delackner

Joined 18 years ago

Karma
1,366
Submissions
633
Member since
Feb 17
Me: seth at username dot com Work: shuffling bits
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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
For me, all these tools suffer from the same basic question, how can I put proprietary private source into a tool notorious for siphoning up and copying everything you say to it?
Comment · 2 years ago
Anki is well regarded and has both first and third party (AnkiWeb) iOS apps
Comment · 3 years ago
Fun anecdote: I walked into a Capital One (BANK) where they have a Café, and the gimmick is that if you pay with your Capital One card, you get a reduced price.

They said their payment terminals were down so they could not take credit cards. I said oh... I don't have any cash, oh well no coffee for me. They said well... we can comp you one drink per person if you don't have cash.

Neither I nor they considered the option of me walking over to the nearby bank ATM and withdrawing cash.

Comment · 3 years ago
What a terrifying experience. This goes into my growing list of reasons why it pays to just take note of negative people's behavior, and quietly terminate their contract without ever discussing anything with them.

Businesses learned this a long time ago, which is why they never tell you why they get rid of you. They just say your services are no longer required.

Comment · 3 years ago
Here's a more real example that is not just one "feeling". In Portland Oregon there are TONS of hundred year old houses that all look fairly similar because they were all built "cheap" back then from mail order catalogs.

Here's a page showing some of those mail order catalogs: https://www.thoughtco.com/foursquare-house-plans-catalog-fav...

Looking from the basement up through to the framing, or from the second story down to the flooring, EVERYTHING was built from really thick timber. If you've walked around a modern unfinished project you can see nearly everything wood is made from fast growing wood or particles of wood just glued together. And that holds true even for "high-end" home projects (aka homes sold as high end because they have fancy kitchen appliances, not solid construction).

Comment · 4 years ago
Maybe someone here will know how to fix this:

I turned off internet access in my LG WebOS TV settings. On power on, it has no audio for about 5s and then the display blanks, shows LG Logo, and then finally is fully awake. Is there a solution?

Comment · 4 years ago
Indeed this "test" is laughable. "the drivers had time to get to know the cars and their infotainment systems" really though? Like an hour? Is it their personal car? "...By photographing the same driver in all cars..." How many drivers were involved and how long did they use their car?

A photo of the winning 2005 Volvo V70 shows it is a pure traditional all controls, zero screen interface. So only intentions that are possible in that era are testable. It is not feasible to have a button for every possible command today.

I've been driving Audis for several years, with their rotary dial interface, and it takes a maddening amount of time to do anything, so much that I often just give up and don't do whatever task I was trying to accomplish.

On a touchscreen, I can be driving along, then 1. take perhaps 0.1s to glance at the screen 2. while watching the road, move my hand to hover a finger where I think is the right place. 3. take another 0.1s glance where my finger is. If I was right, just tap and immediately look back at the road. 4. If I was wrong, while watching the road, adjust and repeat.

At no time am I ever looking away from the road for more than a fraction of a second, and since I don't have to think about finding where some "currently highlighted screen element cursor" is, my mind is relaxed to focus on driving, and each glance at the screen is just to look at EXACTLY what I know is the location of the feature I want to touch.

Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Just reiterating what some others said. The decision in your career life does not have to be a zero sum balance of low pay vs high stress/hours.

There are several companies where the revenue they create per employee is so astronomical that reasonable work-life balance and high pay are on the table.

Comment · 5 years ago
I see geographical splitting being pushed in a few places, but this is a really anachronistic vision of what would really benefit consumers. Even back in the phone days, regional monopolies didn't turn out to be a net win. It just meant that each of those new mini-monopolies dominated their region.

The right way to think about this is what kind of splitting would produce the most competitive landscape. We have a really successful example in the way that ISP competition has played out in various markets.

The US has regional ISP near monopolies in gigabit fiber, since the infrastructural outlay is so expensive. This is analogous to the moat FB has from building a vast and deeply connected network graph.

The ISP outcome has been that the US mostly pays extraordinarily high prices for substandard service.

Other countries have avoided this trap by regulating the enforced splitting of the network itself and the service provider. Since building out the physical network (the fiber, or the friend graph) is extremely hard, great that is a natural monopoly. Maybe you might get a couple of huge players, but the barrier to entry for new players is nearly insurmountable.

Each network graph / fiber provider is required by law to offer access to their network to third party service providers who you can contract with to provide you internet service over the network.

Japan for instance has this setup, with a handful of players that have built national (or regional) fiber networks, and when you buy service, you have a split bill. Part of it goes to pay for access to the physical network. The other part is to pay for an ISP that is routing your packets over the network.

I think this is the proper solution for FB. Break the company apart between the network graph provider, and the CLIENT layer. Let third parties provide their own friend graph client with features that people want.

Then you would see a flowering of competition as people feel free to try the client experience they prefer. * How about chronological news feed? * no ads, but paying your interconnect cost by making you pay a subscription * fine grained control of how many stories you ever see from specific over-talkative people. * delivering a subset of your friends' stories only on keyword-matched topics / hiding all stories that match specific topics.

I am not hopeful the technologically illiterate people writing the decisions will understand this though. Geographic splitting is nonsensical for a graph that is inherently global.

Comment · 5 years ago
Certainly we need a cultural shift towards honoring ALL kinds of work, but if as you said, the work is hard, sporadic, and long hours, then of course no one wants to do it if there are other options that pay the same but lack those features.
Comment · 5 years ago
Glass absorbs a huge chunk of the spectrum, both UV and visible. Without studying the actual difference, it is risky to assume that the effect would be similar.
Comment · 6 years ago
The messenger's clothes don't matter if the message is verifiable.

Go read the clinical study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034215/

Look up his list of Guinness records. Marathon in the desert. Climbed nearly to the top of Everest in shorts and no shirt. World record for longest breath hold underwater. etc.

Only someone who feels strange would even think to try these things.

Comment · 6 years ago
This interview shows Wim Hof Guiding someone through a full single round:

https://youtu.be/JPPlicAEFec?t=3058

Four rounds in a row first thing in the morning blows coffee away by a long shot.

And the free app to make it easy to track progress: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wim-hof-method/id890471578?m...

Comment · 6 years ago
This is untrue. Tokyo Metro is one of the largest systems by ridership in the world, and operates at a profit. It does have sizable capital investments that take years to pay down.

This also completely ignores the halo effects of these systems that vastly increase the economic output of the region. This is why it is often logical for the state to pay for the system, since the costs are centralized and the profits are distributed.

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