Johnwbh

This is the Syrian government we're talking about here. Recent history may indicate that one shouldn't trust them to be entirely truthful about their reasons for doing things

Except a smart scammer won't do it as a hard sell and look like they need you. They know as well as anyone that aggressive sales look suspicious. Madoff waited for people to come to him.

All human activity except agriculture and medicine is a waste of time of you want to be strict about it

They were a thing a few decades ago not really now. I mostly associate them with the 80s

Consumption habits are sticky. It's more effective to get a young person to like your product and they'll buy it across their working life than to try and convert someone already loyal to another brand

That's just false. You can do chargeback on debit card transactions fairly easily https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/visa-mastercard-ch...

I feel like amazon has gotten much less user friendly in the past few years. Although I can filter by "prime" that doesn't seem to actually tell me anything in particular about the delivery date. And I can't narrow it any further. They clearly have the data on what things are one day, two day etc but presumably it's not profitable to let people filter on it. You also can't search for exact terms anymore, the way literally every basic search engine lets you. So you have to read through a bunch of vaguely related items even if you know exactly what you want

Given how many stories there are of IOT devices being hijacked for bitcoin mining or hacked in other ways I am extremely grateful that my smoke alarms are dumb as bricks.

Interesting essay. Reminds me of some of the issues that come up in teaching. Even when you think you have explained something at the simplest possible level you are often missing background assumptions that seem to obvious to you that you can't even conceive of not knowing them

Interesting. One of the things that ancient China had that other comparable civilizations didn't was an intellectual culture that transcended the political divisions of the time. Which allowed for a lot of innovation, and spreading of knowledge. Closest thing in Europe before the modern time is maybe late Rome, but it was fairly centralized, which made it harder for innovations to spread and take hold. Whereas ancient China had power spread out much more, even when it was notionally ruled by a single dynasty

It reminds me a bit of the old dinner party rules of not talking politics, sex or religion. You keep things harmonious but at the cost of more interesting conversation. And doesn't help when you're forced to tackle controversial issues

The analogy with tencent and alibaba seems instructive, but not necessarily in a good way. They are both massive bloated platforms that do lots of different disconnected things not very well. e.g. the wechat messaging app contains subprograms for games, payment, flight bookings, etc you can't turn off. They only continue to exist because of network effects, and because they play nice with the Chinese government.

If Recruit works on the same model then they will have the same problem moving abroad that there is no one thing they are better at than an existing company

Hello from China. Lantern https://getlantern.org/ is a fairly reliable free option maade by a non-profit. It's slower that the paid options here, but works well enough for gmail, facebook, etc.

Also, the more people outside China who have it the better, so if you wouldn't mind installing that would be great

A lot of expats and the upper middle class in China and similar countries use them. Most people don't have the expertise to set up their own

You could also potentially specify constraints on a book and have it generated for you, e.g. generate me a book about a gay dutch vampire in the 1800s. Could open up a whole new concept of hyper speciaised books tailored for individuals particular desires and preferences.

The practical problem with this is that, as I understand it, the deep learning system needs a pretty large data set to work with to infer rules from. You can do this with go because there is a constraint on legal moves and a deterministic win condition, but given how vast the number of potential novels is (If we count the space of all ten thousand word collections of grammatically acceptable sentences) the existing number of novels may no be enough to infer a pattern. (Though possibly you could split the problem up by separately doing the natural language processing and abstractin out the plot)

Most people like that really just need someone to talk to, so introducing them to eachother solves both their issues neatly

"But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational."

I mean its almost like her being an asian woman rather than a white male makes a difference

Ingress (which interestingly is also linked to google) works something like that. Wouldn't be surprised if they're prototyping for a big game release in the future.

I remember loving the original X-Wing and TIE fighter games. Does anyone know why space combat games dropped so dramatically in popularity?

Reminds me a bit of Spore, but hopefully not so disappointing.