departments. I used to be a prof at a large university. One of the reasons I left academics was that I got tired of fighting the battle about textbooks in courses that I was required to teach (faculty divvied up the 100/200 courses, everyone had to do some).
I started out as a starry-eyed young prof trying to help my students by putting alternate sources of inexpensive textbooks on syllabi. We're talking textbooks at $2 vs. $120 on the used market. Saving students a lot of dough. But that go no-noed.
So I pulled it off the syllabus and started just making verbal announcements. That also got no-noed.
So I started just requiring an office hours visit first week of semester and telling students in office hours. That also got no-noed.
So I stopped requiring the textbook and sent them to the library for optional textbook reading. That also got no-noed.
I had serious ethical qualms about forcing students—about half of whom really oughtn't find a way to "afford" it—to spend $hundreds on things that were $nearly free and being forbidden from making it $totally free by just sending them to the library.
Everyone must buy the book, I was told. There's departmental and institutional revenue at stake, I was told. Nevermind that first-year college students from underprivileged backgrounds whose entire extended families were pulling together to help them through were dropping $1k a semester on $50-75 worth of books from used booksellers.
It's just one factor in the decisions that led me out of academics, but it's a very concrete one. It felt like a slimy industry after a while, more about conning money out of people (students, taxpayers, donors and endowers) than caring about the topics at hand.
that there aren't fundamental differences between men and women and what they *like to do* with their time.
If you want to create a completely fair, team-oriented place to work where nobody falls through the cracks, hire a woman.
If you want to build a kick-ass video gaming rig from the ground up in the middle of a hot warzone, hire a man. The woman will tell you that if you want to do this, your priorities are misplaced, and will focus on saving lives, not optimizing gameplay between bullets.
Guess what? Tech on the open market basically amounts to building kick-ass video gaming rigs in the middle of a warzone.
The basic note-taking functionality has gone backward. Harder to make notes, harder to find notes, harder to scroll through and read notes, harder to export notes.
A lot of other stuff that I don't care about has been added. Apparently a lot of people don't care about it.
You have a captive audience of millions with their data in your platform. Hard to screw that up, but Evernote did, and they continue to get worse.
In 2008, it was still a killer app. In 2018, it has squandered its position.
The app has gained zero new killer functionality, which itself isn't disqualifying, but the UI hasn't even bothered to remain stagnant—it's gone backward. Evernote is far less usable and user-friendly for its core purposes than it was back when I started using it. Compare:
I hate all the wasted screen real estate. The lock-in to the same idiosyncratic and clashing colors. The way in which basic information organization have been buried in favor of a "just use the search box" mentality, requiring extra clicks for anything. The fact that data is incredibly difficult to get out in bulk (you can export it to a kind of soup that can be sorted out if you're willing to spent a month of your time doing development on your own). It used to be a pleasure to use, for what it was. Now it just sucks.
Even all of this would have been okay if basic features hadn't been gradually migrating behind a paywall even as prices continued to increase—but both things are true.
In short, Evernote started way ahead as a product that was great relative to everything else and very useful. It just needed some polish and iteration. Not only did they stagnate, they went backward, while jacking up the price. The one and only reason to stick with Evernote now is that it supports the five major platforms—Browser, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS—and syncs between them relatively seamlessly.
Evernote reminds me in a lot of ways of Livescribe. A company with a great idea out the gate that then stumbled and ran in reverse, creating the impression that they hold their most committed users in deep contempt. Which is fitting, because the two partnered together for some time, so they deserve each other. Most of all, Evernote, like Livescribe, is a company that in no way needs—for the functionality that they ought to deliver—the corporate bloat they seem to have developed.
The moment something else comes along that (1) creates rich notes and (2) can sync to always-up-to-date status on all of the platforms mentioned above, I'll jump ship right away. I'll even pay more, just to spite Evernote for holding my data (practically speaking) hostage.
I work remotely for a company that works with large volumes of data. I routinely have to pass gigabytes back and forth—and having gigabit fiber enables me to do that very quickly, in just a few minutes, rather than having to plan ahead for hours of transfer time.
As far as the interface goes—the fiber.google.com interface is very simple BUT the router itself has a web-based interface on its internal IP address. At least mine does. Did you check yours while you had the service?
and I've posted this on Slashdot before, but I'll post it again.
This article is spot on.
Before Google Fiber came to town, getting and using broadband in this area was painful. It was the "telephone company utility" model. Everything had to be done by phone, with tons of time on hold. Installation was workmen with a clipboard, scheduled weeks out. You'd get 5mbps for $$ or 10mbps for $$$ or 50mbps for $$$$, no higher tier than 50mbps without paying for "business service" at the level of $500-$1k monthly. And those were your choices from every carrier. You never reached more than 25-40% of advertised speed up or down. Service was terrible and unreliable and if there was an outage you could be offline for weeks waiting for a service appointment. Account changes or cancellations were a by-telephone nightmare that were virtually destined to go wrong each time. And technical questions about configuration, blocked ports, etc.? Good luck. It was all a black box to the customer service lines. Far easier to figure such things out empirically yourself.
Then, Google Fiber came to down. Installations scheduled online. Accounts administered online, everything from payment to plan selection and changes. Transparency in equipment and documentation. And either 5mbps for FREE, 100mbps for $ or 1gb for $$, what had previously been the 5 or 10mbps cost with other carriers. Installations done in just days, rather than weeks out, by friendly people in branded vans. You get 100% of advertised speed, 24 hours a day, sustained. Outages are virtually unheard of, but if a tree does come down and knock out a line, it's fixed in a couple hours, not weeks. A walk-in Google Fiber store where you can actually talk tech details and they understand everything you're saying. It was like we jumped from 1995 to the present in a single month.
And within weeks, every other carrier had boosted their minimum residential offering to 50mbps and were suddenly offering and deploying gigabit residential fast as they possibly could, at (interestingly enough) exactly the same price as Google. Service improved drastically and they suddenly started to talk tech in their ads.
It does basically feel like Google was tired of seeing their growth limited by a bunch of small timers trying to pick the pockets of the public, so they came in and said "OYA? We're Google. FU." and got everyone gigabit. And for the other carriers it became a case of "either play fair or get fucked." So they played fair and then Google was happy to back off. If they hadn't, I wonder if Google would have continued and just put them all out of business. My impression is that Google doesn't necessarily want to be in the broadband business, but that they want to make damn sure the public has access to legitimate contemporary "broadband" pipes.
I understand that Google has an interest in this, but I don't mind at all. I'm happy to let Google profit if I get rock-solid up/down gigabit fiber with online administration for what was previously the cost of flaky 10 megabit down/768k up copper administered by an idiot bureaucracy behind a 2 hour telephone wait.
