Imagine reading this vacuous nothing-burger and thinking to yourself "Yep, that's what I'm paying $40 a month for."
The only interesting part of the entire article is Peter Thiel railing against the fact that startup founders are getting older, mostly because Thiel seems to be an opportunist who wants fresh meat to exploit. Someone who has been around the block a couple of times might be thrilled by the idea of Thiel investing in them, but they're going to be more cautious because they've already got the bumps, bruises, and callouses of being in the industry.
The reason that so many founders were so young a couple decades ago is precisely because they were at an age where they could imagine online services at a time when even the act of purchasing a domain was seen to be a weird new thing. So they got rich off of building the infrastructure and services of the modern web. It was easier from a market standpoint, even if it was harder technically because they had to help invent or fund a lot of the things that ultimately became the web we know today.
It's like complaining that nobody since Newton or Einstein has come up with new universal laws and ignoring the fact that it's harder to just observe new things and report on them than it used to be. It's not enough to witness an apple falling from a tree anymore, now you have to build an LHC and smash exotic particles together.
Coincidentally, it's what the "young guns" who are web 3.0 proponents are missing: they didn't experience the web BEFORE there was a web 2.0, and they assume that it is the way it is today because of some nefarious plot. They sit there on their pile of shitcoins howling in the wind of a better tomorrow without recognizing that web centralization was a feature, not a bug. Nobody wants Usenet anymore. For the unwashed masses, it's a dystopia. Worse, they put the cart before the horse when they create tokens and then try to come up with ways for these things to actually be useful. They want to get rich from being the idea guy.
The fact that anyone wants to do business with Thiel these days baffles me. He spends his time and money finding and funding the craziest far-right conspiracy theorists in the country to run for elected office. He's a loon.
He's pretty typical, honestly. There is a very large contingent of people who think exactly like he does. 10 years ago, he might be fairly cast as an outlier. Not anymore.
I miss that site. It had a real sense of community, threaded conversations that worked, no suggested posts, no adverts woven into the content. Then it was gone.
We've already encountered that with "Do Not Track"—as soon as you have anything that doesn't require user intervention, websites start arguing that it doesn't reflect the users' intention, and so they have to protect us from the nasty browsers by tracking us.
To be fair, the DNT launch was botched from the beginning, starting more as hack than an industry-wide consensus [1]. While it eventually got implemented by browsers, it lacked adoption, and had risks with fingerprinting [2]. The nail in the coffin was when Internet Explorer 10 decided to enable it by default [3], completely disregarding user intent.
Certainly not at the near 100% level that the default setting suggests. Microsoft poisoned the well with DNT and worsened privacy on the web for everyone.
I can believe that there are some people who don't care if they're tracked, but do you believe that there's anyone who wants to be tracked?
Maybe someone out there somewhere does, but surely such people, who actively want to be tracked, are in the distinctly small minority. In that case, why should the onus be on everyone else to communicate their intent, rather than on the few users affected to communicate their intent?
>why should the onus be on everyone else to communicate their intent, rather than on the few users affected to communicate their intent?
Because this effectively bans any kind of tracking cookies which, while most are kind of awful, there are legitimate reasons for their existence. Shifting the conversation from a user choice to an effective ban is a completely different conversation with pros and cons that must be considered separately.
> Because this effectively bans any kind of tracking cookies which, while most are kind of awful, there are legitimate reasons for their existence. Shifting the conversation from a user choice to an effective ban is a completely different conversation with pros and cons that must be considered separately.
It doesn't at all ban them—it just makes them only effective for users who explicitly opt in. And if that's too much of a burden to impose on those very few users, then why is it reasonable to impose the burden on the vast majority of users who don't want to be tracked?
I still don't understand how this has anything to do with "user intent". What makes you think that the default user intent is to allow tracking? Would it have been better if the browser asked the user to choose? Do you think user intent would have been respected if it was presented as an opt-in setting? (ie. 99% of user would just click ok without opting in)
The reason why this flag doesn't work has nothing to do with user intent. We wouldn't see all these GDPR banners that make it difficult to opt out if anyone actually cared about user intent.
”We make money by selling a snippet of code to websites that integrates with Super Agent.
