mrbadguy

Gah! Don’t give them ideas!

Google’s entire business is based on scraping stuff no-one asked them to so they can go fuck themselves if they don’t like it. The same applies to Facebook. The gall of these companies trying to “ban” public web scraping when they’re the prime movers in that domain is quite something.

The duvet cover is, in effect, the second sheet of which you speak ;)

> trained pilots following procedure would have responded appropriately and avoided a crash.

Boeing acted like there was nothing different about the new aeroplanes and therefore did not train the pilots in how to react to the new system. Indeed, that was the original point of MCAS - to avoid pilot re-training. The pilots were not trained in doing the "right thing" and so had no chance of recovering the aircraft. I don't think it's right to blame them. Regardless of whether their overall training was of higher standard, I don't think American pilots would have fared any better since they, too, would have been in the dark.

I’m sorry, why does it matter that no one has died on an American carrier for a while? Not so long ago, Boeing sent over 300 people to their deaths with their shoddy MCAS scheme. It’s pure chance that this didn’t happen in the USA so I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the nationalities of the deceased.

That’s interesting to hear. What problems did you have with push? Having used this setup before, I found it pretty easy and the only time I found myself reaching for pull (on a service deployed to K8s rather than cloud run) was to achieve greater throughput. Was it the same story for you?

Ha! When you know - you know ;)

I think the self-checkout suffers from a fairly common fact: it doesn’t actually save any labour, just now the customer does the scanning instead of an employee. Of course, the argument goes that you can have more of them as opposed to staffed tills but that doesn’t actually seem to be working out as per TFA since they’re expensive to install.

One thing that I have seen actually adding value is where there’s a scanner that you carry around and scan items as you pick them up (some shops can let you do this with your phone's camera). This does save time and you simply pay at the end and don’t need to scan and bag everything since you’ve been doing that on the go.

Of course, these days I use the delivery service and get groceries delivered once a week so that’s kind of the ultimate convenience ;)

Christ that escalated quickly…

The density of misapprehensions in that sentence is impressive.

Oleato? Is that pronounced like “Aviato”?

Just because money was paid to someone doesn’t make it legitimate. Certainly, even if the purchase were legal, then that doesn’t also confer the right to ethnic cleansing, so it’s kind of a moot point. There was a UN resolution in 2019 that holds that the colonisation of the islands by the UK was illegal. https://press.un.org/en/2019/ga12146.doc.htm

Yeah I agree, the push towards digitalization combined with a lack of care for "edge cases" is kind of scary. People might say, oh, it only affects 0.3% but, in the US, that's roughly a million people so hardly trivial. The problem is that it is difficult to make truly flexible software and no-one has the financial incentive to do so. Increasingly, people don't even want to invest in humans at the edge to try and work around issues. Companies like google just ignore you.

Wow, that is bonkers. Could you maybe get them actually to try sending you an email to that address and show them that, yes, you do receive the damnned thing?

Yep, been there. It’s an absolute nightmare.

Could you please elaborate on this? Your reply is witty but it seems to me that those companies only start doing shady things once they become more capitalist (ie try to “monetize”) so I’m curious to hear more.

The point is that you don’t need to reason about the relationship because the name, in the local language, tells you everything you need to know. Of course, if you don’t speak the language then that’s not useful but the code is written for the end user to be able to use the labels, not for the software or its developer to be able to parse the family tree :)

If everyone's working on their own local copy of the database then the select for update isn't going to do anything. The issue is later syncing and detecting conflicts. It's actually easier to do this with a centralized DB, hence why everything works this way. If an app is mostly offline then, yeah, ship it with a SQLite DB and life will be good, but for something like a hotel booking app that doesn't actually solve many problems and makes existing ones harder.

Agreed, frequently "newer and better software" simply isn't and for something that you rely upon, such as audio processing software or image/film editing tools, cannot be left to the whims of tech companies who have proved themselves over and over again to be unworthy custodians of these important tools. It's better to get a hardware+software combination that works and then just use that forever without modifying it. It will always perform as well as it did on day one, it's only pesky updates that make computers slower.

Why does everyone have to be on the latest version?

Good point - using a wrist rest with a mechanical keyboard feels a lot more comfortable for me, since they tend to be a bit bulkier and more raised from the desk. Without one, I rely on the armrests to have the forearms higher than the keyboard so that my wrists aren't flexed.

Funny, I always feel like I’m about to get injured using really low travel keyboards like the new apple magic keyboards. Hence I prefer mechanical ones.

Guess it varies from person to person. Good to find what works for you.

Ha! Maybe not, at the scale of the US it might well be intractable. That said, the Netherlands made such a transition over the 80’s and 90’s so it is possible to some degree. You do need a population willing to undergo the transition though. And it’s not something that’s done overnight of course.

I just found it somewhat ironic that instead of considering alternatives, people would rather hold out for self driving cars, which may never happen, to reduce time wasted in driving.

Agreed, I find it much more freeing not to have to drive and deal with the various stresses and expenses involved.

I think mostly people are talking at cross purposes though. I too live in a large European city and getting around by car is incredibly constraining (traffic, parking, other drivers etc) while using the public transport system, while not perfect, is smooth in comparison.

However, for less dense areas, eg going on holiday somewhere in the countryside, it is much more convenient to have a car and I suspect that many people are coming from this angle. In those circumstances, I will rent a car as necessary. It doesn’t happen often so I still save in comparison with the cost of owning a car.

Living in sparse suburbs is probably hell without a car. This is partly because of poor town planning but also, I imagine, because a certain set of people want to have that much space. The trouble is that the externalities of the car travel are generally concentrated elsewhere, so it’s a bit unfair.

It might be easier to free up some of those man-years by planning and constructing towns/cities such that people don’t have to drive in them, than developing self driving cars. The two things aren’t even mutually exclusive, you could have a happy, mostly non-car based existence, and then supplement it with a self driving car on the occasion that you really need it (assuming it’s ever achieved).

> There is no situation I would be comfortable making a transaction with that much cash (unless I was in so insanely wealthy that this amount of money meant nothing to me)

That’s fine for you but why does that mean it should be illegal for everyone else?