zippergz

I think you also have to remove subreddits that the member is not part of showing up in search results. Several very niche subreddits I participate in have fairly regular low-quality posts by clueless people who just stumbled across them in search (usually looking for something related but different). The bar for searching for a term and posting in the related subreddit is SO MUCH lower than the bar for finding a forum in a web search, signing up for an account, and posting. It might sound minor, but it's not.

The differences aren't chiefly technical. They are cultural, as you alluded to. I started out using BBSes then usenet and email lists then forums and now reddit, for an overlapping set of hobbies. I can tell you with certainty that the subreddits about those hobbies are a pale shadow of what existed on ANY of the prior discussion platforms.

The volume of conversation might be higher, but the depth and sophistication is lower. The repetition of clueless questions. The endless posting of the same joke responses rather than actually answering questions. And so on.

All of that stuff existed on forums and usenet and other places too. I'm not saying it didn't. It's just that the proportions have shifted. And I think like you said the friction is part of it.

It's not just the interface. It's that effectively "everyone" has an account on Reddit. So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting their own new posts or replies in that very niche community. With standalone forums, it was both less likely that you'd just stumble across them if you weren't specifically interested in the topic, and the bar for starting to participate was much higher.

Even if there were no real restrictions on joining or posting, just creating a new account is a lot more work than participating in a subreddit when you already have a reddit account. You could argue that the same dynamic existed in usenet, but the overall bar for participating in usenet was so much higher, and the global userbase so much smaller than what reddit has. And still, we did in my experience see a lot more of the kind of garbage participation that comes from people who aren't really interested in or knowledgeable the topic being able to participate with zero marginal effort.

An extremely low barrier to participation creates a radically different culture than a situation where you actually have to want to be there before you contribute.

It's not just about how many people are on the internet now. There are still a handful of niche forums I participate in, and maybe they aren't as good as they used to be, but they're still way better than most subreddits.

I have a lot of hobbies. Programming is one of them, but not the only one. There are times that some piece of software would help me with one of my hobbies, but I don't want to steal time from hobby X to build the software. And often these don't involve the kind of coding that I want to be doing for fun. This has been a sweet spot for LLM-aided coding for me. I've built several hobby helper apps where the goal was making one of my other hobbies more fun rather than programming. It's still hobby time, not work, but the hobby is not coding.

Can we also not have Levi's? Ford cars? Jack Daniel's? All of their namesakes died a very long time ago.

I haven't done 4x5 in a while, but I have an HP flatbed with a 4x5 adapter (purchased used on ebay) which does an OK job for the price.

I dread running my own Python projects if I haven't worked with them in a while.

Curious what part of the world this is in. I can recall a grand total of three places I've seen in my area do this. It's a tiny minority here.

I think this is something that sucks about your particular sorting facility or you're just very unlucky. I've been using Informed Delivery since it launched, in two different states, and while it's not perfect, I find it pretty accurate, especially for normal mail (envelopes, postcards, and so forth). I'd guesstimate that it misses a real non-junk mail item less than 1% of the time, and it misstates when something will be delivered 5% of the time or less. Certainly not enough to offset the value of the service.

I've definitely gotten the sense that the flip side of that is happening - in many cases, items get marked as "shipped" when the label is printed, but often shippers don't hand the package off to the carrier until days later. I can't prove it but sometimes it very much feels like sellers, especially on platforms like etsy and ebay, make sure to print the label immediately and mark the item as shipped so they can claim fast shipping, but then are in no hurry whatsoever to actually get the package in transit. Maybe this is not nefarious and is just a side effect of the way the systems work together, but as a customer it's pretty annoying. For me it's less about how long it takes to get the item and more about feeling mislead on whether it is actually on its way or not.

Yes, this search thing is absolutely infuriating.

This is the same thing the food delivery apps (including Uber Eats) do. I have screenshots showing the estimated delivery time pretty consistently jumping up anywhere between 20% and 50% from what it shows on the initial screen to what you get once you've placed the order. And then often they don't even make that time estimate.

I believe you on the technical details, but as an anecdote, I have M12 batteries that are 10 years old and still working fine. At least, good enough that I have noticed no issues with them and I don't even know off the top of my head which of my batteries are newer and which are older. I also have a bunch of M18 tools and batteries, and I've noticed no particular difference in how they age compared to the M12 ones. But I'm just a DIY homeowner, so my usage is relatively light.

