LeonB · HackerLangs

15 дней назадdiscuss

Om shared with me some very personal thoughts and I think I’m not alone in considering his loss immeasurable.

20 дней назадdiscuss

That doesn’t seem right - off the top of my head I think it’s more like 4 years? maybe it should be “103*4/2/52” (not “/12”) ?

… hopefully the effective wait time is considerably shorter if a long line is taken as a demand signal, leading them to buy more.

LeonB

21 день назадdiscuss

That definition hinges on their definition for “economical” - adding a qualifier like “excessively economical” would’ve been good I think.

LeonB

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

Herodotus wouldn’t have written it quite the same — no Jupyter notebook for example, Jupiter being a Roman term; the nearest equivalent for the Ancient Greeks was Zeus.

LeonB

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Finally C# will have a more idiomatic way to represent this classic code example from “The Daily WTF” in 2005 —

    enum Bool 
    { 
        True, 
        False, 
        FileNotFound 
    };

See https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_

LeonB

2 месяца назадdiscuss

…months after it began.

LeonB

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

You must be referring to the abridged Strnk n Wyt

LeonB

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

In Superman III, the eponymous man straightens the leaning tower of Pisa, and in Superman II he spins the earth backwards to reverse time.

A better idea would be to un-tilt the earth’s axis, thus getting rid of variable day lengths, annual seasons, the need for DST etc, just one enjoyable spring day, every where, all year round.

LeonB

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

> Yurchick was one of 21 people that had been indicted for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute kilogram quantities of methamphetamine in Texas and elsewhere from August 2019 to March 2021 … Yurchick subsequently pleaded guilty to that charge on February 1, 2022

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icy_Blu

Feel free to dig deeper, I’ve only taken a shallow look.

LeonB

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

Interesting point.

It’s a kind of reframing (or consequence of) the bullshit asymmetry principle.

LeonB

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

Yes, absolutely.

The survey could say, “given that the existence of corporate monopolies demonstrates weak and non functional governments, should governments a) cede more power to the monopolies, or b) pretend to claw power back from the monopolies?”

LeonB

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

Absolutely.

They hand-wave tremendously complex questions, in such a way that the respondent is free to interpret them any way you wish.

A similar survey question might be:

> I am thinking of a number. Is it, a) too high or b) too low?

LeonB

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

A “ministry of truth” would (I assume) be a part of the executive branch of government.

Whereas the creation of laws and the interpretation of laws are powers that the executive branch does not have, and are held separately by the legislative and judicial branches.

In a, well, y’know “functioning” democracy. Apparently.

LeonB

10 месяцев назадdiscuss

> These days, American meat is absolutely overflowing with antibiotics. I don’t know if there’s any kind of serious effort to address that

There’s several clearly wrong claims in that paragraph alone.

Here’s one counter claim with sources:

https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/antibioticresistance...

“Less than 0.5% of all meat samples tested in 2018 contained detectable antibiotics (U.S. Residue Program). Farmers, processors, and regulatory agencies work together to get this number to zero.”

Please challenge the thoughts you carry around. Sometimes it’s isn’t so.

LeonB

10 месяцев назадdiscuss

Recently I had the screen replaced on my child’s iPad. The tech asked for passcode, and I refused to provide it. The tech complained and said when I came to pick it up he’d need to guide me through some things.

Indeed, there were some settings that needed to be set, to ”help” the new screen.

Having said that — I’ve previously documented a case (well over 10 years ago) where I caught a local PC repair company who used their access to a machine of mine they were repairing - to quickly scan through the thumbnails of our personal photos, and look closer at any image which showed any flesh.

People expect to be trusted but don’t act in a trustworthy manner.

LeonB

3 года назадdiscuss

Without getting into nda territory — the minority of Australians who used iPhones in 2017 represented a figure that far exceeded 50% of wealth held in Australian banks.

Thus apple had tremendous market power in “fact”, even if the raw numbers looked much smaller.

So long.

LeonB

3 года назадdiscuss

You’re missing the point.

There’s no magic percent of a market that proves or disproves the sort of behaviour that antitrust laws are designed to prevent.

LeonB

3 года назадdiscuss

> Apple didn’t force anyone to participate in Apple Pay

We’re on different planets.

> Banks got onboard because customers like the convenience

… Banks in Australia fought it for years.

Your point about 20% market share being enough demonstrates the point. There’s no set percentage of customers. The wielding of power alone demonstrates the issue.

LeonB

3 года назадdiscuss

Apple’s ability to wield its market power to force buyers or sellers to use its platform is firm evidence of the sort of power that anti trust laws (if they retained any teeth) are designed to prevent.

For example they were able to force banks to agree to support Apple Pay. And it’s the wielding itself that is sufficient proof of the trust violation.

LeonB

3 года назадdiscuss

There’s plenty of practical solutions to monopolies who abuse their power.

- First up, stop their tax avoidance by supporting governments that engage in strong international tax treaties.

- Support governments who will provide effective deterrents to Google (and Facebook) monetising scams. Day in day out there are scammy advertisers that I, one measley person, am capable of spotting… but they (Google and Facebook), with all their wisdom and money, are incapable of booting from their platforms.

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