hnick

I had the opposite problem - we received a card that we didn't activate (basically, lapsed account, being young and too lazy to close it).

They let someone in the USA (we are in Australia) pay a Netflix subscription with it. This was new, so it wasn't one of those inherited authorisations that sometimes exist when a card switches over. So not only did someone get the card number from a card that was never used, they let the transaction through when it was never activated.

It took numerous phone calls to sort out. Every time we did, there was a rounding error due to interest, foreign currency fees, etc, which meant we still owed money despite the only transactions being unauthorised. The ladies in the Philippines were nice, but it was ultimately an annoying ordeal.

I'm not familiar with the articles but where I live it wouldn't be surprising for an elderly person to have a million dollar home and not much free cash, since they bought and paid it off decades ago. So that is 'wealth' but not easily accessible as 'money'.

I think this might be what you are talking about? Back in 2019 Trump issued an ultimatum (one of many) to the United Postal Union to get fairer rates for this in particular. It seems to have stuck so they're not quite as cheap as before.

https://www.parcelandpostaltechnologyinternational.com/opini...

There's also a thing lately where link targets posted on New Reddit (I assume, since mine aren't doing this) are all lower cased, while the link text is correct as you typed. This breaks the links for some sites. In addition to the issues with underscores getting extra slash-escapes.

Reminder that Dubbo (population of only ~40,000) had to have water shipped in on trucks during the recent drought, so there are valid environmental reasons for the current layout too. A lot of those cheaper places are struggling, they cannot support large populations, and it's been said we've used up the good topsoil over the last 200 years so farming may be facing some issues in the coming years too.

I do think we should decentralise, but it will likely look more like Newcastle and Wollongong growing, which will probably feed commuters into Sydney more than they already do.

Also note, Canberra kind of fits your description - a regional "town", servicing the government. And it's also very expensive. As in, recently reported to be the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house, after Sydney. I think our issues are far more political as you point out, so other fixes are just bandaids, but anything that impacts home prices will be unpopular with the dominant voter bloc.

We save on CO2 emissions through minimal effort programmer art.

I appreciate baking since it's very algorithmic. It's typically a lot more precise than general cooking, and I love that about it. Just follow the steps, like my brain has been trained to do, except this time I am the runtime.

Don't talk to me about cake decorating or any of that side of things - couldn't care less and will make a mess with a piping bag.

I remember that time. We even used it once on a friend's car. However, we did not ban wire coat hangers. I'm sure the politicians would agree that would have been silly, but common sense seems to leave them when it comes to tech.

I think a big part is that Japanese is a lot easier to pronounce for westerners. We won't get it fully right but there are no tones and it transliterates to English pretty well, compared to pretty much every other Asian country.

I've already lived in my home for a decade and think that would be money well spent. There are probably time bombs coming due I don't know about.

This is one argument I've used in my head for ad blockers - you're removing hostile viewers so it might be a net win. It's like dropping flyers in a "no junk mail" box. I wonder if anyone studied it.

Sounds like encapsulation in OO. You don't want to let other people poke around in your bits except through well defined interfaces.

I had a quick look and it seems that the Brisbane claim is contentious (like these things often are), according to Australian Geographic:

Brisbane claims the earliest jacaranda tree in Australia, planted in 1864, but the Sydney Botanic Garden jacaranda is dated at “around” 1850, and jacarandas were listed for sale in Sydney in 1861.

Either way they've been here quite a while, and longer than many family lines that consider themselves Australian. The midwife story I mentioned is also contentious because there are a few myths going around about North Sydney in particular, but I think the one from Sutherland had some facts backing it up, including a man who remembered gathering them as a child.

They are so ubiquitous here I've had conversations with multiple people who think they are native. Apparently, seedlings were given to new parents from a maternity hospital in southern Sydney back in the day which helped their spread.

Sadly, their reputation seems to overshadow the native Illawarra Flame Tree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachychiton_acerifolius) which itself is showing off vibrantly right now. I'm lucky enough to have a few in my street.

This is the main benefit I get from the free ChatGPT. I ask a question more related to syntax e.g. how to make a LINQ statement since I haven't been in C# for a few weeks and I forget. If it gets things a little wrong I can drill down until it works. It's also good for generic stuff done a million times like a basic API call with WebClient or similar.

We tested CoPilot for a bit but for whatever reason, it sometimes produced nice boilerplate but mostly just made one-line suggestions that were slower than just typing if I knew what I was doing. It was also strangely opinionated about what comments should say. In the end it felt like it added to my mental load by parsing and deciding to take or ignore suggestions so I turned it off. Typing is (and has been for a while) not the hard part of my job anyway.

I'm not sure there is even a way to study the fact that other people have the same sense of time that we do - I think this would fall under qualia. We just assume it's roughly the same like I should see the blue you see.

Regardless it's clear from training our dogs that they feel impatience, which I think would be best described as a rising sense of discomfort over time. A younger dog and/or one with less training will get up more quickly by itself seeking a reward, while after more training they can put those thoughts aside and wait through it. After a tough day of training or sports, just like us they have less willpower remaining and are more likely to revert.

And right now it's 3:30 pm and he's letting me know the school kids have left the neighbourhood so it's time for his walk. I'd chalk this reaction up to other factors like the noise outside but it happens during the holidays too.

I know web search at least runs JS to get better results. Not sure about email pre-fetch but I assume they do. I don't think crawlers click buttons though unless they are malicious so it's probably fine for unique email links.

