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icehawk219on Windows 11's default mail client will show ads starting 2024

I had this exact same reaction less than a week ago and it prompted me to switch to Thunderbird. For years I've fallen into the "if not for gaming ..." camp of Windows users. But I'm getting closer and closer to just not caring about that any more and switching to Mac or Linux instead just to get away from Windows.

icehawk219on US Digital Currency

Waiting that long before the merchant gets their money is a feature, not a bug. It forces the merchant to float a balance that can be used to issue refunds and charge backs back to the consumer without the bank, card network, or consumer taking the hit.

icehawk219on Blue Apron Files for IPO

I haven't used Blue Apron but used one of their competitors and you'd get the ingredients like this but they'd also be in a big styrofoam container (to help insulate against the elements). The other problem was if you had 2 recipes that each called for a cucumber you'd get 2 individually bagged cucumbers. I don't know if they're smarter about this but that was a big turn off when I tried it.

icehawk219on Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

The spend/build-out is even bigger than that because if these cars have no driver how to they refuel? Unless they've got a robot arm capable of doing that themselves they still need a human involved. As well as somewhere to do repairs and maintenance on the cars. Right now Lyft and Uber effectively out-source that to the owner of the vehicle. So whoever is doing this roll out doesn't just need the vehicles they also need the facilities to house, maintain, and fuel them. That infrastructure is, arguably, even bigger and more complicated than buying up the cars.

icehawk219on White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA

You joke but I know plenty of self professed libertarians who want nothing more than to see those very services privatized. I know someone who genuinely believes a privatized police force would be the end of police violence because "then we'd at least be able to fight back." Sadly this is actually how a lot of people think.

icehawk219on White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA

I've used weather.gov for years and love the service. Every person I've talked to who complains about the crap coverage by the weather companies in the US that I've shown it to uses it exclusively as well. It's a perfect example of the governments lack of profit motive producing a genuinely better product than the competition. I know this isn't always the case but it certainly is here.

I don't agree with lots of things our government spends money on but stuff like this I absolutely support.

icehawk219on Staffjoy is shutting down

I'm currently working on a product with a team and we did a bit of exploration for an idea for SMB's and had that same issue. We were talking to someone who on the surface would be a perfect fit for the product but then we asked how they handled organizing a job. They reached down into their bag, pulled out a file folder, opened it up and spread a few sheets of paper in front of us and went "will this page is this thing, this one is the other thing, and that one is another thing". An entire jobs worth of documentation and info right there laid out in front of us all at once in 3 seconds flat.

That was the moment we realized the reason our target industry was still using paper and spreadsheets. Because they're not just "good enough". In most cases, they're the best possible option. Maybe with enough iterating and testing we could've come up with a UX that could've put all that information in front of 4 people in one shot that quickly. But the odds are against it and even if we did it would've taken a long time to get there.

A lot of startup founders view "legacy" as a four letter word. But sometimes it's simply the best course. Not everything needs a high tech solution. And accepting that can be really tough sometimes.

icehawk219on The woes of Windows 10

Maybe they're including Win 8.1? In that case it is 3 generations. Although Win 8.1 was an update to 8 so you could argue whether or not it should be included but lots of version lists list it separately.

icehawk219on At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

People absolutely are tools in the eyes of their employers. I've never been at a company and not heard them refer to employees as "resources" when talking about scheduling and allocation of people. There's nothing special about humans in a factory compared to robots other than our ability to adapt and learn. But as robotics and AI/ML get better that gap narrows until you reach a point that the robot is "good enough". That same robot might be a little slower than a person at first but it's operating for a fraction of the hourly rate and it's doing so 24/7 with no breaks and no slow downs.

Your point about millions of displaced people rising up and being unhappy is 100% valid. But you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employe people just because it's the right thing to do. Especially in the US where the entire culture is based around corporate profits only ever increasing at a rate greater than inflation. The US is in one big race to the bottom to see who can shave $0.01 off the sale price of their product. That naturally leads to two things. Monopolies and hyper efficiency. Because when your profit margin is pennies per unit you have to move one hell of a lot units to make hundreds of millions a year in revenue.

icehawk219on Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking

Misuse of the word "hacking" has been a plague for a while now. Setting your alarm clock is now a "life hack". Not stuffing your face is a "health/wellness hack". Balancing your checkbook is a "personal finance hack".

In this case I don't blame the media entirely because the word has been used like this for years. Is it really any surprise that altering the outcomes of an election is now "election hacking"?

icehawk219on SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed

Something I find interesting about this: what does it mean for countries who monitor and filter/block content (think China)? Presumably since this isn't using their national infrastructure they would lose all control of it, no? I wonder how those countries would respond to SpaceX wanting to let their citizens use the service. Unless I'm missing something it seems to me like they wouldn't really be able to stop it.

icehawk219on Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace

Same story here. At my previous job when they rolled out the open office a bunch of us complained and the boss explained how he'd be giving up his office to work out on the floor with us. Not even joking, less than an hour after he moved his stuff out he moved it back into his office saying "it's too distracting, I can't get anything done out here".

