SimonPStevens

It's called default mode thinking. Or the default mode network [1].

And I agree, not letting your mind do this from time to time results in higher stress and less ability to focus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network

Yeah, I suspected this could be related. Additionally frustrating as I'd honestly not a massive fan of printer dot codes either.

Printer refuses to print. "Replace toner" message. Operating system does appear to submit to print queue. (Windows 10)

Printer toner indicator says Black is almost full (recently changed as I print mainly b/w), Cyan & Magenta are low, Yellow is empty and the one it complains about when trying to print.

I've continued messing with it for the last hour and even putting the printer into "black and white" mode, and changing the printer options in the OS to "Mono" it still refuses to print. Brothers own help page says it works [0], but I've followed these and it still doesn't print.

I've tried resetting the printer, updating the firmware and drivers, rebooting both printer and computer.

https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/52457/s...

Unfortunately it's not one of the transparent window ones. Nice when it used to work though.

I've said this before, and I stand by it. I think AI does pose a threat, but not the existential one that leads popular discussion.

Over the next few decades AI is going to take huge numbers of jobs away from humans.

It doesn't need to fully automate a particular role to take jobs away, it just needs to make a human significantly more productive to the point that one human+AI can replace n>1 humans. This is already happening. 20 years ago a supermarket needed 20 cashiers to run 20 tills. Now it needs 2 to oversee 20 self checkouts and maybe 1 or 2 extra for a few regular lanes.

This extra productivity of a single human is not translating to higher wages or more time off, it's translating to more profits for the companies augmenting humans with AI.

We need to start transitioning to an economic model where humans can work less (because AI supplements their productivity) and the individual humans reap the benefits of all this increased AI capability or were going to end up sleepwalking into a world where the majority have been replaced and have no function in society, and the minority of capital owners control the AI, the money and the power.

I wish we could focus on these nearer term problems that have already started instead of the far more distant existential threat of a human/AI war.

Take a look Parkitect. It's very much a modern RCT, complete with grid layout. As a fan of RCT1/2, I found it very enjoyable.

I last bought a laptop (in fact any PC at all) in 2015.

It was pretty beefy for the time. A desktop 4790K CPU, 32gb RAM and a GTX 980M. It was a long time ago, but I think I paid around £1500 for it.

Shout out to https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ for a great long lasting machine that is very open for maintenance, long before Framework was around. I will absolutely buy from them again next time. Removable battery, replaceable hard drive, ram, cpu, graphics card. Easily open-able case (screws, but I've had it open). They sold me a replacement keyboard for something like £30 when I smashed a few keys by dropping my camera on it.

My inner tech geek is keen to buy something new, but this one is still going strong, and I can't justify spending money when this one works so well. It still plays all the latest games. It's only had two problems over the years. 1) Obviously, the original battery doesn't last very long now. 2) The CPU started overheating after about 5 years when pushed, so I popped the cover open, took the heatsink off and reapplied fresh thermal paste. Has worked perfectly since.

I mean honestly, the single threaded CPU performance only seems to be about 50% behind modern chips. I don't really see many machines even today with 32gb ram.

Things it struggles with these days that I suppose would require a new machine if it bothered you: - 4k gaming. - VR games are a bit too choppy unless you turn the settings right down. (HL:Alyx is playable at pretty much lowest settings) - Probably going to struggle with any generative AI stuff given the older GPU, but I've not tried it.

I code on it, but I don't do high intensive stuff like video editing, 3d work, rendering, etc, so perhaps it would struggle with that kind of stuff.

I mostly agree this way of looking at it, but find 2 things distort this nice clear explanation.

1. Lack of clarity. I've no problems paying a fee I want and use. But when the fees are hidden at point of sale, and then added later it makes comparisons hard or fees I don't want getting added because I didn't know about them in advance so couldn't change behaviour to avoid them.

2. Fees that don't accurately capture the benefit Vs the cost, and are gamed. Things like "2 peices of hand luggage" with no weight specified. I once had an attendant tell my wife her hat she was carrying counted as one peice, so she had to put in her bag to walk past the check-in desk to avoid being charged a fee for extra hand luggage. And then you get the opposite with schemes like wearing vests to carry extra items without it counting in your hand luggage allowance. I once had to move ~2kg from my hold luggage to my hand luggage because one was over and the other under. Why not literally charge a per kg fee regardless where you store it that way everyone pays for exactly what they use, no gaming. The current fee structure tends to incentivise maxing out on hand luggage to avoid hold fees, which means overhead storage gets crammed full. Charging per kg would shift a portion of this to the hold and make the cabin less cramped and better for everyone.

Surprisingly they seem very capable of taking down drones uninjured. They have very strong legs, and with a flexible attack from below they can avoid the props.

Here's a video of some french trained eagles showing how easy it is.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b8kZupqPbJs

Oh the irony of examples of bad UI being posted on twitter where I just get half a UI loading with spinners and can't see anything.

Where are the docker/redis/next.js/linux kernel/qt/roller-coaster tycoon creators?

