flax

Until I have to jailbreak my bricks to make my own designs, Lego is nothing like Apple.

Sure, if they want their 30 minute commute to turn into a 90 minute commute.

We need more public transit, yes. But more than that, we need _better_ public transit.

Personally, when I commuted, I turned my 30 minute driving commute in traffic into a 30 minute biking commute via trails.

About time. Apple has been getting a free pass on the exact same things that Microsoft was slapped down for. Notably: unchangeable default apps (browser, email, text messaging in particular).

I don't believe that they necessarily are violating antitrust by choosing to make imessage or apple watch ios only, but it would be obviously better for consumers in my opinion if they were more open.

One aspect which keeps annoying me is how hostile Apple is to developers that want to use anything other than Apple hardware to publish on the app store. The requirement to use xcode, and the fact that xcode only runs on Mac means they are leveraging their control of ios app stores to force hardware sales. I was particularly annoyed to find that even if I have a compiled .ipa file, the app store requires xcode to even upload it. It's a file upload! This has been working cross platform since before the advent of the web.

The problem, as always, is corporate squeezing every last penny. At my local regular grocery, the machines are set to "complain about a fly-landing on it" sensitivity and regularly berate me for not scanning everything even though I do. They also do not read barcodes well, taking several attempts. And on top of that, they are slow enough that they are often still processing the previous item when I'm ready to scan the next.

On the other hand, the local asian grocery has installed self-checkout machines that actually work. They scan well, do not complain about phantom items, and there were 2 employees ready to help if necessary (it wasn't).

Just actually invest enough to make stuff work! It's not a hard concept.

Like many human habitual bullshitters, they do not even know when they're doing it.

At my current job, they claim to support both Linux and Mac, but literally everyone else was on Mac, and they shipped me a Mac laptop before even asking my preference.

I should have insisted on Linux instead. 3 years in, and I still cannot stand macos.

Y'know, I hesitated to use that word. I meant "authoritarian (derogatory)". I suppose "fascist" relates to a particular political movement. Withdrawn and replaced. It doesn't affect my message or opinion.

I'm also not swayed by whataboutism here. I can do normal expected things on my handheld general purpose computer (like install a new browser or app from anywhere) that are simply not allowed on iOS. I'd love it if one of the many Linux phones were more usable now, but they're not.

I don't give a shit about cool, but I use Android because Apple's fascist our-way-or-no-way policies are a no-go for me.

That said, I vastly prefer Android on its own merits. I would not buy or use Apple even if they open up.

Doesn't mean it's wrong.

I've been on a 80% job for the last 2 quarters. My employer doesn't exactly advertise it, but they offer it as one of the wellness options that were introduced with covid: voluntary unpaid sabbatical for a few months, etc. I was initially worried that taking the option for personal, rather than health, reasons would be frowned upon, but that does not seem to be the case. We'll see how this performance cycle turns out.

Subjectively, this is SO MUCH BETTER. I went from 2-for-me-5-for-them to 3-for-me-4-for-them which is a much better balance. I'm using the "extra" day for errands and to work on personal projects.

I would not recommend it for people looking to climb the ladder and maximize corporate status, but for those of us whose jobs are not our lives, this is a great choice.

Flash, the authoring tool wasn't very good for coding. It was great for visuals and animation, apparently, but I'm a programmer. Flash, the runtime was great.. except for the perennial security issues.

But Flash, the platform on which to deploy my games and experiments made with FlashDevelop and AS3, is still unmatched by anything today.

Flutter's pretty close, for mobile targets. The web performance and library support is still not quite there for games, but its getting there.

These seem almost worth trying. I'd love to play with them if: 1. It's completely open for me to write my own apps to interface with it. 2. It had even the most rudimentary display (text only would be fine!) 3. It had nothing to do with Meta.

If you're a man and try this, prepare to be accused of "weaponized incompetence".

That's Ultra Wide-band (UWB), and it's supported on several Android phones including Pixel 6/7 Pro. I don't know if the proprietary Apple bullshit prevents using Android to find them, but there are UWB trackers from Tile and Samsung as well.

When I consider the relative evil between cocaine on the street vs a police surveillance state, I know which is the lesser evil.

The writing is top-notch, congrats to the author. I disagree with the conclusions, but totally do agree that the depravity of porn that's basically forced on you from front-pages is a problem. So where's the "wholesome porn" vendor? The market is certainly there. Even just a site that actually let you exclude things you don't want would be a huge step. Why IS every porn site trying to normalize incest, for example? Excluding tags is extremely low-hanging fruit to implement, and the fact that none of the sites I'm aware of have actually done so indicates to me that there are some perverse incentives going on. Pun intended.

The feature that I'm most interested in is the ios emulator that will be available through the browser. Dealing with ios development with neither a mac nor iphone is annoying at best.

So far, I'm using Flutter and codemagic to do builds, relying on web and android debugging during development, and friends' bug reports through testflight for ios dealbreakers. Being able to debug ios during development would be nice.

Thanks, I hate it.

