iClaudiusX

I only use Amazon to browse selections, and then buy direct from the brand's site. Buying only from Amazon made sense in the bad old days when most sites didn't have their act together with payment processing and shipping. Thankfully, those days are long gone.

It's basically the reverse of the "browse in store, buy on Amazon for cheaper" experience.

It used to be that a release was tried and tested. Now everyone's an unpaid QA tester months after the official beta period is over. And the folk wisdom of "wait until x.1" keeps getting pushed further and further back to the point of futility.

That's interesting because otherwise tedious chores like washing dishes or cleaning can feel meditative and therapeutic after I've had my coffee.

I came to a similar crossroads when I realized I did not want to switch from windows7 to 10 once security patches end in 2020.

I've been using Kubuntu 18.10 since January and have found it so much easier to get things done. I don't have to constantly reset privacy and telemetry settings to keep the OS's nose out of my life. It has a real shell, ssh, and terminal so I no longer have to muck about with cygwin, putty, and winscp. I can customize the UI to my liking, e.g. dark mode that's consistent across applications.

About the only thing that doesn't work is about 1/3rd of my Steam game library but it's a tiny sacrifice for the efficiency gained with a proper OS that respects your time and privacy.

The opt-out for rerouting is a truly awful design choice.

One time I was driving up through NYC during a heavy downpour where visibility was only a few car-lengths ahead. Traffic had slowed to about 30 mph on the NJTP and most people thankfully had their hazard flashers on. Then Google Maps decides to distract me and pile on the anxiety with multiple "press no in the next 10 seconds or else!" re-routing prompts to save at most 5 minutes.

Just yesterday I got a pop-under to "confirm" that a speed trap was still in effect, which of course obscured some vital information on screen for a few minutes until it finally gave up.

Demanding that your user take their attention off the road to fumble with a touch screen just to stay on the route they're comfortable with is dangerous, and if I opt out once it should at the very least snooze those alerts.

The increasing sprawl of non-search widgets invading the search result page reminds me of the AOL years where "the web" was funneled through a narrow portal controlled by one entity.

Having to scroll down past ads, unrelated news, unrelated youtube videos, and ever more of these info boxes has pushed the actual content I'm looking for out to the second page. It's made it much easier to use ddg as default and use the !g flag only when absolutely necessary.

Fully informed consent should be a bare minimum for this kind of work.

Tech should take a cue from the biomedical research community and adopt an institutional review board that can independently assess the ethical and privacy implications of the data they're collecting.

Apple could be a leader here and drag the rest of the industry forward.

I'm most excited about the modern A72 cores, upgraded hardware decode, and up to 4 GB RAM. They really listened and delivered what most people wanted in a next gen RPi.

Technically, the Zune bug didn't kill the device. The bug sent it into an infinite boot loop until the following day when the leap year calculation could return.

But yes, the difficulty in verifying a correct implementation of date and time calculation calls out for a standard test apparatus to "prove" correct results for a defined scope.

I would trace it to a few factors; most important is the rise of the influencer advertising strategy.

It is vastly cheaper to simply pay streamers to hype up your game on Twitch or youtube than it is to give an honest, sober demo live on an E3 stage. The audience at these press events has shifted from enthusiast reporters/critics to hyperventilating influencer personalities. It was so bad this year that they were obnoxiously screaming and interrupting the presenters every few seconds to the point where the people on stage were losing their train of thought.

The other aspect is that putting together a demo takes time out of development. Almost every game shown this year had a release date of either Fall 2019 or Spring 2020. That means they're either on crunch or ramping up for it and can't afford to set aside a few months to make a vertical slice for E3. This is partly due to the end of this console generation with new hardware coming next holiday season.

The longer term trend is that marketing has caught on to the irrelevance of E3. They can run their own Nintendo Direct style live stream whenever they want to speak to their audience and the press will disseminate that info to the wider community.

You're even seeing companies like EA experiment with dropping a new title with zero advance notice as they did with Apex Legends (their take on battle royale, from the Titanfall developers). They just had an influencer preview event the week before and dumped it to the public with pretty wild success.

Indeed, design choices accounted for the biggest difference by far.

I like that the title frames it as a language shootout to pull people in to see if their favorite language wins (and I'm partial to Python having rewritten tens of thousands of lines of Java into numpy). Still, it would be foolish for people to come away from this brilliant analysis by ignoring the more important conclusion.