ferrocarraiges's comments

Filter bubbles are easy: We are good, They are bad.

Real life is hard: We are imperfect people, They are imperfect people.

How are you supposed to feed the anger center of your brain if you occasionally have to see the objects of your hatred acting all kind and neighborly around your community? It's much easier to avoid Them and only interact with those who have the internet points to prove that they are ideologically pure.

They are very annoying when you block JavaScript in your browser.

We don't know, but the Market would figure out if it were possible for other app-hosting platforms to compete.

Some would try to woo developers by taking less of a cut, and unprofitable ones would go out of business. Eventually, an equilibrium would be reached.

Do you mean unforced error?

They didn't need the metaverse, but they did need some sort of new direction; buying out nascent social networks was a stall tactic to prolong the time before they became uncool with the hip youths.

I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that Zuckerberg read Snow Crash as a teenager, loved it, and either missed the punk ethos or edited it out of his memory when he found himself in a position of respectable authority.

"They" are whoever holds the monopoly on violence in the region. Sometimes colloquially called a "government" or "state".

You probably don't pay them to uphold their power to close roads whenever they want, it's just a consequence of the aforesaid monopoly on violence.

If you think it's wrong, you can try to bring competition into the market, but if history is any indication you'd better make sure you have a lot of upper/middle-class people who agree with you first.

The engine was fine, it was a square peg / round hole situation.

They picked an off-the-shelf engine that was designed to simulate tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons in 3D. Maybe they got a good deal on it.

The bird's-eye click-to-move camera mode is what the engine was designed for, but the developers kludged in some keyboard controls because they were making an action game.

The odd timing-based fighting styles sort of make sense, because the engine wanted to handle combat with dice rolls on a mostly-fixed interval.

It could have turned out a lot worse, when you consider what they were working with. I hope they keep some of the weird quirks, like the rhythm swordplay.

It's a statement about how we are destroying our heritage, our history, and our future.

It makes people think about a world without the famous works of art which tether us to our past, to highlight how far adrift we are now.

That sounds like the opposite of terrible. We are long overdue for some bloodletting in residential real estate markets.

I often wonder why people don't use SI prefixes for money.

We could say that they've spent on the order of 10 gigadollars.

Oh, just wait until you start to work with cantankerous senior engineers.

I once worked with someone who convinced the boss to do a silent yoga retreat as a teambuilding exercise, with a plan to quit before it happened.

I am genuinely curious: why did the FTC take this enforcement action?

There is no fine, no prosecution, no consequences of any sort. Essentially, they're just asking the executive to "implement an information security program" at any companies they head.

This seems to send the message that there are absolutely no consequences for getting caught hiding an extremely negligent data breach. Was that the FTC's intent?

Agreed, it's in the same vein as self-driving cars.

Sure, it could put a lot of programmers out of a job in theory.

In practice, the emergency brake alert goes off for cars waiting to turn in the oncoming lane, the blind spot warnings trigger on cars that are ahead of you, the lane departure warnings are usually wrong, and so on.

I'm not worried, and I prefer to avoid the uncertainty even if it means outsourcing a bit less effort to the magic AI pixies.

If I ever go back to a team that has daily morning stand-ups, I plan to ask that we use the meeting as an opportunity to do some morning calisthenics.

It would be good for all kinds of reasons. Helping people to wake up, discouraging long soliloquies, encouraging camaraderie, etc.

That being said, this paper uses 15 minutes of jogging as an example, and I suspect that might qualify as anaerobic exercise for many of us...

That view goes back much farther than apocalyptic movies. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes wrote:

>the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes, like many philosophers, did not have much faith in human nature.

I wonder if the decision-maker could have been wealthy enough that thousands of dollars felt insignificant to them. At some point, you lose sight of how much things cost, because the answer is almost always "not much".

Reminds me of Jessica Walter's character in Arrested Development: "It's a banana, Michael - how much could it cost? Ten dollars?"

Stephen King wrote a short story on the subject, Autopsy Room 4.

Unfortunately, in practice they now rely on one number: GPA, quietly weighted based on the high school's reputation.

They do, but GitHub is just one website.

Most hiring managers will look at what you give them. Some like portfolios, some like name-brand degrees, some look for publications or parents...the important thing is to keep learning.

People tout GitHub portfolios because the are easy bonus points. If you spend a week learning a new language or framework, you can push your toy project without much extra effort.

Too ambitious. Platforms like MySpace or GeoCities would be closer to the mark, if we could find a way to incentivize a hand-off approach to data collection.

Site builders like SquareSpace, Wix, and WordPress are also close, but they're mostly designed and marketed as professional tools rather than personal spaces.

Most people don't ever want to hear words like "DNS record" or "PHP version", but they do want to express themselves, and they can figure out a markdown or markup language in pursuit of that.

Wikipedia has the FBI's crime statistics from 2019, broken out into categories including "larceny - theft":

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

Their highest rate is Spokane, WA at 5,408/100k, which would mean at most 5.4% of people report a theft. SF is a close second at about 5%.

Curious, let's look at the poll sourced by the article. It was a questionnaire of about 1500 people conducted online or by telephone. But there's no link to a paper, and they don't clarify how the online poll was conducted.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sfnext-poll-meth...

Not every victim will file a police report, but it's usually required for insurance payouts, and an order of magnitude difference is hard to swallow. They might have some sampling bias in favor of people who wanted to be interviewed about the state of the city.