The value just isn't there. Instead, I have always bought phones one or two years behind the retail cycle, when they start to come off contract and be unlocked. You can have last year's flagship, which is usually still pretty damned good, for pennies on the dollar—under $200 for the phone with just a year of use on it, then a SIM (or before that, phoning in the numbers from the beneath the battery to the carrier) plan for cheap.
Carriers like TPO and Net10 in the US offer plans with a few gigs of data and unlimited everything else for just $25-$35 a month right now. Extra gigs run $10 a gig or so, refillable anytime, and I rarely end up using it.
I would not like to be locked into a contract, nor would I like to be limited in when I can upgrade or replace if something goes wrong.
Of course, this doesn't work so well with Apple phones, which hold their value too well. Which is one of the many reasons I don't use iOS. (The other being because I really don't like the OS experience at all, though I do like some of the apps better than the Android equivalents—but not $1k for a phone better).
- You have to drive or take a train - You have to stay out late if you're a working person - You have to commit 1.5-2.5 hours - You have to deal with significantly increased costs for the comforts of refreshments, even a simple drink if you get thirsty - It's actually quite a pain in the ass - And of course the ticket cost
With TV?
- "Can't find anything good to watch" means a waste of a few minutes at most - There's no transit time or other significant preparation - You can pause at any time and return; there is no set time commitment - Food and drink = cheap - You can multi-task with that time - If you "abort" a show, you can immediately do something else, and you've not lost an investment of time, money, whatever
Basically, you're investing a lot (time, money, effort, lost convenience) to go see a movie. So you want to know if it's going to suck so that you're not stuck wasting all of that investment or having to sit through something you don't enjoy just so you *don't* waste all of that investment.
In combined costs if you have, say, a spouse and a kid and the kid gets thirsty or wants a snack, it's going to cost something like $50-$60 minimum, more if you have to pay to park, which is, like, half a year of Netflix.
People don't care about TV ratings but they do care about movie ratings for the same reason they don't bother to research pencils before they buy a 10-pack at the store but they do research fountain pens before they buy one. Anytime something costs an order of magnitude more, and involves significant additional investments beyond that, people are going to want value for money.
Make new releases $1.00 PPV and show them via streaming in living rooms and people will stop caring about reviews for movies, too.
People have been saying "programming should be easier" forever.
Many have tried, all have failed.
And the task keeps getting bigger because the uses and requirements keep expanding. From one simple input (keyboard) from one source (user) to a variable domain of many complex inputs from many sources. From one simple output (answer) to a variable domain of many complex outputs to many destinations. And the core tasks, too, aside from input and output, are far more complex than they were.
If you have one hex nut to loosen and tighten, you can make a simple wrench to do it. If you have to be able to work on an infinite number fasteners—hex nuts, machine screws, torx screws, allen bolts, grommets, flip latches, tumbler locks, screw-down locks, snap fittings, adhesive strips, magnetic plates, snap rings, cotter pins, etc. and the domain of tasks goes from loosen and tighten to loosen, tighten, open, close, diverge, converge, adjust left, adjust right, increase weight, decrease weight, etc. and the number of possible surfaces increases from two adjoined flat surfaces to be bolted together to N surfaces of M possible shapes... Well, you're going to end up with a shed full of tools, each one of them reliant on a different kind of knowledge and experience.
Life is complicated. Programming is approaching use in virtually every domain of life. Ergo, programming will be complicated.
You want programming to be simple, you may as well start off by trying to make life simple—that's the root of the problem.
trying to help people who'd bought them to make use of them. One each from Acer, Lenovo, and HP.
Things:
1) The screens are absolute crap, hard to look at. They remind me of the very first active matrix color LCD panels. Fuzzy, sparkly, unclear, low-viewing-angle, low-contrast terrible.
2) You can do three things with them, as far as I can tell. Web, email, and Google Docs. Need to open a file someone sent you? Good luck. Need to print it out? Good luck. Need to share the things that you create with someone else who's not using a Chromebook and Google's ecosystem? Good luck.
3) Mac OS does web apps better, ironically. The web apps in Chrome OS are fragile. Renderbugs, whyd-it-crashes, oh-no-a-glitches galore.
4) And there aren't very many apps of any kind that are useful in any way. As I said, basically web, email, and Google Docs.
I think you get more apps, and better mileage, and better portability, and better battery life, and a better screen, and a better experience overall, out of an Android tablet.
Listen here, I"m no right-winger, but facts are FACTS:
1) People were racist in the past 2) a lot of people 3) and they tortured and they maimed and they killed and they raped 4) and they wrote fiction, nonfiction, history, and philosophy about it
This is our inheritance as human beings. Any notion of "rightly blocking" racism, violence, sexism, etc. is nothing more or less than book burning.
If a politician today says something racist, by all means don't vote for them.
But if Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson says something racist, and you decide that this means that we have to erase Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson from history, all I have to say is: human history belongs to all of us, and it's both unpleasant and educational. So a big fuck you to the book burners.
What this will do is put independent sellers and entrepreneurs out of business. The largest companies, like Amazon and Wal-Mart, with the infrastructure to cope, won't miss a beat. Everyone else... won't be able to comply. eBay will fall farther behind, if not collapse entirely, because they don't sell anything themselves and aren't configured to be in the business of selling anything themselves.
This is bad for consumers and bad for the economy. And it will lead to large firms with regulatory capture dominating e-commerce. It's one more step in the centralization of the 'net as a deeply controlled profit source for a handful of megacorporations.
I'll believe this when I see it. I think it's far more likely that in 20 years the relative peace and prosperity that we see today will have broken down somewhat into less functional economies, societies, public infrastructure systems, etc. and that a small global overclass will live in relative comfort still tended to mostly by humans while the bulk of the populations around the globe continue more or less on the path that they are now.
I can see universal basic incomes happening eventually, but not in 20 years, more like 150 after a great deal of turmoil and a certain amount of reconstruction.
Kurzweil seems always to think that every Big Thing is just around the corner. If we survive long enough, I have no doubt that there will be Big Things, but society just doesn't change in 10-20 years. The names change (the Soviet Union collapses, computational machines become computers become phones) but the substance is evolving much more slowly. It's still evolving, but punctuated revolutions in the basic circumstances of life every 10-20 years like Kurzweil seems to predict just don't really happen.
Even the vaunted "smartphone revolution" hasn't changed all that much at the day-to-day level. We still drive cars, put out the trash in the morning, do the dishes, complain about veterinary bills, and bemoan the state of politics, more or less as was the case 50 years ago. Some of the details have changed, but humanity is not radically different, despite (sadly) all the hand-wringing.
