My office replaced our 2015 Macbook's with the "latest and greatest." I hate sitting next to my coworkers who use them now. They're good typists and prior to the switch I didn't even notice their keyboard noise, but the new keyboard design made keystrokes noticeably louder because the cushioning was sacrificed in the name of thinness.
It's distracting in the workplace and I would feel bad if I ever had to use one in a library or any other "quiet" environment. These were considerations I never had to make with the previous keyboard.
The NYT editorial board seems to have a personal vendetta against FB/Amazon in particular. Twitter and Google get passes in mainstream media, for whatever reason.
I wish they would give the same scrutiny they gave to FB for the past year to Equifax or cellphone carriers that sell our location data.
The vast majority of Americans don't know/care what the active ingredient in Tylenol is because its effects have been extensively studied and tested and there's strong evidence consuming it over long periods of time has minimal to no harmful health effects.
This is the Nirvana fallacy. You aren't addressing the main point of the article, which is even if marijuana is legalized its use perhaps shouldn't be widely promoted because its health effects--both positive and negative--aren't fully understood yet.
Anecdotal, but I am not a heavy phone user at all. Within a year of purchasing my brand new iPhone SE, the battery capacity dropped from 100% to 82%, causing it to begin to lag considerably doing even basic tasks and shut down randomly two or three times a week. This should not happen to a product that's only a year old.
Not that there's anything wrong with reporting on the same topic by multiple publications, but this article just seems like a poor copy of this WSJ article published in August:
Out of curiosity, are there journalistic guidelines about publishing duplicate articles when there are seemingly no new pertinent developments? I haven't seen anything like this before.
You're right, but the aforementioned "12/13" years ago was only 2006. I don't think many significant changes have been made in that period, but I may be wrong.
I would also be interested in this. Many soft drink recipes are well-established and rarely adjusted because even small, well-intentioned changes can damage the brand and customer loyalty. Furthermore, it seems counterintuitive that producers would increase sugar content by as much as 1.57 times because that would inherently cost them significantly more money over time.
I must have played through the game at least two dozen times and I never got tired of it. To this day it's still my favorite game of all time. Modern RPGs just don't compare in terms of storytelling and gameplay experience, in my opinion.
Elements of Programming Interviews in Python is excellent imo. The authors give a crash course in all of the data structures and all of the code is written extremely cleanly. Most of the problems give standard solutions and also idiomatic ones using iter/functools. I've been programming Python for years and felt like I gained a lot from it as a developer even though I bought it to interview prep.
Quick example of the "look and say" problem:
def look_and_say(n: int) -> str:
s = '1'
for _ in range(n - 1):
s = ''.join(
str(len(list(group))) + key
for key, group in groupby(s))
return s
The author's thesis is fundamentally flawed. They say it isn't clear why everyone was so excited to have a Facebook, but that's exactly the answer - because everyone had a Facebook. One of the biggest appeals of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (which is arguable even more useless than FB), etc. is that every nobody has direct access to an audience of millions. They can scream their offensive, unoriginal, spontaneous, nuanced thoughts into the void and instantaneously get sympathy, disgust, praise, and simple acknowledgement with little to no effort.
Contrast this with maintaining a personal website. Even in a world where FB doesn't exist, it's still a chore to get people to memorize yet another URL and regularly visit it, especially if it isn't updated on a consistent schedule (which most personal websites aren't.) Furthermore, given that the author seems to be advocating for self-sufficiency as much as possible and avoiding centralized platforms, assuming you're hosting your own website and not using a cookie cutter template, you're now fighting Google for search engine visibility and that's a battle that is absolutely not based on merit of content.
This is not to mention the unpleasantness of using most personal websites because they're poorly designed (light text on a white background), or they try and guilt-trip me into supporting them with Patreon/Paypal popups, or the only consistent content produced is content promising to produce more content in the future, etc.
I'm probably reading too much into the author's article, to be honest. It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but at the same time the thing I don't understand about the recent trend of publishing articles on mainstream news sites preaching the life benefits of going cold turkey on social media is that it isn't a binary choice. I know it's a novel idea, but you don't have to quit FB to pick up that hobby you once loved again! You don't have to quit FB to maintain your personal website! In fact, you can probably use FB and your audience on it to grow your readership on your personal website! Even if you accept the author's argument that personal websites fulfill the purpose that FB does (strongly disagree), they give no reason why you have to pick one over the other.
I said this this morning and I'll say it again: There's a lot of indefensible stuff Facebook has done in the past 5-10 years that they rightly deserve to be criticized and called out for. The NYT is an esteemed news publication with a history of excellence and their coverage of FB and the other tech giants is important and something that should be extended in the interest of protecting individual privacy for unscrupulous actors.
That said, dishonest reporting for unknown agendas only hurts and delegitimizes this cause. At a news organization with the stature and editorial resources of NYT, narratives are no accident. Every word is meaningfully articulated and scrutinized before it goes it's published. NYT's decision to create a narrative for their largely technologically illiterate readership that Netflix, Spotify, and RBC could unilaterally control and access private user messages is not only disappointing and unnecessary, but harmful to their credibility and to the overall goal of holding FB accountable.
P.S. To whichever admin flagged this as a dupe, as far as I can tell this story has not been submitted. FB released two statements today:
Well in the latter the user specifically gives permission to Spotify when they choose to connect their FB account to Spotify's desktop app. NYT's wording makes it sound like they have unilateral control regardless of user consent. You can revoke Spotify's access whenever you want from your FB account settings.
I apologize if my argument wasn't clear enough. My issue isn't that they aren't being factually incorrect, it's that they're seemingly using "facts" to be misleading.
Example: Saying Spotify has full editorial control over your messages is a very different narrative from "If you connect your FB account to Spotify, you can then send FB messages to your friends from Spotify's desktop app."[1] In one, the implication is that Spotify as a company somehow has the power to directly modify a users' private message. In the other, the user has the power--through Spotify's app--to modify their own private FB messages.
NYT is being factually correct with their reporting, but they're also being misleading, and my argument is that at a news organization of their size and stature this is no accident. Just read the comments from their readers and you'll quickly see how many of them are misinterpreting the above information.