> Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right place
I feel like this is putting too much faith in "natural" methodologies.
Eg, who's to say a cross breeding solution is less dangerous than a GM solution?
If the concern is that it may take 50 years to know the GM is bad, why are we assuming the non-GM is good now? You could say that people have been cross breading for many many generations, but i'm unsure why we'd know that one cross breed being safe means all crossbreeds are safe. I'm not inherently defending GM. I'm attacking the notion that man made tricks like cross breeding are inherently safe.
I have a pear tree with three different types of pears on different branch. Grafting has been going on for centuries.
I think the fear around gmo is that food will be less healthy. The same way prepared food takes a few elements of food mixes with chemicals to get strong favours without the depth of flavour. They do this to save costs. GMO companies are making seeds that create plants that do not get eaten by pests. It sounds great until we realize those plants have a toxic substance inside that harms us.
I disagree (to a degree). Everyone i know kicked and screamed about switching from Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble. I feel like it eventually dominated not because it was easy to dump existing solutions, but because existing solutions were poorly designed by comparison. No mobile, horrid chat, required install, poor voip quality. Discord came along with a better offering and it still was a tough switch.
With that said, i agree that no one "cares" about Discord. If a better thing comes along i could easily see people dumping it. But, i imagine it'll be a bit more difficult. Discord "won" in my view because it simply had to be modern to be vastly superior. However, i'm unsure how easy someone can make a next version that is such a superior leap.
Fwiw, as a gaming voip/chat i still find it a pretty great UX. My only complaint is that it is a bit laggy due to the, i assume, web-based interface on "desktop".
I think one big killer feature Discord has is that you just have to paste in an URL/shortcode to join a server instead of needing to enter an IP and create a username to join every server. It is so much more streamlined to join a Discord server. The voice quality and chat features are both whatever although I would say that Discord feels like a more responsive and less resource intensive application than something like Slack or nuSkype.
The last time I used Slack it was a giant memory hog and used a lot of CPU resources. I don't think Discord would have become nearly as popular compared to say Mumble or Teamspeak it was not also relatively efficient in terms of system resources because PC gamers are very sensitive to big resource hogs.
As far as becoming a digital retail storefront, it has zero advantages compared to the other various competitors. While the other digital retailers do have social features, those social features are generally add-ons that aren't critical to the experience. Many of those storefronts also have API hooks that many developers rely upon for certain game-relevant social features like joining a friend's game in progress.
> Discord "won" in my view because it simply had to be modern to be vastly superior.
Discord "won" because it's literally burning cash and offering a service for free (for example, I don't have to pay for a t2.micro instance to host a Mumble server). But this is obviously not sustainable.
If you're selling a dollar for fifty cents, it's not hard to find a market.
Relaying some text is cheap. If I had to pay 3x the actual server cost to run one (so the rest can go toward development and staff), it would still be minuscule.
My friend circles on discord have enough people with nitro that it's almost certainly cash-positive by a lot.
Yep; it’s important to note that the signaling required to coordinate P2P voice and video is no more expensive than “relaying some text” with modern protocols. The question is whether Discord can remain sufficiently innovative to be ahead of the next thing that tries to disrupt its model. I think it is sufficiently irreverent, and sufficiently independent from B2B stability needs, to be that innovative.
But even if you gave me a free mumble service, it still wouldn't be comparable to Discord - at least when i was using Discord.
The price wasn't the issue (imo), it was simply the user experience. It had the best, by leagues. Users (ie, non hosts) didn't pay for any of these products, but the UX of Discord was vastly superior in my view.
Good for you, but it's still optional for the right crowd. More specifically, you don't have to. Users can connect to your gaming group with zero friction. Not even signup! (at least, back in the day, i'm unsure what it's like not)
It is and it isn't. I imagine your humor implies that technical people are using Mastadon, ie the same type that would be using HN, but the reality is that while that is true, Twitter "rejects" are also using Mastadon. Sometimes this means communities filled with very.. controversial people.
