156 karma · joined November 29, 2022
I've long suspected that these sites default to dropping cookies when my consent is neither asked for nor received, as MS appears to have done here.
It's good to hear that such behavior is probably illegal in the EU.
Back on Android, my daily life is blissfully bereft of ads, except when I visit somewhere with live TV. It's a shame, because Apple makes some great pieces of hardware, but I won't be back until they loosen up on controlling the software that I'm able to run on my devices.
If you have adults watching and ready to spring in at a moment's notice, the kids will limit their behavior to what they think they can get away with.
If you don't, there's a good chance someone will get seriously hurt or killed.
Not surprising that they (or maybe their underwriters) picked the first option.
It sounds cartoonishly evil, but "cartel" is just an economic term for a market where a small number of participants collude to control supply and pricing. Like OPEC.
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda...
IMHO, we should be more aggressive about converting industries which gravitate towards cartels into regulated natural monopolies, like power/water supplies. Some kinds of markets really are more efficient with fewer participants, and we should find ways to encourage that efficiency without letting the lucky winners indefinitely dictate the terms of the market.
OP bemoaned how people on StackOverflow would tell you not to do what you're asking about. Reference material is not the cause of that "weird bearded guy" problem, but it is one possible solution.
We're talking about software developers, not wizards. It's not like you have to offer a dram of blood and draw a pentagram with salt before you approach the ancient grimoires.
In those days, we would usually read the manual when we needed to dig past a surface-level understanding of how things work. The manuals are dry and dense, but they're much easier to read with modern niceties like "Ctrl+F".
IMO, this is one of the reasons that people recommend using software with a long track record. If you have a question about some parameter in a systemd service script, and the internet doesn't have a ready made answer, the details are all written down in the manual.
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/systemd.service.5....
Plenty of modern tools have comprehensive detailed docs like this. Python, Go, even most widely-used JS frameworks. The primary sources are often downranked in search engines because they don't sell ads, but it's a good idea to find and bookmark them when you start working with a new technology. RTFM!
I've seen videos at BCI conferences of deep brain stimulation implants which provide the patient with a "happy button" to relieve chronic pain/anxiety/depression/etc. They seem to work very well in a clinical setting, but the patient reactions make it clear that there will be an enormous potential for recreational use (and abuse).
>For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
>For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
>For want of a horse the rider was lost.
>For want of a rider the message was lost.
>For want of a message the battle was lost.
>For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
>And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
The moral of the proverb is: it is important to ensure that critical systems have redundancy built in.
For the under-30 crowd, everything in their post-puberty lives has been carefully recorded in a semi-public ledger, and they know it.
We should expect people to declare their independence as they enter young adulthood, and it's hard to do that without any space to safely screw up. The Facebook generation was aggressively conditioned to conform with their peers through an industrialized record-share-shame pipeline, so it's good to see gen Z pushing in the opposite direction.
I'm curious if there is something about acrylics which makes it impossible to make very large single pieces.
Same issue with cheap IoT gizmos. Even if the retailers wanted to publish an implementation of their backend servers, they probably bought (rented) much of the functionality from a third party, under a license which forbids redistribution of the third party's IP.
That being said, I returned my first and last iPhone after realizing that Firefox on iOS couldn't run the NoScript extension.
It is frankly shocking that Apple has managed to go this long while blatantly contravening the precedent set by United States v. Microsoft Corp., and I'm glad the EU is finally taking a stand on that front.
I would still rather have a diverse ecosystem of power-tripping moderators than a few unavoidable ones, though. There would probably be more calm tidal pools like the one that dang cultivates here.
Maybe some things, like human relationships and communication, are better off without a profit motive.
For example, a small group of friends could easily run a social media network for a small town of a few 1-10ks. Tens of people would be capable of moderating it, especially once the bad apples are identified and banned.
There would obviously be some disagreement about issues like admission criteria or what it means to be a "bad apple", but your neighbors could start a competitor just as quickly and cheaply, and you would both be legally responsible for the content that you allowed to be published.
