registeredcorn

How was the work outsourced around that timeframe? Do they no longer have an auto-industry at all in Detroit, or is it just greatly reduced?

Without going into an exceptionally long rant: bad and angry.

There is no aspect about it that I enjoy.

Supposing your assertion is correct, isn't it equally plausible that "we" are constantly addressing how impossible it is to be noticed on here, but "we" also are not noticing it because it is impossible to be noticed? :)

Ah, my mistake. Thanks!

What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger?

The pessimist in me says that at least part of the intent isn't about what they do, but rather about who they work for.

Assume you can afford to hire unnecessary amounts of employees. Is it more cost effective to:

a) Hire them and have them essentially sit around, floundering

b) Not hire them, allowing competitors the chance to hire them to work on something that could be of importance

Sure, you could hire them and devote them to working on other projects, but there are also risks and costs associated with that. If you have already budgeted with X, Y, and Z for however many quarters, it may not make good sense to green light additional projects. Too many balls in the air adds extra complexity for middle management, which impacts their ability to communicate the state of things to upper management.

Reduce access to resources available to the enemy by hoarding what you can. When the stock price looks like it might take a hit, toss the excess.

and it has a repairability score of 9/10 from ifixit

Do you mean a 6/10? The only score I saw for the neo on iFixIt is here: https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...

I checked the "Laptop repairability scores" page and the Neo doesn't appear to be listed. https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...

The ones which are truly local end up in a "call us to know more" button, no pricing info disclosed.

I cannot speak for the specific part of Europe that you are in, but in the professional Photography community, it is common practice to not list prices and instead have a "contact us" option. The reason isn't a, "Look at us, we're so exclusive and fancy!" Rather, if you list a price for various packages, people get scared off or think they are a master negotiator and can essentially get the work done for free. All of the professionals I've spoken to are happy to work with customers to find a package at an affordable price for them, or at least recommend other professionals in whatever price range they have in mind. The issue is that its exceptionally hard to convey that in a sincere, real way because if someone only sees a price of say $10 000 or whatever, they are naturally going to assume that you cannot possibly get anything for $100-$1 000.

In truth though, many are glad to try and accommodate and get people something that they will be happy with. Perhaps it ends up being 1 or 2 photos instead of an album of photos or whatever, or perhaps the photoshoot is a little bit more "low budget" than a standard one, but there is still lots of opportunity to get the client something they will be happy with. People tend to get wrapped up in the bottom line though, and just assume that they can't afford to capture a happy memory because of the cost - that's something that photographers really want to avoid because (aside from scaring off paying customers! :) ) it means less photos existing, or making it feel impossibly hard to ever show an interest in photography, which is very sad for people who live and breath it.

Being genuinely interested and sharing experiences and common interests and learning from each other are good reasons though.

(Not OP, but interested to hear more)

In terms of motivation, do you know of a way to begin a sincere and genuine interest in others that doesn't have some ulterior motivations? That may sound kind of mechanical, but what I mean is roughly something like: "I don't know people, so I do not have any 'genuine interest' in them. As a result, any interest that I do have is insincere."

I chose not to have friends for several decades, which has been extremely convenient for the most part, except for tasks that require more than one person, or work-related situations. Not having to worry about offending people, remembering birthdays, messing up my own plans for the needs of others, etc. was very burdensome. However, being able to use people as a job reference, or getting leads on future opportunities from people I used to work with would also be beneficial so I can understand why people would expend the effort. However, retaining a friendship solely for those job-related purposes seems grossly manipulative because there is no sincerity in what I want from them. I do not want them I only want to extract what they can give to me.

Is it simply understood that, if you make friends with someone as an adult, it is inherently with ulterior motivations in mind, whether it be to avoid loneliness, get work-related benefits, or extract knowledge from them? As a child, I think people tended to make friends simply because they were bored and the person seemed neat. Is that why people still try to make friends with people?

