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User: retchdog

retchdog's activity in the archive.

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Comments · 2,733

  1. Re:if that's true, on Windows 10 Shares Your Wi-Fi Password With Contacts · · Score: 1

    i forgot no such thing. something is better than nothing.

    by the principle of comparative advantage, stupid people can benefit the world by struggling and suffering through what should be minor annoyances for the more capable. and thus, there is equality.

  2. Re:if that's true, on Windows 10 Shares Your Wi-Fi Password With Contacts · · Score: 1

    then you should be for this. if enough people do it (and get in trouble thereby), there might be pressure to get rid of that liability.

    as long as you don't use it personally, it's a win. just chill, have a drink, and let stupidity work in our favor for once.

  3. Re:I never knew on Is Safari the New Internet Explorer? · · Score: 2

    hint: Chrome (or any browser* on iOS) is little more than a skin over Mobile Safari (=webkit). sure, sometimes the skin is useful, but iOS Chrome is actually more like "Safari with some Chrome-ish Extensions".

    *: at least any browser on the App Store; Apple literally won't allow any other renderers. maybe there are homebrew browsers for jailbroken iOS. i don't know.

  4. Re:I never knew on Is Safari the New Internet Explorer? · · Score: 1

    myself on my 5 family iOS gadgets, everybody I know uses Chrome

    holy shit, we got a bad ass here!

  5. Re:i switched back from chrome to safari on Is Safari the New Internet Explorer? · · Score: 2

    Well, presumably it would just resync the next time you used chrome, unless you fuck around in Chrome and/or your Google account until you find the setting which changes the priority of local vs. remote storage.

    This seems to be a problem with most platforms. It can be partly (and condescendingly) dismissed as user error, but Google does seem to make things more confusing than necessary. We use google drive at work, and the unclear referents in its dialog boxes made me lose a directory before i realized it was "syncing" my work directory to an empty google drive. I know how it works now, but it was literally impossible to know exactly what it was doing in advance from the dialogs, and the documentation was so poor that I had given up trying to learn anything from it.

    Maybe the community should just write man pages for web services.

  6. Re:Conferences are one thing... on Is Safari the New Internet Explorer? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's more or less what I was thinking as well. From a user perspective, Safari is pretty much like Chrome except more stable and much less resource-hungry.

    Maybe this relentless catering to every sloppy demand of every hack web programmer is what makes web browsers the bloated pieces of shit that they are nowadays.

  7. Re:Value is more than just price on How Uber Takes Over a City · · Score: 2

    afaict, from a NYC perspective, Uber is much better if you live in Brooklyn or Queens because, unlike yellow cabs, it's actually possible to get one by using the app. I've heard that in other cities, e.g. San Francisco, the cab service is about as bad as Brooklyn. I'm sure that in these areas, Uber is a big improvement over what was there before.

    If you live in Manhattan, it's largely a matter of taste. the cars tend to be cleaner and the drivers friendlier, etc., but will cost you ~20% more. There is better tech integration, e.g. the app can be used to split a ride with your friends, and it integrates with paypal/whatever whereas yellow cabs just barely have credit card readers.

    Additionally, you hail Uber from an app and meet at a designated spot, whereas yellow cabs by law have to be flagged down from the sidewalk. Personally, i'm not really into Uber, but I live in Manhattan and am probably just sticking with what i'm used to. I'd probably use it occasionally if i lived in Brooklyn. A lot of my younger coworkers use Uber exclusively (and frequently! i wonder how much of their pay they spend just on transportation).

    I suspect that what happened is that other cities took NYC Medallion model (which isn't even really appropriate for Manhattan, at least these days) and applied it reflexively for whatever reason. Coming from Florida, I think it's fair to say that Uber is the first real taxi service many suburban areas are getting. The regulations preceded the industry, and so the industry never even developed. Uber basically said "fuck it," made up some silly story about "ride-sharing" (lol), and that was that.

  8. Re:Curious on Philanthropy For Hackers · · Score: 1

    hey, Facebook researchers are doing some serious hard-core work in the fields of computer vision (=how to track you) and applied psychology (=how to get you to want to be tracked and click on ads). they just hired Yann LeCun ffs, who basically invented convolutional neural networks as we currently know them, and he seems at least as happy and productive there as he was at NYU.

    of course, this has little to do with Marky Mark Z., who seems to have just been in the right place at the right time with the right personal characteristics. then again, you could say the same about Bill Gates. that's the bitch of it, really. who knows whether the alternative to Microsoft would have actually been any better in the long-run?