Many small blogs operate on a manual approval process for comments, and it works fine on a small scale with a spam filter or two to speed things up. Why shouldn't we expect the same to be true for social media, if the cost of scaling manual moderation couldn't be ignored by unscrupulous parties?
It amazes me that the world's richest man was able to buy this company with a bunch of borrowed money, and saddle the company with the debt rather than himself. If he actually cared about Twitter's financial health, you have to figure he would have bought it outright. He has the money.
You probably shouldn't finance a vehicle you can afford with current interest rates, and you may not want to give your debit card to a secondhand dealer for processing.
While I do have fond memories of paying less than $10k for a beater, those days may not be coming back. In 10 years, high-end phones and computers could easily fall outside that limit too.
http://southernghoststories.com/the-witch-of-fentress-county
>When Joseph Stout went before Judge Abraham Caruthers, Attorney General John B. McCormick refused to prosecute him. The witch-hunters tried to argue with Judge Caruthers and cited the Statutes of Henry VIII and James I which made witchcraft a felony. The judge shot them down and told them that the statute only applied in England and had no standing in the state of Tennessee.
>My job is not to write code. My job is to solve business problems efficiently, using computers as a medium.
Sounds like data scientists have the same problem. Sometimes, to solve business problems efficiently, you have to step out of your comfort zone and learn to do things that seem ridiculous.
Why just the other day, I had to write a report for humans to read. Using words and pictures! What am I, a technical writer?
Back in the day, when it was first rolling out, you could (theoretically ofc) join the plane's network and scan for MAC addresses, then clone someone else's for free access.
I think the authentication is a bit more sophisticated these days, but it's clear that these providers treat security as an afterthought. At least the one in the article had a bug bounty program and responded quickly, I guess.
Unrelated, I think it's funny that the AI artist put a little picture of a house on the airplane's interior wall in the article's header image. Maybe plane trips would be more bearable if the cabins didn't look like a utopian abbatoir's waiting room.
Personally, I don't think that stoicism is a good fit for modern times, because it conflates virtue with foregoing strong emotions, and leaving other people to their mistakes.
It does have its share of worthwhile lessons though, and if you dig a little deeper you'll find that it encourages guiding and explaining when people are wrong, rather than getting upset with them about perceived moral or practical failures.
As Marcus Aurelius wrote sometime around 170CE:
>It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. ...
>So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.
In the words of John Oliver's character in Community, "the average person has a much harder time saying 'booyah' to moral relativism."
The need to check your sources is an important lesson to learn early, AI or no.
Education is a prime target for rent-seekers for two reasons. First, you can use the same product and marketing on thousands of schools. Second, your marks are young and impressionable.
They dropped one presenter and a camera crew out of a helicopter around the top of a hill-climb OHV track in the Canadian wilderness, and had them activate an emergency beacon. The other two had to perform a rescue race in pickup trucks.
Overall, it was an entertaining ad.
This is where my "Probably written by AI" filter tripped, and I skipped to the end.
I can't exactly say why. Maybe we'll all start to develop a seventh sense for ML-generated content, in addition to the "probably an ad" filter that usually kicks in around middle/high school.
In a rural area, you're still looking at a pat on the back instead of handcuffs, in the unlikely event that an authority figure notices.
In a suburban area, you get cops asking if you could please stop detonating vegetables near your nosy neighbor's property.
In a dense city, you might be lucky if you can avoid being shot to death after the first few explosions.
It wouldn't be surprising. I've looked into starting a side business selling some rebranded Ali/Bao items on Amazon, there are loads of niches you could corner. The thinking goes:
> The product is available for $X today, and Amazon takes a $3-5 cut.
> I can buy the product for $X-Z.
> I could sell these products with prime shipping for $X-Y, and make $Z-5-Y on each sale.
Doing that simple math often makes you think you could make a living off the scheme, even after accounting for packaging and inventory fees. If it works for a few months-years, you might double down and get into this situation.
Ultimately, I came away feeling like this is how dropship vendors find new product categories to move into: they wait for somebody to demonstrate that there's a sizable market for a product, then they add that product to their listings and cut out the competition. So you probably have 3-6 months on each successful product, tops.
It's a jungle out there.