I'm not arguing with what you're saying, but it does make me wonder: What exactly is the point of the status page, if "it is normal for users to already see errors before GitHub officially counts it as an outage"?

Is it more so to have something to link to for managers who aren't using the service have a pretty bar to look at and feel like they are "doing something"? Or is it more of a kind of a way to prevent confirming what you already suspect to be true. E.g. "Huh. Me and Jim are seeing problems. How about you Tom? Oh wait, crud. The service page is confirming it's down now. Never mind! Who wants coffee?!"

You're welcome.

I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.

Do not vote on this comment! I am a server! :)

I found it extremely entertaining.

Forgive me for being nitpicky, but I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.

Example: I can be extremely engaged while listening to a stand-up comedian deliver an anecdote about why they believe what they believe. It can be incredibly interesting, engaging, and well put. It is not, however, an argument which supports their assertions, but merely a conduit which makes that position more palatable.

Insight is often dreary and frustratingly complex in terms of nuance and substance because what matters is everything, and what doesn't makes headlines. Entertainment is a broad stroke of a premise; a hand wave that says "like this".

If there were a caveat for something like that, like say, "adult supervision for minors is required. Transfer between legal guardians is permitted, provided they can prove ..." or some kind of language like that.

Are there other common cases that would apply? I assume there are probably some other situations, but I can't think of what they might be. I also find it hard to understand why a little bit of leeway couldn't be baked into the language of the transferable nature under certain circumstances. Presumably the venue wants people to have a good time so they will want to come back again and again, right?

Perhaps something as easy as "If one friend can't make it, you can give it to a different friend." Then, at the door, the guards can look at the ID of someone and ask basic questions; "What is (person)'s name? What town does (person) live in?" Etc.

I'd be interested to hear if this also has positive results on non-C19 related people, too. I've had Hyposmia (partial inability to smell) for essentially [1] my entire life.

I don't really enjoy the taste or smell of things, and I usually only notice stuff if it's especially strong, or right next to my face. I see that whole sensory thing to being a kind of distraction from living life. Like, why should you care if something smells good or not? I just don't see the point. Regardless, I'd still be interested in it because I can smell stuff like rotting fruit or feces or whatever, so I do understand that there are clear and obvious benefits to knowing "Hey, don't eat that!" because it can make you sick or kill you or whatever.

I think that, being able to smell and taste everything would probably be kind of gross and overwhelming, but it may be worth exploring since so many people make such a big deal out of it. From my perspective though, it all feels like a kind of mass hallucination on a global scale.

If nothing else, it would probably make my cooking a little bit better. I obviously tend to go very crazy with spices and stuff, and my wife kind of suffers through some of it. I've wondered what it'd be like to be able to detect anything other than a kind "terrible taste" for something like wine, or what the hell Swiss cheese is actually (supposedly) "taste" like. And for the record, I still refuse to believe that: Munster, Swiss, Provolone, American, Feta, Parmesan, Beaufort, Camembert, and Romano cheese have an actual "taste" to them! Blue cheese and Roquefort have some flavor, but everything else is just tastes like slightly different cuts of a cold, textured "food substance". It's like insisting that lettuce or spinach have a "flavor"! They're just some crunchy nonsense that you put in between the bread to make the mouth-feel vaguely more interesting; little green piles of nonsense.

[1] I don't know if my issue was from birth, or came on later from a blow to the head, or what. I didn't realize I had Hyposmia until I mentioned how, "All bread tastes exactly the same" in my mid 20's and multiple people started looking at me funny.

I was puzzled if I was the only one wondering what in the world any of this had to do with MIT enrollment rates. Haha.

mushware*

The company didn’t provide any details on the agreement, including whether it involved a payment, and didn’t elaborate who was behind the hack.

Oh, cool! Maybe they all just sat down with a nice cup of coffee and the hackers decided to delete the data out of the goodness of their hearts.

