place between a fast paced shooter and a strategy game. I love thinking about relative energy and the capabilities of the enemy plane and how they match up with mine in order to come up with an engagement strategy. I also love the tension as you identify a target and you're both trying to come into the engagement from a favorable position. It reminds me of match sprints in track cycling. Very much recommend it.

I have similar thoughts. I don't see how I could trust my notes to someone else, besides the obvious privacy implications I just don't feel like it makes sense to rely on someone else for something important like this. I want the data on my computer, and I want to be able to use the version of the software I like and not be forced to update to increasingly awful garbage as they try desperately to grow enough for an IPO or whatever the fuck. Yes, I am still very bitter about Evernote, why do you ask?

Yes. It's an annoying negative sum game we all have to play or spent enormous amounts of effort avoiding.

Couldn't agree more. To expand on the point a bit I feel that Node (and JS in general, and other wildin' langs like C++ too) mostly have disadvantages that can be circumvented with discipline while keeping their advantages intact. Go and related crew on the other hand impose discipline as a language feature, and if you circumvent it (if you even can) you're missing much of the point of the language.

HAH, imagine a FAANG employee experiencing personal responsibility!

"I only work on infrastructure. I have no control over this. I just want to do my job."

I knew I would spend some time without an internet device and beyond reliable communication. I wrote us a private chat website that was something like 2kb so that I could load it up on stranger's phones over 2G and still get messages from, and out to my partner.

You say that like it's a bad thing! Async work is a solvable problem. I want a fairer world.

I didn't say that was my well researched opinion/plan!

The first thing that went through my head when I saw this headline was: "Huh, maybe I should send them a resume." I'm hype if this trend continues.

It's possible to get it going even better than strong. I have an old 60GB iPod that I swapped an SD card adapter into in lieu of the hard drive and then used the extra space to put in a bigger battery. The parts are super easy to find on ebay and now I have a 256GB iPod that can play music for 50+ hours straight.