Bringing 7 billion people along spread across an entire planet does not lend itself to rapid change unless the change is natural and catastrophic (i.e. beyond our control).
I own two Macbook Pros for mobile work, but for desktop work I rely on a self-built that runs MacOS and actually has the hardware that I need in it. Too bad Apple won't sell me one, I'd buy it instead and not have to worry about dealing with the vagaries and annoyances of maintaining my own white box hardware.
What I do know is that I felt very proud to not take the full cost of attendance out as loans when I was doing my degree. I thought (and the "adults" told me) that I was very smart to minimize my borrowing.
I know two separate people who took out the full cost of attendance loan (max they could get) every semester they were in school, and used that money as down payments on their first rental buildings. Years later, they both now have small real estate empires, the loans are paid off, and one retired in his '30s, all started by student loans. Both leveraged their student loan debt into investments that paid off.
Meanwhile, I was under the debt thumb for years and years and am still working for a salary 50+ hours a week. Someone was smart, and it wasn't me (despite what the older generation applauded me for).
On the other hand, I'm not sure that cryptocurrency is quite the same deal. Seems like it would be smarter to invest and rent-seek as the people that I know did.
My inner gadget freak kept wanting to be wowed, but I kept not being wowed, so I kept trying other models. By the time friends started to get Apple watches, I had already transitioned to wearing traditional analog mechanical watches instead. I played with their Apple watches a bit, but it was the same basic stuff as the ones I'd tried, maybe with more spit and shine.
So smart watches got me into wristwatches... but not in the end into smart watches.
I've always been a tech early adopter, so I was expecting to eventually be seduced into the upgrade cycle or wanting the latest-and-greatest, but instead I realized that what I liked most were things like having the time on my wrist, the designs of the faces, customizing the strap/bracelet, and generally wearing them as an apparel item. What I liked least?
- Having to pair with my phone - Having to deal with apps and taps that were cumbersome and ultimately just poorly duplicated what was on my phone - Having to charge the watch over and over and over again - Starting to envy the idea of having *really* timeless and personal thing on my wrist, rather than tossing out/upgrading in a year or two
Basically, I hated all the "smart" parts. And on top of that, I got a taste for the sense of the really personal nature of something that you wear on your body all the time, and suddenly didn't like the idea that this thing that was literally a part of me all the time was disposable and just a temporary relationship. For a phone, okay. For something that you touch nonstop, that becomes a part of you, it was a step too far into the bionic man world.
I have no desire to own a smart watch any longer. But I now have over 30 automatic mechanical wristwatches with lovely dials and lume, domed sapphire crystals, hefty bracelets with sold end links, and classic looks. And I am learning how to service and repair them (I recently serviced my first Slava 2427 movement) and my young son has expressed a lot of interest in them, so someday I can leave them to him and he will still be able to tell the time with them while identifying them with childhood memories and with me—something that would not be the case with a transient smart watch.
and they walk around for a few minutes with a distant look on their faces and then ask to leave, it is a shitty toy store.
I have no idea if they had a science kit in the back somewhere, or the microscope we got at Target on a top shelf somewhere (no doubt it would have cost at least double what we paid at Target) but the fact is, I have two young kids and on the couple of occasions we've gone there (once to spend a bundle of grandparent-given birthday money), both kids were, like *so meh*.
If you're a toy store and kids don't want to be there, you have a serious problem.
There are a couple of local independent toy stores, on the other hand, that they absolutely LOVE. You have to fight to get them to leave. We only shop these maybe a couple of times a year the prices are still high to me for what you get compared to online, BUT they have a very different selection of toys from brands that I don't remember on Saturday morning cartoons, not to mention very engaging displays, both of which the kids are fascinated by—it all generates that same "wow!" look that tells you the kids are fascinated. And I'd say that 35% of what the local independents stock isn't easily available online. From said local toy stores in the last year we bough a big dragon kite, a set of fairly difficult 3-D cast metal puzzles, a large bow and arrow set with foam-tipped arrows that actually has very real-life action and shoots arrows about 100 yards, a strategy game called Rubber Road that they really like, a Bloxels set, and a cool card game called Evolution that the kids are willing to play for hours and that actually does a reasonable job of illustrating the concept of natural selection in a very basic, reductive way (it's supposed to be for 12 and older, and it cost $40 ugh, but they love it anyway even though they're both under 10).
We never sighted stuff even remotely like this at our local Toys'R'Us stores. Instead, the board game aisle features about 50 variations on Monoply which of course we already have because there are eleventy billion sets already being passed down in families out there, a few ill-conceived highly branded board games that appear to be more about representing the characters to keep the kids interested in the TV property and drive ad revenue, plus a bunch of "gross out" games—plastic toilets that spray water in your face, random catapults that fling slime at the players (for which they're happy to sell extra slime on the side), etc. No strategy. Barely any rules. And the "toy" aisles are labeled with big signs: Disney. Marvel. Hasbro. Mattel. Crayola. etc. It's all organized by what appear to be brand-sponsorships, yet each aisle seems to have essentially the same stuff, just with different faces and costumes and paint jobs and packaging slapped on them. Bubble-packs of action figures hung on hooks. Below them, their "vehicles," "weapons," or "transport animals" in boxes. Supporting or minor characters toward either end of the aisle, major "characters" from the film/cartoon/etc. in the middle. All overcolored and overpriced and boring as sin.
To make matters worse, it's all $30-$50 for these cheap little hunks of plastic that really don't stimulate the imagination at all, or up to $hundreds for variations on the concept of "play house" (or castle or fortress or whatever) for said hunks of plastic. I mean, this stuff is just random brightly colored shit without much replay value or learning value, is not inspiring in the least, and would cost $3 at a Chinese import bric-a-brac store if not for the brand stamped on it and the overdone bubble packaging and loud labels IN ALL CAPS WITH EXCLAMATION MARKS! The Crayola aisle at least has creativity stuff, but the local Wal-Mart stocks the same crayon box sizes for $0.99 (for sixteen crayons) to $5.99 (for sixty-four) vs. starting at $3.49 for sixteen crayons. Who is going to pay $3.49 for a box of sixteen crayons? Or $7.99 for a 100-sheet sketch pad of not particularly high quality paper? WTF?! Particularly when the exact same items, t
My kids are always bored there. We've found much more fun toys at Target, not to mention Amazon.com, whatever you think of both companies. We bought a potato-driven clock and a home-terrarium kit on Amazon.com for under $10 each that the kids enjoyed. They get TinkerCrate which they also enjoy, and I consider it expensive at $29 a crate. But walk into a Toys'R'Us and all you can get is 8" plastic action figures in garish colors for $49.99 each.
