I was sent a survey to rate a business I frequent-- not to be posted online, just as feedback to the owner. I was asked to rate my experience on a scale of 1 to 10. If I selected 10, it asked the question, "What did you like about your experience?" I selected 8, and the question automatically changed to "What did we do wrong?"
I didn't think they did anything wrong, but to me, the service warranted an 8. To me, 8 is good, just not quite excellent. So I answered the question, "It's not that you did anything wrong. I liked [a bunch of stuff]. In my opinion, you could improve by [doing some things]." I thought it was a very fair review, and I tried to give constructive feedback. I few days later, I got a phone call from the owner to apologize. It wasn't quite annoying, but it definitely seemed unnecessary and awkward, but I said thank you and reiterated that I thought the service was good, and I didn't intend the rating of 8 as a complaint.
Since then, the business has continued to send me requests for feedback. My overwhelming feeling is not wanting to go through that experience, so I either just rate them a 10, or I ignore the survey entirely.
So I read a rumor (sorry, no link) that indicated they're not going to kill Hangouts, but they are trying to simplify their offerings. Right now, they have a few different applications that are doing text messages (SMS), IM, voice calling, etc. Supposedly they're going to expand Hangouts and try to turn it into a unified business communications platform similar to Skype for Business. Then they're going to have a few consumer-grade apps, e.g. Google Voice plus a messenger app similar to Facebook's.
I have no idea if that's true, whether the rumor was created by someone with inside knowledge, or whether it's pure speculation. Years of tracking Apple products have lead me to be interested in but doubtful of all rumors.
I don't remember exactly, and maybe someone will remember and have a link handy, but I think there was a recent study (in the past few years) that suggested that mild forms of synaesthesia might be extremely common, and in fact simply part of how human intelligence works.
I think the suggestion was that there are various ways that we connect sense information naturally, and unavoidably. Red is hot. Blue is cold. Red tastes like cherries and green like sour apple. Odd numbers might seem sharp to you, while evens seem rounded. Someone yelling angrily at a certain pitch might conjure the feeling of running your hand the wrong way on a cheese grater. You might feel a tactile sense of pain when hearing finger nails on a chalkboard.
Now someone is going to come forward and point out that many of these things might just be learned associations, which is true. I think the argument was that the ability to make these associations, as well as the ability to form and understand metaphors like "His voice was like rubbing your hand the wrong way on a cheese grater," implies that your brain is already capable of tying different kinds of sensory information together. Visual information can have a sound. Sounds can have colors. Colors can have tastes. What we call "synaesthesia" may just be an amplified version of this very common phenomenon.
Deferring particular updates to also be pushed down outside of my control doesn't really solve the issue. I want real control over what patches are applied, when they're installed, and when reboots happen.
I agree with this. Along with everything else, if you work for a small company, you may end up working with big companies as clients, partners, or suppliers. Having experience in the inner workings of big companies can be immensely helpful in understanding how to deal with them.
Honestly, I don't have enough real insight into the research, publishing, and review process to agree or disagree with you about their share of the blame. I would say this, though: Part of the job of reporters is to research the topic they're reporting on and vet their sources. If we assume that the universities and researchers are misrepresenting their results on a regular basis, then reporters should start refusing to air stories about these "discoveries", or at least report them with a tone of skepticism.
It'd be like if the political reporters were simply repeating the politicians' press releases, without even a superficial check to verify that the information in the press release isn't inaccurate propaganda. Unfortunately, that's actually something that a lot of reporters seem to do. They just take whatever story some business or political group is pushing, interpret it uncritically, and then publish it with a sensational slant that will be pleasing to their viewers/readers.
You're right that we keep getting contradictory information, but the problem often isn't that the studies are bad in themselves, it's that the reporting on the study is bad.
One group does a study that shows a correlation between diet and "brain shrinkage". That's all. One study finds some kind of statistical correlation. Further study is needed. First, the study should be replicated before really trusting the results. Someone would also have to hypothesize what the causal link is, and then study that, because (sorry, I know it has become a cliche, but...) correlation does not equal causation.
But ok, let's assume for the sake of argument that it's determined that the exact diet described here as the "Mediterranean diet" prevents "brain shrinkage". Ok. Now what? What is "brain shrinkage"? Is brain shrinkage bad? What are the negative effects of it? Are their positive effects of brain shrinkage? Oh, and are there other negative effects of the Mediterranean diet that outweigh the benefits of preventing brain shrinkage?
