pluma

That was an error, thank you for catching it!

There are a few different sides you could take from this article. 1) this could improve flight experiences and help find individuals who are on the run or could cause a threat but 2) like the article discusses, it is invasive and there are no rules with regards to storing and selling bio-metrics in 99% of the states.

Interesting. It definitely didn't seem the case for web dev outside of Rails though. In the mid-2000s it felt to me like the default was Linux (because servers were running Linux) and beginners started on Windows (because that's what they already had at home). But then again web dev mostly meant LAMP (or WAMP for development, via XAMPP).

But this may be a regional thing (so selection bias again). When I was freelancing as a Python web dev, the few places that used Python usually used Plone/Zope (barely anyone used Django or Flask) and there were even fewer places using Ruby except startups. The popularity of Plone/Zope seems to be very much a German thing, just like SuSE Linux and Typo3/Drupal (instead of Wordpress). We've even had a very large Firefox marketshare until fairly recently (because of privacy concerns over Google Chrome).

That said, in European JS conferences over the past five years I'm definitely seeing more and more non-macbooks each year.

It's fine. I'm not going to engage you in an argument about whether policing tone is productive if you don't police content (or the effective politics you produce by what content you do police) but I'm mostly just annoyed that the HN blocklist extension stopped working for some reason.

HN seriously needs a way to hide (mute/block) specific users' comments rather than just relying on moderators or mob voting/flagging to decide what's "appropriate".

I'm assuming you're a native German speaker too? Must be a regional accent thing, then.

The closest I can get to ambiguity by slurring "neunhundertsechzig" is "neun oder sechzig" or "neun, neununsechzig", never "neunundsechzig", and I have to make an effort to speak faster than I normally would even if I was reading out numbers in a hurry. I've also never run into this ("hundert" and "und" being mixed up) in my daily life, so I'm surprised to hear that this is something you hear often.

Selection bias. People who go to tech conferences make up a tiny share of all the people working in the industry. Plus they're far more likely to look towards other people going to those conferences for "trends" than to the majority who don't, thus reinforcing that bias.

Even most designers I know personally don't use macOS. But if I was going by what I see at JS conferences, you'd think Apple has a 99% marketshare (although things have improved in recent years with "full stack" bringing in Linux folks and Microsoft's investment in dev tools making Windows more appealing).

This is similar to how everyone at these conferences seems to have one of the latest iPhones yet (depending on where you live) the majority of smartphone users uses Androids and those who are using iPhones generally hold onto them for years before upgrading.

Also FWIW as a long time JS dev, it seemed to me like Rails actually was one of the major contributors to the macbook monoculture because Rails (in the early days) was popular with startups who also often focused on iOS apps first, which means they had no other choice than to use macOS for development. As iOS became less of a focus than web dev, the macbooks stayed and only now seem to be slowly replaced as Microsoft is making a heavy push into web dev relations and the opinion of Apple's quality gets tarnished by dev-unfriendly decisions and hardware problems.

What you're experiencing indeed doesn't sound like burnout. It's plain old alienation. Big corporations are the prime example for this, small startups generally promise to alleviate this (though obviously this only holds true to a degree unless you hold a significant share in the company).

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

At least having worked in Big Tech you have likely built up enough resources to be able to just do something else now, rather than being stuck in this situation until you can retire (or become physically unable to continue working).

I come from a law enforcement family, I have many friends in local, state and federal law enforcement roles.

You didn't even have to say that, it was obvious from the lengths you go to in order to excuse the murders and brutality committed by police officers in the US.

You can talk about "but what if a polar bear attacks you" all day but that won't ever excuse why it is literally every week that new video evidence of US police officers brutalising or murdering people comes out and barely any of the officers involved ever are seriously punished for it.

If this violence was inevitable because of the gun ownership, you would see similar events in Canada or Switzerland. If this violence was necessary to protect officers from civilians, you would see vastly more stories about injured or killed police officers in the UK.

That you think your scenario of the muscular angry brute looking for "targets" is even remotely plausible should tell you something. Suspects are suspects, perps are perps, not enemy soldiers or wild animals.