Yeah again I guess this is the choice isn't it? Those communities spring up everywhere, but instances can still block one-another. I'd say it's better to have a choice of moderation style than one grand overseer.
>It is and it isn't. I imagine your humor implies that technical people are using Mastadon, ie the same type that would be using HN, but the reality is that while that is true, Twitter "rejects" are also using Mastadon. Sometimes this means communities filled with very.. controversial people.
Mastodon being federated, though, means that while the controversial people may be using it, the rest of the Mastodon-Verse doesn't need to interact with them.
The big trouble with Twitter is that if those people want to harass you, you as a user have very little choice but to sit there and take it.
> No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial core of it, is viable without tracking.
Clearly they disagree. Or maybe you should let them know that they don't need that.
To say it without sarcasm, what you feel you are entitled as a paying customer and what they feel they need/want to understand their customers are clearly at odds. Ultimately, what you think matters nothing in isolation and what they think matters nothing in isolation. What you two agree upon, is the only thing that matters. That is to say, if you think they shouldn't track you but you use their tracking product anyway, you've compromised and agreed to new terms.
I imagine you could come up with a subscription that would adequately compensate them for a truly no tracking experience. But I doubt you two would agree on a price to pay for said UX.
You're correct of course, but I don't really see how this isn't a vacuous observation. Yes clearly our perceptions are at odds, but that has nothing to do with the reality of whether or not they need to be doing that tracking. Obviously they think they need to, or they wouldn't do it. But I think I've laid out a pretty strong argument that they actually don't need to, which leads me to believe that they actually haven't considered it seriously enough to give it a shot.
Would they be as profitable? Maybe, maybe not. Would they become unprofitable? No, strictly speaking. I'm confident in that because the NYT weathered the decline of traditional news media before the rise or hyper-targeted ads, and because I've maintained a free website in the Alexa top 100,000 on my own, with well over 500,000 unique visitors per day. That doesn't come close to the online audience of a major newspaper, but it's illustrative. There is a phenomenal amount of advertising optimization you can do using basic analytics based on page requests and basic demographic data that still respects privacy and doesn't track individual users. I outlined a few methods, such as Daring Fireball's.
Maybe instead of this being a philosophical issue of perspective between a user and an organization, it's an issue of an organization that hasn't examined how else it can exist. Does the NYT need over 10,000 employees? Is there a long tail of unpopular and generally underperforming content that nevertheless sticks around, sucking up money and forcing ever more privacy-invasive targeting? If the NYT doesn't know its audience well enough to present demographic-targeted ads on particular articles and sections, what the hell is it doing tracking users individually? It's just taking the easy way out and giving advertising partners the enhanced tracking they want. But they don't need to do that, and whether or not they think they need to do it is orthogonal to the problem itself.
> You're correct of course, but I don't really see how this isn't a vacuous observation. Yes clearly our perceptions are at odds, but that has nothing to do with the reality of whether or not they need to be doing that tracking. Obviously they think they need to, or they wouldn't do it. But I think I've laid out a pretty strong argument that they actually don't need to, which leads me to believe that they actually haven't considered it seriously enough to give it a shot.
It most definitely is. But so is the word need, in this context. How would we define what they need to do, and what they don't need to do?
My argument is simply such that, of course they don't need to (by my definition), but nothing will change that unless they see a different, more lucrative offer. Ie, "oh hey, here's 2 million readers who will only read the page in plain html and will pay an extra $20/m". It just seems like a needless argument, as I don't believe there's anything that can change their behavior without us changing ours. Without the market changing.
Rather, I think the solution lies not in them, but in you. In us. To use blockers and filters to such an extreme degree that it's made clear that UX wins here, and they need to provide the UX to retain the customers.
Thus far, we've not done enough to change their "need". If a day comes that they do need to stop tracking us, well, they'll either live or die. But the problem, and solution, lies in us. My 2c.
