Or, rather than trying to keep your hands sterile which is a futile exercise, doing what the military teaches - keep your hands away from your face (eyes, nose, mouth) and don't scratch your skin.
The reason you care about germs on your hands is because they make you sick when you stick them in your body orifaces. Otherwise, those germs don't matter.
Related rant: The widespread stupidity around bathroom doors calls the intelligence of humans into (even more) question.
Airplane-bathroom doors open out because they must. But the number of public-bathroom doors that inexplicably open INWARD is mind-boggling. Instead of simply having doors open outward, millions of bathrooms create mountains of paper waste by having them open inward and encouraging users to waste a paper towel to grab its handle.
The reason that interior doors in general open inwards is fire safety. Doors that only open outwards can be obstructed from the outside, preventing evacuation.
honestly the issue i hate the most is how bad the keyboard has gotten over the past 3-5 years/major iOS releases.
on top of the bug people mention a lot where types are miss-pressed, there's a problem i get where if iOS considers a word misspelled it'll refuse to let me use the space key or otherwise move away from the word or close the keyboard. it's almost like a UI thread lockout. it's extremely frustrating.
your last sentence reminds me of my dorm roommate in college. very standard stoner who was constantly blazing and years later i've never known a lazier dude.
I struggle with this a lot. I'm currently about ten years in to the career and technically at my org I'm a "senior".
One issue I have quite often is I'll know I have a problem with understanding something and so I ask my team but then the response can be something like "you should know X" or "you should know this because of Y context" and it can be discouraging. I think a lot of the time I notice people conflate experience level with amount of context I have with something.
I'm still struggling with these kinds of challenges and I would readily admit it could be my own weakness but I also wonder if it's a team culture issue; but I've noticed this across my current org and my last one so maybe it's more of a me-problem.
> [...] the response can be something like "you should know X" or "you should know this because of Y context" and it can be discouraging.
This is definitely a cultural problem. You should get clear and non-judgmental answers to questions like these, because it should be regarded as absolutely normal that you can’t keep everything in your mind, or that you may have missed some context.
In a culturally healthy org, everybody supports each other.
i'd never heard of that counter before so i googled it:
> The word "gorillion" is often used by white supremacists and Holocaust deniers in the form of "six gorillion", which mocks the figure of six million Jews that died during the Holocaust.
According to a Wiktionary entry, which was revised to say that by an anonymous person in 2023, whose only other contribution was "sperm, c*m" as alternative meanings of the word "puree."[1] I could only find (citation of) a single use of the word with that meaning,[2] and the rest were antisemitism documenters repeating it as if it were in common use.
You may want to look at using a different dictionary.
Most non-shitty people probably picked it up from Meme stock sub cultures and wallstreetbets
Of course, one should ask themselves why so much of that culture is fed from and feeds into outright hateful people like nazis and Eugenicists and vague wife haters, and conspiracy theorists who "aren't nazis" but sure seem to believe everything is the fault of the jews.
"Gorillion" as I saw it was about the "Ape" context of wallstreetbets discourse. The Ape framing is actually non-hateful, referencing the new Planet of the Apes movies where someone makes a dumb analogy to a bundle of sticks: "Ape together strong"
They are similarly fans of calling people and things retarded, but that was getting reddit itself to nag them. So they switched to "regarded", because they aren't very clever.
Other gems of this community include frequent references to making "wife changing money" and an insistence that after GME totally turns out to not have been a scam and they bring down the entire american economy through literal shenanigans, that they will all collectively be crowned king, and totally won't oppress anyone, but also they relish the expectation that they will be able to smugly say "I told you so" to all the people suffering in their new regime.
They also adore doing the kind of "theory crafting" that is usually done by the most crazy person you know trying to "prove" bill gates did 9/11 because of that wingdings thing from 20 years ago.
But culture leaks, so this person might have just picked it up somewhere.
Technically yes but on any given track day there can still be gravel, weeds, rubber, bits of material from car body kits/aero, and even various liquids that have leaked.
If you do hit gravel/oil, tracks at least have runoff areas or soft barriers, and no oncoming traffic or cliffs to worry about.