Ah, interesting. Thanks!

(Open question to anyone reading this)

I've been meaning to ask for quite a while now: What exactly is "flag" supposed to indicate?

I assume it's something more specific than "dislike". I take it to mean something along the lines of, "I think this is (sneaky) spam", or "This does not fit on a technology news site, even tangentially.". Or, perhaps something broader like, "I can't describe what the problem is, but this submission/comment should be reviewed by a moderator."

It's just never been particularly clear what the intention of it is.

Thanks for the response. I'm not quite getting it though. Are you saying something like, "If there are fees, the amount of those fees between A, B, and C are relatively inconsequential"? Or something else? I would think that if I am shop owner, I want to get as much of the sale as I can. So, if Company A and Company B both want 7%, but Company C only wants 4%, I'm going to switch from A/B to C as soon as I can. I don't get why there isn't a Company C trying to snag more shops in that way.

I'm also not very well versed in what you mean about Steam; are there specific types of games that Visa and MasterCard have prevented them from selling recently? I've used that service for a number of years now, and usually the only titles I don't see on there are ones that have some kind of exclusivity deal either with a gaming console, or with Epic or whatever. I know that they had some controversy a while back over the game "Hatred".

I have also been a little grossed out at the amount of Hentai-like content they've started to allow on their platform, but once I turned on the "Hide adult-content" setting, and setup a few additional filters, it's been pretty painless for me. Is there other types of games that they want to sell, but have been prevented from selling?

Do you mean that they have lobbied virtually all countries though, or what? I don't understand how they can be so dominant on a kind of global scale. I suppose there may be some places where they are not (I.e. North Korea, and a few other outliers) but I would assume they do have a certain amount of broad, global reach. Have they really just managed to bribe/make "friends" with (almost) every country on the planet?

Can you explain what you mean by that? Are you saying "You can just drive instead" or do you mean there is a way to fly within the US without going through the TSA?

I'm making a joke-website, "Everyone Loses as a Service (ELaaS)" [1]

The premise is essentially:

1) Accept money from angry customers asking us to prompt-hole tokens from targetedCompany chatbots

2) Approach targetedCompanies to offer the "real" (secret) service. For a monthly subscription fee, we won't prompt-hole their LLM tooling.

3) The real, real service is to setup some google alerts for targetedCompany release notes & forum posts. Whenever threshold exceeds some predetermined threshold, initiate Turbo Mode: the higher the hatred-per-customer, the greater the discount the service will be for them. Spit out newsletters as needed, regardless of whether or not they subscribed.

Meanwhile, initiate "surge pricing" for targetedCompany on a per-hour, per-payment basis. The more customers that pay, the higher the "one-time fee" is to targetedCompany.

Staffing is almost entirely made up of interns, a few roles are filled by underpaid contractors with unattainable goals; keep them both working there with the promise of full time employment "after things calm down."

If all goes well, everyone pays us money to do absolutely nothing with minimal outflow of revenue.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953158

in reality it was because Visa and MC had taken over all the POS market

Do you happen to have any insight on this? I mean, how is it that one or two companies can manage to squeeze everyone else out so completely? If two big players control Point of Sales (POS), shouldn't someone be able to come in and make a business out of underselling the competition? I would think that smaller overhead means smaller margins are needed.

I've talked to small businesses about fees and charges for their POS and they are always thrilled when people pay with cash, because it means they get the full amount. (These conversations have come up because I've run small businesses in the past, and I remember how horrible it felt to "sell" something for $30, only to get like...$5 out of it between fees, taxes, and insurance costs. It seems like every business I've spoken to hates Visa and MasterCard with a passion, so I would think that small business would be thrilled to have a new player.

At a guess, I would think that part of(?) the reason may be due to (and rightfully so) whatever regulations are in place to force money transfer companies into meeting certain security ratings or whatever. Even so, surely there are people that are willing to fight for a piece of the action, right? It seems crazy to me that no one else sees that as an opportunity to do it better. I'd really like it if fees for small-to-medium businesses could be dropped entirely, and it was only the major players that offset the costs for everyone else.