Toys'R'Us should be called AMillionFlashyBrandedOverpricedActionFigures'R'Us.
At least near us, the two stores had no science kits, no craft stuff, no learning toys to speak of, no building toys to speak of, no creative toys of any kind. The best section were bikes and skateboards in the back. The rest is literally wall-to-wall action figures from cartoons that my kids have never heard of because cartoons are so twenty years ago and we don't have TV. They are much more interested in apps than in TV.
Toys'R'Us is selling toys from decades ago—thousands of them, all the same, and for 4x what they ought to cost.
The service is excellent. Google's uptime has been flawless, the original install appointments went smoothly and were kept, the equipment is high quality, and the gigabit service does actually deliver a full gigabit of bandwidth up *and* down in tests. And all for $70/month, which includes 1TB online storage via Google Drive.
Just as cool, you can simply log into fiber.google.com and downgrade to 100mbps ($50/mo.) or 5mbps (free) at will. You can upgrade and downgrade, click, click, click, and it will pro-rate costs for you automatically. Basically, it's a flawless service in every way.
One of the things that I'm convinced hurt Google in this area is that there was already entrenched competition from the usual suspects in national broadband brands.
For decades, it had been 5mbps-10mbps down and a fifth of that upstream as the maximum service tier at every major provider. And for that you paid $50-$70 monthly. As soon as Google Fiber deployed, suddenly *every provider* offered Gigabit for less than $100/mo. plus value adds and promos. I mean, it took weeks max, once Google Fiber started scheduling installations. Just like that. And a lot of people stuck with the devil they already know, particularly if they were already getting TV and/or landline service through them, and particularly if Google had install times a week or two out but their current provider could bump them up within a day or two.
Google broke the market wide open here, but at the same time ended up with scraps in the end. Most of the people that I know stuck with their previous provider and ended up with gigabit speeds anyway at or near their previous subscription cost once Google entered the local market. I worry that if Google were to pull out of the market for some reason, suddenly "market realities" would reduce the offerings of the other providers once again to $70/mo. for 5mbps, as it had previously been.
sites that use this show a dialog that uses local store and enables you to opt in.
"Once you've read, say, your first five articles, fade in a modal that says "You seem to like what we're providing here. We need funds to operate—journalism isn't cheap, traditional subscription models are dying, and we need funds to operate. To continue to read, you need to select one of these options:
[ ] Mine Monero for us as you read (preferred) [ ] See ads as you read (more obtrusive)
Save Preference and Read On >"
Then, after that, if you don't opt in to either one and you visit, you just see this modal each time you visit instead of articles. No opt-in, no articles.
That way, consumption of the work is funded, but consumers are given an opt-in choice that is unobtrusive and saved once, then remembered so that they don't have to bother with it, and you get your choice between ads and mining.
But it should be opt-in, not silent default. The silent default of ads that don't pay the bills (so that you need to click fifty times to read the equivalent of ten paragraphs) is the problem with the entire web right now, and it's killing the web.
Bigger problem: you can't see what other people share. FB has "monetized" themselves out of the business by selling all the space in the feed to advertisers and never showing you anything from the people that you're trying to stay connected to.
It used to be a good tool for keeping up with everyone in your circle and what they're up to in a kind of rapid, quick-check way. Now if you want to see your friends' or family's updates, you have to go to each person's timeline individually, one at a time. Otherwise, they're essentially invisible to you. So you just call them instead, since it amounts to the same thing as checking and scrolling through every individual profile one by one.
Meanwhile, your feed is a whole bunch of bullshit clickbait from advertisers that have paid to insert themselves into the feeds of everyone of your age and your gender in your country.
And on the very rare occasion that you do happen to see a promoted item on your feed that you're interested in, generally the the app updates the feed just as you're about to tap on it, and *poof* it's gone. And there's no way in heaven or hell to go back and find it ever again, it's just gone. It's literally a platform for carefully obscuring from you anything you want to see and putting in front of you and endless list of things you couldn't care less about.
That's not what anyone was promised when they signed up, or what led to Facebook's growth.
Basically as soon as they decided to monetize the feed aggressively, the result was predictable and lots of people predicted it. "Great, so now we're going to see a lot of ads that we don't give a shit about, disguised as 'updates' from organizations and pages we don't care about, and everything we do care about will be hidden."
wristwatches... But I no longer have the two smartwatches that I bought. Instead, I have a handful of wristwatches, any one of which I wear on a given day, without fail. The smartwatches themselves are long gone to eBay.
The smartwatches were a pain to use and did nothing well, had a hit-and-miss UI that only sometimes felt even partially usable, and they had to keep coming off and on for charging, which meant that I'd routinely forget to wear them for the day (I tried two in succession). I really liked having the time and date on my wrist, though, and once I tried an old fashioned self-winding mechanical analog wristwatch, I loved having this little machine on my wrist that did its job *perfectly* and without intervention and was scheduled to do so for the next 15-20 years until needing, in very quaint fashion, to be "lubed" with highly refined dino oil by a mechanical specialist.
So I've ended up with several pieces of 19th century technology (which is really just miniaturized 16th century technology) that do the job rather well and also are visually fascinating and aesthetically pleasing to look at as they do it. They're maintenance-free, water resistant to 200 meters, really impervious to most any hazard, and when I change them I only take them off for a few seconds to swap, rather than having to leave them off for hours, so I rarely forget to wear one. It does happen, but far less often than it did with the smartwatches.
And as a bonus, telling time now Just Works—there's no need to wake them up (which often required actual "steps" on the smartwatches, despite advertising to the obvious), they just show the time all the time. Even if I'm, day, driving and need to leave my hand on the wheel, I can just glance at an angle and read the time easily. They don't require me to move my arm from the steering wheel and/or do actual stuff to read them.
As a bonus, a reasonable quality mechanical wristwatch from Seiko or Orient costs 1/3 to 1/2 what a smartwatch does, so for the same price you can have several traditional wristwatches that will last many years and offer a variety of styles and appearances and provide redundancy in the case that one should fail... Without the further requirement of periodic "upgrades."
So smartwatches convinced me to wear a watch. Just not, in the end, a smartwatch.
Slashdot Mirror
You are going to their house and doing what you do, and they're just making note of what you did in their living room.
departments. I used to be a prof at a large university. One of the reasons I left academics was that I got tired of fighting the battle about textbooks in courses that I was required to teach (faculty divvied up the 100/200 courses, everyone had to do some).
I started out as a starry-eyed young prof trying to help my students by putting alternate sources of inexpensive textbooks on syllabi. We're talking textbooks at $2 vs. $120 on the used market. Saving students a lot of dough. But that go no-noed.