Every track day I've attended required the cars to have been inspected for leaks and loose components. And they were quick to clean up any debris or oil.
Not that tracking cars is the safest hobby, but if someone is gonna drive like that regardless its far safer at a track than on public roads.
I have seen pushback on this kind of behavior because "users don't like error codes" or other such nonsense. UX and Product like to pretend nothing will ever break, and when it does they want some funny little image, not useful output.
A good compromise is to log whenever a user would see the error code, and treat those events with very high priority.
We put the error code behind a kind of message/dialog that invites the user to contact us if the problem persists and then report that code.
It’s my long standing wish to be able to link traces/errors automatically to callers when they call the helpdesk. We have all the required information. It’s just that the helpdesk has actually very little use for this level of detail. So they can only attach it to the ticket so that actual application teams don’t have to search for it.
> I have seen pushback on this kind of behavior because "users don't like error codes" or other such nonsense […]
There are two dimensions to it: UX and security.
Displaying excessive technical information on an end-user interface will complicate support and likely reveal too much about the internal system design, making it vulnerable to external attacks.
The latter is particularly concerning for any design facing the public internet. A frequently recommended approach is exception shielding. It involves logging two messages upon encountering a problem: a nondescript user-facing message (potentially including a reference ID pinpointing the problem in space and time) and a detailed internal message with the problem’s details and context for L3 support / engineering.
I used «powermetrics» bundled with macOS with «bandwidth» as one of the samplers (--samplers / -s set to «cpu_power,gpu_power,thermal,bandwidth»).
Unfortunately, Apple has taken out the «bandwidth» sampler from «powermetrics», and it is no longer possible to measure the memory bandwidth as easily.
> UX and Product like to pretend nothing will ever break, and when it does they want some funny little image, not useful output.
Just ignore them or provide appeasement insofar that it doesn’t mess with your ability to maintain the system.
(cat picture or something)
Oh no, something went wrong.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support: (details)
This code will better help us understand what happened: (request or trace ID)
Nah, that’s easy problem to solve with UX copy. „Something went wrong. Try again or contact support. Your support request number is XXXX XXXX“ (base 58 version of UUID).
We do have both a span id and trace id - but I personally find this more cumbersome over filtering on a user id. YMMV if you're interested in a single trace then you'd filter for that, but I find you often also care what happened "around" a trace
If you care about this more than anything else (e.g. if you care about audits a LOT and need them perfect), you can simply code the app via action paths, rather than for modularity. It makes changes harder down the road, but for codebases that don’t change much, this can be a viable tradeoff to significantly improve tracing and logging.
...if it does not, you should add it. A request ID, trace ID, correlation key, whatever you call it, you should thread it through every remote call, if you value your sanity.
I got a dog during COVID and I'm not sure if this is a related issue but the number of times I've had people not brake but accelerate as we're crossing the street or flash their high beams or try to drive around us at the last moment is insane.
there are days where it happens multiple times during one walk and weeks where it happens at least each day of the week.
i'm actually a car guy but when i drive if i see any pedestrians i always slow down and i take it even easier if i see they have small children or dogs since either can randomly stop or dart away.
I've had the advertising settings disabled on my LG C2 for a while and yesterday I decided to browse the settings menu again and found that a couple new ones had been added and turned on by default.
This is what seemingly every app does. They add 15 different categories for notifications / emails / whatever, and then make you turn off each one individually. Then they periodically remove / add new categories, enabled by default. Completely abusive behavior.
Want to unsubscribe from this email? Ok, you can do it in one click, but we have 16 categories of emails we send you, so you'll still get the other 15! It's a dark pattern for sure.
They’re sad they can’t point that particular marketing hose at you, anymore, but appreciate confirming your validity as a lead they’ll sell to data brokers.
e+ is such an unintuitive decimal representation system. going in blindly, it's completely non-obvious what "e" stands for, surely "d" would make far more sense. also, the namespace for e is plenty filled up as is, and, most of all, +12 implies 12 additional digits, not digits after the point
Google's choice to use it for calculation results despite having essentially no restriction on text space always annoyed me. I think this is the first time I've seen a human using it
The letter "e" (for "exponent") has meant "multiplied by ten to the power of", since the dawn of computing (Fortran!), when it was impossible to display or type a superscripted exponent.