Nobody really knows. I'm sure an expert could provide some information in response to their answers, but they won't have a complete answer.
But reporters don't necessarily understand all of that, and in any case, that kind of nuanced and intelligent reporting won't sell ad time on CNN. You know what will grab people's attention? The headline, "Drinking olive oil will make you smarter!" So that's what they report, and suddenly the common wisdom is that we should all be guzzling a gallon of olive oil per day.
And then a few years later, there will be another study where there's some correlation between olive oil and an increased risk of some particular rare form of cancer. There will be all the same uncertainties and complications of interpreting the results of the study, but reporters won't report on the complications. There will just be a headline, "Olive oil causes cancer!" Now everyone decides we're supposed to cut olive oil our of our diets.
Science may eventually find that the studies themselves were flawed, or the results were misinterpreted, or the correlation was just a statistical anomaly. Or we may eventually find that there is a correlation, but the causal link is something unexpected. Maybe people who cook with olive oil are less likely to eat butter, and butter causes brain shrinkage. Or, it's possible, just possible, that olive oil does in fact help to prevent brain shrinkage as well as increase the risk of a rare form of cancer, but that it does each of these things to such a minor degree that it's not worth considering when choosing what to eat.
It's also true that some studies are bad. Unfortunately, we don't put much priority on repeating studies to confirm results. However, the far bigger problem is that most of our news outlets suck. Even the respectable ones like the BBC and New York Times are just awful. Honestly, I'm not sure how to improve them, because another big piece of the problem is that *we, the audience*, suck. We insist on clicking on clickbait, watching tabloid junk, and superstitiously believing whatever our chosen news outlet reports.
Yeah, I came in here to comment because I'm not sure this is gaslighting. It seems the behavior would be better described as "scrutinizing" or "micromanaging", or perhaps just "fucking with".
For example, cancelling someone else's appointment at the last minute is not "gaslighting". If you somehow hacked into someone's email account and occasionally deleted reminders from their calendar, specifically so that they would miss appointments and think they'd forgotten to put it on their calendar, *that* would be gaslighting. Telling a coworker that their code sucks is not gaslighting. Covertly adding typos to their working code, without leaving any record of the edit, so that it mysterious stops working and the author believes they just had a bunch of typos-- that would be gaslighting.
Gaslighting is all about messing with someone in such a way that they don't know you're doing it, and instead feel like they're the one who is making mistakes, forgetting things, misplacing things, etc. The intention is to make them doubt their own abilities and sanity. What was described in the summary doesn't sound like gaslighting.
Yeah. One of the things I find really annoying is connecting to VPN using the built-in Windows VPN. You used to be able to click on an icon on the task bar, find the VPN tunnel, and click "Connect". Done.
Now it's the same process, but when you click on the VPN tunnel, it opens the window for VPN settings. You then have to locate that VPN tunnel again in that window, and click on the tunnel name, and then click on a button that says "Connect". Then you have to close that Window.
By no longer being news, and being tabloid journalism instead. By being clickbait instead of useful information. I go through a lot of different news sources, and many of them are still full of nonsense.
I'm not particularly a fan of Medium, and it may be that in this instance, blaming the "broken system" is an excuse. However, that doesn't mean he's wrong. The system is broken. It is not serving people well.
Meh. Here's the thing, a lot of people want things to be cheap, and getting something this nice and thin and light for under $1000 is a pretty good job of keeping prices low. In order to make that price, Dell was going to have to cut corners somewhere. I'd rather have less RAM (as long as it's at least 4 GB) and less hard drive space (as long as it's over 100 GB) than sacrifice on the quality of the screen (for example).
In short, I think it's fine to sell a laptop with these specs as long as they also provide an option to scale up those specs for people who want something more. If it's 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB drive soldered onto the motherboard, with no upgrade options, then I'm a bit annoyed. But not too annoyed, because really it means I just won't buy it. But I'm only using 128 GB on my work computer right now, and that includes 2 VMs.
But for the 95% of the population who only needs bursty CPU power for web browsing and firing off tweets and Facebook posts, it's pretty ideal.
I would say that's true even for people who are doing normal office tasks. Even running something like Microsoft Outlook or doing some light editing in Photoshop isn't going to require more than an occasional burst of CPU. Most people overestimate the power they require for their computing. I've dealt with a lot of people who say they require a high-end CPU, tons of RAM, and a nice video card. Then they spend all day in Office apps, CPU basically idle, using 2GB of RAM, rendering nothing in 3D except for their OS putting drop shadows behind windows.