Huh. That actually brings up a kind of modern parallel I hadn't thought of. A lot of action movies are done primarily, or in part, on greenscreen. The intent of using a greenscreen has nothing to do with what was captured, and more so to do with what is trying to be depicted; what ought be seen, not what is being seen by the actors and actresses.

It would be interesting to know if, in say, 100-200 years, there is some alternative technology that could de-render todays CGI perfectly, and then replace it with some alternative, perhaps insert some form of practical effect in a convincing way? Would being able to do so be better to do just because it can be done?

Like, suppose that one of the more recent big budget movies, Transformers or whatever, could entirely have all of the CGI stripped out of them instantly, and then be replaced with some form of "less fake" effects in a different way. Would it be good to do so, if that were possible? For me personally, I'm very much in favor of rubber suits and fake blood over sticks with ping pong ball overlayed with graphics. [1] In spite of my preference though, I don't know if however many hundreds of people who had worked the digital modeling for all of those scenes would appreciate essentially deleting all of the thousands of hours they had put into the movie.

Bringing that back to B&W films, I think that if someone was really excellent at doing the set design for B&W films, it makes me wonder how they might react if someone insisted on "fixing" the film by colorizing it, and showing their set pieces in a way that they never intended for those pieces to be seen by the audience. Like, if they weren't outright upset with even the idea of doing it at all, perhaps they might insist on some sort of creative control on how each of those set pieces were colorized and portrayed in the final product. Obviously, that would then extend out to all of the other things too, like wardrobe, makeup, etc. I could see the complexity ballooning out to be as complicated and involved as making the movie was to begin with! For example, maybe the guy that scouted the original location for the film wouldn't have chose the spots he had chosen if he knew that people would be able to see it on giant TVs that they could pause every single frame of, and perform all kinds of upscaling and digital zooms in and out on.

[1] I am firmly in favor of practical effects over digital for everything, except small technical errors like a boom mic or a coffee cup in a shot, because I think that the constraints a movie set faces will demand either: incredible innovative solutions by the crew, or, those constraints force directors to scale their vision back to something more contained and manageable. It helps to show where the scope creep for a movie is, and where it's simply unnecessary. For example, Jaws has a great backstory regarding the constant issues of the mechanical shark, it really forced Spielberg to rethink how and when the shark would be shown, and when it would be better to let the viewers mind fill in the blanks.

Eh, I suppose that that's fair.

it sills maddens me there's no somewhat universal tab-entry in OSes like we have with enter

That's a good point!

Were it up to me, I'd probably say something like: Ctrl+`, or maybe ` followed by escape, or something like that. Maybe one of the function keys? Eh...most if not all of those have been hijacked to mean various inane and stupid things too. :/

Hmm...oh! How about: Caps Lock+Shift ? I'm using an ergonomic keyboard, but I think the button press would still work pretty easily. I assume most styles of keyboard would have both, so it wouldn't lock people out if they are writing in a different language, either.

Do you see there being a realistic alternative?

I realize we can't really go backward in time, but I would prefer if the farmers that lived close to where I am sold to people who live local to me. That can happen to some degree (open yard stands), and I like to do that for some of the smaller farms, but it's really a kind of "nice to have" rather than a "The market stocks stuff that was grown a town or two over" type thing. I feel like something probably got lost when that kind of arrangement went away.

There's still one or two local businesses that manage to make it into the local market for me which is neat to see, but that's more so because they are for frozen pastries and stuff, and can prepare a metric ton in advance, and the market can mark it up for being a "local specialty" type thing. I like to buy them when I can afford it. It just sucks that essentially every other thing on a shelf probably wasn't even made in the same time zone or hemisphere.

Interesting! Thanks.