FiddlyPack

Tbh I want my 3GS form factor back. That design was the "right" one imho, and we lost it due to market pressure for bigger screens and better cameras, when what we needed to do was keep the utility but largely stay off our screens.

Dan Ariely was one of the biggest disappointments and betrayals of my intellectual life. I found the "research" he did to be mind-blowing, groundbreaking stuff at the time, and I told many people his work, sharing his papers and podcasts as a true enthusiast.

I am astonished that he holds an academic-adjacent position anywhere, no matter what his regrets might be today. Private redemption shouldn't be out of reach, but it shouldn't be possible for him to hold a position at any institution concerned with uncovering Truth. He should have resigned out of respect, if his institution was too gutless to do so. It's a tragedy.

How? I tried but got forced back onto 5.

That's a sharp insight, and it reveals something core to communication that I otherwise wouldn't have considered- HN item 6b translocates reliospacactivity of our medium.

Shall I engage the tachyon beams, sir?

That's the fun part. We don't. Could have happened 10 years ago without us noticing. I don't expect my skin cells to be able to recognize "me" anymore than I expect we will be able to recognize a superintelligent AGI. If it arrived 10 years ago, then the last 10 years could simply be its PR campaign. We wouldn't even be able to tell if it was successfully achieving its "goals" or not, assuming an AGI even has "goals"

I was writing slop grenade essays in Slack before LLMs were a thing. To everyone who had to put up with my overly verbose style: I am sorry.

I'm trying to take your comment seriously, but it's very difficult. My partner is a physician in the US. People are ending up in ERs because it takes a year for them to see the specialist who could have prevented the same problem.

"If you can afford it" is true everywhere. You can also see a specialist in just about any country in a couple days if you've got the money to fly there; often cheaper and faster to travel outside the US to get care, depending on what you need.

"Public" healthcare in the US is a joke. Insurance costs more and covers less every year.

Gotta find some way to keep the population occupied with something “meaningful” as you automate away their jobs while providing longer lifespans!

Multiple cursors has been supported for quite some time now in VSCode, as well as related useful default editor shortcuts like jump cursor by word, beginning/end of line, etc, that are especially useful when moving around multiple cursors/selections simultaneously.

Once you have audience _capture_, worse UX becomes a valuable dark pattern because it requires _investment_.

Have you ever seen a modern slot machine? There seems to be a pattern to winning, if only you study it a bit longer...just put in one more coin and the epiphany will come.

I’ve been a bike commuter too and if it’s any consolation whatsoever, I just want to let you know that if you see me with my cell phone on my steering while driving, it’s because I have my navigation app open and I want it in my peripheral vision so I can be attentive to the road.

If it prevents two or three cars from making the light you were both in together, you’ve needlessly made those specific cars wait for an entire additional cycle...in heavy traffic, it’s bad for everyone when as many vehicles as possible don’t make it through the pipe, as it slows down the entire congested apparatus further.

Regarding McDonalds, correct, the innovation was not in the franchise. The innovation was in creating the corporate and logistic structures necessary that every single McDonalds, everywhere, even though owned by franchisees, would deliver pretty much the same experience.

Innovate means to make changes in a thing that is established. The innovation here is that the thing is the same everywhere, you don’t need to know the local errata to rely on it.

I say this as someone who was downright flabbergasted that the iPhone was described as “innovative.” After all, I had been using a handheld PC with full Windows installed for years when the original iPhone came out, and it could make VoIP calls just fine! It took me awhile to accept that the incremental “new” people are talking about when they talk about innovation is distinctly NOT novelty. It’s a shuffling of the already existing puzzle-pieces in a way that, in the cases it is successful, we call innovative, and when it fails, it was simply “ahead of its time.”

...the innovation is a consistent more reliable and timely experience, consistent across geographies, where it did not exist before.

McDonalds didn’t have the first burger franchise, the innovation is very much in the reliability of an experience that is a better fit for the needs of the consumer than the alternatives.

I too avoided booking taxis due to bad dispatchers, even though I’m sure some good dispatchers existed in some areas. That doesn’t really do you any good when the use case for a taxi is generally that you need a car in a place that is not your home, and so you are unfamiliar with the area.

Uber not only gave you a reliable dispatcher, they show you with GPS that the taxi on the way, which greatly improves consumer confidence that yes, the ride really is on its way. If that existed pre-Uber for some areas, it hardly matters if you never visit the area and so don’t know about it’s existence.