  9. Re:There are a few options. on Ask Slashdot: User-Friendly, Version-Preserving File Sharing For Linux? · · Score: 1

    so, which one would you vouch for?

    since you lead off with FUSE (jesus christ) layered on git (wtf?), i really want to know which one of these you think is the most stable and whether you'd vouch for it if your life depended on it.

  10. Re:Great on US Teen Pleads Guilty To Teaching ISIS About Bitcoin Via Twitter · · Score: 3, Informative

    You're right. Treason is constitutionally punishable by death, after all. We could avoid that problem rather easily.

  11. Re:Good Luck on France Claims Right To Censor Search Results Globally · · Score: 2, Funny

    Greek Nationalist, eh?

    I don't understand. You seem to be anti-socialist, yet without the Poles and the Turks, would anyone do any work at all in Greece? I'm just wondering.

  12. Re:What is being missed... is the $2 million part. on Commodore PC Still Controls Heat and A/C At 19 Michigan Public Schools · · Score: 2

    Well, at least this student did. God only knows what kind of unholy messes the others made. Or, for that matter, how much cost accrued silently through inefficiencies over 25 years.

  13. Re:Wow on Oculus Announces Partnership With Microsoft · · Score: 1

    Marathon.

  14. Re:Slow learners on OpenBazaar, Born of an Effort To Build the Next Silk Road, Raises $1 Million · · Score: 1

    yeah, but what does Andreessen care about the fall guy chumps who actually end up running the code he's chipping it to have written? they're as expendable as any other piece of hardware. it's even in the name Dread Pirate Roberts, except instead of retiring they end up dead or in jail.

  15. Re:WHAT! on Baidu Forced To Withdraw Last Month's ImageNet Test Results · · Score: 1

    the arXiv paper presenting the results was authored by five people all with Chinese names. at least one of them is fresh from Beijing; i didn't bother tracking down the rest.

    i'm sure a lot of research goes on there, by all sorts of people. Andrew Ng seems like a good guy. none of this is directly relevant to the submissions. (though neither is any of this that important, really.)

  16. Re:WHAT! on Baidu Forced To Withdraw Last Month's ImageNet Test Results · · Score: 5, Funny

    it's not called cheating there. the ideograms translate roughly to "auspicious cooperation with jade dragon of opportunity."

  17. Re:So we have a lack of people with wha skills? on Disney Making Laid-Off US Tech Workers Train Foreign H1-B Replacements · · Score: 1

    yes, they are complete opposites.

    for one, crony capitalism actually exists.

  18. Re:Contact your Senator sitting on the fence on The Patriot Act May Be Dead For Good · · Score: 1

    You post like a pregnant yak!!!

  19. Re:Hilarious! on Chinese Nationals Accused of Taking SATs For Others · · Score: 1

    perhaps correctly, but also vacuously. your "counter-example" only applies if the connection is perfect, which is not implied by a correlation.

  20. Re:SAT, high school, and college grades mean nothi on Chinese Nationals Accused of Taking SATs For Others · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Uh, you are "some millennial with a [communications] degree".

  21. Re:Wait for further developements on Chinese Nationals Accused of Taking SATs For Others · · Score: 2

    It used to annoy me that the Chinese applicants to my program had a separate admissions group comprising exclusively Chinese professors.

    It still annoys me, but I realized that it's necessary since every single one has perfect test scores (including the TOEFL as you point out, which is just hirarious), glowing carbon-copy letters of recommendation, and a near-identical statement of interest. There's very little information to make a decision on a formal level, so you need to make best guesses based on province and other culture-specific cues.

  22. Re:Hilarious! on Chinese Nationals Accused of Taking SATs For Others · · Score: 1

    And apparently you don't understand what "correlate" means, either.

  23. Re:One web site. on Creationists Manipulating Search Results · · Score: 2

    this is an old tactic.

    a long time ago, i picked up a random book in the library about the Aktion T4 program and read it while i should have been writing my thesis. it was interesting enough, until the last two chapters which ranted about how, obviously, pro-choicers were pushing America down the same path. it was annoying, but a nice reminder; i had to fact-check everything i read. i did, and the facts about T4 checked out, which suggests that they just took some legitimate research and bolted their drivel to it.

  24. Re:The guy is full of himself on Apple Design Guru Jony Ive Named Chief Design Officer · · Score: 1

    not much i didn't already know. care to elaborate a bit?

  25. Re:The guy is full of himself on Apple Design Guru Jony Ive Named Chief Design Officer · · Score: 0

    Does anyone remember how a Power Mac used to be a power house of computing?

    uh. no?

    hasn't Apple been a 1%-ish company for decades? it's just that raw compute power is kind of meaningless now (if i need cycles, i'll ssh into something), so the innovations are almost exclusively on hardware aesthetics and user interface. what's wrong with that?