jwestbury

This is regionally specific. The US south, for instance, sees higher usage in summer due to air conditioning demand.

> It can't tell you about f better learning is worth it

It can, given sufficient inputs in terms of desired outcomes.

Of course, desired outcomes are where subjectivity enters into things. :)

Or just give the government reasonable power to enforce things. GDPR, as an example, has been very effective, because the fines which can be levied for violations are genuinely impactful to businesses. The maximum fine is 4% of global annual revenue. Alphabet, for instance, could theoretically be liable for up to $11b, or around 20% of their net income. Amazon could be liable for up to $20b -- almost double their operating income (their 2022 net income was negative to begin with).

As a result, GDPR is pretty well followed. As an American living in Europe, I have to use a VPN to access many of my American financial institutions, because they don't think the GDPR risk is worth it and have chosen to simply block access from Europe.

I'll go further: Three months is too long. Secrets which are used to authenticate and identify should be rotated far more regularly, using infrastructure which treats them as effectively ephemeral. The industry has learned to do this -- and built the infrastructure to support it! -- for things like user credentials (see: extensive use of AWS IAM roles, rather than user creds). We should be making a push to treat certificates the same way.

(That said, three months is better than any longer period. The shorter the rotation, the lower the risk -- but, more importantly, the stronger the impetus to build strong automation around the process.)

One of the principal engineers I used to work with at AWS had a saying: "A one-year certificate expiration is an outage you schedule a year in advance." Of course, it's a bit hyperbolic -- but a ten-year expiration is almost a certainty to result in an outage.

In a similar vein, you should never generate resources which will expire unless some undocumented action is taken. A common one I've seen is self-signed certs which last for n days, and are re-generated whenever an application is deployed or restarted, under the assumption that the application will never run untouched longer than that. (Spoiler: It probably will, at some point, whether due to unexpected change freezes, going into maintenance mode, or -- in my personal favourite -- being deployed to an environment that just isn't updated as regularly.)

University presidents hardly need to be distinguished researchers.

Same -- FAANG, Dropbox, quant hedge fund on my resume, ~10 years of experience, senior engineer. I don't actually want a new job, to be fair, but I prefer to interview at least a couple times a year to keep skills sharp and get a good idea of my value in the market. Right now, my value appears to be approximately nil. It's wild.

Have you worked at Microsoft? I have. Their engineering practices are suspect at best. Nobody in Office actually knows what's going on -- it's difficult to find anyone who actually understands more than a tiny, tiny fragment of the stack. And the not-my-problem culture from the days of Gates and Ballmer stack-ranking is absolutely still present -- I found what looked like a pretty major security bug (expired user certs being accepted, including those for a service admin account), and was told by multiple long-tenured, senior engineers, that since it wasn't our service misbehaving, I shouldn't worry about it. (I ignored them, dug in more, discovered it was a totally unrelated -- and less scary -- bug, and still found the owning team to let them know.)

I've worked at -- including Microsoft -- three major tech companies and a quant hedge fund, and Microsoft's engineering practices -- at least within the Office org, where I worked -- are appalling by almost any measure, in comparison with their competitors. Their success is largely down to three things, IMO:

1. First-/early-mover advantage in many spaces.

2. Excellent business management.

3. Some very, very strong engineers at the principal level and higher.

Membership is a hook -- once you have a member, they're more likely to buy from you. It's not really a marketing channel, per se, but it is a method of increasing sales.

"Marketing" gets kind of murky at the edges, really. Consider Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, who are famous for their fish-throwing, but have never actually spent anything on advertising -- are they marketing or not?

I've been in tech for over a decade. I know all of your examples -- except a11y and i18n. Numeronym proliferation is a bit insane right now, and really needs to be stopped. :(

At least in media, it is.

And, of course, King of the Hill skewered the idea by having Bobby get addicted to cigarettes when Hank used this punishment.

> My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality as having gone way down.

This is actually something which is borne out by research, though in a slightly different context. Niro Sivanathan at the LBS has studied how arguments are presented, and essentially, recipients of arguments engage in an averaging function instead of an additive function, when evaluating strength -- adding one weaker point to a pair of very strong points actually detracts from the perceived strength of an argument.

It would not be at all surprising if we did the same sort of thing in different contexts, such as the example you gave here.

It's not, though - it's about blackholing unknown sources. Yes, this makes it incredibly difficult to self-host or to start up a new provider in the space. But from the perspective of anyone trying to protect their users, it makes sense.

By definition, every new source has never sent spam -- but it's reasonable to assume that an unknown source is likely spam, however unfortunate that may be.

> - Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted.

I assume this has an implicit "in the USA"? Trying this in Europe would be an awfully bad idea -- GDPR has teeth, unlike most American consumer protection regulations.

Honestly, confusion here is just poor driver education in the US. HAWK signals follow normal patterns: Amber is caution/be prepared to stop. Red is stop. Flashing red is "stop until clear," i.e., use as a stop sign. This is true for all traffic lights in the US.

Having originally gotten my license in the US -- in what is apparently the hardest state to get a license in (WA) -- and now in the UK, I can say emphatically that US driver education is severely lacking.