namingthingsiseasy

joined 2 years ago
[–] namingthingsiseasy 3 points 2 months ago

This is the thing UI designers never understand[0] - if you keep changing shit around, nobody will ever figure out how to use it. If you keep it consistent and don't make dramatic changes, users will have a much easier time using it because they don't have to keep relearning the damn thing. Consistency is the most effective UI paradigm.

[0] or to put it in better terms, they're paid to not understand this so they can justify their jobs....

[–] namingthingsiseasy 47 points 2 months ago (6 children)

While I think this is a good idea (because copyright is a stupid concept in the digital age), the problem with this proposal is that Europe is also very pro-copyright. Doing something like this would probably piss off Americans, but if it also pisses off your next best ally as well, it's probably not going to work out.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 7 points 2 months ago

She better not go from suck to blow....

[–] namingthingsiseasy 3 points 2 months ago

Google pays the Linux Foundation a LOT of money.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 1 points 2 months ago

Can we push back the deadline for the apocalypse? Have we talked to the customer to see if this is a possibility?

[–] namingthingsiseasy 4 points 2 months ago

That's actually very easy to do and you don't need any special equipment. Simply use a male-male 3.5mm cable and connect one end from the stereo output of the cassette player and the other end into the microphone jack of any computer you own. Play the cassette - you can test the audio quality by running arecord -f cd - | aplay - - you will have to tune the volume output of the cassette player and the input sensitivity of the microphone.

From there, if you're paranoid, you could use arecord to save the output to a .wav file and encode it once the recording is done, but I had no problem just using oggenc directly on the piped audio. The final command looked like this: arecord -f cd - | oggenc -q 5 -o file.ogg - (change to -q 10 if you want lossless encoding).

I'm not sure if this is the best quality per se, but I would definitely recommend it over using specialized equipment like cassette-mp3 converters. The problem with those devices is that if they use underpowered hardware, you might experience buffering issues where the encoding hardware can't keep up with the audio stream or something like that. But doing it on a computer ensures that you will have all the processing power you need to make sure that this doesn't happen.

Good luck! I found it very easy to do - it took 5-10 minutes of setup.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 3 points 2 months ago

For me, the most important thing is always simply understanding who has what role in the company. When I have a question, knowing whether I ought to ask my direct manager, other colleagues on the team, a subject matter expert, other management teams, our sysadmins, etc. is the most difficult thing to figure out. It can take months sometimes.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 17 points 2 months ago

They don't think that way. "It does not generate revenue, therefore it cannot be allowed to exist." This philosophy is so deeply ingrained into the American psyche that it is inescapable.

Story time: American colleague and Canadian colleague are talking. Canadian says that university costs only 5000 CAD in tuition. American nearly falls out of his chair and yells, "BUT HOW DO THEY MAKE MONEY??"

And bear in mind that he was one of the most educated and successful people I have ever met, and yet he found it so difficult to fathom that a university could exist without making money. Now with that in mind, imagine convincing a large group of average people to fund public services.

This is why the USA is the way that it is.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 29 points 2 months ago

It is so quintessentially American that they would base their entire healthcare system around the good will of for-profit companies and be shocked when they see how that turns out.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 29 points 2 months ago (3 children)

For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.

In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing "AI" to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.

As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.

And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 4 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Does this mean we can freely distribute Tintin in Thailand now? Outstanding piece, everyone should read it!

[–] namingthingsiseasy -3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

None of that has anything to do with the case at hand though, and I don't understand why you would bring it up. This bad law is being abused and just because you don't like the person being targeted in this specific instance, it will just be a matter of time before it's used to target journalists that you like.

I understand that ultimately argued against what the government is doing to him, but I think all the other information you posted (with no sources at all by the way) is not relevant at all and just a pointless distraction.

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