Classic narrowcasting mistake that dying companies make.
Statista claims 2.3 million digital subscribers. NYT is trying to milk that 2.3M for everything they got, squeeze the last drops of blood from the stone while they still can.
That's a great way to go out of business, when 99.97% of the world population is not your customer and your squeezing labors are not going to encourage them to sign up.
If you hyperoptimize to squeeze every drop out of a small customer base, eventually you end up with something like legacy TV networks where 99% of the population won't watch a show even for free, and the tighter the target focus on an ever shrinking legacy audience, the smaller the audience gets, until the whole house of cards collapses.
Its similar to the slice of pie argument; there are many business strategies that make a pie slice "better" at the price of shrinking it, and eventually the paper-thin slice disappears from the market because the enormous number of the employees can't eat anymore, but that certainly will be the most hyperoptimized slice of pie ever made, right before it entirely disappears.
NYT is going to have a truly amazing spy product right before it closes.
Why is that doubtful? There's all kinds of examples of tiered subscriptions in the world. I think it would be doubtful because the NYT wouldn't want to explicitly admit all the tracking they are doing.
> Why is that doubtful? There's all kinds of examples of tiered subscriptions in the world. I think it would be doubtful because the NYT wouldn't want to explicitly admit all the tracking they are doing.
Many reasons, one of which you said. What would the price tag be for them to admit all they are tracking?
Currently the price is free, and comes bundled with uMatrix, and a cookie flush. I’d like to pay the NYT for their journalism, but only with money, not the ability to track me. As a result they get no money, and no tracking.
> Currently the price is free, and comes bundled with uMatrix, and a cookie flush. I’d like to pay the NYT for their journalism, but only with money, not the ability to track me. As a result they get no money, and no tracking.
You misunderstood me. I mean, what would they like you to pay them, for them to be 100% transparent about what they're doing for tracking, what their advertisers are doing and who they are, and possibly stopping all that entirely. Ie, what is it worth to them.
Is that really preventative care though? Why would I take pills for high blood pressure, if I don't have high blood pressure already? I thought preventative care was care that is, well, in prevention of the problem. Ie, checkups and recipes to exercise more.. or eat less carbs, or do more cardio. or w/e.
I know nothing on the subject, so please take this as a question.
High blood pressure is not an immediate problem for the individual, but it can lead to heart attacks, strokes, kidney problems and more if it isn't treated. So that pill is preventative of bad outcomes.
If you are diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes you should be referred to a dietician, personal trainer, etc. to improve your lifestyle. This is preventative medicine against amputations and other complications.
Now the advice they give diabetics is the same advice everybody should get. Health promotion is pretty hard to do, however. In all it is a good thing but some people who do the right thing will fall victim anyway like running guru Jim Fixx, or Jerome Rodale who died on the Dick Cavett show in 1971.
Even more than that; I left Google (as a user, never employee) because I was scared of being banned. Seeing stories of users on Amazon / Google getting their account banned due to something related to a business concern, made me realize that if someone flagged a google app I had my whole life could come to a grinding halt. Phone, phone number, email, storage, internet access! All that because maybe I got reports on a phone app I wrote (hypothetical).
I'm doing nothing illegal or unethical, nothing wrong. Nevertheless, I ran from Google asap due to that reason alone. Google represented a massive single point of failure to my digital life.
I now use separate products for just about everything I own. While it's not as convenient as Google, I feel far more secure.
Similar concerns, I recently used Google Express for a purchase, it worked fine, and then I deleted it. My Google account is my main email, and every new Google service is another opportunity for my whole account to get irreversibly banned.
Using Google with their famous lack of customer service to make purchases that I could conceivably need to put a chargeback on felt uncomfortably risky.
Tie my home internet connection to that? How do I know I won't get locked out of the cloud-integrated admin app? Why would I want it connected to anything Google?