Police officers in other countries are trained to deal with these situations without shooting unarmed people. How little do you think about your friends and family that you think they're incapable of learning how to do that?

Instead your peers get dehumanising pseudo-intellectualism like this: https://www.policeone.com/police-products/training-products/...

Yes, all cops.

If you think using a taser is a way to "deescalate situations", you have a very different interpretation of what a "deescalation strategy" is meant to accomplish than most.

TBH the problem seems to be that US police is often trained to "deescalate situations" by shutting them down quickly and forcefully rather than actually deescalating, i.e. carefully defusing the situation.

Tasers are violent, less-than-lethal (i.e. potentially fatal) weapons. If they're ineffective at reducing casualties and decreasing the overall use of violent force, they need to be removed.

I have no idea how this became the widely held belief about markdown. Markdown is based on Gruber's buggy Perl implementation of a rich text format that's intended to be fairly readable while editing the raw source files. Gruber had zero concerns for how other people would use it, he didn't even support standardisation efforts that tried to resolve the contradictory informal spec he had published.

I used to think that too, but the problem with gun ownership in the US tends to be more about gun culture than ownership. Other countries with high gun ownership rates don't have nearly the same problems, especially when it comes to accidental shootings.

The problem of law enforcement killing people also has little to do with gun ownership. The frequent (or at least frequent enough to be concerning) shootings of unarmed black men for example are generally excused with police officers saying they were "afraid for their lives". This can only either be explained with terrible training or plain old racism (i.e. black men seem more threatening by default to the extent that an unarmed black man is considered more threatening than an armed white man), or most likely a mixture of both.

There's a lot wrong with how police in the US is trained and held accountable. Gun ownership is the smallest contributor to that problem.

You'd think the solution to "scared" and well armed officers wouldn't be more weapons.

Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting unarmed people dead and using tasers as legal torture devices.

US police doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to the equation "problems + more equipment = less problems".

Well, Uber is more exploitative for the drivers and less safe for the riders, so the choice seems clear.

On the other hand Uber has a flashy logo and an app and is sometimes cheaper.

Yes wrong. The first decade was either 9 or 10 years (depending on whether you want to be weird and include 1 BC), every decade after that was 10 years starting at 'X0 and ending at 'X9. This is how the common usage defines the term.

A lot of concepts in daily human lives get fuzzy near the edges. That's not a failing on humans, that's how language works. This isn't scientific or perfectly rational, yes, but neither are humans.

For those still unclear: it's a type of tumor that basically grows things in places they're not normally supposed to be. "Things" including cartilage, hair and teeth.

No, the problem is that people read out long numeric sequences in inconsistent ways.

Consider this: "sixty-nine" is clearly 69. But when spoken out, especially in a long string of digits (like an IBAN, a banking code) that might be announced as "six, nine" or "sixty-nine" or "sixty...nine" or even "six...ty-nine".

So even in English there's some chance of ambiguity whether it is supposed to be 6-9 or 6-0-9 (consider: "forty-two, sixty, nine" for 4-2-6-0-9).

In German the awkward inversion makes this worse. So you might get "neunundsechzig" (6-9), "neun...undsechzig" (9... no, wait, 6-9? or maybe 9-6-0?) or "neunund...sechzig" (...6-9). Although the last one is unambiguous, you're basically stuck waiting for the end because you're trying to write digits down left to right and don't want to skip digits and backtrack.

As for why "neun...und sechzig" is ambiguous: with that weird pause it's not clear if this is still 69 or literally "9 and 60" (which is what the word "neunundsechzig" means), i.e. 9-60. As people sometimes emphasise the final digit or digit pair by saying "and" before it (like you would in a list of words), this is ambiguous and at least might give a listener pause.

"Hundert" and "und" generally aren't similar enough for this to be a problem and there's a special place in hell for people who read out groups of digits longer than 2 as numbers, so this isn't generally a problem. Most people do however tend to slur the "und" so e.g. "sechsundsechzig" becomes "sechsnsechzig" but this rather avoids the problem I mentioned (except for the backtracking).

