will_pseudonym

For competing with Discord, it seems like it would benefit from a more robust free offering to compete with Discord. Being able to create a free Discord server is great, and it is incredibly capable for most communities that don't need the fancy perks of Discord Nitro etc.

> The free Discord plan provides virtually all the core functionality of the platform with very few limitations. Free users get unlimited message history, screen sharing, unlimited server storage, up to eight users in a video call, and as many as 5,000 concurrent (i.e., online at the same time) users.

For a lot of small communities that aren't focused around commerce of any kind, Discord's free offering blows Element Matrix Services out the water. It's a non starter. If I could create a server with feature parity to Discord's free server, any new community I'd create I would definitely jump on EMS in a heartbeat, and I'd start trying to recreate communities currently within Discord, to be on EMS.

So like a very normal progression for Discord servers is that some niche sub-community wants to gather, and so they create a free server, and people join and there's all kinds of rich content that gets posted and curated and great discussions and then as it gets bigger, people running the community or people who want to support the community will boost the server with Discord Nitro for additional features like more slots for custom emojis (I can't communicate enough how important of a feature this is to Discord's success, even though it seems like minor window dressing).

That kind of model is what would justify a server starting to shell out money every month for EMS. I would note that Discord's pricing for this kind of level of community is tiered and not a per-user thing. You unlock more features based on how many users are paying for Nitro, going up a tier based on breakpoints of 2/15/30 Nitro Boosts per month. It doesn't cost more to have a tier 3 server if you gain more users. This is a big deal for fostering growth and unseating incumbent social networks (which is what Discord and Slack are).

Just some thoughts. I really want stuff like Element/Matrix to succeed!

or fear of Roko's Basilisk [0]

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk

> From an enterprise perspective, Excel is so entrenched it would be a 5-10 year effort to port existing spreadsheets to sheets. Practically speaking, most companies wouldn't see the benefit.

And at the end of the day, it would have worse performance than Excel both in calculation speed and _much_ worse UI. One of the reasons Excel is so much better than Sheets is speed. Insurance companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on actuaries. Even if Excel cost them $500/year/user, it would be easily worth it for actuarial departments.

No, for many reasons. Workbook calculation performance, advanced, complicated spreadsheet incompatibility, worse UI/keyboard shortcuts, slow UI, different language than VBA for custom functions (It isn't necessarily worse, but it's the same thing as trying to convince a department to switch from language X to Y including rewriting every application that's written in X. Also, every person you've ever hired was familiar with X, and has no experience with Y.)

R/Python/SAS etc. are a much more compelling alternative to Excel than Google Sheets (to say nothing of the actuarial modeling software packages that are used already for more rigorous/complicated problems).

If an insurance company decided to move all of their MS Office users to Google Docs/Sheets etc, my money is on the actuarial department paying for Excel out of their budget without a moment's hesitation.

What are your thoughts about it being the 7th most dreaded language on Stack Overflow's 2020 developer survey? I've never programmed in Ruby, but it seems attractive to me.

Every time I see an "ł", I think there's something on my monitor, or dead pixels. I definitely tried to remove the debris from my monitor with my thumb before realizing it was an "L with stroke" haha :)

AFAIK, I didn't have to add any plugins to achieve that feature. I believe you can set the order to be Shuffle Tracks or Shuffle Albums out of the box, but I might be misremembering if I needed to do anything for that to be there.

see: https://i.imgur.com/zL0oZsx.png

You can customize this feature in Advanced Preferences. Then, go to Playback -> Shuffle -> Album grouping pattern.

See: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=113035.0

foobar2k wins again ;)

That makes so much sense! Thank you for explaining, abduhl!

Interesting! That is really surprising to me.

I would guess then that the increased traffic from people ordering online instead of in person offsets the increase in driving to work/socializing etc.

That also would be reflecting a significant (assumed-- possibly non-existent--see twblalock's reply below) reduction in the number of car crash fatalities we'd normally have if lockdowns weren't going on (There were 38,800 total in the US in 2019 [0]).

But data seems to be showing increased deaths due to overdoses & suicides due to those lockdowns, so it's hard to tell.