I got into computer science, and then tech/programming because I was good at it, and it seemed to promise to minimize the amount of social/political bullshit to deal with. Now, like the rest of the internet, it's been corrupted by attention-seeking look-at-me extroverts.

I don't want a brand. I don't want to _think_ about a brand.

I'm no statistician, but the quoted data in the article is interesting.

> When looking at age and gender together, 63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age group.

Who are the women dating, then? If it's older men, then you'd expect an inverse inequality among the over 30s. No idea if that's the case. If it's other women, and that's new, that's interesting in itself. Maybe it's a subset of under-30 men who are dating multiple women? Or maybe it's definitional, with the women counting looser relationships as "not-single" than the men do? Finding out what is going on there would be far more interesting than baseless speculation about AI girlfriends.

I've been building a game in Flutter for the last couple of years, and I absolutely love the dev experience. Dart is the best language I've used professionally in 20 years (for reference: Dart, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, ActionScript3, Kotlin).

I do web stuff for my day job, and I just HATE the javascript/typescript house of cards build system and npm. Flutter's pub is great, and the builds just work.

I chose Flutter because I already liked Dart, and I was building a game to play with my wife, so it had to be cross-platform from the beginning. That was difficult since I don't have any Apple hardware. But I was able to get things going by borrowing hers for a minimal setup then offloading production builds to codemagic.io.

Shameless self-promo: https://MarkMyWordsGame.com

A lot of these arguments against this sound like long-term prisoners convinced that they can't make it on the outside.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/insti...

He's wrong, of course. Perhaps I am biased because I am quite asocial, but squandering the full possibilities of AR to focus on social stuff is myopic.

Instead, AR should be about empowering the individual. I have no desire for "zoom, but heads-up".

What I want is heads-up walking directions in an unfamiliar city. I want annotations of plant and animal species as I walk around the park. I want IKEA assembly instructions that make sense in 3D. I want to look up and know where any particular plane is coming from and going to. I want to know where the last time I saw that car with that license plate was. I want to leave cute messages around the house for my wife that are triggered by environmental cues (a heart in her coffee cup when she makes her morning latte, etc). I want to cross reference my grocery list with the store layout and plan the best path to get my shopping done. I want to blur out the advertisements and idiots around me. I want interactive virtual christmas decorations that I don't have to pack away...

The same thing that stops Apple from making their phones USB-C compatible, or iMessage RCS compatible, or making the app store back-end not require xCode and a mac merely to upload a file. They are a monopoly, and they are trying to coerce consumers to give them more money.

Then the last 20% was the only interesting part in the first place.

If there's any company that I do NOT want to have the controlling share of this market, it's Apple. AR will be as transformative as the web, and it needs to be as free. Getting nickle and dimed (and $100ed and $1000ed) by Apple's troll toll to begin to develop for it is completely unacceptable.

When I was at Google (Kirkland), the offices were basically open-plan fishbowls. WFH was massively better.

I once worked at a startup (pre-covid) that had an open-plan setup with a significant portion of people using standing desks. They provided one stool for 2 standing desks justifying it because "if you use a standing desk you should be standing most of the time".

Pure cheapskate short-sightedness.

>the only purpose of laws like this is to increase transparency and thereby make the labor market more a free market. I really don't understand your concern here.

Yes, you do.

I do not rely on her for a social life. What I'm saying is that I have no need or desire for a social life beyond the incidental social interactions that come with being married, having a kid, having in-laws and parents that want to be grandparents to that kid, and also the interactions that come with having a job.

No, I do not have anyone I'm on friendly terms with due to a shared interest. I do sometimes go to meetups to talk about things, but I do not care about those people, and I do not expect them to care about me.

I do have some legacy friendships as I said before. These typically run multiple years between interactions, and that's how I like it. I recently met up with a college-era friend because I was in town. My kid enjoyed playing with her kids. Before that, we hadn't had significant contact in a few years.

Since I've been married, I make no particular effort to maintain or establish friendships. The small social circle of my wife, her family, and my family is more than enough for me. And I have never been more satisfied with my social life, such as it is.

That's not to say there are no people I am on friendly terms with (coworkers, exes, ex-coworkers, people I knew 20+ years ago in college, etc).

From a utilitarian standpoint, it's important to have a few people you can reach out to to find work. And from a social standpoint, the times of my life where I had no social connections were difficult. But people have different needs, and my social needs are very modest. Do not feel bad because you don't have friends just because you think you're expected to.

As far as the title of the book, I believe eating alone is one of the great joys in life, especially when it's a respite from the forced social atmosphere of an open-plan office.

I was forced into music as a kid, because marching band was the least terrible way to get the fine arts and athletic credits I needed. By all accounts, I wasn't terrible at it (often got 1st chair, etc), but I hated it. The problem is the performance aspect. I'm an extreme introvert and always have been. Doing something in order to be seen/heard doing it is basically torture.

The article never really seems to consider that the kids just don't enjoy it. "The parents suck the fun out", or "the lack of freedom makes it boring". No. It's just not enjoyable on its own merits.