13,805 karma · joined February 5, 2014
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I was under the impression there was a revenue-allocation problem that Amazon needed to solve (Kindle Unlimited subscriptions?), that depended on reliable reading statistics. E.g. How many people read book A?
Wish I could find the article, but the implication was there were a ton of publishers attempting to game the system. For example, by publishing blank, very long "books" and having them "read" by software automation.
If the industry moved to a standardized disclosure form (e.g. something like the HUD-1 [1] in real estate sales), people would stop complaining about this.
Clarke's linguistic corollary has probably been true for as long as there's been technology.
But the market for expensive, short term loans, from people who can access and use the internet and/or apps is smaller.
I don't imagine a payday loan customer is thinking about that new financial service option they read about in the paper.
Which increases cost of customer acquisition. Which makes this more of a Palantir market and less of a scalable one.
Square has a much better shot, as pivoting an existing customer relationship seems a much better angle.
I suppose {sat -> orbital DC -> sat} (latency) or {sat -> orbital DC processing -> ground} (transmission bandwidth) are the primary use cases? Maybe security?
My mind was blown when I heard the 2013 remaster of The Eagle's "Taking It Easy".
Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0ZZHNRHA2g&t=1m36s
Remaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v8KEbQA8kw&t=1m36s
I never knew there was a backing bluegrass guitar on the track!
Most of my work is making known transitions (e.g. page1 to page2) work reliably, so I have the benefit of knowing the landing page structure.
If you're crawling pathological, client-side redirect chains, maybe do pattern-matching scans on loaded code for the full set of redirect methods? There's only so many, and includes / doesn't-include seems a fair way to bucket pages.
One could design a page that visually loaded, then jumped to a redirect after 10 seconds on the page. But who would?
The primary approach is always event-based, because most pages do that sanely.
If not... the best approach I've found is looking for sentinel elements.
Essentially, something that only matches once the website is de facto loaded (regardless of events). Sometimes it's a "search results found" bit of text, sometimes a first element. But more or less, "How do I (a human) know when the page is ready?"
Invoke-WebRequest 'https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest-ssl&os=win64&lang=en-US' -OutFile firefox-latest.exeIn China, as near as I can tell, 2-3 generations have been raised with the understanding that truth is always subordinate to the goals of the CCP. In fact, if not in abstract.
That's one thing, internal to a country. That's very different when you're talking international diplomacy.
And yet it seems like China follows this exact playbook in that arena too.
It has to make for some awkward conversations when a diplomat is swearing (and believing, inasmuch as doublethink is possible) that the fleet numbers X, when another country is providing literal evidence that it's 5X.
Centralized services have built personalization systems in which they operate the personalization algorithms.
I don't have a problem with that, per se, except in that their interests (profit) and user interests (effectiveness) are only partially aligned.
The biggest reason, as near as I can tell, these system architectures were built is that control of personalization algorithms means (1) a means and reason to collect and retain data on users (that can be used for targeted advertisement) & (2) a means to execute targeted advertisement (via insertion into "recommended" content).
It's likely the only way these services are possible at the "free" price point. But it's disingenuous to suggest that they're the only model by which personalization could be realized.
It may be true that Google has over-invested in personalization-driven features, and under-invested in user-neutral features.
Personalization belongs in the agent. Specifically, the agent that I own and control.
Just wait until they see what we're like when we get there.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp
Isn't there a term for using dominance in one market to compel behavior in another?
They actually hired and empowered a PM to ride herd over the project (including Chris Roberts), and that's helped with forward progress.
Previously, it seemed there was a lot of unnecessary technical churn for artistic reasons. E.g. the "We can make this thing 5% better, but it will take a 50% increase in time because we'll have to rewrite a lot of code" request.
As one might imagine, an unbounded project takes infinite time to deliver.
And they seem to be keeping to that schedule.
tl;dr - Don't give artists unlimited time and budget. Bad things happen without constraints.
Why not tip the freezer / fridge onto its back? So that doors open "up"?
Aware they're typically not perfectly flat on the rear face, but close enough you could support it with minimal work. And if it's unpowered, there's no need for clearance back there.
Chest freezer would have had less of an impact, but still noticeable.
But the genesis is always a bit counter-intuitive, because people don't build things for which there's no use case.
E.g. Machine agent consumable mobile services were created because people had mobile devices capable of consuming them. Nobody would have wasted time porting physical data into machine-readable format before the devices / use cases existed.
So the killer app, in this case, would be having your phone auto-filter / -alert you if for menu item(s) that match your preferences. Or create an ecosystem where menu costs are negligible, and restaurants are free to pivot to ingredients-of-the-day.