> Synthetic opioids (primarily illicitly manufactured fentanyl) appear to be the primary driver of the increases in overdose deaths, increasing 38.4 percent from the 12-month period leading up to June 2019 compared with the 12-month period leading up to May 2020. [1]

> Compared to the last three years (2017-2019), the number of suicide deaths was lower than average during the initial phase of the pandemic but, starting in July 2020, exceeded the past trend. The source of the increase was mainly female suicides, whose numbers increased by approximately 70% in October 2020. Suicides by young women (less than 40 years of age) almost doubled in October, with a 95.58% increase, compared to the same month in the past three years. The number of suicides among students was also notably higher in August and September 2020 than the corresponding numbers of past years. Our survey data indicated that the status of mental health among young women has been deteriorating in recent months, and also that young female workers were more likely than any other group to have experienced a job or income loss, suggesting adverse economic conditions surrounding some of these individuals. [2]

[0] https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estim...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...

[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2020/12/05/202...

As with basically every study that comes out these days in the social sciences, my response is: "We'll see."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

The gigantic replication crisis in social science and medicine for a start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

YMMV, but I got 4 months of Tidal for $1 as a Black Friday deal, and I really felt like its "radio" feature was better than other services. It's one reason I miss Tidal over Spotify.

The software being written being slower is of course enabled by those hardware improvements, but 1) the slow software is due to those technical inefficiencies making software easier/less expensive to produce, and 2) we can still make fast software by not using those inefficient means.

That said, there's something of a problem with that though, because by making 1) more and more prevalent, it makes 2) more expensive due to fewer people choosing to work in that manner. Similar to how consumer technology goods get much less expensive, but have many more defects and issues. That "race to the bottom" makes cheap things cheaper, but makes more expensive things more difficult to make. I don't know what that phenomenon is called specifically, but it's definitely something I've been frustrated by in nearly every industry and product category.

It looks like there is a law against companies writing contract clauses barring you or penalizing you for writing a negative review, but I don't know if there is a law that bars companies from deleting truthful, non-libelous reviews. Seems like a basic loophole to me that should have been covered in the Consumer Review Fairness Act.

> Whether your summer plans include replacing your air conditioning, installing new flooring, or riding the range, you will probably read customer reviews to learn what people say about their experiences with a business or product. Shoppers benefit from knowing what others have to say, and the Consumer Review Fairness Act (CRFA) protects people’s ability to share their truthful experiences and opinions.

> The FTC enforces the CRFA and recently sued three businesses (and two of their owners) for violating that law. According to the FTC, the companies used form contracts that barred customers from sharing negative comments and that imposed financial penalties against customers who did so. Under proposed agreements with the FTC, the businesses — including an HVAC and electrical contractor, a flooring seller, and a company that takes people on horseback rides — will stop using, and will not enforce, those contract provisions. They will also inform people who signed the contracts that the provisions can't be enforced.

> The CRFA protects your ability to share your honest opinions about a business’s products, services, or conduct in any forum, including social media. You can publish your honest review even if you say something negative about a business or the services it performed for you. If you have a signed form contract that restricts you from sharing reviews or penalizes you for doing that, the business may not be able to enforce those restrictions. If a business tries to enforce a restriction or penalty, let the business know about the CRFA, and please report it to the FTC or your state consumer protection agency. [0]

[0] https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2019/05/your-right-post-ho...

Do you mind if I ask what company you're with? I'd love to put it on my list of companies with good interview practices that I would want to apply to. If you're not comfortable with getting that specific, just for my personal curiosity, is it a FAAMG/big tech company, or other? haha :)

- MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) https://maps.org/

- Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/

Except the revenue that they potentially would have been losing out on had they not acquired their competitor.

> Andrew Carnegie provided far more real, unquestionable value to people too. It ended up being worth it. The same can be said for Leland Stanford or most other monopolies. They didn't become monopolies by not providing value.

Absolutely. The same could also be said of the closest parallel of Facebook in history, the Bell System.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

Hi, I'm thinking of learning how to edit videos. What software do you use, and what is the best way to learn it, for someone who isn't a master at photo/video editing, but is a power user of computers generally?

Yep. Exactly the same reason we break up procedures and functions into smaller units in procedural code, to be able to reason about individual pieces, and understand each step.

I've never used Pandas, but I imagine I'd have the exact same instincts to break calculations up as you do, since Excel was my "first programming language" that I was first exposed to in the 4th grade, haha. I certainly didn't learn much advanced stuff at that point, mostly because of the time period and being in a rural Midwest area there weren't a lot of programmers around to learn from and the internet was rather different in the mid 90's. :) But Excel planted the seed of programming in my mind, even though I didn't know what "programming" was.

