I keep a mental list of some of my favorites of these:
I remember seeing a popular post on Reddit like "My girlfriend's sweater matched her cup" with a cropped figure of a woman holding a cup that looked like her sweater and behind her there was a pack of Oreos on the counter.
I also wonder about the initial Sonic design leading up to the movie release. There was a huge wave of "bad" press over the terrible design, then another wave of "good" press when they fixed it.
You kind of never know but these are definitely the sorts of things I'd want to be thinking up if I worked in marketing. Trust Me I'm Lying is a great book on the topic and it's probably a quintessential book of our time along with enshitification.
I took me a while but I finally figured this out. I think the difficulty is a dark ui pattern that hides the control behind an age selection. In the youtube kids admin settings, there's a part where you select your kids age 0-4, 4-9 etc...
My kid is 4 so I never really looked at the later options but after probably 20 times on that screen, I noticed at the end (where my eyes glossed over the higher ages) there's something along the lines of "control content yourself".
Once I selected it, I could whitelist channels and completely disable search and recommendations. This means the youtube kids app _only_ shows what I say it can.
If I want to give him access to something like "smarter every day" or a specific video that's not on youtube kids, I can click share from my account and share with "kids"
We've still pretty much banned youtube on all devices but, like you said, there's a lot of valuable stuff and I really miss the time when he would get in to "tornadoes" or "helicopters" or some other topic and we could watch a bunch of educational videos without being flooded with trash toy videos and subversive attention leeching ads.
This at least opens the door back up for some of that good content without the garbage.
Traefik has that same auto ssl with LE that caddy does. That's what originally drew me to caddy - which I still use for stuff - but I just recently started working on something configured for Traefik out of the box and discovered it was pretty much the same experience. Just FYI.
Surprised media monkey never makes this list. I started using it initially because it worked work with my ipod but I still use it because if the visual UI. Cons are that it only works on Windows and there's a paid version. I've been investigating players over the past year and I've installed most of these but I'm always disappointed in how lacking they are in terms of just giving me a visually pleasing dark mode grid of album covers. It's nitpicky but it's something I absolutely want as a way to browse all my music.
I've been getting a ton of those USPS and Amazon shipping and return related phishing texts. The first couple of times I genuinely looked at them but they always have bitly URLs and sometimes they have little thoughts at the end like "May the day ahead bring you peace and clarity, from USPS!" Which is so funny to me because it reveals a complete cultural unawareness of how American companies communicate.
Life pro tip (I believe that everyone should do this):
- Buy a domain and set up a custom email that represents you like [email protected] - you own this domain and email address and no company, with the exception of your registrar maybe, has any control over it or authority to take it from you.
- Set up a dummy gmail/proton/whatever acct with a random address - this address will never be used or exposed publicly but it will represent your online email hosting acct.
- Forward your custom email address to the email provider address and configure the web client to send from your custom address.
- set your provider email account up in a local client like outlook that allows you to create a local backup.
- continue watching your previous account and updating your accounts to your new lifetime address. At some point, you should be getting minimal emails to the old account, then you can forward it to your new one.
The idea here is that you've decoupled your identity (your email address) from your webmail provider (gmail)
So google inexplicably cuts your access. Now what?
No problem. You have a local backup of all your emails in outlook. You repeat the process with a different service like proton (or a new gmail acct) with a new dummy email. Then you set the new acct up in outlook and drag all of the emails from your old acct in to the new one you haven't missed a beat. You're still sending and receiving emails to/from the same address and you can access all your historical emails in the new hosting acct because you migrated/synced them all over locally in outlook.
Losing access to your email identity is arguably one of the most catastrophic scenarios you can think of in terms of being online. This guards against that about as much as possible. It doesn't cover other services like voice and stuff but you can follow similar strategies for things like documents and files.
I use kagi exclusively now except for shopping and images. Anytime I use Google, now I'm disgusted with how bad the results are. The bar seems really low to supplant Google search.
If you want a component library that's going to give you accordions and stuff there's going to have to be a JS implementation involved.
