greymeister

Haha, nuke and pave as a first resort rather than a last resort.

Sounds straight from a 90's Microsoft marketing department, I'm glad not everyone listened back then.

More users is definitely a feature though.

Ah, another reminder of Jason Scott's talk https://youtu.be/qh7EARxkxoU?list=PL7WR9B9eZNmxm8_LzP1Qf8xnN...

Did you have the information necessary to make the correct decision? Most problems or failures I've encountered in software come to missing information much more often than any other reason. Having justifications for the decisions you reach given the information you had available should lead you to feeling confident in the actions you take. No one has all the pertinent information available at all times, and anyone who acts that way is disingenuous.

I believe it is human nature to put more emphasis on failure than success, but I also believe that people set themselves up for failure by assuming that their decisions are somehow flawed compared to others. Most decisions we make are based on incomplete information, so the only recourse is to build stating your justifications with your decisions so that others's may review them in the light of the information you had available.

Anyone else remember the "Summer of Love"? [1]

I had stopped attempting to answer or ask anything on the site due to the behavior I observed. It was pure gamesmanship for people trying to rack up their SO score and then summarily abuse it with enforcement of opaque, draconian rules. My favorite was when a question would be marked as a duplicate incorrectly, so what was the takeaway? That solution was barred from discussion on the site?

Since then I simply look at SO when it happens to come up in a search. I'm not ever logged into the site anymore. If I want to describe how I fixed something, I do it in my own space, and only reference answer when linking to SO.

1. https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/07/20/kicking-off-the-summer...

God creates dinosaurs, god destroys dinosaurs, god creates man, man destroys god, man creates dinosaurs.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish.

E-mail remains one of the last decentralized communication mediums. If Google can make it a walled garden, they will.

Good point, I remember the game storefront being announced but had not heard about their subscriptions.

I still wouldn't recommend using it for anything because of the potential gold mine they have with the user data. I can imagine Tencent or someone similar coming in for the data alone.

I refuse to use Discord because I don't know how or to whom they are going to sell my data yet. It's possible they go to a subscription model but I doubt it, it seems more likely they'll be acquired by one of the big data brokers at some point.

I would say the modern state of surveillance capitalism is in a large part what rms warned about with proprietary systems being used against the user.

Just like rms, PETA and the ACLU do things I don't agree with, but philosophically, especially with FSF, EFF, and the ACLU, I think that their overall goal is one I agree with.

No one has the time and attention to address everything, and so I am glad there are those that focus on each of these individual issues.

The only disagreement I have with his statements is that I think the Itanic and blind vendor buy-in is what sunk non-x86 processors. amd64 is what actually brought x86 ubiquity while ia64 never reached any relative market share.

Stop. Using. Chrome.

I would argue that e-mail has been used via phishing and other (419 scam) tricks to swindle more people out of their money than other technologies.

Clearly it is a dangerous tool that must be restricted to select users.

jwz predicted it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y&t=53m36s

I find the methods listed on https://botsentinel.com/faq a bit confusing:

"Q: How do you determine which accounts are classified as fake news?

Classifying fake news accounts is a manual process. We review hundreds of tweets and retweets during the review process. If an account has a large number of followers and a high percentage of misleading and/or factually incorrect tweets, that account could be classified as Fake News."

"Q: Why is my account rated problematic or alarming?

Our machine learning model was developed to identify accounts that exhibit irregular tweet activity related to politics. The more you exhibit irregular tweet activity, the higher your trollbot score will be."

So how much is manual and how much is their model? By what criteria do the manual reviews judge tweets?

It all seems way too opaque without more information.

... and yet another downside to Microsoft moving to Chromium.

Who is defining progress that way?

It seems to be defined as convenience by any means necessary.

Thanks for posting this. It's all too often people (like in this article) want to lean on bureaucracy and legislation to fix their problems as opposed to actually doing something about it. Not using Twitter and Facebook has a positive step for my sanity, much like not watching 24 hour cable news was another positive step. I don't need the government to break up CNN or News Corp to solve that problem.

Cheat tables were removed from the cheat engine forums because Bethesda et al sent them a threatening letter claiming similar things to what Nintendo claimed in that case. I doubt that they could have actually won a case, but most don't have lawyers on retainer and so essentially the game companies shut them down with the threat of legal action. It's a ridiculous claim, but game companies that want to sell things in game see it as a hindrance to further monetizing their customers I guess.

If it was a software system, it would have been rewritten decades ago.

Like all of the software that runs power plants, defense systems, medical records? You make a good point, accidentally, that no, in fact most systems that become large and complex aren't re-written.

Modern online advertising companies are malicious entities that actively harm users, and I absolutely classify them as malware.

This is exactly the response for anyone that is frustrated by blocking ads impacting revenue for web publishers. Had the ad tech not become so invasive and pernicious, users wouldn't be going out of the way for solutions like this. The advertisers have essentially forced our hand.

"I'm just curious. I saw you shuffling your checks with your right hand. Can you do that with both hands?"

I'm sure they have plenty of examples to go by, all they need to do is consult Yahoo, Google or any of the telecoms for good strategies.

I guess on the plus side at least we know now that it is happening despite the lies the Federal government told us. I worry that as bad as it is for whistle blowers in the US what chance does China have?

Not at their current price point.

How long before they use the commerce clause as an excuse to kill California's law?

I have one of these as well. The trade offs of a smartphone aren't worth it any longer for me. Convenience comes with a cost.

And yet companies can completely ignore the voices of employees. This article presupposes that the employees are in a position to leverage leaving because they aren't pleased with how things are being done, and that the company cares if they leave.

The feudalism metaphor is appropriate given the lack of collective bargaining power employees have access to.

Go through 5+ year old bookmarks to find all of them dead, this will show how permanent books seem compared to digital publications. They truly are "time machines" for how temporal information is today.