The "one account everywhere" thing is convenient and great for their branding, but it's not great for my peace of mind.
Agree on lack of support. I have an account that is blocked. I forgot the password since it was always logged in. When I try to recover the password, it asks me a bunch of questions that I am pretty sure I am answering correctly. At the end it just tells me that the account cannot be recovered... even if I had the second factor authenticator still working and I punched in the right code. I searched high and low online but since they do not have any kind of support I have no way out. It is depressing.
To be honest, if someone doesn’t know my password, doesn’t have my 2-factor code, and can’t answer the security questions, I don’t want them to be able to call up customer service and social engineer an account takeover. I don’t think there’s any amount of proof that I could provide but an adversary targeting me couldnt’t fake to convince a call center employee.
What I’m more worried about is their “You violated the TOS. We can’t tell you how you violated the TOS. We can’t unban your account.” If you don’t know someone at Google, you’re out of luck.
Go is my daily driver. With that said, I love Rust. I even tried to switch my team to Rust for a short while, and used it as my main personal language for ~8Mo or so. My decisions to stick with Go were mainly the following:
1. For work, my team just wasn't going to switch to Rust. From a Python shop, Go has enough pushback. Which tells you a lot about my shop lol. I'm still holding out for Rust on a future project that I think can't be Go, and has to be Rust.
2. For work and home, Go just feels easier and faster in mental overhead with the exception of one thing[1]. Which ultimately means if I need to blindly program my way through a vague feature description, and then find out it's way different than they said, it's easier to refactor and retroactively fix a bad design in Go than Rust.
3. For work and home, Rust had a terrible dev UX when cross compiling HTTPS. I was trying to cross compile my HTTPS Rust binary, an easy task in Go, and in Rust it was a massive headache. In Go it's an afterthought. This will improve in time I'm sure, but the easiest solution in Rust was to not do it, compile on the platform it's running on.
[1]: As said, I find Go to have less overhead than Rust; Except, for any type of optional value. Go's lack of enum types and Rust's Option<> is a huge blow for me. I absolutely love Option in Rust.
For me, the biggest thing in logging these days is being able to remove performance impact of logs lower than the level threshold. How does this library compare?
Currently I'm using Zerolog, which has a nice compromise of UX, performance and adoption. The less cost the better if my application logs with a level that is not enabled.
> I suppose, for me at least, the network speeds are in a similar category to processor speeds for normal, every day use. Would an extra 10-20% download bandwidth be appreciated? Would an i9 running at 2.9GHz help me transpile and package my JavaScript quicker? Sure. But it's way down my priority list in terms of real-life productivity and time saving.
Definitely. Furthermore, I typically don't even care about things going fast. I want things to "not be slow". Which, typically I guess the distinction is that I don't mind expected slow things being slow. Ie, if I have to run integration tests I expect it to take 30s. If I got a (somehow) faster SSD and CPU could it take 20s? Maybe, and sure that would be great.. but .. meh. It just doesn't matter to me.
However the things that should be instant, that I don't like to be slow need to remain so under all conditions. In my experience, RAM is the biggest culprit for causing simple things to be slow. If I open one to many browser tabs, suddenly I have no RAM and my UX goes down significantly.
So RAM ranks far, far higher on my list than CPU. CPU rarely has a big affect on my these days, and unless I switch to a workload where I'm heavily concerned with shaving time off of hour+ compiles (video editing/etc), then I just don't care. But RAM, oh boy do I love RAM.
I feel like this is putting too much faith in "natural" methodologies.
Eg, who's to say a cross breeding solution is less dangerous than a GM solution?
If the concern is that it may take 50 years to know the GM is bad, why are we assuming the non-GM is good now? You could say that people have been cross breading for many many generations, but i'm unsure why we'd know that one cross breed being safe means all crossbreeds are safe. I'm not inherently defending GM. I'm attacking the notion that man made tricks like cross breeding are inherently safe.