Essentially, websites can have a JS snippet unique to them so that when a user with Super Agent visits, cookie preferences are applied automatically without having to ask anything.”
https://www.super-agent.com/faq
Cookies are just completely broken. The EU should never have got involved in the way that it did. No matter how positive the intentions, the web is a worse experience as a result, with marginal privacy gains.
The focus on cookies was always a bit off and more a result of too much technical detail resulting in laws missing their intent. The legislative moves slowly, over time, this will be fixed. However the legislative regulating how webservices have to handle data privacy was very necessary (and the people of the USA should really consider amending their constitution by also demanding a basic human right to data privacy). The key elements are "informed choice" and "consent to data gathering/processing" which have little to do with cookies. Let's say you buy a smartphone from china and it comes with a keyboard app that sends all your inputs to a chinese company so they can make predictions and offer autocompletion. You kind of want that app to display a banner asking you if that is okay. And you kind of want a privacy policy attached that explains they will create user specific profiles and sell them to advertisers and share them with the chinese ministry of state security. I think you want that banner. Now google analytics isn't much different. It tracks you all over the web, creates profiles of your browsing habits, sells those to advertisers and shares them with the american national security agency. Sure it also shows statistics to the website owners, the same way that keyboard app has an autocomplete function, but you kind of want to be informed about those other functions and have the option to say no, don't you? That is why 'consent management' is so important for data privacy.
I'm really hoping Do Not Track becomes legally binding. (Also, how is it not already treated like a piece of a contract negotiation? It is machine readable and sent on every request. Hidden website EULA's are already treated like contracts.)
I would rather use Lynx than any more creepy JavaScript.
When I want “experience” —- a concept I loathe because it is a euphemism in all senses, and somehow arrogant and naive at the same time. —- that is the role of a desktop program. And it better ask me and inform me whenever it wants to perform a network request.
> A Meta spokesperson confirmed to CNBC Wednesday that Meta will take an overall cut of up to 47.5% on each transaction. That includes a “hardware platform fee” of 30% for sales made through the Meta Quest Store, where it sells apps and games for its virtual reality headsets. On top of that, Horizon Worlds, will charge a 17.5% fee.
For all the grandstanding of Tim Sweeney and Epic Games about the "metaverse" and the "30% App Tax"... at the end of the day they made sure Epic's store doesn't take 30% and Epic's engine royalties don't stack on the store royalties. That is a show of goodwill.
Facebook is now in full-on "self-aware wolf" status, complaining about paying 30% to Apple purely because they wanted to take that 30% and missed the boat on mobile.
I think technically inclined folks are so inclined to think about skills they miss that aspect sometimes (including me).
A local football coach was giving a talk and said "a lot of people want things, but very few people are willing to do what it takes".
The message was that the opportunities are out there, and it might be surprising how few people are reaching for it / doing what it takes to get it so quit worrying about imaginary "better" folks who likely aren't even trying.
Artist Jenny Holzer wrote in 1999: "Monomania is a prerequisite of success", that quote has stuck with me. Most people (myself included) get distracted and change focus easily, which I think is healthy, but being long-term obsessed probably helps your chances of being really successful in late capitalism.
> With the continued expansion of Prime member benefits as well as the rise in wages and transportation costs, Amazon will increase the price of a Prime membership in the U.S., with the monthly fee going from $12.99 to $14.99, and the annual membership from $119 to $139. This is the first time Amazon has raised the price of Prime since 2018. For new Prime members, the price change will go into effect on February 18, 2022, and for current Prime members, the new price will apply after March 25, 2022, on the date of their next renewal.
Wow, $14.99/month is a stark difference with the €2.99/month that they charge for a Prime subscription here in The Netherlands. I wonder if they will increase the subscription fee here to the same level once they reach the desired market share in the video streaming and e-commerce spaces here.
2-day delivery would be uncompetitive in The Netherlands. Next day delivery is the standard for webshops here, and most offer same day delivery as a paid upgrade when you either order before noon or live in a large city.
yeah, it'd be nice if Amazon had an urban discount in the US :). Deliveries to large multifamily buildings must be tons more efficient than to the 'burbs.