I think the Fiat Multipla is distinct in that it is unlovably ugly.

I can get behind the ugliness of vehicles like the Cybertruck because it just looks absurd, but the Fiat is just grotesque.

Fellow German here. I find it extremely annoying when people read out numbers for me to write down and announce pairs as numbers instead of digits.

If you mean 42 and read out "zwei und vierzig" I will pause and have to figure out if you meant 240 and you know it. This kind of thing just seems almost intentionally inconsiderate because of the unnecessary ambiguity.

That's literally rape. If you consent to a sex act, that doesn't mean you consent to any sex act. If you "switch holes", or "lose the condom" or simply don't put one on at all, without consent, that's a non-consensual sex act and thus rape.

Spousal rape and sexual abuse were legal in many places for a long time (and still are in some), doesn't make it not rape and sexual abuse, though.

"Informed enthusiastic consent" isn't so hard to figure out, is it? If you feel like you're being pressured into something you don't want, that's still non-consensual even if you don't put up a fight.

Too late for an edit but I was going by what was shown in the video, which very much didn't look it could do that.

That said, that's still basically "3D but without glasses", not exactly the Holodeck "hard light" future tech many people think of when they hear "real hologram".

CET and EST are also the same time in Miami as in Singapore. That's just how time zones work. The distinction with UTC is that it isn't tied to any particular physical location, it's not the "time zone" for anywhere.

But UTC is ultimately defined by consensus. We need a reference clock and we need to be able to measure or estimate our skew in order to sync to it.

Gore isn't bleak. A pop up of a chuckling Vault Boy notifying you of a critical hit isn't really "dark humor". Fallout 3 is very on the nose compared to Fallout 1.

I'm not faulting anyone for enjoying any of the newer games (or even Fallout Brotherhood of Steel) but the tone is extremely different. You can call Fallout 3 bleak, but it's not bleak in the same way as Fallout 1 was.

<SPOILER> The entire story arc of Fallout 1 is that you are cast out into the lethal wasteland to save your vault (one of the first things you find is the corpse of some other unlucky guy from your vault), struggle against all odds, bring down an army of super soldier mutants and a fanatic cult that wants to turn all humans into mutants while what's left of the US military sits in its own little bunker full of high tech equipment but refusing to help you, then once you make it back to your vault your Overseer refuses you entry because you would no longer fit in with the community. The entire journey is basically the premise of Rambo First Blood. </SPOILER>

That's a lot bleaker than the gory ultraviolence in Fallout 3. BTW, Fallout 1 and 2 already had the Bloody Mess perk and ultraviolent death animations, it just wasn't slo-mo and first person. Those weren't what made the game bleak, though. If anything, that was intended as dark humor (cf. splatter "horror" movies like Braindead, ultraviolent "splatstick" comedies) and a nod to pulp fiction (cheap novels, not the movie of the same name).

Note that this "only" adds depth. It can't make anything appear to "come out of" the screen, the effect is more like a window. It's not like holograms in science fiction.

It's still pretty impressive tho.

Fallout pretty much died after Fallout 2. The new franchise has very little to do with the original game(s).

It's important to understand what Fallout went through before Bethesda even got their hands on it:

By the time there were plans for a Fallout 3, Western CRPGs had become a niche as the "RPG" label had become widely associated with "Action RPGs" like Diablo and RPG mechanics (skill progression systems really) had started popping up in many genres.

So rather than funding another RPG, Interplay decided to test the waters in a more promising genre: tactical action games. Because they lacked any experience with the genre, they outsourced the production of Fallout Tactics to a company unfamiliar with the franchise with very little input. The game was aesthetically and thematically very alien to the established canon. Some fans encouraged others to buy the game to demonstrate an interest in the franchise while others saw it as evidence that the series was dead. In the end it was a mixed bag but had very little to do with Fallout other than some flavor text.

With FoT not being nearly as successful as they must have hoped, Interplay made another last ditch attempt: Fallout Brotherhood of Steel, an action adventure based on the engine of an AD&D game that only had a moderate level of success. Instead of sticking with any of the core themes, the game heavily relied on language and dialogs written in a desperate attempt to appeal to teenage boys with an over-reliance on sexual themes. The press kits included glow-in-the-dark condoms. The game bombed, as expected.