Yes, that's why I avoid them. They're not part of some character sets (including UTF-8) and are likely to turn into some kind of gibberish if you convert text between character sets.
Who's freedom of speech is being violated here? They're still perfectly free to say whatever they want...
The "freedom of speech" is being infringed when you tell people where and when they can do it, or when you say, "it can't be made public". Obviously those things can be restricted in some cases, e.g. you can't share classified information, but adding new restrictions on the freedom of speech shouldn't be taken lightly. It certainly shouldn't be done by one political party in order to shut up their opposition-- which is exactly what the first amendment was written to prevent.
And oddly enough, the first amendment doesn't cover the freedom to record nor broadcast whatever the hell you want
What, are you retarded? They didn't have recorders or broadcasting systems when the first amendment was written. However, they did having these things called "printing presses", and they explicitly put into the first amendment that you were allowed to use those to "broadcast" whatever the hell you want. I'm going to stop arguing with you, though, because you're obviously an idiot.
Actually, Republicans respond by adding a penalty to the existing rules against photos and videos from the floor.
It was technically against the rules, but with no penalty, and not enforced.
What's remarkable is that the video while the house was out of session was being done for purely political purposes, something that C-SPAN was created to avoid.
Nonsense. The whole of Congress exists for political purposes. Speeches made by Senators and Representatives are all political. The first amendment protections of speech and protest are for the purpose of protecting political speech. And CSPAN is there to record ongoing politics. The purpose of the rules in Congress are not, or at least should not be, to silence the opinions of those who disagree with the political party in power.
So you're fine with the freedom of speech being infringed upon, so long as you disagree with the people whose rights are being taken away? It seems like that's only serving to validate the concerns about social justice.
Even assume that's not going to happen, it's a pretty disturbing proposal, especially considering it seems to be in response to this:
But after the sit-in, led by John Lewis (D-Ga.), Ryan called a recess, effectively ending the C-SPAN broadcast. That is when Democrats used their phones and took to social media.
So Democrats staged a public protest. Republicans shut down the broadcast. Democrats resorted to broadcasting online by streaming from their phones. Republicans respond by trying to make streaming illegal. That's pretty fucked up.
Slashdot Mirror
Another aspect of this that's weird to me:
I was sent a survey to rate a business I frequent-- not to be posted online, just as feedback to the owner. I was asked to rate my experience on a scale of 1 to 10. If I selected 10, it asked the question, "What did you like about your experience?" I selected 8, and the question automatically changed to "What did we do wrong?"
I didn't think they did anything wrong, but to me, the service warranted an 8. To me, 8 is good, just not quite excellent. So I answered the question, "It's not that you did anything wrong. I liked [a bunch of stuff]. In my opinion, you could improve by [doing some things]." I thought it was a very fair review, and I tried to give constructive feedback. I few days later, I got a phone call from the owner to apologize. It wasn't quite annoying, but it definitely seemed unnecessary and awkward, but I said thank you and reiterated that I thought the service was good, and I didn't intend the rating of 8 as a complaint.
Since then, the business has continued to send me requests for feedback. My overwhelming feeling is not wanting to go through that experience, so I either just rate them a 10, or I ignore the survey entirely.
So I read a rumor (sorry, no link) that indicated they're not going to kill Hangouts, but they are trying to simplify their offerings. Right now, they have a few different applications that are doing text messages (SMS), IM, voice calling, etc. Supposedly they're going to expand Hangouts and try to turn it into a unified business communications platform similar to Skype for Business. Then they're going to have a few consumer-grade apps, e.g. Google Voice plus a messenger app similar to Facebook's.
I have no idea if that's true, whether the rumor was created by someone with inside knowledge, or whether it's pure speculation. Years of tracking Apple products have lead me to be interested in but doubtful of all rumors.
I don't remember exactly, and maybe someone will remember and have a link handy, but I think there was a recent study (in the past few years) that suggested that mild forms of synaesthesia might be extremely common, and in fact simply part of how human intelligence works.
I think the suggestion was that there are various ways that we connect sense information naturally, and unavoidably. Red is hot. Blue is cold. Red tastes like cherries and green like sour apple. Odd numbers might seem sharp to you, while evens seem rounded. Someone yelling angrily at a certain pitch might conjure the feeling of running your hand the wrong way on a cheese grater. You might feel a tactile sense of pain when hearing finger nails on a chalkboard.