Or, as I so often get, ask me to log in to "my account". Which is not my account, it's someone else's account but they don't know their own email address, so logging in is probably technically unauthorised access to computer systems and highly illegal.

Bonus points when contacting support requires me to log in to "my account" too.

I think some crawlers run JS, because a lot of the web simply won't work without JS to initialise the page state these days.

You can use captcha or similar, one workaround I've seen has a submit that is hidden so never clicked by real people then a visible submit that sets a hidden input and clicks the other one which requires the hidden input... not foolproof but avoids some accidents.

I don't know what the letter of the law is but I (and most people I've seen here in Australia based on driving patterns) interpret yielding to cars on the roundabout as giving way if I will get in the way. If they're still on the other side of the island, and we can both pass through without getting in each others' way, it's fine.

Of course the de facto standard here (which many people actually think is the law) would be "give way to the right" (i.e. left for US) meaning some people will proceed without stopping even if the car to their direct left got there just before them. I think this is predictable since more risk falls on the driver who is going to get T-boned in their driver side door if they don't stop so they will be naturally cautious.

Yes traffic lights can be far better in heavy traffic - at least everyone gets a turn. In some roundabouts I've driven through, where there is a "main" way the cars coming from the other directions often get locked out as people queue through it. It works out if people have some courtesy and take turns but that's not always a good basis for traffic planning.

Is this true? I'm not sure if sponsors ask for this but I think metrics are available to creators to show how many people watch during different portions of the video, so they could, including post-payment based on the results.

See audienceWatchRatio under https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics/metrics

Example: "A one-minute video is watched 100 times. Half of the viewers stop watching after 15 seconds and the rest watch the entire video. None of the viewers watch any parts of the video more than once. In this case, this metric's value would be 1 for time buckets in the first quarter of the video, and its value would be 0.50 for the remainder of the video."

So someone could ask for ratios before, after, and during the ad segment to see if it's worth sponsoring them again. On average they can tell how many people skip the segment, how many stop watching entirely, etc. You can also see this on the UI where it shows peaks above the timeline with other users clicking past sponsored content.

I was trying to do something with delegates in C# but couldn't remember what the various bits were called since it's been so long, so didn't have the magic words for Google to work. ChatGPT sorted me out with my vague question and one followup.

Ultimately, I would like to see more about the other side. If generative AI can make blog spam, then I think it can recognise blog spam. How far are we from implementing a reliable filter of useless spam sites from search results? I don't expect Google has a monetary incentive for this, but maybe someone else does. But from my story above maybe "search" is a thing of the past and for functional queries, we will just talk to the gatekeeper. Reading the actual words written will only be for leisure.

Do those statutes apply for interoperability? Which takes precedence?

This is basically how Rockstar used it - to make the game work on computers without CDs. So the actual rights holder has recognised that this tool or one like it is legitimately required for interoperability, between the game as a piece of technology and a modern computer. They won't work together otherwise.

Maybe I am being too tricky but that's how I see it. And if that makes it a legitimate work then it's funny to think about the consequences.

This is essentially how we used to do it for some "print-ready" jobs at a mailhouse I worked at. Usually we'd use proper tools to produce documents ready to print, but sometimes clients thought they knew better and would send us PDFs. It was more effort to work with those usually, and had a higher chance of errors.

Even if the output was correct, we still needed to re-order pages, apply barcodes for mail machine processing and postal sorting, and produce reports - which usually involved text scraping off the page to get an address via perl and other tools. Much easier in PS than PDF usually, but sometimes very unreliable when e.g. their PDFs were 'secure' and didn't have correct glyph mappings.

In the worst cases, they would supply single document PDFs, and merging those would cause an explosion of subset fonts in the output which would fill the printer's memory and crash it. When I stopped working in the area, I think there still wasn't a useful tool to consolidate and merge subset fonts known to come from the same parent font - it would have been a very useful tool and should be possible but I didn't have the time or knowledge to look into it.

Worth noting that wood ash becomes corrosive when you add water which is probably bad for the concrete.

Do you feel the same way about scroll-enabled menus? I had to implement a menu recently (similar to the one on https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.3/getting-started/introducti...) and my first draft used traditional anchor-to-id links.

It was very jarring and also felt weird being flush with the top - we added a jQuery smooth scroll to go to just a little above the item in a few hundred ms and it felt much better. I say this as someone who generally hates scrolljacking and custom scrollbar rendering on sites.

I think it's a bit of a grey area, you can't patent abstract things like rules of a game, but a game engine makes that a little less abstract and turns it into an implementation.

For example, Magic: The Gathering has a patent here on the gameplay process: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en

Let's be honest, a lot of non-minified JS code is barely legible either :)

For me I guess what I was getting at is that I consider source the stuff I'm working on - the minified output I won't touch, it's output. But it is input for someone else, and available as a View Source so that does muddy the waters, just like decompilers produce "source" that no sane human would want to work on.

I think semantically I would consider the original source code the "real" source if that makes sense. The source is wherever it all comes from. The rest is various types of output from further down the toolchain tree. I don't know if the official definition agrees with that though.

Is minified "code" still "source code"? I think I'd say the source is the original implementation pre-minification. I hate it too when working out how something is done on a site, but I'm wondering where we fall on that technicality. Is the output of a pre-processor still considered source code even if it's not machine code? These are not important questions but now I'm wondering.