Now working from home I make more progress per day then I did on a weekly basis there.

icehawk219on Google buys Eyefluence eye-tracking startup

One that I've seen is plugging something into the audio jack, and then breaking it off and taping over it. That way the computer will detect something is plugged in and turn off the mic. Of course this won't be possible once Apple, and then everyone else, gets rid of the audio jack from computers.

icehawk219on Penn Station Reborn

I like this idea as much as I like some of the others I've heard over the years. I was a daily NJ Transit commuter for almost 8 years but am now down to twice a week. Upgrades to Penn Station are as needed as are upgrades to the rest of our nations infrastructure. But to me, therein lies the problem. Infrastructure. Something our country seems hellbent on destroying through neglect. I would love to see one of these big "fix Penn Station" projects be made into a reality and actually have the intended affect, but the cynical part of me (which seems to grow a bit every birthday) simply can't be brought to believe I'll see it happen anytime in the next couple decades.

To me Penn Station as it exists today is a prime example of how we've come to treat our vital infrastructure.

On an average morning it takes 5+ minutes to get off the platform because it's normal for two, or three, rush hour trains to be unloaded onto a single platform back-to-back which results in thousands of people trying to squeeze up four or five small staircases.

Looking around the platform the concrete is cracked, some of it creaks when you walk over it, there are huge chunks of concrete missing everywhere. Lights are constantly out, even when they're on its perpetually dark, everything is covered in a layer of filth.

The rest is the same. Cracked walls and ceilings. Filth, trash, stink, and overcrowding everywhere. Perpetually bad lighting. One good delay for any of the transit systems that converge under Penn and it becomes impossible to move as thousands of people stand around hoping for their train to arrive.

On the NJ Transit side track numbers aren't posted ahead of time. If you're lucky you might get ~10 minutes notice but during rush hour it's normal for tracks to be posted minutes before departure. So you get train fulls of people rushing back and forth to make it to the few stairs or escalators (which are usually going up even when trains down on the platform are boarding) to get to their train on time.

And despite all this Penn Station is vitally important to the area. NJ and NYC's economies benefit immeasurably from it. Even as far as Philadelphia, DC, and Boston. Yet, there it rots and crumbles. For decades. And the best we can do so far is hope for some more fancy computer renderings of something that maybe could make things better. And while we wait delays become more frequent, trains and stations get more crowded, things continue to fall apart, and the costs continue to rise.

icehawk219on U.S. Signals Backing for Self-Driving Cars

To be honest I'm less concerned with nefarious governments, since they already have countless ways to track you and kill you if they really want to. And for the most part these days they don't even have to be discrete about it because of how little ability people have to push back.

I'm more concerned about what corporations are going to do when they have complete control over your movements. Especially with someone like Google getting in on it. They'll have control over what information you have access to, your communications, all your data, and now also your ability to move around. And once they have this data the US Government (at least) will have complete access to it too.

Although to be honest I'm even less concerned about that then I am the big problem. What happens when our countries economy completely collapses because a huge chunk of the current workforce is no longer needed? And I'm not talking utopian UBI day dreaming solutions. I mean real, tangible, short term solutions to dealing with 20%+ unemployment? In a country that can't even get behind something like universal healthcare ...

icehawk219on Soaring Student Debt Prompts Calls for Relief

Part of the problem is that the last few generations have been told the same thing: blue collar jobs aren't "good" jobs. You need to go to college so you can get a "good" job sitting at a desk because those other jobs are below you. If you take one of those blue collar jobs then you've failed and aren't "achieving your potential".

The grand irony in all of this is that the people who did go on to become plumbers, electricians, mechanics, roofers, HVAC specialists, etc, are all the ones that are currently in huge demand. And over the next 20 - 30 years they're the ones that aren't going to be automated (well ... mechanics may become less relevant with electric cars rising in popularity). As much as I'd love to automate remodeling my kitchen I'm not holding my breath on seeing it happen any time soon.

icehawk219on Elevated error rates on applications and deployments

I'm using Heroku right now and have thought about switching to EC2 as it would save me a bit of money. But the reason I haven't is simply time. Heroku's Pipelines feature, integrated with GitHub, means I get review apps and automatic deploys on merge, just by clicking a few buttons. Now I know this is completely doable with AWS but the time to set it up and switch would be more than it's worth right now.