They create their own thing from scratch, and turn it into a job.

The first 5 from that list were open source creations that became big because they met a need at the time and lots of people adopted them. Which is one route into creating your own thing.

I've seen senior engineers who have leveraged lots of domain knowledge to build a prototype of something super useful internally within a company that then grows in adoption and size as people recognise it's value. Projects then start to organically cluster around the core that was built solo.

Kind of disappointed. What would have been amazing is if the code it gave you did what you requested but also contained a breakout attempt to take over your computer and copy itself.

I'm imagining a future where AIs try social engineering on humans to convince us to give them root access to our devices.

Not sure it matters that much.

Most non-technical people I know wouldn't have a clue what a .zip was. Windows has hidden file extensions by default now for decades. And having a phishing link in an email that says something.zip but links to somethingelse.com is a basic scammer 101 level technique. Why would it matter if the .zip was a real part of the URL or not.

Don't get me wrong, I dislike all of the generic TLDs, and the registration process behind them. But of all the points to argue on them, this seems like the weakest and least relevant.

I think for many gig type work out would be hard to hit 50 hours. There are only so many peak hours for these jobs in a week.

If tried to work more you'd find yourself just waiting for jobs a lot of the time and your average hourly rate would drop even lower.

To be a 60 year old software engineer now you would have to have started in 1984. (Assuming graduating age 21 and going straight into work*)

There just wasn't the same number of developers back then.

I can't find good numbers, but according to [1], there were 612,000 developers in the US in 2002, compared to 4.4 million in 2023 in the. It's reasonable to assume that there were probably an order of magnitude less again in 1984. So very little opportunity to become a 60 year old software engineer in 2023.

I'd hazard a guess that in another 40 years there will be a lot more 60 year old developers. (Either that, or zero because ChatGPT 15 has taken over)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demogra...

* Yes, I know this doesn't quite hold as I'm sure people switched careers. Particularly early on in the computer industry where I imagine many people switched into software from more technical electrical/hardware type roles. But I still think the major point still stands which is the main reason for the lack of older developers now, is just the lack of younger developers 40 years ago.

I used to use booking.com a lot. I can cope with the dark patterns and the aggressive anxiety based encouragement (although I find it repulsive).

But more recently what's put me off is many of their listings aren't hotels, they are private landlords letting apartments Airbnb style. I'd like to be able to filter out those types of listings because having had a few bad experiences with AirBnB in the past what I usually want is a hotel. I don't want to deal with a private landlord hassling me, cleaning deposits, and rules, etc.

I wonder if the visible white patch around Zuckerberg's eyes in the main photo are genuinely because he's been wearing a VR headset for 12 hours a day testing the metaverse or if they added it in Photoshop to make it look like he had.

The business case for open sourcing dev tooling is that more developers will use them and build on them and that brings more people to your platforms.

No, that's the point I'm making. You approve in the banking app, and when you switch back to the app you were paying in it's forgotten where it was and doesn't complete the payment.

I've no desire to name and shame. I've notified apps via their support channels where appropriate. I just think there's value in raising this to a wider audience as it's become a recurring issue and I'm guessing that not all Devs are aware it's even a problem.

Yeah, expansion type DLCs are at the border here. But the overall experience with scammy stores has left me leaning away from trusting any game with any significant DLC.

For example. Dirt Rally 2 honestly feels like a complete scam. The base game comes with 6 rally locations (not counting some rally cross tracks). And there are 7 more available as DLC. The base game feels intentionally slimmed down to make you feel you need to buy the DLC. it pads in extra junk content to make it seem long without actually having much there (like for example the rally cross tournaments make you compete in about 6 rounds of heats on the same short track to make it seem like there are lots of events, but in any other game all the rally cross tracks would have been a single event with perhaps one qualifier and one final on each track). Lots of the daily challenge type activities use the DLCs so are unavailable if you don't by them. All the locations are listed in the menus along with the not-included ones with just a small "DLC" flag across a corner. In addition there are perhaps dozens of cars available as DLC. And several very unclear things like the "flat out pack" which incorporates some of the other DLCs It very much feels like they've taken one game, a split it up into small parts to make you pay more for what would have been one purchase in the 90s. And the multiple small packs with overlapping content seem designed to make you accidentally pay more or buy the same thing twice through confusion. I completely refuse to engage with this and despite being a bit fan of rally games I won't touch this DLC, and tbh if I'd known the game was like this I wouldn't have even touched the base game.

On the other hand, Mario Kart 8 on switch comes with 12 "cups" each with 4 unique tracks, so 48 tracks in total. They have a single DLC which adds a further 12 cups and 48 more tracks for £22. (About half the price of the base game). 48 tracks in the base game feels substantial, I was happy with the game and didn't feel short changed. And the DLC that doubles the number of tracks also feels worth it without being a scam. But I have to be honest, because of the scammy nature of the rest of the business my default stance is to avoid DLCs so it was a while before I purchased this one, despite it being on the better end of the spectrum.