In computing, we all got used to it because there was no other available notation (this is also why we use * for multiplication, / for division, etc). And it's intuitive enough, if you already know scientific notation, which Fortran programmers did.
Scientific notation goes back even further, and is used when the magnitude of the number exceeds the available significant digits.
E.g., Avogadro's number is 6.02214076 × 10⁻²³. In school we usually used it as 6.022 × 10⁻²³, which is easier to work with and was more appropriate for our classroom precision. In E notation, that'd be 6.022E-23.
1.3076744e+12 is 1.3076744 × 10¹². The plus sign is for the positive exponent, not addition. You could argue that the plus sign is redundant, but the clear notation can be helpful when working with numbers that can swing from one to the other.
And if you just add them to your spam filter, it won't even work easily, because they deliberately shift around the domains and subdomains they send from every so often.
I just use a unique address for each service. Any email that gets leaked or is getting unsubscribe resistant spam is added to /etc/postfix/denied_recipients :)
Luckly they don't seem to shift the addresses they send to, so if you own the domain you use for email you can make dedicated addresses for each service you sign up for. Then filter based on the `to:` field.
this is where LLMs could actually help. create spam filters that an LLM can parse and deny if it looks close enough. but then again, hallucinations would be kind of terrible.
I agree this would be a good use of an LLM (assuming that it was running locally). I wouldn't put one in charge of deleting my messages, but I could see one being used to assign a score to messages and based on that score moving them out of my inbox into various folders for review.
I'd be really interested to see a comparison between LLM spam scoring and a traditional spam scoring algorithm because an LLM is essentially a spam generator. Can that be used to make a better spam detector?
Same can be achieved with a catch all domain and a sub for every service you use. Cost $13/year. Extra protection: now if you lose access to your email provider, you still have access to future emails.
Thanks again for unsubscribing! This is your weekly reminder that you are still unsubscribed. As usual, we've included a little bonus for you to enjoy at the end of this unsubscribe-reminder e-mail: a complementary full edition of this week's newsletter!
Yep. Had that happen with the United app a few weeks ago. Unsolicited spam sent via push notification to my phone. Turns out that they added a bunch of notification settings - of course all default to on.
Turned them all off except for trip updates that day.
Best part is- yesterday I received yet another unsolicited spam push message. With all the settings turned off.
So these companies will effective require you to use their app to use their service, then refuse to respect their own settings for privacy.
I've taken to "Archiving" apps like this on my Android phone. When I need it, I can un-archive it to use it. Keeps the list of things trying to get my attention a little bit smaller.
I just hellban every app from sending any notifications, except for a select few. Apps get like a one strike policy on notification spam. If they send a single notification I didn't want, I disable their ability to send notifications at all.
Also all notifications/etc are silent, except for alarms, pages, phone calls, and specific named people's texts.
Everything else... no. YouTube was the worst offender before for me.
Another technique for me is to avoid apps like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. I run them all through mobile Firefox with uBlock origin and custom block scripts that block sponsored posts and shorts. This combines well with having Youtube's history turned off which prevents the algorithmic suggestions.
I give apps a one strike policy on notification spam. If they do it at all, I'm uninstalling it until I actually need to use it next (if I can't find an alternative). And the same goes for getting in my way to beg for a review on the app store: that's a shortcut to getting a one-star rating.
The main exception to this is the notification spam from Google asking me to rate call quality after every damn call. I don't have my phone rooted, so I can't turn off that category of notification.
Why even give most apps even one chance? For almost every app I have zero interest in ever getting a notification from. I see no reason to give them an opportunity to annoy me even once.
Honestly because I won't remember to go into the settings page and disable it. When a notification comes in, there's a quick route to disable forever, otherwise I have to go preemptively digging
This is why whenever you try to do anything significant on a web site with a phone, they tell you to "Download our app". Detection is very good now. Slack can see right through desktop mode, cheater, and will redirect you to the app regardless.