So I pulled it off the syllabus and started just making verbal announcements. That also got no-noed.
So I started just requiring an office hours visit first week of semester and telling students in office hours. That also got no-noed.
So I stopped requiring the textbook and sent them to the library for optional textbook reading. That also got no-noed.
I had serious ethical qualms about forcing students—about half of whom really oughtn't find a way to "afford" it—to spend $hundreds on things that were $nearly free and being forbidden from making it $totally free by just sending them to the library.
Everyone must buy the book, I was told. There's departmental and institutional revenue at stake, I was told. Nevermind that first-year college students from underprivileged backgrounds whose entire extended families were pulling together to help them through were dropping $1k a semester on $50-75 worth of books from used booksellers.
It's just one factor in the decisions that led me out of academics, but it's a very concrete one. It felt like a slimy industry after a while, more about conning money out of people (students, taxpayers, donors and endowers) than caring about the topics at hand.
But yeah, don't blame the profs.
that there aren't fundamental differences between men and women and what they *like to do* with their time.
If you want to create a completely fair, team-oriented place to work where nobody falls through the cracks, hire a woman.
If you want to build a kick-ass video gaming rig from the ground up in the middle of a hot warzone, hire a man. The woman will tell you that if you want to do this, your priorities are misplaced, and will focus on saving lives, not optimizing gameplay between bullets.
Guess what? Tech on the open market basically amounts to building kick-ass video gaming rigs in the middle of a warzone.
The basic note-taking functionality has gone backward. Harder to make notes, harder to find notes, harder to scroll through and read notes, harder to export notes.
A lot of other stuff that I don't care about has been added. Apparently a lot of people don't care about it.
You have a captive audience of millions with their data in your platform. Hard to screw that up, but Evernote did, and they continue to get worse.
because I want so badly to love it.
In 2008, it was still a killer app. In 2018, it has squandered its position.
The app has gained zero new killer functionality, which itself isn't disqualifying, but the UI hasn't even bothered to remain stagnant—it's gone backward. Evernote is far less usable and user-friendly for its core purposes than it was back when I started using it. Compare:
https://mediafrenzy.files.word...
https://i0.wp.com/thenerdystud...
I hate all the wasted screen real estate. The lock-in to the same idiosyncratic and clashing colors. The way in which basic information organization have been buried in favor of a "just use the search box" mentality, requiring extra clicks for anything. The fact that data is incredibly difficult to get out in bulk (you can export it to a kind of soup that can be sorted out if you're willing to spent a month of your time doing development on your own). It used to be a pleasure to use, for what it was. Now it just sucks.
Even all of this would have been okay if basic features hadn't been gradually migrating behind a paywall even as prices continued to increase—but both things are true.
In short, Evernote started way ahead as a product that was great relative to everything else and very useful. It just needed some polish and iteration. Not only did they stagnate, they went backward, while jacking up the price. The one and only reason to stick with Evernote now is that it supports the five major platforms—Browser, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS—and syncs between them relatively seamlessly.
Evernote reminds me in a lot of ways of Livescribe. A company with a great idea out the gate that then stumbled and ran in reverse, creating the impression that they hold their most committed users in deep contempt. Which is fitting, because the two partnered together for some time, so they deserve each other. Most of all, Evernote, like Livescribe, is a company that in no way needs—for the functionality that they ought to deliver—the corporate bloat they seem to have developed.
The moment something else comes along that (1) creates rich notes and (2) can sync to always-up-to-date status on all of the platforms mentioned above, I'll jump ship right away. I'll even pay more, just to spite Evernote for holding my data (practically speaking) hostage.
I work remotely for a company that works with large volumes of data. I routinely have to pass gigabytes back and forth—and having gigabit fiber enables me to do that very quickly, in just a few minutes, rather than having to plan ahead for hours of transfer time.
As far as the interface goes—the fiber.google.com interface is very simple BUT the router itself has a web-based interface on its internal IP address. At least mine does. Did you check yours while you had the service?
and I've posted this on Slashdot before, but I'll post it again.
This article is spot on.
Before Google Fiber came to town, getting and using broadband in this area was painful. It was the "telephone company utility" model. Everything had to be done by phone, with tons of time on hold. Installation was workmen with a clipboard, scheduled weeks out. You'd get 5mbps for $$ or 10mbps for $$$ or 50mbps for $$$$, no higher tier than 50mbps without paying for "business service" at the level of $500-$1k monthly. And those were your choices from every carrier. You never reached more than 25-40% of advertised speed up or down. Service was terrible and unreliable and if there was an outage you could be offline for weeks waiting for a service appointment. Account changes or cancellations were a by-telephone nightmare that were virtually destined to go wrong each time. And technical questions about configuration, blocked ports, etc.? Good luck. It was all a black box to the customer service lines. Far easier to figure such things out empirically yourself.
Then, Google Fiber came to down. Installations scheduled online. Accounts administered online, everything from payment to plan selection and changes. Transparency in equipment and documentation. And either 5mbps for FREE, 100mbps for $ or 1gb for $$, what had previously been the 5 or 10mbps cost with other carriers. Installations done in just days, rather than weeks out, by friendly people in branded vans. You get 100% of advertised speed, 24 hours a day, sustained. Outages are virtually unheard of, but if a tree does come down and knock out a line, it's fixed in a couple hours, not weeks. A walk-in Google Fiber store where you can actually talk tech details and they understand everything you're saying. It was like we jumped from 1995 to the present in a single month.
And within weeks, every other carrier had boosted their minimum residential offering to 50mbps and were suddenly offering and deploying gigabit residential fast as they possibly could, at (interestingly enough) exactly the same price as Google. Service improved drastically and they suddenly started to talk tech in their ads.
It does basically feel like Google was tired of seeing their growth limited by a bunch of small timers trying to pick the pockets of the public, so they came in and said "OYA? We're Google. FU." and got everyone gigabit. And for the other carriers it became a case of "either play fair or get fucked." So they played fair and then Google was happy to back off. If they hadn't, I wonder if Google would have continued and just put them all out of business. My impression is that Google doesn't necessarily want to be in the broadband business, but that they want to make damn sure the public has access to legitimate contemporary "broadband" pipes.
I understand that Google has an interest in this, but I don't mind at all. I'm happy to let Google profit if I get rock-solid up/down gigabit fiber with online administration for what was previously the cost of flaky 10 megabit down/768k up copper administered by an idiot bureaucracy behind a 2 hour telephone wait.
The value just isn't there. Instead, I have always bought phones one or two years behind the retail cycle, when they start to come off contract and be unlocked. You can have last year's flagship, which is usually still pretty damned good, for pennies on the dollar—under $200 for the phone with just a year of use on it, then a SIM (or before that, phoning in the numbers from the beneath the battery to the carrier) plan for cheap.