I don't see Heroku as a very long term solution for us but for the time being, while still a one-man tech team, it just means one less thing I need to deal with. Until I do ...

icehawk219on Why GitHub Finally Abandoned Its Bossless Workplace

In my limited experience working on teams that were flat what happened every time is a sort of unofficial structure formed. Experts, and senior staff, just sort of became the go-to people. As new folks were hired they'd see that certain people simply had more institutional knowledge or were already friendly with other parts of the org and would drift towards following their lead without being told to. Obviously there are exceptions but I've noticed this on a few teams now.

icehawk219on “We have been experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack”

Quite the opposite. Our government at least appears to work very hard to make sure these attack venues remain wide open.

icehawk219on Warned of a Crash, Startups in Silicon Valley Narrow Their Focus

I've basically stopped using the word startup because at this point it seems to apply primarily to companies that only care about vanity metrics and nothing else. The word has been hijacked by investors and founders who want companies to appear profitable so they can cash out.

icehawk219on Warned of a Crash, Startups in Silicon Valley Narrow Their Focus

For the past 10 months or so I've been part of a 3 person team that is bootstrapping. I can't count how many times I've been looked at like I have two heads when I tell someone that no we don't have funding, and we aren't looking for it, and we aren't planning on looking for it, and we're not entirely sure we even want it. And when I tell someone that we're more worried about building a sustainable business that can stand on its own I might as well be speaking a foreign language.

icehawk219on Announcing the GitLab Issue Board

I was just lamenting this recently. GitLab's latest features are really nice but the lack of integration with things like Heroku's Pipelines makes switching more costly because I'd have to setup that type of functionality myself. I'm hopeful though that as GitLab gets more popular this will change.

icehawk219on Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

I've seen quite a few large streamers getting paid to switch off Discord and promote Curse's chat client. If anything that's probably what Twitch is after but I'd be curious why they didn't pick up Discord then since it seems to be more widely used.

icehawk219on Banning Sites That Don't Respect Adblock

Is this not the natural conclusion of the trend that started with ad supported sites/services though? I use an adblocker because most sites require one in order to be usable but do whitelist sites I like and use frequently. The problem though is that for the last decade and a half entire industries have gone 100% free in exchange for ads and when people stopped clicking they started adding more and more ads and then made them more and more obnoxious and then added more and more tracking and analytics.

I also feel kind of scared of where we're going because I don't see any way for everyone to win. An entire generation has been taught that they should expect everything 100% free out-of-pocket. And to pile on top of that there's another point to consider. Even if everyone was willing to pay for their favorite sites, how many can actually afford to do so these days? And that problem is only going to get FAR worse before it gets better.

icehawk219on Congress is spending $400M on a ship the DoD doesn't want

This is my problem with carrier groups. Today the Navy doesn't really need to worry about battles because they're already so big that no one can compete but also because that's just not what they do day-to-day. As far as I can tell the primary purpose of the Navy these days is ensuring shipping lanes are well protected so they always remain open and safe. That doesn't require huge ships like carriers it requires lots of smaller ships that are big enough to be scary but numerous enough to be everywhere.

icehawk219on GitHub's 2015 Transparency Report

I believe this is what the security canary used to be that companies would use to skirt the rules until the rules were changed. It used to be that you couldn't say how many you received but you could say you hadn't received any. Now you aren't even allowed to say that.

icehawk219on Stop saying learning to code is easy

I agree with this but one other side affect of lowering the barrier to entry (which is a good thing I completely support) is it also makes it easier for people who genuinely don't care about that to get into the game. I've met so many devs who absolutely could write readable, maintainable, secure code with few bugs (while working in places where higher ups supported it and allowed for the time for it). They just didn't give a crap. Those are the ones that drive me up the wall. I have no problem taking time out of my day to help a junior developer learn those things. I'll gladly spend my work day helping someone and then make up the time in the evening but when I meet someone who already has the know-how and just doesn't care I want to scream at them.

icehawk219on Startup will help landlords and employers mine intimate data from Facebook

“People will give up their privacy to get something they want,” he said.

And there in lies the problem I have with this. The sad thing is that a large percentage of people would give up their privacy because the old "if you have nothing to hide then what are you worried about?" is still sadly a common mindset.

I would expect there to be a greater push from Facebook, Twitter, etc to crack down on companies trying to do this though. Because at the end of the day the way to avoid this surveillance is to not use their services.

icehawk219on Google Fonts Redesigned

From my experience with front-end dev's it's not that they don't test in Firefox but rather they only test in Chrome. I've worked with FE devs who insisted it was unreasonable to expect them to test in all the major browsers.

icehawk219on Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

For things like coal and oil the cost is in acquisition, transportation, and storage of the fuel and the infrastructure that goes with that.

You can't just go out and find coal lying around. You need to hallow out or level an entire mountain to get it. That requires a lot of people and equipment. And you need to transport large quantities of it around to where it's needed which requires special infrastructure dedicated to that task. The same goes for oil/natural gas.