Never had that issue on Vanadium browser, or Brave or even Firefox. I personally refuse to download an app if there is a website for the same. For a long time I was even using door dash in browser.
I get the sarcasm, but it's like comparing apples to oranges. Calling a number and talking to people is vastly different to clicking some buttons on your phone. App/website have almost same user interface, just different ways to get to that interface. Calling the number is totally different interface.
Boarding pass. For the airline apps, it probably is a good assumption that most people want to get a notification that their flight is delayed, or started boarding, etc..
Sending ad notifications is a recent trend, normally Apple guidelines don’t allow it, but they know that Apple cannot much fuss about with all the regulatory pressure.
It’s the enshitification of the notification system, the apps are already filled with ads and now they’re making you open the app or splash things on your face.
When I get email like that, I mark it as spam. That trains the spam filters to remove their marketing email from everyone's inbox. I see it as a community service.
That behavior is what finally got me off Facebook awhile back.
Edit: And something similar with Windows now that I think about it; there was a privacy setting which would appear to work till you re-entered that menu. Saving the setting didn't actually persist it, and the default was not consumer-friendly.
LinkedIn does the same thing re emails, notifications, etc that they send. I think I turned off notifications that connections had achieved new high scores in games they play on LinkedIn. Absurd.
LinkedIn is one the most useless app ever. I have trashed it countless times, but I do use it now and ten to keep up with companies and respond to a few solicitations. There is almost never anything of value in my feed, between the fake jobs and the low value self-promotion AI-written posts. Who even reads this? Not even mentioning the political, and pseudo-activist posts. And this happens despite systematically marking all of these posts irrelevant or “inappropriate for LinkedIn”. This app is beyond repair. Uninstalling.
The real trick is to never connect your TV to the internet under any circumstances. These things are displays, they don't need the internet to do their job. Leave that to the game consoles and streaming boxes.
Existing LTE is fine. If they wanted to embed modems in the TVs they could do it now. I'm guessing they simply don't have to, simply because a huge number of consumers will dutifully hand over their Wi-Fi passwords.
While this is certainly possible, I’d imagine this sort of thing would be found quite quickly and would result in a massive lawsuit if not disclosed on the package.
It's going to happen on any device. It's a software thing. If LG isn't doing it, it's Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. My PS5 basically shows ads on some system ui screens (granted mostly for "game" content but it still counts).
I have a Hisense TV which recently did the same. It turned on personal recommendations and advertising. I have no idea where the ads are or how it works; I only use devices over HDMI. I'm sure the TV is spying on me incessantly nonetheless.
I’m using my tv with all the stuff disabled (the ones it’s possibly disable), but even then I realize I don’t trust them and I don’t trust their choices. Because they get to say sorry and not held responsible.
I want smart tv because I want use my streaming services but that’s it. I also want high quality panels. Maybe the solution is high quality TVs where you just stick a custom HDMI device (similar to Amazon fire stick) and use it as the OS. Not sure if there are good open source options since Apple seems to be another company that keeps showing you ads even if you pay shit load of money for their hardware and software, Jobs must turning in his grave
The TV would definitely spy on you, the connected device might not. And even if it does, you can pick one from a company you mind less, or who you've already given up on trying to prevent spying on you. For me, that means a Chromecast; I haven't managed the effort to de-Google, and most of what I watch is Youtube anyway. For some that might be Apple, who is probably the least egregious offender among the big companies. Or you could use a Raspberry Pi or other small computer and have even more control, at the cost of being higher effort.
I think they probably would, with maybe the exception of Apple TV. It’s probably not a coincidence that Apple TVs are the only hardware in this space that isn’t sold at a loss (or near loss), the rest are simply Trojan horses to park in the living room and maximize profit elsewhere by leveraging its privileged access to your eyeballs and/or ears (really no orifice is safe from these companies anymore, watch out for Smart Bidets).
When a new permission appears without notice and defaults to the most-violating setting, gaslighting you into the illusion of agency but in fact you never had any, you've been Zucked.
I've had a lot of issues using the QuickTime screen recorder, especially when it comes to recording from an iOS simulator for app/game development and needing to produce preview videos.
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