Carriers like TPO and Net10 in the US offer plans with a few gigs of data and unlimited everything else for just $25-$35 a month right now. Extra gigs run $10 a gig or so, refillable anytime, and I rarely end up using it.
I would not like to be locked into a contract, nor would I like to be limited in when I can upgrade or replace if something goes wrong.
Of course, this doesn't work so well with Apple phones, which hold their value too well. Which is one of the many reasons I don't use iOS. (The other being because I really don't like the OS experience at all, though I do like some of the apps better than the Android equivalents—but not $1k for a phone better).
Listen, going to a movie is *going*.
As in, effort. Yes, money, but also time.
- You have to drive or take a train
- You have to stay out late if you're a working person
- You have to commit 1.5-2.5 hours
- You have to deal with significantly increased costs for the comforts of refreshments, even a simple drink if you get thirsty
- It's actually quite a pain in the ass
- And of course the ticket cost
With TV?
- "Can't find anything good to watch" means a waste of a few minutes at most
- There's no transit time or other significant preparation
- You can pause at any time and return; there is no set time commitment
- Food and drink = cheap
- You can multi-task with that time
- If you "abort" a show, you can immediately do something else, and you've not lost an investment of time, money, whatever
Basically, you're investing a lot (time, money, effort, lost convenience) to go see a movie. So you want to know if it's going to suck so that you're not stuck wasting all of that investment or having to sit through something you don't enjoy just so you *don't* waste all of that investment.
In combined costs if you have, say, a spouse and a kid and the kid gets thirsty or wants a snack, it's going to cost something like $50-$60 minimum, more if you have to pay to park, which is, like, half a year of Netflix.
People don't care about TV ratings but they do care about movie ratings for the same reason they don't bother to research pencils before they buy a 10-pack at the store but they do research fountain pens before they buy one. Anytime something costs an order of magnitude more, and involves significant additional investments beyond that, people are going to want value for money.
Make new releases $1.00 PPV and show them via streaming in living rooms and people will stop caring about reviews for movies, too.
People have been saying "programming should be easier" forever.
Many have tried, all have failed.
And the task keeps getting bigger because the uses and requirements keep expanding. From one simple input (keyboard) from one source (user) to a variable domain of many complex inputs from many sources. From one simple output (answer) to a variable domain of many complex outputs to many destinations. And the core tasks, too, aside from input and output, are far more complex than they were.
If you have one hex nut to loosen and tighten, you can make a simple wrench to do it. If you have to be able to work on an infinite number fasteners—hex nuts, machine screws, torx screws, allen bolts, grommets, flip latches, tumbler locks, screw-down locks, snap fittings, adhesive strips, magnetic plates, snap rings, cotter pins, etc. and the domain of tasks goes from loosen and tighten to loosen, tighten, open, close, diverge, converge, adjust left, adjust right, increase weight, decrease weight, etc. and the number of possible surfaces increases from two adjoined flat surfaces to be bolted together to N surfaces of M possible shapes... Well, you're going to end up with a shed full of tools, each one of them reliant on a different kind of knowledge and experience.
Life is complicated. Programming is approaching use in virtually every domain of life. Ergo, programming will be complicated.
You want programming to be simple, you may as well start off by trying to make life simple—that's the root of the problem.
trying to help people who'd bought them to make use of them. One each from Acer, Lenovo, and HP.
Things:
1) The screens are absolute crap, hard to look at. They remind me of the very first active matrix color LCD panels. Fuzzy, sparkly, unclear, low-viewing-angle, low-contrast terrible.
2) You can do three things with them, as far as I can tell. Web, email, and Google Docs. Need to open a file someone sent you? Good luck. Need to print it out? Good luck. Need to share the things that you create with someone else who's not using a Chromebook and Google's ecosystem? Good luck.
3) Mac OS does web apps better, ironically. The web apps in Chrome OS are fragile. Renderbugs, whyd-it-crashes, oh-no-a-glitches galore.
4) And there aren't very many apps of any kind that are useful in any way. As I said, basically web, email, and Google Docs.
I think you get more apps, and better mileage, and better portability, and better battery life, and a better screen, and a better experience overall, out of an Android tablet.
There is a big difference between "I don't support the racist bits" and "erase all of that from history."
The former is perfectly justifiable. The latter deserves the guillotine.
"rightly"
There is no reason to block Mark Twain.
Listen here, I"m no right-winger, but facts are FACTS:
1) People were racist in the past
2) a lot of people
3) and they tortured and they maimed and they killed and they raped
4) and they wrote fiction, nonfiction, history, and philosophy about it
This is our inheritance as human beings. Any notion of "rightly blocking" racism, violence, sexism, etc. is nothing more or less than book burning.
If a politician today says something racist, by all means don't vote for them.
But if Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson says something racist, and you decide that this means that we have to erase Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson from history, all I have to say is: human history belongs to all of us, and it's both unpleasant and educational. So a big fuck you to the book burners.
What this will do is put independent sellers and entrepreneurs out of business. The largest companies, like Amazon and Wal-Mart, with the infrastructure to cope, won't miss a beat. Everyone else... won't be able to comply. eBay will fall farther behind, if not collapse entirely, because they don't sell anything themselves and aren't configured to be in the business of selling anything themselves.
This is bad for consumers and bad for the economy. And it will lead to large firms with regulatory capture dominating e-commerce. It's one more step in the centralization of the 'net as a deeply controlled profit source for a handful of megacorporations.
I'll believe this when I see it. I think it's far more likely that in 20 years the relative peace and prosperity that we see today will have broken down somewhat into less functional economies, societies, public infrastructure systems, etc. and that a small global overclass will live in relative comfort still tended to mostly by humans while the bulk of the populations around the globe continue more or less on the path that they are now.
I can see universal basic incomes happening eventually, but not in 20 years, more like 150 after a great deal of turmoil and a certain amount of reconstruction.
Kurzweil seems always to think that every Big Thing is just around the corner. If we survive long enough, I have no doubt that there will be Big Things, but society just doesn't change in 10-20 years. The names change (the Soviet Union collapses, computational machines become computers become phones) but the substance is evolving much more slowly. It's still evolving, but punctuated revolutions in the basic circumstances of life every 10-20 years like Kurzweil seems to predict just don't really happen.
Even the vaunted "smartphone revolution" hasn't changed all that much at the day-to-day level. We still drive cars, put out the trash in the morning, do the dishes, complain about veterinary bills, and bemoan the state of politics, more or less as was the case 50 years ago. Some of the details have changed, but humanity is not radically different, despite (sadly) all the hand-wringing.
