kn0where

Specifically, VHS had both longer recording times and cheaper VCRs (due to Matsushita’s liberal licensing) than Betamax did. Beta only had slightly better picture quality if you were willing to sacrifice recording length per tape. Most Betamax users adopted the βII format which lowered picture quality to VHS levels in order to squeeze more recording time onto the tape. At that point Betamax’s only advantage was a slightly more compact cassette.

Also to correct another common myth, porn was widely available on both formats and was not the cause of VHS’s success over Betamax.

iBook G4, not G3, but yes.

Yes, weight alone is not that important for fuel economy at highway speeds. Aerodynamic efficiency of a vehicle is determined by the cross section area + drag coefficient. A 90s Honda Civic has a worse drag coefficient but a vastly smaller cross section than the Rivian, so it needs to move less air out of the way to drive forward. Smaller EVs can go farther with smaller batteries, but the American consumer has decided for one reason or another that cars must be tall, and therefore less aerodynamically efficient.

Considering the amount of personal data on people’s phones, plus how commonly people lose them in public, I would say that encryption by default is unambiguously a good thing, and it’s incredible that it took Google until Android 10.

Google can be an excellent place to work, but most of the people working there are not contributing to the company’s profits. Whether or not you think that still has value, leadership is trying to “optimize” by squeezing everyone harder and demanding they show productivity gains using AI. Some teams will adapt and keep being a nice team to work on, but many employees are getting “optimized” out of the company and replaced with vendorization and consultants.

A lot of those individual googlers are longtimers who are now leaving after 15, 20 years. Google has been offering voluntary exit packages this year and I suspect the kind of people who would value Google.com working in Lynx are also the type who have made plenty of money and are disillusioned by what the company has become.

My concern is the politicians are suddenly flip flopping because they realize in the short term Israel is close to exterminating the entire population of Gaza. Perhaps they will let a pittance of food aid through to prolong the genocide so Netanyahu can stay in power. I have little confidence in US leadership actually having a change of heart now.

It’s fine to accept your mom or your neighbor changing their mind, but I think we should be skeptical of politicians changing their mind and consider what hidden, calculated motives they may have for changing it now, when they had plenty of information to reach the same conclusion over a year ago.

The return of Claris!

Similar with google docs, if you share a link to a doc, even if the doc is restricted access, anyone can see the thumbnail icon with the contents of page 1.

Because any choice in a two party system is stupid to some degree, for most people. Most people’s beliefs don’t all line up exactly with one political party or the other. So every election is a compromise: which of your values must you prioritize? A whole lot of Americans aren’t doing well economically, they haven’t been doing well for decades, and under Biden they saw everything get more expensive. So they don’t like either side, and if you can convince them to vote, it’s only going to be for change. Kamala didn’t portray any change from Biden, so she lost.

And it works when leaders aren’t completely bought and paid for.

Plenty of US cities and towns have regulations prohibiting billboards.

So if you went to prison for 7 years, and your conviction wasn’t overturned but you served your time, it’s somehow ok for the government to send you a bill for $50 * 365 * 7 = $127750? When convicted felons usually struggle to find better than minimum wage jobs due to their records? What a perversion of “justice”. And if you get out early for good behavior or due to prison overcrowding (again, your sentence was valid) you still get charged for the full 7 years? How is that morally reasonable?

The Framework touchpad is unfortunately a lot worse than the haptic touchpads on MacBooks. The click is just a little too mushy, and requires too much force as you click higher up the trackpad. I think there are finally some PC laptops with haptic touchpads, so if Framework starts offering one I’d definitely upgrade my FW13.

OCLP is great, but not parent-proof. I had to walk my mom over the phone through manually updating OCLP after she installed a macOS update without running the patcher first, which resulted in a machine with no working wifi. (OCLP did pop up a dialog letting her know she should update it, but she closed it without reading it as users typically do when given an unexpected random dialog)

Genuine question: is there any technological/scaling problem with Mastodon that actually needs solving, and that the AT protocol would fix? What reason is there to split different parts of their backend tech stack between different “operators” with different policies? Does this separation of concerns improve the performance (or other desirable attribute) of the decentralized network versus Mastodon’s approach?

Yes, I had that issue too (years ago, when they first allowed deleting the Music app). I think it might not be a problem in newer cars, but my car radio only had iPod support, not iPhone, and it seemingly needed at least one song in the music library for the connectivity to work at all.

I actually bought this 10 minute long silent song on iTunes at the time, so my phone wouldn’t automatically play Weezer’s “Across the Sea” every time I connected my phone to the car: https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-a-a-a-a-very-good-song-si...

Bill met with Epstein on multiple occasions, after Epstein already had a conviction, and Melinda has cited this as a contributing factor to the divorce: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/melinda-gates-jeffr...

Perhaps the lack of availability in certain countries due to their data laws is a sign that this app really shouldn’t require an account. If the ultimate goal of this free app is monetizing my data, no thanks.

General Motors was nationalized at the time.

In Preview.app, I wonder if doing a Print to PDF step would normalize those comments into “actual text”

Companies that sell users data for their own profit will never get users’ consent unless they either:

1. Use dark patterns to make withholding consent inconvenient or impossible

2. Compensate users for the use of their data (e.g. giving discounts or providing free products in exchange for giving up your privacy)

Obviously many companies would rather do #1 if they can. #2 is the Google approach and also the “put this OBD2 dongle in your car for cheaper insurance” model. But its even more profitable for an insurance company if they can avoid giving discounts to the smallish subset of good drivers who consent to being tracked, and just price all “reckless” drivers higher (because then the good drivers who still don’t want to be tracked aren’t compelled to switch insurers to get a good price). Of course, in this scenario the insurance company doesn’t need to care about the good driver whose rates unfairly go up because of a rarely triggered software bug that mischaracterizes his driving, so long as on average the classifier is mostly accurate.

My point here is that any effort to just make consent “more transparent to the consumer” is fruitless, because when users are actually given the choice, like the iOS dialog to allow Facebook to track you, they overwhelmingly won’t give consent unless there’s something in it for them. So automakers will probably just make the TOS checkbox consent slightly more onerous and annoying, to appease regulators, and it will end up like cookie banners.

Much needed cash? Apple was making lots of money off the iPod in 2005. If it was a “success” it was in the sense that it proved they needed to make their own phone

On the other hand, an FTC that was afraid to bring forward any cases that weren’t an automatic slam dunk wasn’t good either. Maybe changing the direction of the agency ruffled the feathers of those who prefer it operate in the same way it always had. Maybe LK is bad at running the agency, but the career politicians of Congress like Jim Jordan also have motivation to tear down anyone who actually threatens the power of the big corporations who legally bribe them each election cycle.

Different agency, but lots of people thought the DOJ’s case against the JetBlue/Spirit merger was too aggressive and would fail. Turns out a Reagan-appointed judge agreed the merger was anticompetitive. I’d like to see the government try and sometimes succeed rather than never try.

As a subscriber and Patreon member, thank you for making videos with so much substance. You strike a good balance between entertaining and informative, and I’m glad you’re also able to create written records for work like this.

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Don’t forget about the classic 80s song “Radar Van” by Johannes Vonk and the Clogheads: https://youtu.be/F7_1rc8riNU?si=uuVIn26cZNPBgHPv

Breathability

Highly recommend installing FLauncher[1] as an alternative to Google's ad-filled TV home screen. Just a nice simple icon grid.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.efesser.fla...