lennivelkant
@lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 16 hours ago:
I never had one of my wired earbuds fall off the platform at the train station and disappear in the gravel, nor did I ever have isues with forgetting to charge them, let alone their case being brolen and not charging at all. And if I want to switch my favourite headphones over from my PC to my phone, I’m really glad my old phone still has a jack.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 1 day ago:
Some house nearby must have one of those in their garden, because there’s a section of the road where I always catch that odour. Thanks for pointing it out to me, now I’ll look for the tree next time I have to pass through.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 days ago:
In the United States, a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) is a third-party administrator of prescription drug programs.
[…]
PBMs play a role as the middlemen between pharmacies, drug manufacturers, wholesalers, and health insurance plan companies.
Parasites who make money off of ripping off patients and fucking over pharmacists. They are the rotten core of the US healthcare system and the primary facilitators of the exploitation machine turning your misery into profit.
They negotiate cheap prices from the manufacturers, charge the pharmacies (and by extension the patients) an arm and a leg and pocket the difference.
I believe they’re also the ones that argue with the pharmacist whether the patient really needs that expensive life-saving medication their insurance doesn’t want to cover, because they get kickbacks for saving them money. Sure, you might have cancer, but have you tried Yoga instead of chemo?
Dr. Glaucomflecken has a nice video on it as part of his series on US healthcare.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 days ago:
Bet MMA is making the list too
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 days ago:
We have one app where client management can’t globally disable update checks or notifications, but also, the updates aren’t critical enough to constantly validate and roll out.
So we get that “update available” badge in the app and can’t do anything about it. Probably not an issue for most people, since they already do updates only when they’re forced to, but annoying to the few who even look at those notifications.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 days ago:
Entitled customers of any flavour are awful. It’s one thing to know what you want and to decide whether something is worth your money, but it’s another to demand people cater to your specific taste and be a dick about it, as if the devs’ time and effort wasn’t worth anything.
And particularly annoying in my opinion are those who think they know how to fix a given issue, call you an idiot for not “just” doing that and have no idea of the constraints and decisions that might preclude or complicate that “simple fix”.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 days ago:
I would never be able to explain coherently the difference between UX and UI people.
In theory, UX deals with the psychology behind it: What do people want that our product can provide? Does our product communicate that it can do so? Do people understand how to use the product? Does the product guide them through usage helpfully? Are they satisfied with the result?
Perhaps most nebulously: How do they feel before, while and after using the product, independent of the product itself, and how does that impact their experience? For instance, if you’re buying a train ticket, you might already be stressed and annoyed, so you’ll have less patience.
Source: My wife, who had UX as the focus of her undergrad.
In practice, a lot of people are like you in that they don’t really know or grasp the field, particularly managers who aren’t qualified to make the hiring decisions they do and accordingly there’s always gonna be people capitalising on that ambiguity and grifting their way to a cushy “I’m important and get to have a say, so pay me well” job.
- Comment on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. 3 days ago:
a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics
A lot of history work is based on statistics and crunching numbers, apparently. For example, ACOUP is currently currently doing a series on the life of pre-modern peasants that involves a lot of calculating and modeling.
- Comment on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. 3 days ago:
I guess the point is that MBA systematically trains you to be unethical in order to do well
- Comment on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. 3 days ago:
I work with one on the daily. I swear, his primary expertise is in buzzwords. Tried to tell me how much better a certain format for documenting requirements is because I can let the people that require something do the documenting for me.
Never mind that this format is neither feasible outside his example case, nor even sufficient for this specific case.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 5 days ago:
Finding the silver linings, the rays of light, the diamonds in the mud is a skill to learn, and I think learning it is worthwhile. That doesn’t mean I close my eyes to the bad stuff, but spotting the good stuff definitely makes it all more bearable.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 1 week ago:
Gotta love the perennial “our kids are spoiled idiots” bit. That one never gets old. I bet at least one of Aritophanes’ plays will have made fun of the damn kids.
- Comment on makes more sense than this shit 1 week ago:
That still doesn’t explain how this timeline would come to exist. Reality as it is is still insane, no matter how we got here.
- Comment on Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain' 2 weeks ago:
Money in my bank account I can spend on just about anything. If I realise “shit, I’m out of toilet paper”, I can go to the grocery store and pay by EC, with the money in my bank account. The money that I keep in there, just in case there’s something I want or need to spend money on literally anywhere.
Besides, my bank is subject to my local jurisdiction and my own country’s laws and regulations. If my money is with some US company, I can’t be sure whether they’ll suddenly go “sorry, pal, your money has been confiscated on some bullshit pretense you have no way of actually fighting back against”.
- Comment on Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain' 2 weeks ago:
Valve could extend a limited credit for the first two hours of play time. If after downloading and playing for two hours there’s still no confirmation from the bank, they’d then block your access to the game.
- Comment on I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days 2 months ago:
I believe that’s what a write down generally reflects: The asset is now worth less than its previous book value. Resale value isn’t the most accurate way to look at it, but it generally works for explaining it: If I bought a tool for 100€, I’d book it as 100€ worth of tools. If I wanted to sell it again after using it for a while, I’d get less than those 100€ back for it, so I’d write down that difference as a loss.