Bringing 7 billion people along spread across an entire planet does not lend itself to rapid change unless the change is natural and catastrophic (i.e. beyond our control).
I own two Macbook Pros for mobile work, but for desktop work I rely on a self-built that runs MacOS and actually has the hardware that I need in it. Too bad Apple won't sell me one, I'd buy it instead and not have to worry about dealing with the vagaries and annoyances of maintaining my own white box hardware.
I don't know about cryptocurrency, though.
What I do know is that I felt very proud to not take the full cost of attendance out as loans when I was doing my degree. I thought (and the "adults" told me) that I was very smart to minimize my borrowing.
I know two separate people who took out the full cost of attendance loan (max they could get) every semester they were in school, and used that money as down payments on their first rental buildings. Years later, they both now have small real estate empires, the loans are paid off, and one retired in his '30s, all started by student loans. Both leveraged their student loan debt into investments that paid off.
Meanwhile, I was under the debt thumb for years and years and am still working for a salary 50+ hours a week. Someone was smart, and it wasn't me (despite what the older generation applauded me for).
On the other hand, I'm not sure that cryptocurrency is quite the same deal. Seems like it would be smarter to invest and rent-seek as the people that I know did.
apart from a stint as a kid when I was learning to tell time.
Smart watches sold me on the idea of "watches" but not on the idea of "smart."
with a first-generation Sony smartwatch: https://www.theverge.com/2012/...
and then a Basis tracker: http://www.bestfitnesstrackerr...
and then a Pebble: https://www.pebble.com/
and then a Moto 360: https://www.motorola.com.au/pr...
My inner gadget freak kept wanting to be wowed, but I kept not being wowed, so I kept trying other models. By the time friends started to get Apple watches, I had already transitioned to wearing traditional analog mechanical watches instead. I played with their Apple watches a bit, but it was the same basic stuff as the ones I'd tried, maybe with more spit and shine.
So smart watches got me into wristwatches... but not in the end into smart watches.
I've always been a tech early adopter, so I was expecting to eventually be seduced into the upgrade cycle or wanting the latest-and-greatest, but instead I realized that what I liked most were things like having the time on my wrist, the designs of the faces, customizing the strap/bracelet, and generally wearing them as an apparel item. What I liked least?
- Having to pair with my phone
- Having to deal with apps and taps that were cumbersome and ultimately just poorly duplicated what was on my phone
- Having to charge the watch over and over and over again
- Starting to envy the idea of having *really* timeless and personal thing on my wrist, rather than tossing out/upgrading in a year or two
Basically, I hated all the "smart" parts. And on top of that, I got a taste for the sense of the really personal nature of something that you wear on your body all the time, and suddenly didn't like the idea that this thing that was literally a part of me all the time was disposable and just a temporary relationship. For a phone, okay. For something that you touch nonstop, that becomes a part of you, it was a step too far into the bionic man world.
I have no desire to own a smart watch any longer. But I now have over 30 automatic mechanical wristwatches with lovely dials and lume, domed sapphire crystals, hefty bracelets with sold end links, and classic looks. And I am learning how to service and repair them (I recently serviced my first Slava 2427 movement) and my young son has expressed a lot of interest in them, so someday I can leave them to him and he will still be able to tell the time with them while identifying them with childhood memories and with me—something that would not be the case with a transient smart watch.
and they walk around for a few minutes with a distant look on their faces and then ask to leave, it is a shitty toy store.
I have no idea if they had a science kit in the back somewhere, or the microscope we got at Target on a top shelf somewhere (no doubt it would have cost at least double what we paid at Target) but the fact is, I have two young kids and on the couple of occasions we've gone there (once to spend a bundle of grandparent-given birthday money), both kids were, like *so meh*.
If you're a toy store and kids don't want to be there, you have a serious problem.
There are a couple of local independent toy stores, on the other hand, that they absolutely LOVE. You have to fight to get them to leave. We only shop these maybe a couple of times a year the prices are still high to me for what you get compared to online, BUT they have a very different selection of toys from brands that I don't remember on Saturday morning cartoons, not to mention very engaging displays, both of which the kids are fascinated by—it all generates that same "wow!" look that tells you the kids are fascinated. And I'd say that 35% of what the local independents stock isn't easily available online. From said local toy stores in the last year we bough a big dragon kite, a set of fairly difficult 3-D cast metal puzzles, a large bow and arrow set with foam-tipped arrows that actually has very real-life action and shoots arrows about 100 yards, a strategy game called Rubber Road that they really like, a Bloxels set, and a cool card game called Evolution that the kids are willing to play for hours and that actually does a reasonable job of illustrating the concept of natural selection in a very basic, reductive way (it's supposed to be for 12 and older, and it cost $40 ugh, but they love it anyway even though they're both under 10).
We never sighted stuff even remotely like this at our local Toys'R'Us stores. Instead, the board game aisle features about 50 variations on Monoply which of course we already have because there are eleventy billion sets already being passed down in families out there, a few ill-conceived highly branded board games that appear to be more about representing the characters to keep the kids interested in the TV property and drive ad revenue, plus a bunch of "gross out" games—plastic toilets that spray water in your face, random catapults that fling slime at the players (for which they're happy to sell extra slime on the side), etc. No strategy. Barely any rules. And the "toy" aisles are labeled with big signs: Disney. Marvel. Hasbro. Mattel. Crayola. etc. It's all organized by what appear to be brand-sponsorships, yet each aisle seems to have essentially the same stuff, just with different faces and costumes and paint jobs and packaging slapped on them. Bubble-packs of action figures hung on hooks. Below them, their "vehicles," "weapons," or "transport animals" in boxes. Supporting or minor characters toward either end of the aisle, major "characters" from the film/cartoon/etc. in the middle. All overcolored and overpriced and boring as sin.
To make matters worse, it's all $30-$50 for these cheap little hunks of plastic that really don't stimulate the imagination at all, or up to $hundreds for variations on the concept of "play house" (or castle or fortress or whatever) for said hunks of plastic. I mean, this stuff is just random brightly colored shit without much replay value or learning value, is not inspiring in the least, and would cost $3 at a Chinese import bric-a-brac store if not for the brand stamped on it and the overdone bubble packaging and loud labels IN ALL CAPS WITH EXCLAMATION MARKS! The Crayola aisle at least has creativity stuff, but the local Wal-Mart stocks the same crayon box sizes for $0.99 (for sixteen crayons) to $5.99 (for sixty-four) vs. starting at $3.49 for sixteen crayons. Who is going to pay $3.49 for a box of sixteen crayons? Or $7.99 for a 100-sheet sketch pad of not particularly high quality paper? WTF?! Particularly when the exact same items, t
Their toys are mindless un-fun corporate shit.