Now someone is going to come forward and point out that many of these things might just be learned associations, which is true. I think the argument was that the ability to make these associations, as well as the ability to form and understand metaphors like "His voice was like rubbing your hand the wrong way on a cheese grater," implies that your brain is already capable of tying different kinds of sensory information together. Visual information can have a sound. Sounds can have colors. Colors can have tastes. What we call "synaesthesia" may just be an amplified version of this very common phenomenon.
Deferring particular updates to also be pushed down outside of my control doesn't really solve the issue. I want real control over what patches are applied, when they're installed, and when reboots happen.
This sounds like a good move. While they're giving users some control back, can we get back the ability to control when updates run?
I agree with this. Along with everything else, if you work for a small company, you may end up working with big companies as clients, partners, or suppliers. Having experience in the inner workings of big companies can be immensely helpful in understanding how to deal with them.
Honestly, I don't have enough real insight into the research, publishing, and review process to agree or disagree with you about their share of the blame. I would say this, though: Part of the job of reporters is to research the topic they're reporting on and vet their sources. If we assume that the universities and researchers are misrepresenting their results on a regular basis, then reporters should start refusing to air stories about these "discoveries", or at least report them with a tone of skepticism.
It'd be like if the political reporters were simply repeating the politicians' press releases, without even a superficial check to verify that the information in the press release isn't inaccurate propaganda. Unfortunately, that's actually something that a lot of reporters seem to do. They just take whatever story some business or political group is pushing, interpret it uncritically, and then publish it with a sensational slant that will be pleasing to their viewers/readers.
All the way.
You're right that we keep getting contradictory information, but the problem often isn't that the studies are bad in themselves, it's that the reporting on the study is bad.
One group does a study that shows a correlation between diet and "brain shrinkage". That's all. One study finds some kind of statistical correlation. Further study is needed. First, the study should be replicated before really trusting the results. Someone would also have to hypothesize what the causal link is, and then study that, because (sorry, I know it has become a cliche, but...) correlation does not equal causation.
But ok, let's assume for the sake of argument that it's determined that the exact diet described here as the "Mediterranean diet" prevents "brain shrinkage". Ok. Now what? What is "brain shrinkage"? Is brain shrinkage bad? What are the negative effects of it? Are their positive effects of brain shrinkage? Oh, and are there other negative effects of the Mediterranean diet that outweigh the benefits of preventing brain shrinkage?
Nobody really knows. I'm sure an expert could provide some information in response to their answers, but they won't have a complete answer.
But reporters don't necessarily understand all of that, and in any case, that kind of nuanced and intelligent reporting won't sell ad time on CNN. You know what will grab people's attention? The headline, "Drinking olive oil will make you smarter!" So that's what they report, and suddenly the common wisdom is that we should all be guzzling a gallon of olive oil per day.
And then a few years later, there will be another study where there's some correlation between olive oil and an increased risk of some particular rare form of cancer. There will be all the same uncertainties and complications of interpreting the results of the study, but reporters won't report on the complications. There will just be a headline, "Olive oil causes cancer!" Now everyone decides we're supposed to cut olive oil our of our diets.
Science may eventually find that the studies themselves were flawed, or the results were misinterpreted, or the correlation was just a statistical anomaly. Or we may eventually find that there is a correlation, but the causal link is something unexpected. Maybe people who cook with olive oil are less likely to eat butter, and butter causes brain shrinkage. Or, it's possible, just possible, that olive oil does in fact help to prevent brain shrinkage as well as increase the risk of a rare form of cancer, but that it does each of these things to such a minor degree that it's not worth considering when choosing what to eat.
It's also true that some studies are bad. Unfortunately, we don't put much priority on repeating studies to confirm results. However, the far bigger problem is that most of our news outlets suck. Even the respectable ones like the BBC and New York Times are just awful. Honestly, I'm not sure how to improve them, because another big piece of the problem is that *we, the audience*, suck. We insist on clicking on clickbait, watching tabloid junk, and superstitiously believing whatever our chosen news outlet reports.
Yeah, I came in here to comment because I'm not sure this is gaslighting. It seems the behavior would be better described as "scrutinizing" or "micromanaging", or perhaps just "fucking with".