And IFERROR() wasn't added until Excel 2007. The other way to make that operation less unwieldy if the expression was complicated, to avoid repeating it I'd put that inside another cell, and that way it would be =IF(ISERROR(C2),0,C2), but IFERROR is a much better solution.

Excel is such a good tool in many ways, and such a bad tool in many ways. Really experienced power users can follow Excel formulas much easier than blocks of imperative code. But the more complicated it gets, the harder it can be to follow it all. But that also goes the same for software, too. I do think that there is something powerful about the "debugging" you always have turned on in Excel, in that you always know what value a formula has produced, even after it has run. And you can (usually) easily see at what point an error started in your calculations.

For the programmers out there who aren't fans of Excel, or aren't super familiar with it, if you haven't seen "You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky" [0] you might be pretty amazed at what you can do with Excel at an intermediate/advanced level.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Does this exist but applied to industrial/aerospace/military interface design? The extreme example that always comes to mind for me is the Apollo Command Module [0], but all different kinds of more complicated/advanced interfaces exist, and I think that a joint learning effort between designers of those types of applications, and traditional software design, could yield amazing improvements for both sides, and every user of both types of systems.

xipho described a similar idea between video game designers/developers, and the scientific community here in this thread. [1]

[0] https://www.si.edu/sites/default/files/newsdesk/fact_sheets/...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316420

For anyone else not in the know, "DoH" means "DNS-over-HTTPS"

Here's an article from November 19, 2020 about the rollout and some of the criticisms/backlash:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/fearing-drama-mozilla-opens-pu...

For those who haven't experienced homelessness personally, doing volunteer (or paid) work for homeless shelters/outreach centers etc, or in mental health treatment centers, is one of the best ways to gain a fairly deep perspective, and get close to feeling what that perspective feels like, without actually walking a mile in those painful, broken shoes.

My homeless experience was incredibly brief (4-5 months) compared to the struggles of so many people I met during that time, but it had profound, permanent effects on my level of empathy I feel towards people still going through it. If you are struggling in your own life, dealing with depression or anxiety despite your white collar and comfortable financial situation, it can be a humbling and powerful experience to meet people who have no money, no friends, no family, and no support, not even from their own minds. Helping serve food at a shelter or something in that ballpark can be incredible for learning more about yourself as well as those folks, and you both gain from that relationship.

I'm in the same boat as you having no formal college/university CS training. You've given me a good idea for a blog series. Writing posts that go through the solutions I came up with for each day of AoC if I can do so without benefit of knowledge of useful algorithms & data structure concepts, and then reading the best solutions I can find on reddit etc, and write a blog post on how it works, as well as what underlying concepts it utilizes, and how they work. If I do that for all days/years of AoC, I could post a summary of the most useful concepts that I learned, that were applied to the most problems of AoC.

I've gotten bitten by Google locking me out of an account because I hadn't logged into it in a long time, and the device that I used to log into it was stolen long ago. Even though I have full access to the recovery email address on that account, because it's an unknown device, Google blocks me from accessing it.

In a similar way but a different mechanism, I also had the same thing happen with some accounts which I had opened up using my mobile phone number. I have struggled with mental illness throughout my life, and one of the things that can happen through crises in particular that can have vicious consequences is having no ability to regulate your behavior, in particular your finances, so you easily and quickly wrack up debt, cash out retirement accounts and blow through all that money, and being unable to pay your phone bill (or any other bill) leads you to losing that phone number, and any account which you access through that number.

The systems that we use as a society to authenticate identity for access to digital services and systems, is incredibly punishing to people who struggle with mental health issues. It's a bit of an own goal, since some of the potential solutions to it are potentially technical in nature rather than requiring legislative or societal action.

That said, the difficulties presented by the digital world to people who struggle with mental illness pale in comparison to those they face in the physical world, and how ineffective the society, governments, and medicine are at helping those people, sometimes hurting them in that process through lack of training, ability, and the flaws in the design of the overall systems.

BTW, the entirety of my post after the URL is simply quoting from that page. I would have liked to have remembered to put ">" in front of those paragraphs so it was clear that I didn't write all of that, but c'est la vie.

It's not until just now that I realized the irony inherent in my reply. What the person I was replying to did was to "post the wrong answer", and I was uncontrollably impelled to enact the very phenomenon I was describing, completely unaware I was doing so.

Whether unintentional or not, it has put a huge smile on my face.