My kids are always bored there. We've found much more fun toys at Target, not to mention Amazon.com, whatever you think of both companies. We bought a potato-driven clock and a home-terrarium kit on Amazon.com for under $10 each that the kids enjoyed. They get TinkerCrate which they also enjoy, and I consider it expensive at $29 a crate. But walk into a Toys'R'Us and all you can get is 8" plastic action figures in garish colors for $49.99 each.
Toys'R'Us should be called AMillionFlashyBrandedOverpricedActionFigures'R'Us.
At least near us, the two stores had no science kits, no craft stuff, no learning toys to speak of, no building toys to speak of, no creative toys of any kind. The best section were bikes and skateboards in the back. The rest is literally wall-to-wall action figures from cartoons that my kids have never heard of because cartoons are so twenty years ago and we don't have TV. They are much more interested in apps than in TV.
Toys'R'Us is selling toys from decades ago—thousands of them, all the same, and for 4x what they ought to cost.
The service is excellent. Google's uptime has been flawless, the original install appointments went smoothly and were kept, the equipment is high quality, and the gigabit service does actually deliver a full gigabit of bandwidth up *and* down in tests. And all for $70/month, which includes 1TB online storage via Google Drive.
Just as cool, you can simply log into fiber.google.com and downgrade to 100mbps ($50/mo.) or 5mbps (free) at will. You can upgrade and downgrade, click, click, click, and it will pro-rate costs for you automatically. Basically, it's a flawless service in every way.
One of the things that I'm convinced hurt Google in this area is that there was already entrenched competition from the usual suspects in national broadband brands.
For decades, it had been 5mbps-10mbps down and a fifth of that upstream as the maximum service tier at every major provider. And for that you paid $50-$70 monthly. As soon as Google Fiber deployed, suddenly *every provider* offered Gigabit for less than $100/mo. plus value adds and promos. I mean, it took weeks max, once Google Fiber started scheduling installations. Just like that. And a lot of people stuck with the devil they already know, particularly if they were already getting TV and/or landline service through them, and particularly if Google had install times a week or two out but their current provider could bump them up within a day or two.
Google broke the market wide open here, but at the same time ended up with scraps in the end. Most of the people that I know stuck with their previous provider and ended up with gigabit speeds anyway at or near their previous subscription cost once Google entered the local market. I worry that if Google were to pull out of the market for some reason, suddenly "market realities" would reduce the offerings of the other providers once again to $70/mo. for 5mbps, as it had previously been.
So I hope Google stays.
sites that use this show a dialog that uses local store and enables you to opt in.
"Once you've read, say, your first five articles, fade in a modal that says "You seem to like what we're providing here. We need funds to operate—journalism isn't cheap, traditional subscription models are dying, and we need funds to operate. To continue to read, you need to select one of these options:
[ ] Mine Monero for us as you read (preferred)
[ ] See ads as you read (more obtrusive)
Save Preference and Read On >"
Then, after that, if you don't opt in to either one and you visit, you just see this modal each time you visit instead of articles. No opt-in, no articles.
That way, consumption of the work is funded, but consumers are given an opt-in choice that is unobtrusive and saved once, then remembered so that they don't have to bother with it, and you get your choice between ads and mining.
But it should be opt-in, not silent default. The silent default of ads that don't pay the bills (so that you need to click fifty times to read the equivalent of ten paragraphs) is the problem with the entire web right now, and it's killing the web.
Bigger problem: you can't see what other people share. FB has "monetized" themselves out of the business by selling all the space in the feed to advertisers and never showing you anything from the people that you're trying to stay connected to.
It used to be a good tool for keeping up with everyone in your circle and what they're up to in a kind of rapid, quick-check way. Now if you want to see your friends' or family's updates, you have to go to each person's timeline individually, one at a time. Otherwise, they're essentially invisible to you. So you just call them instead, since it amounts to the same thing as checking and scrolling through every individual profile one by one.
Meanwhile, your feed is a whole bunch of bullshit clickbait from advertisers that have paid to insert themselves into the feeds of everyone of your age and your gender in your country.
And on the very rare occasion that you do happen to see a promoted item on your feed that you're interested in, generally the the app updates the feed just as you're about to tap on it, and *poof* it's gone. And there's no way in heaven or hell to go back and find it ever again, it's just gone. It's literally a platform for carefully obscuring from you anything you want to see and putting in front of you and endless list of things you couldn't care less about.
That's not what anyone was promised when they signed up, or what led to Facebook's growth.
Basically as soon as they decided to monetize the feed aggressively, the result was predictable and lots of people predicted it. "Great, so now we're going to see a lot of ads that we don't give a shit about, disguised as 'updates' from organizations and pages we don't care about, and everything we do care about will be hidden."
Yup. Exactly what happened.
wristwatches... But I no longer have the two smartwatches that I bought. Instead, I have a handful of wristwatches, any one of which I wear on a given day, without fail. The smartwatches themselves are long gone to eBay.
The smartwatches were a pain to use and did nothing well, had a hit-and-miss UI that only sometimes felt even partially usable, and they had to keep coming off and on for charging, which meant that I'd routinely forget to wear them for the day (I tried two in succession). I really liked having the time and date on my wrist, though, and once I tried an old fashioned self-winding mechanical analog wristwatch, I loved having this little machine on my wrist that did its job *perfectly* and without intervention and was scheduled to do so for the next 15-20 years until needing, in very quaint fashion, to be "lubed" with highly refined dino oil by a mechanical specialist.
So I've ended up with several pieces of 19th century technology (which is really just miniaturized 16th century technology) that do the job rather well and also are visually fascinating and aesthetically pleasing to look at as they do it. They're maintenance-free, water resistant to 200 meters, really impervious to most any hazard, and when I change them I only take them off for a few seconds to swap, rather than having to leave them off for hours, so I rarely forget to wear one. It does happen, but far less often than it did with the smartwatches.
And as a bonus, telling time now Just Works—there's no need to wake them up (which often required actual "steps" on the smartwatches, despite advertising to the obvious), they just show the time all the time. Even if I'm, day, driving and need to leave my hand on the wheel, I can just glance at an angle and read the time easily. They don't require me to move my arm from the steering wheel and/or do actual stuff to read them.
As a bonus, a reasonable quality mechanical wristwatch from Seiko or Orient costs 1/3 to 1/2 what a smartwatch does, so for the same price you can have several traditional wristwatches that will last many years and offer a variety of styles and appearances and provide redundancy in the case that one should fail... Without the further requirement of periodic "upgrades."
So smartwatches convinced me to wear a watch. Just not, in the end, a smartwatch.