So there's a good way and a. And way to do DLC. But the bad way is poisening the whole market and putting me off considering the DLCs that are done well.

Quite frankly in-game purchases has destroyed an entire industry for me.

Mobile games are so filled with this junk I don't even bother looking at them any more.

I avoid anything on PC that has a store, repeating season passes or virtual currency of any kind. It's even coloured my view of the types of add-on DLC that 20 years ago would have been a legitimate expansion pack, purely because it feels too similar to the dark patterns used in stores.

I refuse to give money to the companies that push these financial cons on people.

The formal certificates will help in some situations, but don't assume you need them for everything right from the start. Speaking for myself, I would have happily hired a consultant with the experience of being blind themselves over anyone with a certificate.

Another thought is that for one of the projects I had the accessibility requirement came from the UK government. It was a project being used in a public service department and it was a requirement for them that every bit of software they purchased was accessible. If you're in the UK you may find the public sector is a good place the look.

Have you tried working freelance? I've had several big projects in the past where we've had accessibility requirements to meet and it always involves training testers and developers in the tools. I'd have happily paid a someone to consult on best approaches, run the tests, maybe train a few people to keep it going.

For me it's about purpose and expectations. If I installed a password manager who's purpose is to inject my passwords into password fields that's what I expect it to do. That's fine. I'm explicitly giving it permission to inject such content.

If I installed a browser extension to remove trackers from sites, I'd be surprised to find it adding in email onboarding buttons to every email entry form.

It may not be clear, but the email privacy thing is a new feature. I just checked back on the chrome store and it does now make it reasonably clear that it's part of the extension now. Fair enough. But for those who had installed before, this would have come as a surprise when it suddenly started happening. The change of purpose is surprising. This reduces trust for a brand who's entire reason to exist is built on trust from a user base who are more than the average amount of paranoid.

If I installed a speech synthesis extension who's purpose was to read out the content of a web page, I would be equally annoyed if it after an update it started verbalising extra words trying to encourage me to try out their braille books everytime I browsed Amazon. Braille books might be just what the average user of a speech extension might want. But it's still a breach of trust to start modifying other websites content for a reason you weren't explicitly given permission for.

Long time DDG user here. I really like the search and the android privacy app. I just wanted to add my vote to what others have said.

You have a brand that requires trust. You've built up that trust slowly, and it could be destroyed so easily. To me this injection crosses a line of interfering with content that isn't yours. You are trusted to have access to this content, not to change/add to it. I get that it's not quite the same as 3rd party ads, etc. But it's an untrustworthy thing to have done.

As a happy long time user I'm currently still willing to give some benefit of the doubt about this being a misstep, and I'm hoping to see it corrected shortly.

But I think the value of the trust you've built up shouldn't be understated. It won't take many scandals like this and once the trust fades you'll never get it back. The bigger issue to address is not just how to fix this, but also how to fix the broken decision making process that allowed this to happen at all.

Someone else has said about having a core set of values against which everything is reviewed. How about an ethics committee of sorts to uphold those values. A group of beta tester users who don't just test things work, but also give feedback on whether new changes are aligned with your brand and core user base. (Email is in my profile if you want to discuss this idea, if be interested in helping)

This is certainly true.

However, consider that the 99% who don't contribute on Reddit, may be contributing elsewhere.

I never post on Reddit, only browse. But I comment here.

Maybe that's the case with most people. That the majority contribute somewhere, but just not all in the same place.

This would invalidate the hypothesis that the internet is written by insane people. It's just that any one site only includes 1% of the people, evenly distributed across all the sites.

Except the higher interest rates actually makes the mortgage much less affordable.

Monthly repayments over 25y:

    £300k mortgage at 2% = £1271
    £250k mortgage at 5% = £1461

As someone who listens to most audio books at between 1.5x and 2x I'm interested to try this. Although I think it will be problematic for me.

I would like the silence between words removed. But the silences betweens higher level structural blocks are necessary. You need a pause between chapters to signal the change of topic. Or depending on the books structure, sometimes between paragraphs too, when they indicate a switch of topic/perspective/thread.

One of my annoyances with some narrators (directors?) is that the gap between sentences and chapters is equal length, which often makes a confusing jump of context. I like it when each new chapter is announced as it comes.

This exactly. SO is not really a resource to get your personal questions answered.

If you are a reasonably senior developer there are close to zero questions that you have that should be asked on stack overflow. You already have enough ability to figure out most problems on your own. Or if you can't, it's most likely too niche for SO and you need to hunt out a friendly subject matter expert instead.

Alternatively, if you're a beginner, it's likely all the questions you have have already been asked, and you are SOs target audience. But not for asking questions, just for looking up the answers. Use SO like a differently organised Wikipedia instead.

Blocking SO is a really odd response, it's one of the best and most comprehensive well organised data sets of beginner to mid level programming information. Don't contribute, fine, but why stop using what's there. Similar to how only 0.1% of people contribute to Wikipedia, doesn't mean it's not still a valuable resource for the other 99.9%