DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

You're working very hard. Now and then, you grab a free soda. You work so hard that the corporation has a chance to grow. What is your reward for all that hard work? The chance to pay 50c for the previously free soda. From this point of view, there is nothing rational about it.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

My point is that taking a physical does not change your physical attributes; being asked "are you nervous?" can't give a proper answer because the question, by itself, changes the outcome. Like the "whatever you do, don't think of a pink elephant" thing.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

> No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.

Maybe the insight here is "keep your engineers happy, it's important". But I believe there is more to it on this story. The engineers heard "we could give you soda when we were small, now we're big, we cannot give you soda" and, to the rational mind, that makes no sense.

Maybe they left because they were sitting on a precarious equilibrium and the free sodas tilted the balances. But I think it was also that the engineers saw the sign on the wall, and thought "this guys have lost their collective corporate mind, let's bail before they have any more bright ideas".

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

I would also be very troubled of the possibility that mass testing in children would, itself, cause some degree of anxiety. I know I don't enjoy being tested.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

It depends: are you selling bras, or are you selling the bras' brand?

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Little nitpick: "the algorithm" does not even find the things "most people wants"; it finds the things some executive or other decided it was the most convenient to find taking into account the needs of the corporation only. Yes, there is theoretically some way to return, up to some degree, what people would find useful; but the decisions are not made by the people fiddling with the algorithms. Those people have their hands tied and must follow the interests of someone who most of the time knows nothing about algorithms or people or the end product.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

The gold ones better not be much gold at all. After a few hundred tumbles they would be so lumpy they'd be more useful as golden nuggets.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Just like Google is not an actual search engine but a "recommendation" engine that prods users into getting recommended just what Google needs to recommend ("did you mean...?") this is not an actual writing assistant but a "write (and think) the Google way" mould

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

> suggested he change it to “angry” or “upset” to “make your writing flow better.”

Nope, it suggested to change from this to that so the writer could be Google's avatar on writing what Google wants to get written

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Here is my hunch. It is not a shroud, as in, it is not a piece of cloth that was used at some point to envelope a dead body. But it is not a forgery per se, either.

What do I mean?

I think this is what happened: at some point, after christianism had already settled and there was known iconography, someone made a sculpture of the crucified Jesus. Said sculpture had to be transported somewhere, so someone covered it in cloth, then maybe baled it in with straw or cotton or whatever as protection.

Then it was forgotten for a century or two. Long enough for the sculpture to leave a clear impression on the cloth.

Bam. No need of supernatural whatchamacallits, no need either for advanced forgery techniques. Just a statue and a bit of time.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Of course games are boring, the same way an old towel, a broom and bucket for your head are boring. The purpose of the game is giving you a few (ok, maybe a few million) rules so you can make your own fun out of a couple random things that would not be that interesting otherwise. The fun depends on, among other factors, what would you be doing otherwise, who else is playing with you, how seriously you take it... the "fun factor" of the game itself comes only from how many opportunities does it give you or wastes for you.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

> For example, you come up with some (...) idea (...) and no results are found -- I'm almost always headed down the wrong path.

And by that you mean, Google is telling you how to think, and that you should think in some way and not in some other way. I'm quite sure I am not comfortable with that.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

"When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment is just huge."

Unless I am understanding something really, really wrong... all those apps are windowed, and can and do resize all the time, taskbar or not

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Clicking on a cookie prompt would be admitting it will do something useful, which is a clear falsehood. The problem is "some cookies are being abused for tracking", and the purported solution is to shove in your face a message claiming "this uses cookies, click here to acknowledge the fact because the real problem is that you're an ignorant who does not know this uses cookies". It's not just useless, it's insulting and patronizing.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

"If the computer knows I’m missing a semicolon here, why won’t it add it itself?"

The computer does not know that. The computer is being too smart. And probably wrong.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

That would mean adding a rule to the language. The rule of "you can use 'print' as an statement". A rule that, time after time, has been shot down.

Which leads us to the real issue at hand: if the compiler is going to do anything by itself, that means it is following well defined rules. Therefore, whatever automatic thing the compiled does is part of the language. And, sometimes, the design rules of said language plain and simply do not allow for that.

DancesWTurtles

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Strictly speaking, yes. Strictly speaking, invading a territory that is just a border away from the Atlantic Treaty's borders, with no clear indications that the advance will stop at any point, is very clearly 'akin to declaration of war', too.

DancesWTurtles

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

What do you know, I tried, and found it to be impossible. You cannot block msn.com at the DNS level, not inside Windows anyway. It's been discussed and everything:

https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2006/Apr/509 [RE: Microsoft DNS resolver: deliberately sabotaged hosts-file lookup]

So the only answer is, as pointed out, a pihole or similar outside approach.

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