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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I can’t speak for the original commented, but I’m personally quite tired of the thin veneer that’s slapped into these statements. I would prefer a company just be honest and talk about the profit incentives. They want people using the free version to please pay for the expensive one.

    For my experience, I still retain the general irritation at product quality going down regardless of how they word it. But now I’m also annoyed that MS isn’t being straightforward about it.


  • They were never giving it away. They included wordpad with your purchase of windows. They no longer do. I don’t think anyone is saying that windows is not “within their rights”, they’re saying that this degrades the product we already pay for. That is worth complaining about, even if our ultimate recourse primarily ends up being to find an OS that better serves our needs.

    Honestly though I’m struggling to understand why you’d think that’s about Microsoft’s rights to begin with??



  • Yup, it’s why O(N+10) and even O(2N) are effectively the same as O(N) on your CS homework. Speaking too generally, once you’re dithering over the efficiency of an algorithm processing a 100-item dataset you’ve probably gone too far in weeds. And optimizations can often lead to messy code for not a lot of return.

    That’s mostly angled at new grads (or maybe just at me when I first started). You’ve probably got bigger problems to solve than shaving a few ms from the total runtime of your process.


  • The problem breaks down into a few broad sub problems, as I see it.

    1. Confirming the reviewer or voter is who they say they are (to prevent one entity from making multiple reviews).
    2. Confirming the reviewer or voter is a valid stakeholder. This is domain-specific, but can be such metrics as “citizen of country”, or “verified purchaser”.
    3. Confirming the intent of the reviewer. This meaning people who were paid off (buyers who are offered a gift card for a positive review, which happens plenty on Amazon), or discounting review bombs when a game “goes woke”.

    1 and 2 have solutions. Steam cares about whether you’re a verified purchaser, and the barrier to entry of “1 purchase of a game per vote” is certainly enough to make things harder to bot. Amazon might be able to do the same, but so much of the transaction happens outside their purview that a foolproof system would be hard. Not that it’s in their interest to do so, though.

    For places like Reddit or Lemmy, verifying one human per up vote is going to be impossible. New accounts are cheap and easy as a core function of the product. bot detection is only going to get harder, too.

    If you used some centralized certificate system (like SSL certs), you could maybe get as granular as one vote per machine, but not without massive privacy invasions. The government does this for voting kinda, but we make a point to keep those private identifiers the government gives private.





  • Mind that I’m not the person you originally responded to. I don’t think Apple installs a time bomb that bricks your device at a certain point.

    But it’s disingenuous to say they aren’t intentionally reducing product life spans, and degrading the experience in the meantime. I don’t necessarily mean support either!

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

    You’re free to decide if you take their statements on this at face value. But it’s really not just Apple. It’s everyone. Cars today have a shorter lifespan than they used to. Fridges. Laptops. Competitor phones.

    Like are you saying planned obsolescence isn’t a thing generally, isn’t a thing for Apple, or just that it isn’t that bad with them?





  • Ahhh this makes sense. It’s wildly hot, and my backpack isn’t going to be and cooler. If I carry them in the heat, it might break down.

    It sucks cause taking them with me to eat at breakfast has been my most reliable way to remember to medicate. I’ll have to try keeping only a week at a time or something so it doesn’t kill a whole bottle with the heat during these 100° spells.

    Thanks for the source!