Markmonitor is much more about the people and service behind it rather than the software. To replace markmonitor you don't need a dev to write a tool. You need a dev to write a tool, and then a team of people who build relationships with everyone in the domain world and are available 24/7 to make calls and deal with issues if they come up.

I have HAD a human assistant who booked flights for me. But it took them a long time to learn the nuances of my preferences enough to do it without a lot of back and forth. And even then, they still sometimes had to ask. Things like what time of day I prefer to fly based on what I had going on the day before or what I'll be doing after I land. What airlines I prefer based on which lounges I'd have access to, or what aircraft they fly. When I would opt for a connecting flight to get a better price vs. when I want nonstop regardless of cost. And on and on. Probably dozens of factors that might come into play in various combinations depending on where I'm going and why. And preferences that are hard to articulate, but make sense once understood.

With a really excellent human assistant who deeply understood my brain (at least the travel related parts of it), it was kind of nice. But even then there were times when I thought it would be easier and better to just do it myself. Maybe it's a failure of imagination, but I find it very hard to see the path from today's technology to an AI agent that I would trust enough to hand it off, and that would save enough time and hassle that I wouldn't prefer to just do it myself.

It does not make hard links. It makes copy-on-write clones.

A copy-on-write clone is not the same thing as a hard link.

Similar problem with email addresses. Tons of stuff relies on it, and providers can shut it off at will. Which is why I use my own domain - at least I can move it to another provider if I get shut down. But that has its own limitations and is not reasonable to expect a normal person to deal with.

This caused me a problem because I signed up with my personal email address, and then wanted a separate account for work but I only have one phone number and they won't let me use the same one on two accounts. I don't really care about giving them my phone number (it's out there everywhere anyway) but this has really reduced my ability to use their product.

Have you updated? Mine has search, in 1.2024.289.

Agreed. To each their own, but the obsession with the biggest and/or most possible screens is something that is very hard for me to relate to. As soon as I am regularly craning my neck to see all of my screen real estate, it is no longer a positive in my life. I'm glad these solutions exist for people who enjoy them, but they are definitely not for me.

They do.

My experience when I last looked into Flutter was that it was heavily used in India - at least based on who participates in the community online - and much less elsewhere. That's not a value judgement, just might be a factor in why you don't hear much about it if you're not in India.

News to me, since I still have a Marcus account that is fully functional and the website says "Goldman Sachs" all over it. I've been expecting it to split off or shut down at some point, but no signs of it so far from my perspective.

I have zero issues with the design of Overcast. But rebuilding from scratch introduced so many incredibly disruptive bugs many of which are still not fixed even though the developer claims that almost all of the major issues have been addressed. Something seems fundamentally wrong with the syncing or data store. That's what sent me looking for alternatives after many years as a dedicated user.

A shocking number of people login to their personal Apple IDs (and email accounts and banks and etc. etc. etc.) on their work computer. I personally do not, but lots of people do.

A sign connected to the internet but with IP whitelists and cryptographic checks is still CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. Yeah, it's way safer than the same sign with ports open to the world and no authentication, but you can't treat it as "not connected to the internet." You still have to worry about networking bugs, cryptographic vulnerabilities, configuration errors, and other issues that can allow remote attackers to exploit the system. If you want to make the point, you have to give an example of something that's literally not connected to the internet, not one that's simply locked down better.

The most interesting thing in this, to me, is just how differently people perceive and enjoy music. I find that the algorithms work pretty well for me. But novelty in melody or rhythm are not something I care about (I literally can not remember an instance of even thinking about how a melody in a new song might go, let alone predicting it). The kind of “newness” that the algorithms provide work exactly right for how I enjoy music. But it makes a ton of sense that if you are more driven by finding new melodies, they would not work well for you.

I get an error from that site too ("reporting engine is down!"). Is the site posted here directly querying the DOT database and knocking it offline, or just a coincidence?

Cue the posts complaining about how impossible it is to do any transaction online because you have to provide so much proof (and the companies collecting even MORE data about us, to later be stolen).

Ebay 1998 (used a few times a year), amazon 1997 (used all the time)