For someone using sed often enough inventing prettypath won't make sense. However, if producing correct sed command, be it by remembering the options, reading manual or digging through the shell history, takes some amount of mental effort, your brain will happily stick "prettypath" into memory as long as doing so stays less mentally taxing than doing original task from scratch.
Personally I only ever needed it once. I was re-implementing javascript function doing some strange string processing by using characters in the input string to calculate indexes of alphabet array to replace them with. Since I was using Python I just imported string.ascii_lowercase instead of manually typing the sequence, and when I showed the code to someone more experienced than me, I was told it's base64, so all my efforts were replaced with a single base64.b64_decode() call.
If I were to choose between bearing the fruits of 20 years of practicing music and equal amount of time spent playing this kind of games, it would certainly be the latter, and I did try both.
I don't really get the point of disabling Youtube history just to never visit the main page again anyway. That said, recommendation algorithm is actually a valuable asset and it doesn't seem wise to discard it entirely instead of learning how to use it.
Imagine for a second, that you only care about watching cat videos, and arrange your viewing behavior accordingly. The algorithm will be quick to realize your preferences, and your entire home feed will be filled with nothing but kittens. Occasionally it will try to feed you some dogs and such, but Youtube is generous enough to provide "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" buttons on every video in recommendations, which are a great tool in shaping the home feed, or forming a nice little information bubble if you will. As for all the horrors of mainstream recommendations described in the article, they would look so out of place in your feed it won't take much mental effort to ignore them (or get rid of with aforementioned buttons).
Occasionally, you might want to watch something other than cat videos, or get sent a link in a personal message. For everything you don't want the algorithm to get the wrong idea about, use separate browser context or private mode.
Now, let's say you're got diverse tastes and like both cats and heavy construction videos. With two topics the Youtube algorithm might still manage to stay on track, but if you try to add more, the feed will quickly degrade to a mess. There is, however, a way around it: don't mix different topics in a single Youtube account. Youtube allows making multiple users on a single Google account, and with container tabs it doesn't even require switching between them.
Of course, and this is one part of the article I can agree with, use the subscribe feed if it fits your workflow, but certain kinds of content are made mostly by small channels on irregular basis, and the algorithm is a valuable tool to discover new ones.
Was able to correctly guess it's about Therac-25 from title alone.
I can't help but think this specific story is being overtold, while other software-related accidents doesn't get enough attention.
Software controlling a safety-critical equipment doesn't even need a bug to cause deaths, bad user interface can do it just fine. "Behind Human Error" gives an example of device used to assist a surgery, that required complicated procedure to set up, which had a step unrelated to device functions in context and was easy to forget (rendering the device non-functioning) and would not indicate in any way it wasn't working when it was expected to. As for a more modern example, many of recent aviation accidents involve pilots failing to correctly interact with cockpit systems.
In the Therac-25 case the core issue (leaving aside procedures put in place to prevent the exact thing) was an error in the code, that could eventually be found and corrected, but software with badly designed interface can kill people while working exactly per specification, shifting the blame on the operator.
If you are lucky you might get an image that hasn't yet been shown to enough people for the system to learn the "correct" answer, in which case you get a free pass submitting even blatantly incorrect solution.
The scraping and reuploading issue could be solved by some kind of universal global content identification system, integrated into the micropayments system, making sure no matter where certain piece of content is uploaded, the fee would still go to the copyright owner, perhaps with some small percent given to the hosting website. Not saying it would certainly work, but there is a few technologies probably everyone here have heard about that seems like a very good fit for the task.
It's pretty much the same as a phone camera app adding watermarks on pictures, or free email provider inserting its name in the mail signature. I don't see how this kind of cheap advertisement could be seen "classy".
The few times I actually tried it, it worked badly, with huge chunks of text content missing from the page. Makes me wonder if with modern web the task has became so difficult even a browser couldn't pull it off, or if they just wasn't trying to do a good job with the feature.
> Java's explicit exception system is great at forcing developers to deal with potential failures, but in practice Java developers chose not to deal with exceptions so often that exceptions now get hidden.
Every time I see someone bringing up the idea of adding checked exceptions to a language (usually in these endless exceptions vs returning errors debates), it is met with "it won't work, look at Java", and it feels like a real shame. I'm sure complications of additional syntax would pay off just as fast as it does for regular type annotations.
I can relate to idea of refusing to switch to a new version because it removes features or breaks usual workflow. By extension, I can understand the idea of switching to an older version after installing most recent one and learning its limitation, in which case it could be called "upgrading by downgrading".
However, downgrading the medium by going back to CDs, vinyls and CRTs as a way to run away from the reach of big tech corporations still feels like a downgrade to me. An upgrade over, say, Spotify would be something that solves these big-tech corp issues while keeping the same or close level of convenience, not going back to CDs.
If iTunes provides everything you need for managing music then good for you! However, getting "more intimate connection" to a music collection comes at a price of spending bigger chunk of limited time managing it, and I would rather spend it actually listening to music.
That said, looking at image depicting a phishing mail in the article, I notice that hyperlink text looks like legitimate link, while the link itself points to the bad site, and I would expect this alone to be extremely effective. Many people, myself included, would probably not bother hovering on this kind of long link to confirm it matches the text.
With delicate task like this, if I were to trust a technical solution I would rather have it open source, reviewed by myself, hosted on my terms and with appropriate degree of redundancy.
If I were to trust a person or organization, I would prefer them not talk about technical details at all, and instead ask me as many ways to get in contact as possible (phone number, facebook profile, maybe even physical address), not just single email, and promise to do everything reasonable possible to get in contact within defined term if delivering email fails. And I would also prefer them to be in this business for a few decades at least.
With appliances like battery pack the explanation could be that Type A ports are dirt cheap compared to Type C with all the speed and power requirements, so even removing four Type A would not save enough for another Type C.
Note that I didn't say "cheap". If price difference comes from manufacturer's hope of selling its cloud service, then the time and effort required to set it up is not worth the money.
If I were to solve one-time task of keeping an eye on someone indoors I would go with USB camera (if lighting conditions allows even the laptop's build in), which is going to be cheaper than ones with IP and WiFi support.
Since you're mentioning opening laptop's lid I assume you mean literally failing to start, as after power cycling. For that, wouldn't simple hitting the power button be enough? It certainly doesn't require keyboard. If you plan to place it somewhere not easily accessible, there is Wake on LAN, which most modern PC motherboards are going to support.
If some maintenance task cannot be done with ssh/tmux, you can always use remote desktop software, in local network even RDP will do. And if something went wrong enough for you to not be able to connect to the server remotely then there is indeed no way around bringing and connecting a spare keyboard and monitor, but events like that should be quite rare normally.
Playing video on Youtube causes much more cpu load than playing the video with the same av1 (or even more computationally intensive vp9) codec in VLC.