In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter that much.
Once you starts parallelizing, CI time is: setup_time + (test_run_time / workers), so assuming money isn't a problem you can add more workers as you keep adding more tests.
What really matter is how fast you can setup your test workers and how slow individual tests are.
I think your last statement captures something that not often emphasized, which is that startup time of workers and app are variable costs which scale with the amount of parallelization and so if you have a very large test suite there may be a limit where setup eats up so much time that parallelizing more is going to be pretty "wasteful" and I guess that's where the money comes in.
Secondly if you're actually trying to startup 100+ test workers per build and so on there's going to be some time distribution for how long it takes for each worker to startup and that adds a bit more time for all workers to complete. This distribution probably isn't _that_ wide timewise but if you really start to push your test suite runtime down it may pop up. If you're running things in docker sometimes a node doesn't have the image in it's docker cache...
Unsure if CI services like buildkite have really made this that much faster but it seems like they are using a single box with 64 cores.
> Unsure if CI services like buildkite have really made this that much faster
Buildkite doesn't directly help with it, but since you bring your own hardware and that it's highly customizable, it does allow you to invest in improving setup time quite dramatically. It's a great product.
Indeed. The only hint is "Our whole test suite locally takes around 12 minutes running serially on a MacBook Pro" so it should be a real world case. They used 64 cores on Buildkite.
Considering that those acquisitions proceeded before the intense scrutiny Facebook has received in the past year or two, it is quite likely that it would be blocked.
This is a fantasy. The US government has not meaningfully regulated big tech and there's no reason to believe they will start now (unless you consider the public bloviation of politicians "reason to believe" - I do not).
General regulation for the tech industry and blocking M&A activity from large companies are completely different things. I think it is very fair to assume that the US will block large acquisitions by Facebook, Google, and Amazon going forward.
The article says why. The US Chamber of Commerce has fought tooth and nail against climate legislation because they view themselves as "job creators" and see anything that threatens corporate profits as an existential threat to society.
They've only recently been forced to admit that climate change even exists, but it's still like pulling teeth because they insist that any solutions have to be technology driven from the private sector, with no mandates whatsoever from government.
Nuclear energy is probably our best bet for big scale carbon-free energy. Renewables without (costly, often impractical) enormous storage can't do the job, and keeping gas plants for peak loads isn't helping. Nuclear has enormous upfront costs, making it a somewhat risky investment, so big subsidies are required to get it up and running. After that you get carbon-free electricity for decades.
Yeah, to me much of this sounds great. No menu bar? Great, I never use it. Keyboard shortcuts make it unnecessary. No reload button? Great, one less thing I don’t use cluttering up the UI.
I understand that less experienced users may find this confusing though. Although saying that i think anyone can learn Cmd-R and Cmd-W, and would be better off for it.
I agree with the article on the tab/address bar merge being bad though.
Can you name any non-niche casual website that requires you to refresh the current page?
Unfortunately, I can’t recall one, and it seems to me that refreshing a page in 2021 has become a niche feature reserved for IT guys who know how HTTP works.
Then why not remove ALL the buttons. Stick them in a hamburger menu. And present everyone with a list of keys they must memorize during OS first boot?
This is how far UX discussion has fallen since the early 00s. We went from talking about affordances, discoverability, and "principle of least surprise" to fashion. "I like it to look clean. Less chrome, and let the users eat shortcut keys, hamburger menus, and gestures."
Your comment doesn't reply to anything in mine. I haven't written anything about hamburger menus, things looking lean, chrome or gestures.
The only thing my comment was about is the practice of imagining non-computer-expert people to be mindless zombies who don't know basic stuff. Cmd+C, Cmd+V, and Cmd+R are one of the most popular shortcuts in computers, known by people who aren't computer experts. Just because something is done with the keyboard, doesn't mean it's some l33t knowledge exclusive to "power users". But computer professionals often talk about "casual users" as stupid, probably to feel better about themselves, because they know all that oh-so-advanced-hard stuff.
So yes, just like a "copy" button would be a waste of space, when Cmd+C is so widespread, a "refresh" button is similar in that regard.
Apple would be the last company to optimize for power users.