In the early days of bootstrap, it was jQuery. Now, if you want to use bootstrap w react etc, you're going to have to have a third party implementation for the framework you're using (like react-strap if you use react)
Ant and MUI Target react directly which allows them to provide a first party JavaScript implementation for interactive components.
Tailwind is a great example of a JavaScript agnostic solution right now because it's purely concerned with CSS and leaves it to the developer to implement JavaScript stuff on their own. This way you can use things in the ecosystem like react-table and style them with tailwind CSS classes.
I tend to prefer MUI but I've been working on an inherited project with Ant and it's gotten a lot better. Years back I would run in to cases where docs and forum posts were in Chinese. These days that's not an issue.
I feel bad because I mention it here all the time but "Trust me I'm Lying" is a great book about modern guerilla marketing that gives some concrete examples of the sort of things I'm always skeptical of in "organic" online content. If I were in some corporate or state think tank I'd be spending all day trying to figure out how to get some post about "my wife's shirt" on the front page of Reddit with my product or propaganda in the background.
Why bother with MP3s in this day and age?
I have a whole little flowchart like this too but one thing I'll mention is that I use cueripper with eac as a fallback. When I end up using EAC I run the result through cuetools to get the verification log and store it with the original rip in a sort of source directory. Then I split the single cue file to individual flac tracks (I convert them from wave if I had to use EAC) and tag them all/add images etc. the final destination is media monkey and an iPod running Rock box. I keep a spreadsheet with every CD and the rip results and whether metadata has been applied and whether it's been moved over to the iPod.
Using a password manager negated the whole signing up thing from me and I actually like it better because I'm signing up with a site specific email and random password instead of using a third party account that they might not support or that I might not use in the future. Mostly I just don't want my major provider identities associated with individual third-party sites. A password manager basically provides the same click to login experience without the side effects of using SSO.
I read "Trust me I'm lying" and it reaffirmed a lot of my theories about how modern marketing works. (This isn't a sly paid plug for the book. Trust me ;)
Now I assume everything is marketing by default. A couple that come to mind:
the ugly sonic design when the movie came out. You get a whole wave of promotion from the outrage, then another when the design is fixed.
An innocuous "my girlfriend's shirt matched her coffee mug" post but there are some brand name cookies in the edge of the frame.
If I worked in marketing, these are the sorts of things I'd be trying to come up with. It gets even more fun when you apply these concepts to political propaganda.
LEGO has always had that rep as the injection molding MVP but I have to say I've been really impressed with bandai. They really dominate the model kit space and I find myself noticing how high quality they feel. I've built a bunch of gundams, Star wars, Pokemon, and one piece kits and they were all super fun. I also like how they kind of inspire me to customize them which I don't feel as much with Lego kits these days (I still love Lego but the kits are so good oob I just leave them as is)
For what it's worth, I did this with the PS4 to play like two or three games. On the other hand, I've played 100%ed more games on the switch than any console since probably super Nintendo or N64. It's had such an amazing run. I do wish they'd release more games though. I played all the donkey Kong country games, super Metroid, and super Mario on the emulator and it was great. I've been thinking about busting the Wii u out just to play wind waker.
That's why I'm a huge shill for gitkraken. It's a paid product so I'm a little hesitant sometimes but I've used them all and nothing compares to the power it unleashes. It completely lifts the curtain on the black box that many developers experience in the terminal and puts the graph front and center. It exposes rebasing operations in an effortless and intuitive visual way that makes git fun. As a result, I feel really proficient and I'm not scared of git at all. I can fix just about anything and paint the picture I want to see by carefully composing commits rather than being at the mercy of the CLI. I still see CLI proficiency as a valuable skill but it's so painful sometimes to watch seasoned 10 yr developers try to solve the most basic problems or completely wreck the history in a project because they're taught you can't be a real engineer if you don't use the git CLI exclusively. Lately I've resorted to arguing "use the CLI but you should at least be looking at the graph in another window throughout the day - which you can do for free in vs code, jetbrains, or even the CLI"
For example: anytime one of my teammates merges a pr, I see it and I rebase my branch right away. As a result my branch is always up to date and based on main so I never run in to merge hell or drop those awful "fix conflicts" commits in the history.