d2p's comments

d2p | 6 years ago | on: Guidance against wearing masks for the coronavirus is wrong – cover your face

> At best, they're effective at presenting people who don't know they're sick from infecting others.

I don't have numbers, but I'm pretty sure the number of people infected by people that didn't know they were sick is significant. Imagine if all those sick people wore masks (or some substitute, like a scarf over their mouth/nose).

If we can agree that wearing a mask (or substitite) if you might be sick is a good idea, but you don't know if you might be sick, that seems to translate to wearing a mask (or substitute) is a good idea.

> that only works if you can mask a significant portion of the population without a shortage of masks for people who we know need them.

I agree it's important to reserve masks for those who need them most, but that doesn't mean we have to teach people they are not effective. We could instead teach them how "non-masks" can make very reasonable substitutes. And let's not forget that reducing the spread has a real impact on the need for healthcase workers to have them.

d2p | 6 years ago | on: Wacom tablets track every app you open

> browser extension

Using browser extensions to block ads is much higher risk than doing DNS blocking. Most ad blockers have full access to all web pages, which essentially means they could trivially scrape your usernames/passwords for your email/banks/etc or perform actions on your behalf.

There's room for this to go bad (AdBlocker dev turns bad, or sells extension to a bad guy for a wad of cash, or extension has security vulnerabilities, or keys for publishing extension are not propery secured) so while DNS-level blocking might not work as well, it's definitely not an obviously-worse solution.

(though FIWI PiHole in the past had some really agressive default lists which stopped my from using it - though I set it up again recently and it's been much better - I haven't had any broken websites besides Amazon's own sponsored product links at the top of their own search results pages).

d2p | 7 years ago | on: Think Twice Before Downgrading to a Free GitHub Account

> Its not

It's not common to rebase?

> i will communicate a force push on master to the whole team and will disable protection temporarily

Isn't that exactly what this point was about? You have branch protection enabled for master because you think it's a good idea to avoid accidental force-pushes. These comments were exactly about not having the ability to protect branches.

I'm not really sure what you're arguing for/against.

d2p | 7 years ago | on: Think Twice Before Downgrading to a Free GitHub Account

Working on a separate branch may still require periodically bringing in changes from master (eg. to resolve conflicts). The options are either a) a merge commit or b) a rebase. A rebase will require a `--force` push. Some people prefer merges, but personally I prefer rebasing - I like to keep my full history even when merging back to master, since it's not a lot of extra effort and it can be useful when tracking down issues in old code :)

d2p | 7 years ago | on: Think Twice Before Downgrading to a Free GitHub Account

It's fairly common to do `git push --force` (or hopefully `--force-with-lease`) after operations like rebasing. This overwrites the remote history, so can easily lose work. Many people set some branches as protected, so they can't be force-pushed over accidentally.

d2p | 7 years ago | on: Think Twice Before Downgrading to a Free GitHub Account

I downgraded too, and noticed GitHub Pages stopped working (the content is still there, but they don't rebuild - although they did for a little while after downgrading). It is clearly marked as a Pro feature, I just hadn't considered that the free private repos would be more restricted.

It's not a big deal to me, I'll probably just make the repos public.

d2p | 7 years ago | on: Chrome “clear cookies on exit” feature does not work

I posted an answer on SO but may be worth repeating here. The screenshots show "reddit.com" as clear-on-exit and "www.reddit.com" as the owner of the cookie.

When adding a site to the clear-on-exist list, the box shows

  [*.]example.com
I think you need to use

  [*.]reddit.com
if you want to include sub-domains too.

d2p | 7 years ago | on: Block Ads in Apps on Android

> Because the app is open source, if it was doing anything shady, it would be found out

This is a little misleading... Just because there is source code on GitHub does not mean the random APK you're downloading from the internet and side-loading is safe.

If you're paranoid (and you probably should be - if I was a bad person and wanted to get malware onto your machines, I'd be making some useful "open source" app and publishing "its source code" on GitHub too), you'd want to build the app yourself! :)

d2p | 8 years ago | on: Subscription Hell

I tend to prefer subscriptions for things where what I'm consuming is somewhat throwaway; so things like TV, films, books (things I'd never want to revisit/rewatch). I don't prefer it for things I might like music though. Some years ago, I ripped all my CDs (yeah, it was a lot of effort) and said I'd spend up to £10/month on music rather than a Spotify sub. I don't spend anything like that, but still tend to pick up all the new music I like. At any point I could stop buying new music and still having a big library, so I think it's worked out well.

That said, if Google Play Music Unlimited was either half the price (£5/mo) or was shareable with my wife for the current price, I'd probably have a different opinion!

d2p | 8 years ago | on: Subscription Hell

> Every day you are being subsidized by users that don't use adblockers

I guess I'm a subsidiser; I don't use an ad blocker (for many reasons). I'm also slightly of the opinion that people using ad-blockers have made things worse for those that don't :(

I don't mind ads - I don't even mind advertises tracking some things to give me more relevant ads (heck, I'd tell them what I like to get more relevant ads).. I do mind obtrusive and noisy ads, and the security risks that tend to come with them (and other third party content) being slapped on every site with no thought though; and for some content I would pay to a reasonable fee to remove them.

d2p | 8 years ago | on: Subscription Hell

> I highly doubt it.

I never said it was likely, just possible. And I wouldn't question the incompetence of anyone these days; big companies make questionable decisions all the time ;-)

d2p | 8 years ago | on: Subscription Hell

> The biggest hurdle is not price elasticity between getting someone to pay $10 versus $35, it's getting people to pay anything instead of something.

I'm not doubting that's tough; but it's significantly easier to get someone to pay $1/month than $35/month. People aren't completely stupid; they won't just blindly pay any amount just because they'd decided they'd pay something.

Like I said though; if I was making this decision, I'd start high.

d2p | 8 years ago | on: Subscription Hell

Even if we choose not to have things because they're expensive, it doesn't mean we should not complain about the prices. Companies make changes based on feedback so if there's good evidence that people think something is too expensive, the company may consider changing their prices or have offers.

I don't think people don't complain about stuff enough, we get taken for rides by big companies all the time while their CEOs take home massive pay packets. People should fight for better services and lower prices more; it works!

d2p | 8 years ago | on: Subscription Hell

Just because a large percentage won't pay doesn't mean that putting the price high will maximise income. It's possible that at $10/month they'd get 5x the signups.

That said, increasing prices is hard; reducing is easy. If you're trying to figure out sweet spot for max revenue is it probably makes sense to start high and slowly reduce it until you find it. If you're on a rolling monthly payment and decrease everyones prices together, nobody will get upset.

d2p | 8 years ago | on: Subscription Hell

This is my issue with most subscriptions too. The price has to be set based on the average use, which makes it really expensive for the infrequent user (and ultimately this means less conversions, yet nobody seems to care about this?!).

I've had the same gripe with games for years. I stopped paying for Xbox live and World of Warcraft because they're the same - if I only played for a few hours in a month, I've paid over-the-odds. I can't predict in a given month how likely I am to have how many hours, so I end up paying them £0. They could get more money out of me if they had a better PAYG or tiering option.

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