smelendez

Yes, this is exactly the problem.

Multiple pieces of software vying to be your passkey provider, often using dark patterns so you don’t realize you’re making a choice, and not using the term “passkey” so people are using the technology without knowing what it is or how to research it.

Kind of reflects the state of the web today, where every company wants to be your intermediary in every interaction, from making a purchase to transcribing a meeting.

I enjoy the radio. I have a few stations I’ll cycle through at home and in the car. But all nonprofit/college /etc.

Most US commercial radio is very bad. I don’t really understand why the playlists are so small, and why they don’t even occasionally play lesser-known songs by the big acts. Like, why don’t classic rock stations play deeper cuts by Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, etc. instead of the same hit singles over and over for decades? How can that be what listeners want? People who work in retail environments with a repeated playlist usually say they hate it for obvious reasons.

It’s as if those TV stations that show The Office and Seinfeld every night showed the same five episodes every week.

Ignoring it is hard to distinguish from waiting to see how other businesses successfully use it, then copying them, which will then be framed as adopting best practices.

The story doesn't mention how this schoolteacher got enough "private investors" so she could quit her job and pursue this.

Yeah, this is the big question. Family money?

Whatever the case, it’s still pretty impressive. Running a project involving legacy IP and legacy source code and actually getting multiple games out the door (and a puff piece in the New York Times) isn’t as simple as throwing money at it.

Very interesting!

Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason.

The bananas were cut up or pureed and fed to a child at a particular stage of development. Kid is now eating on their own, doesn’t want bananas or doesn’t have the dexterity to peel them. Parents reintroduce bananas a few months later, kid likes them again.

Or someone got a new job and they’re not eating breakfast at home. A few months later, they go back to eating at home to save money or lose weight.

Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.

Bananas are often the only fresh fruit at convenience stores. Sometimes there are apples or oranges that look extremely underripe or dried out and starchy. Bananas also don’t need to be washed and don’t excrete juice, so you can eat them on the go. There’s nowhere to wash an apple in most convenience stores, and oranges are more likely to get juice on your clothes or car seats, have a harder peel to remove and neatly dispose of, and may have seeds.

Right. Laptops are basically work (or school) tools now for a lot of people. They might have one tucked away that they pull out now and then when they need it, similar to a power drill or a sewing machine. It’s not a daily use device.

I think it helped Microsoft historically that people used their operating systems at home, although even then a lot of people would have learned Windows at work or school first.

And also typing cat x to get a quick look at the file, hitting up, then piping that into another command and taking a look, hitting up, piping that result into a third command etc.

The most common CD players around now are probably video game consoles.

This is how it now works with music, I believe. Apple, Amazon, Bandcamp, etc. all sell you access to DRM-free files along with the ability to download or stream them in perpetuity.

Yeah, it’s a problem with the employment and organizational structure, in a way.

Software doesn’t need continual redesign and redevelopment at constant scale, nor is there unlimited need for new software tools in any one company’s wheelhouse, but the expectation is that software companies hire people and keep them onboard as long as they’re performing well, not that they’ll scale up for a periodic launch and then scale down again. And a company that did that — outside of the video game industry — would be shunned by developers (at least in a good labor market).

They do need more attention per person. Doing anything with a group of eight is just more complicated, and you’re more likely to have a person in the group who slows things down for whatever reason plus people trying to help them which can slow things down more.

They’ll take longer per person to order because they’ll be coordinating appetizers and who’s sharing what, etc.

They’re more likely to be celebrating a special occasion which means people less familiar with the restaurant or even people who don’t eat out much at all.

And the group is big enough that people will be having side conversations while one side of the table talks to the server, which also slows things down.

I’d put working for tips in here as well.

From the worker’s point of view, it’s adding a gambling element to every transaction, complete with the usual gambler’s folk wisdom about which ones are going to pay out and how to maximize your luck, which I think is part of what makes it popular.

Everyone who’s ever worked for tips has stories of unexpected “wins” and the biggest jackpots are reported on like big lottery wins.

Yeah, I can’t actually think of any contracts besides media licenses that are fixed payment for access to a resource for an indeterminate length of time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think about it.

Yes. I recently tried ordering a standard cardboard tube box of oats from Amazon, and it arrived crushed and leaking in its presumably nonsterile paper envelope. They gave me a refund and told me to throw it out.

I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.

It works better with music because many stores will sell you a DRM-free mp3. Most movie stores are just “selling” you long-term streaming access.

Exactly — they should have just offered a lease until the end of the licensing agreement: “Pay $X today and watch this movie as many times as you want through June 2026!”

