Also don’t forget the “externalized” costs of massive and irreversible environmental damage!

Apple is great at polishing and packaging things that already exist. The iPhone was a better Blackberry, the iPod a better MP3 player, the iMac a better all-in-one PC… I have a hard time thinking of stuff they truly pioneered. The Newton maybe? That did not end well for them.

If I had to bet, the Vision Pro will turn out to be a burnt pancake, but long term I have no doubt that something like it — something that augments reality one way or another — will become a thing. And in the meantime Apple has pockets more than deep enough to survive a failed Vision Pro.

The backlash against them trying to innovate is kind of dumb though. They aimed high for a change, and taking risks like this should be lauded not laughed at.

I gave up trying to make Mastodon work. Two minutes of scrolling and I always end up closing it with an overwhelming feeling of cringe.

Mind you I could never get in to Twitter either. Maybe it’s just the format? It reinforces ego/personal brand over the value of the actual content.

This community is off to a way better start compared to what was going on on r/dataisbeautiful by the time i left.

These graphics are great! Keep them coming.

Keep in mind most of that machinery nowadays is made by workers elsewhere in the world, primarily in China, where the union membership rate is something like 45%.

A while back, I (with a few others) built and sold an innovative tech company to a large “enterprise”. What you’re describing is exactly why they bought us and how things played out post acquisition. I’ve since left, but the thing we built is now in shambles, buried and suffocated by bureaucracy and institutional ineptitude. The parent company has learned nothing, continues to keep buying smaller tech companies, and can’t seem to figure out why things always turn to shit.

DataGrip is the one JetBrains IDE I can’t work without and continue to pay for. I’d love to find a pure OSS alternative, but there’s nothing else like it.

Alkaline batteries lose voltage as they drain, so 1.5V is at full charge but it drops down to about 1.2V very quickly and then stays at 1.0V - 1.2V for most of the alkaline battery’s operating life.

NiMH batteries tend to consistently stay at their nominal voltage (1.2V) through their entire charge.

So in other words, if you have devices that really expect exactly 1.5V per battery, they would only work with alkalines at the very top of their charge. Nowadays most non-garbage circuits should be designed to work just fine with anything above 1V per battery.

Def the other way around.

Writing a privacy policy generally forces a company to make commitments about what they will and won’t do with data they collect about you.

No privacy policy means anything goes — they didn’t say what they will or won’t do, so you can’t sue them if they do something sketchy.

But many jurisdictions require companies to publish a privacy policy, so just about any company these days will have one. The devil is in the details though, as this article points out.

There have been a number of attempts in Canada to sue credit agencies for libel. None have succeeded so far, largely because the cases have been a bit murky.

This one seems really clear cut though. I really wish this person would try to sue for libel. A successful precedent could end up drastically changing the way credit scores work in Canada. The credit agencies might suddenly find themselves having to be accountable for their sketchy practices. Imagine that!

In central america at least they call these suicide showers. They’re really common in low end hostels / cabinas.

I made an attempt a few years ago, but the way this book was written really hasn’t aged well. I found it dull and patronizing and gave up.

Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” is a much better book if you ask me, dealing with similar themes but written more recently.