With buying / depreciating / selling companies instead of tools, things become more complex, but the basic idea still holds: If the whole of the company’s value goes down, you write down the difference too. So unless these guys bought it for five times its value, they’ll have paid less for it than they originally got.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 2 months ago:
I wish you a speedy and affordable recovery
- Comment on A 3-tonne, $1.5 billion satellite to watch Earth’s every move is set to launch this week 2 months ago:
Which words do you mean? Because I understand them all. They convey information, the fundamental point of language, hence they don’t detract. Just because you can’t make sense of them doesn’t mean they’re nonsense.
If you’re talking about “Mach Yeet”, yeet refers to forceful movement. This specific combination then means really fucking fast. The exact speed doesn’t matter. The frivolity of the language underscores their excitement or might just be their idiolect.
Either way, so long as it’s nothing hateful or harmful (beyond hurting your linguistic sensibilities), trying to police other people’s vocabulary is narrow-minded and needlessly stuck-up.
Why don’t you yeet that shit (throw it far away) and come join us in watching the fascinating evolution of language?
- Comment on There's no wrong way to stroke it 2 months ago:
Someone else covered it in another reply, but moles have bald areas. Hairy Ball only applies when it’s entirely covered.
- Comment on There's no wrong way to stroke it 2 months ago:
I did not need to know that, but I respect the witty way you communicated it
- Comment on p is for pHunky 2 months ago:
Fair, but also, you could look up XKCD comics by their name or transcript and link to them directly when you come across them.
- Comment on Smartphones are Designed to Fail Us (and We Have to Change That) 2 months ago:
For some character sets with a lot of different characters like the Han Unicode representation, that could be cumbersome. Granted, Han might not be a great risk for confusion so you might just whitelist them collectively, but my point is that the approach would have to be more nuanced and complex. Ultimately, humans are complex and so are their languages.
- Comment on The Wikimedia Foundation Pauses an Experiment That Showed Wikipedia Users AI-Generated Summaries at The Top of Some Articles, Following an Editor Backlash. 2 months ago:
If AI constantly refined its own output, sure, unless it hits a wall eventually or starts spewing bullshit because of some quirk of training. But I doubt it could learn to summarise better without external input, just like a compiler won’t produce a more optimised version of itself without human development work.
- Comment on Smartphones are Designed to Fail Us (and We Have to Change That) 2 months ago:
To clarify, I meant that from the devs’ perspective: The effort of individually vetting every single character for possible confusion is immense, and the end result would still be just as western-centric. Imagine having a domain name in Greek where some characters are replaced because they might be confused for Latin characters. Or, conversely, having a few characters replaced by similar Latin ones for an attack, which your solution wouldn’t catch.
The result would also still be unreliable even for Westerners. If some other character set you didn’t vet also contains similar looking characters, there’s a new surface for attack.
To properly close that security gap would be an immense arms race… or you could simply shut down the entire attack vector.
So when you consider the importance of protecting gullible people from insidious attacks and the complexity of trying to allow non-Latin characters without creating openings, the question “How widespread are non-Latin URLs in my target audience and is it critical that they be rendered in their native script?” becomes a calculation of cost and benefit.
It’s a shit compromise to deal with the shit fact that some people being assholes ruins good things for the rest of us who aren’t.
- Comment on The Wikimedia Foundation Pauses an Experiment That Showed Wikipedia Users AI-Generated Summaries at The Top of Some Articles, Following an Editor Backlash. 2 months ago:
Yeah but the compilers compile improved versions. Like, if you manually curated the summaries to be even better, then fed it to AI to produce a new summary you also curate… you’ll end up with a carefully hand-trained LLM.
- Comment on Smartphones are Designed to Fail Us (and We Have to Change That) 2 months ago:
Though I guess that would be a lot harder.
From the devs’ perspective, the relevant question will be this: How hard is it to map out all the lookalikes, and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?"
- Comment on Smartphones are Designed to Fail Us (and We Have to Change That) 2 months ago:
As in, desgined to fail early? I highly doubt that.
Even if it were true, lightbulbs still last longer and are way cheaper. Whether I have to replace them every six years or every five years doesn’t matter as much.
- Comment on Massive internet outage reported: Google services, Cloudflare, Character.AI among dozens of services impacted 2 months ago:
You could just google it-
oh wait
- Comment on The Arc Browser Is Dead 2 months ago:
Clearly if you arnt building your own web browser from the ground up, your a sheep. This is the only logical conclusion!!1!1!
Obviously. It’s the only way to be sure it has exactly the features I want and nothing else. Anyone recommending anything else has clearly been deluded to accept mediocrity. How else could they think something other than my exact tastes is decent?
Lol, but seriously every modern browser is basically crap ran or controlled by a large company that does fucked up or less then ideal things.
Yeah, it’s fucked that we basically have to pick what flavour of shit we’d hate least. And once we’re all settled in with our least disgusting brand, we obviously don’t want to move anymore. I’m sticking with Firefox and probably will for some time to come. Adjusting to a different UI, migrating all my bookmarks and finding equivalents for my extensions is an effort.
Maybe some alternative will eventually entice me enough to overcome my reluctance to mix up my digital environment. I just hope it’ll be by actually being good, rather than just “not as bad”.
- Comment on The Arc Browser Is Dead 2 months ago:
You mean the one from the company that pays out their CEO a fat $6m salary, paid for by Google bribing Mozilla to be the default search engine?
I don’t trust your recommendation. Do you even realise you’re being herded like sheep?
(I actually use it too, but I won’t pretend they’re saints. It also occasionally has trouble with some websites, but I haven’t done any comprehensive testing to confirm whether it’s browser-specific.)