Recent submissions

Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 8 months ago
It sounds like this study might have been funded by.... Big Breakfast.

I'll see myself out.

Comment · 8 months ago
That program listing hit me right in the feels.

I remember when I was 6 or 7 teaching myself Applesoft BASIC and writing programs with funny (to me) little print statements all through them - when computing was just exploding with possibility.

I wouldn't have had a clue what a Fibonacci sequence was though ;)

Comment · 8 months ago
What a time to be alive!

After nearly two decades of complaining loudly about deteriorating quality of Google search results and Ad injection, Google puts in AI summaries and provides 1-shot answers to >50% of queries, annihilating the advertising business in the process and TFA is complaining about that?

This is a win! I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts...

I guarantee that the minute enough people wake up and cut their advertising spend with Google, then they'll change tack again.

I wouldn't want to be hanging my career on "SEO marketing" right now..

Comment · 9 months ago
It boggles the mind as to why they choose a name for this application that is very clearly a Microsoft trademark.

In understand it's also the French word for Videoconferencing, but even still...

Comment · 9 months ago
This! I have the 14-core M4 Macbook Pro with 48GB of RAM, and Word for Mac (Version 16 at this time) runs like absolute molasses on large documents, and pegs a single core between 70 and 90% for most of the time, even when I'm not typing.

I am now starting to wonder how much of it has to do with network access to Sharepoint and telemetry data that most likely didn't exist in the Office 97 dial-up era.

Features-wise - I doubt there is a single feature I use (deliberately) today in Excel or Word that wasn't available in Office 97.

I'd happily suffer Clippy over Co-Pilot.

Comment · 9 months ago
Surely the constraint will be the rate at which you can get them into and installed orbit, not the manufacturing rate
Comment · 9 months ago
It is 100% about FOMO. The greatest pushback you'll get from anyone when you suggest voluntarily cutting off their social media accounts is that it's their way of keeping in touch/track of friends who they probably never interact with outside of watching their feeds.

Did you interact (like you know, two-way communication) with these people at any time in the last month? In the last year? In the last decade?

_Disabling_ your account, and deleting the app won't stop you from being able to log back in one day in the future if you want to look someone up, but in the mean time, you'll be living a blissful life without an ad-fuelled torment nexus simulating meaningful relationships.

Comment · 10 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
I'm by no means defending the percentage they take, but I would suggest that it's a percentage because it's simple:

Pick 3 imaginary games for sale priced at $1, $10 and $100. Any one of those games could be a million download a month success, and any one of them could be a complete dud.

What flat rate would you suggest to:

* Pay the developer for their work (ongoing per sale)

* Review each game and ensure it meets store guidelines (once per update)

* Host said game regardless of how popular it is (ongoing)

* Process transactions for the game (ongoing)

The alternative would be pricing based on revenue tiers (similar to what Unreal Engine does now), which aren't known in advance and don't take global variance into account (USD$200 in Eastern Europe might be a month's salary).

Percentage is just simpler. It also means that they'd be taking a loss on every free app or in the case of Free-to-Download In-App purchase apps - until users start transacting.

Comment · 11 months ago
> If everything goes offline for one hour per year at the same time, then a person is blocked and unproductive for an hour per year. > On the other hand, if each service experiences the same hour per year of downtime but at different times, then the person is likely to be blocked for closer to 100 hours per year.

Putting Cloudflare in front of a site doesn't mean that site's backend suddenly never goes down. Availability will now be worse - you'll have Cloudflare outages* affecting all the sites they proxy for, along with individual site back-end failures which will of course still happen.

* which are still pretty rare

Comment · 11 months ago
Comment · 11 months ago
Specifically old Japanese hardware from the 80s and 90s - this stuff is bulletproof
Comment · 11 months ago
I have had fairly extensive hearing loss in my left ear for about 20-something years and finally decided to investigate options about a year or so ago.

I tried a set of Phonaks for about a fortnight, but I found them tinny-sounding (which I'm told you get used to), and their automatic mode switching (for when you walk into noisy rooms) was incredibly frustrating.

A month later, Apple dropped the Airpods Pro hearing-aid mode software update and I have never looked back. The feedback from my family has been overwhelmingly positive, which more than offsets any qualms I had about them being so visible when you wear them.

My (obviously subjective) view is that the sound quality of the AUD$400 set of Airpod Pro 2s completely smokes the AUD$5,000+ set of Phonaks, and that's before you account for all the UX niceties you get from Apple when you play in their ecosystem (virtually seamless transition between phone, computer and TV (with AppleTV box)).

The fact that you can run an on-demand hearing test on your phone for free, giving you the ability to track any decline yourself without having to front up to an audiologist is just the icing on the cake.

Comment · 11 months ago
>> “You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one.”

> This resonates deeply with me. That's why I built one myself [0]

I was hoping to see a home-made bike at that link.. Came away disappointed

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