Interestingly Greene’s Dictionary of Slang cites more than a century of US use of “jab” for injection. Seems like it must have died out in the US and revived a bit lately.

https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/i66n7hi

In the UK, I believe jab has long been equivalent to shot in the US (complete with nonviolent connotation despite the word meaning something violent in other contexts).

Another one is that you can tell “professional” from “personal” email addresses or that every address even cleanly fits into just one category.

A lot of small business owners use gmail or a longstanding ISP account. A lot of people have personal email addresses you can’t easily distinguish from professional ones, between college alumni addresses, personal domains, and obscure ISP and email providers that aren’t in your database.

Images are also a huge part of messaging. For memes obviously, but also other communication (here’s the flyer for the event, look what the teacher wrote on my exam, should I get this gift for mom, look what my significant other sent me — what do you think I should say?), etc.

What confuses me is that the education system, especially the college track, was designed for men and boys. Lots of colleges didn’t even admit women, and they were largely excluded from learned professions like medicine, law, the ministry, engineering, etc.

I haven’t really seen a good argument for what changed. I guess it’s possible that the school system was originally designed to teach young men skills, like quiet study and deference to authority, that women either learn more naturally or get reinforced in other contexts, and the schools no longer effectively teach those skills but still reward them.

As Scott mentioned on his blog, what if someone stumbled upon the agent’s post? What if they believed it was real? It could have serious consequences for Scott’s personal or professional life. A recruiter could deny him a job, and a potential contributor to Matplotlib could step away from the project. The consequences could reach beyond this case.

What would it mean for it to be “real?” It’s a rant about him discriminating against AI.

If you believe that’s a problem, judge him accordingly, I guess. If you think it’s silly, as most people will, laugh about it.

Fact-checking and editing a mediocre piece of writing be way harder than writing from scratch. Proving that something isn’t true or can’t be substantiated is hard work, and so is arguing that a word choice is subtly inappropriate.

And making a ton of corrections to a document everyone was hoping was ready to go is never fun politically.

The ADHD patients aren’t necessarily the ones doing weekly talk therapy. They’re meeting occasionally for a quick chat with a psychiatrist.

I agree, if you’re just doing talk therapy it seems overkill. But they may have concerns about emergencies, where a patient is in crisis and you realize you don’t actually know who they are.

And insurance fraud: Alice has health insurance, her friend Betty does not but needs therapy, so she signs up under Alice’s name (“oh, I actually go by Betty.”)

In general, I don’t think it’s that outlandish that the company wants to know definitively who its patients are and be able to demonstrate it does, but hopefully they can come up with more options for verification.

I definitely know people who prefer online therapy because they have a busy schedule or live far from a therapist who meets their needs (e.g., people in rural areas).

Some people also prefer online visits for other care, usually things they can self-diagnose: a recurring sinus infection, erectile dysfunction, hair loss, etc.

I was trying to think what the least intrusive option here would be. You need to verify that the patient has ID matching their name and face, which could be done offline by a notary or other trusted party if a patient prefers.

But you also need to confirm the person showing up for the online sessions is actually the verified patient, and I'm not sure how you do that to maximize privacy. I guess you could take a photo at the in-person verification, have the medical provider sign off that it's the same person as their patient, and then destroy the photo?

Probably medication fraud.

They mention heightened scrutiny around controlled substances (with amphetamines for ADHD as an example) on the FAQ. https://help.headway.co/hc/en-us/articles/29673299878676-Doc...

The risk is that a drug dealer or addict pays people to use their identities and possibly insurance info, pretends to be them and to have ADHD in telehealth sessions, and stockpiles Adderall.

I see these kinds of stories here a lot, and I'm curious whether they reflect a steady stream of need for AI coding, or whether a lot of companies have a burst of AI-appropriate coding work now that the technology is available and then will have a smaller need going forward.

Is it like the stereotypical dad who rents a power washer, powerwashes every exposed surface on his property, and then doesn't need to do any powerwashing for a few years; his neighbor who gets an Instant Pot and uses it for every meal for a month, then sees it gathering dust when the family gets tired of pressure-cooked stews; or like their neighbor who gets a microwave oven and uses it multiple times a day for decades?

I guess only time will tell.

Well, travel booking is one of those things every company wants to get involved with because it's just straight referral fees. I get advertisements to book travel through my phone company (T-Mobile US) and a slew of financial services companies.

If it's easy enough to add to the app and sticks around for a while, it may well be profitable even if only a small percentage of customers use it or even realize it's available.

Sometimes I'll be in a large used bookstore, like the kind of cavernous ones you find in places with cheap real estate, or at a charity sale and there will be a book with a title like "Learning J2SE 1.4" or "XHTML for Dummies" that is just utterly and completely useless.

I wonder if these books will eventually be interesting, the way old ham radio or slide rule manuals can be, or if they're just forever doomed to irrelevance.