Eventually Interplay did leak information about an in-progress sequel developed in-house with the code name "Van Buren" but Interplay had long been struggling financially and the game was eventually scrapped, though many elements would later re-appear in New Vegas (developed not by Bethesda but a company employing several people who worked on this and earlier Fallout games).

Interplay initially sold the licenses for Fallout 3, 4 and 5 to Bethesda. Still trying to produce their own take on the franchise they now spent their last resources on a Fallout MMORPG, temporarily titled "Fallout Online". "Fallout Online" (or "FOOL" as it had been titled by the community) had been an idea in the fan community for a long time but always been dismissed because the idea of an MMO game ran counter to the thematic constant of Fallout 1 and 2: the lone wanderer in a hostile wasteland.

If I recall correctly, part of the deal with Bethesda was that they would get the full rights to the franchise if Interplay did not produce another Fallout game within a given timeframe. The failure of Fallout Online sealed that deal. Ironically Bethesda's latest Fallout game is basically Fallout Online but based on their renewed franchise rather than the originals, but still an utter failure though for slightly different reasons.

Fallout's fan community, small but strangely persistent, at the time had been adequately described by game journalists as "glittering gems of hatred". I think that is justified to some extent: many of us would have rather seen the franchise die after Fallout 2 than move on and change. Some even argued that Fallout 2 was already overloaded with pop culture references (which to some degree had already been part of Fallout 1's DNA) and strayed from Fallout 1's leitmotif. But with the release of Fallout 3 it had become quite clear that this leitmotif had been completely abandoned.

For those unaware: While Fallout had always juxtaposed the optimistic 1950s Americana aesthetic and futurist outlook of technology and the "Atom Age" with the post-nuclear hellscape, the message was clearly a cynical dismissal of that optimism: nuclear power hadn't created a utopia, it created hell on Earth; instead of picket fences you had dirt farmers and scrap merchants trying to survive in an irradiated desert. Fallout 2 further emphasised this bleak outlook by showing that even the vaults that were supposed to protect American citizens from the aftermath of WW3 were actually cynical experiments, each being flawed in their own cruel ways, while the government elites get to live in safety (intentionally taking a page or two from Doctor Strangelove).

Fallout 3 eliminated any of the remaining bleakness and subtlety and replaced it with mini-nuke launchers and more Americana. Where Fallout 1 and 2 were satire, Fallout 3 had already lost the intent of that satire and just ended up playing it straight. But these themes were already mostly absent in Fallout Tactics and completely abandoned in Fallout Brotherhood of Steel: Fallout already died before Bethesda added to the franchise.

Prostitution is legal in Germany but it is regulated and money made from it is taxable income.

Also famously you do have to pay taxes on illegal income, otherwise the income is both illegal and tax fraud.

It's switching two corporate overlords for one, so I think they'll still see it as a net win.

Generally the advice in Germany is not to use "funny" descriptions, but not because the bank might have no sense of humor but because the tax agency might take it literally.

If your friend sends you money "for sexual favors", that might be considered taxable income and you'll find yourself having some explaining to do.

Just like how most public healthcare proposals in the US while technically raising taxes would end up leaving the individual with a much lower financial burden because of the ridiculous amounts of money Americans pay for healthcare and medication.

I'm with you except for conflating right wing propagandists with sex workers and the cannabis industry.

Right wing propagandists are rarely deplatformed compared to the other two groups and when they are it's generally for spreading conspiracy theories (remember that people have already died because of Pizzagate and QAnon "truthers") or inciting (racial/religious/homophobic) hatred.

The difference is that right wing propagandists are also a lot more vocal than the other group (or left wingers for that matter), skewing the perception. There's a widely known joke about how many comedians have shows on mainstream platforms with titles like "Cancelled" or "Triggered", complaining about "things you can't say anymore". Also see the "Intellectual Dark Web" whose whole shtick is being "deplatformed" by academia and the mainstream while having a massive mainstream media presence.