Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
I wouldn't disagree that decomposing a system in this way before implementation is a net positive, however I think different stake holders view plans like these very differently. If you discover partway through development that the library you planned to use for a feature will not work and as a result have to revisit your plan, then some stake holders see that as a failure or delivering late because to them the original plan was an iron-clad guarantee whereas to developers that's just an expected part of the process where not everything can be known ahead of time
Comment · 4 years ago
I quite like the idea of a ratcheting mechanism, something like copyright for a few years is free, then the creator must pay an increasing amount of money to extend it every X years up to a maximum of the creators lifetime
Comment · 4 years ago
It's unlikely to ever happen as it would require a lot of political wrangling, but I think a system where you only gain copyright protection or the ability to sue for damages by submitting your work to a repository/archive would be beneficial (either for free or very low cost). Then when copyright has expired the archive can make the work available to the public
Comment · 4 years ago
It probably is against the ToS, but it's also perfectly legal first amendment speech, which undercuts Elon's claims that he's turning Twitter into a free speech platform. Seems more like a Elon-sanctioned speech platform
Comment · 4 years ago
I wouldn't be happy with it but that doesn't make it illegal. In some countries it might be considered libel/defamation depending on what was said, but those standards vary wildly between/within countries and are to my understanding generally not considered criminal

And permitting lying or misleading speech is a pretty core part of free speech, it might be socially frowned upon or disincentivised by terms of service/moderation/other methods, but it's certainly not illegal

Comment · 4 years ago
For the purposes of opening a bank account or for getting a loan then it would be considered identity theft. Pretending to be someone else online though? That's perfectly legal free speech in the US as far as I'm aware
Comment · 4 years ago
I'm not a big Twitter user but am often bombarded with right wing content on other sites like Reddit and Youtube no matter how often I try to tell the site/train the algorithm that it's not content I'm interested in seeing whatsoever, the idea that conservatives are being silenced when I (a left wing Brit) am constantly seeing their content is frankly ridiculous
Comment · 4 years ago
Wouldn't these points also apply to the internet itself? Large monopolies in infrastructure, having to teach people what domains are, diplomatic conflicts between nations over access to information/infrastructure, prolific spam and scams, etc.

The internet did grow out of telephony so perhaps it's not surprising that it shares many of the same qualities, however I think these government vs private debates often ignore that the failures and shortcomings of these systems are usually a result of both bad government intervention and bad private actors, not solely one or the other

Comment · 4 years ago
Very much agreed. I also take issue with the 'received wisdom' that eking out productivity from people at any cost to their physical or mental health is actually producing more benefit over the long term, it seems more likely to me that it's just externalising the increased societal/healthcare/other costs for short term benefit
Comment · 4 years ago
Personally I quite like the settings change, perhaps I didn't spend enough time with the old one but it felt rather clunky/disorganised to me. Whereas now they're roughly approximate between devices there's less for me to remember. I'd agree no one expects a computer to work the same as a phone/tablet, however when it comes to such basic things as settings having the same interface and syncing things where it makes sense is a positive for me
Comment · 4 years ago
I recently ran into this setting up a laptop for work and how user hostile this step had become made my blood boil. There is no option to setup an initial local account unless you intentionally provide bad input to the Microsoft login page, I ended up just wiping the machine and installing Windows 10 from scratch

I'd really like to able to send invoices to Microsoft and other companies like Dell who pull this bullshit for wasting time in my life to work around this stuff (and I wonder how much potential productivity is used up by these practices)

Comment · 4 years ago
That's true, and there may be valid reasons to remove a library and reimplement that 10% yourself such as for performance, stability or educational reasons. However if the library is performing as expected, does not using 90% of it make it any less valuable? If the problem has been solved in a satisfactory way and remaking it doesn't bring benefit or solve a problem then it seems wasteful to spend the human time to do so
Comment · 4 years ago
I think they mean that it's code they're not having to write/test/maintain themselves because presumably if you pick a good enough library the quality of code/features are better then what one individual or team could do

While there are issues with this approach like the article outlines, personally I believe it to be better then the alternative of countless developers reimplementing the same feature sets over and over because honestly that just seems like a waste of human time and talent

Comment · 4 years ago
Yeah this would be an improvement I think, considering how little I've seen iPads used in portrait mode it's a little surprising they haven't done it already. I'm guessing it's to support the pencil charging, since the new iPad does have cameras in the expected landscape location but only supports pencil 1
Comment · 4 years ago
It seems like they were just a client for Instagram which was stripping out the ads, which would probably be a pretty clear cut violation of Instagram ToS or whatever API they were using, so I'm not surprised Google/Apple would remove it from their stores

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