For example, cancelling someone else's appointment at the last minute is not "gaslighting". If you somehow hacked into someone's email account and occasionally deleted reminders from their calendar, specifically so that they would miss appointments and think they'd forgotten to put it on their calendar, *that* would be gaslighting. Telling a coworker that their code sucks is not gaslighting. Covertly adding typos to their working code, without leaving any record of the edit, so that it mysterious stops working and the author believes they just had a bunch of typos-- that would be gaslighting.
Gaslighting is all about messing with someone in such a way that they don't know you're doing it, and instead feel like they're the one who is making mistakes, forgetting things, misplacing things, etc. The intention is to make them doubt their own abilities and sanity. What was described in the summary doesn't sound like gaslighting.
Yeah. One of the things I find really annoying is connecting to VPN using the built-in Windows VPN. You used to be able to click on an icon on the task bar, find the VPN tunnel, and click "Connect". Done.
Now it's the same process, but when you click on the VPN tunnel, it opens the window for VPN settings. You then have to locate that VPN tunnel again in that window, and click on the tunnel name, and then click on a button that says "Connect". Then you have to close that Window.
Why on earth did they change that?
By no longer being news, and being tabloid journalism instead. By being clickbait instead of useful information. I go through a lot of different news sources, and many of them are still full of nonsense.
It's not working for you. You're just so misinformed that you don't know how badly it's serving you.
I'm not particularly a fan of Medium, and it may be that in this instance, blaming the "broken system" is an excuse. However, that doesn't mean he's wrong. The system is broken. It is not serving people well.
Meh. Here's the thing, a lot of people want things to be cheap, and getting something this nice and thin and light for under $1000 is a pretty good job of keeping prices low. In order to make that price, Dell was going to have to cut corners somewhere. I'd rather have less RAM (as long as it's at least 4 GB) and less hard drive space (as long as it's over 100 GB) than sacrifice on the quality of the screen (for example).
In short, I think it's fine to sell a laptop with these specs as long as they also provide an option to scale up those specs for people who want something more. If it's 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB drive soldered onto the motherboard, with no upgrade options, then I'm a bit annoyed. But not too annoyed, because really it means I just won't buy it. But I'm only using 128 GB on my work computer right now, and that includes 2 VMs.
But for the 95% of the population who only needs bursty CPU power for web browsing and firing off tweets and Facebook posts, it's pretty ideal.
I would say that's true even for people who are doing normal office tasks. Even running something like Microsoft Outlook or doing some light editing in Photoshop isn't going to require more than an occasional burst of CPU. Most people overestimate the power they require for their computing. I've dealt with a lot of people who say they require a high-end CPU, tons of RAM, and a nice video card. Then they spend all day in Office apps, CPU basically idle, using 2GB of RAM, rendering nothing in 3D except for their OS putting drop shadows behind windows.
You need some method of storing energy gathered during the day.
Well I don't know what the problem is, then, but if I copy them into a text editor, save as UTF-8, and reopen... I get gibberish back.
Yes, that's why I avoid them. They're not part of some character sets (including UTF-8) and are likely to turn into some kind of gibberish if you convert text between character sets.
Who's freedom of speech is being violated here? They're still perfectly free to say whatever they want...
The "freedom of speech" is being infringed when you tell people where and when they can do it, or when you say, "it can't be made public". Obviously those things can be restricted in some cases, e.g. you can't share classified information, but adding new restrictions on the freedom of speech shouldn't be taken lightly. It certainly shouldn't be done by one political party in order to shut up their opposition-- which is exactly what the first amendment was written to prevent.
And oddly enough, the first amendment doesn't cover the freedom to record nor broadcast whatever the hell you want
What, are you retarded? They didn't have recorders or broadcasting systems when the first amendment was written. However, they did having these things called "printing presses", and they explicitly put into the first amendment that you were allowed to use those to "broadcast" whatever the hell you want. I'm going to stop arguing with you, though, because you're obviously an idiot.
I think you're making the rather childish mistake of thinking that you can separate, "the business of governance" and "politics".
But at least you did admit that the Republicans are not trying to make it illegal, just attach a penalty to an existing rule that previously had none.
Taking a penalty-less procedural rule and attaching legal consequences *is* "making it illegal".
Not by itself. But trying to block Congress-critters from using protests and free speech certainly doesn't protect free speech.
Actually, Republicans respond by adding a penalty to the existing rules against photos and videos from the floor.
It was technically against the rules, but with no penalty, and not enforced.
What's remarkable is that the video while the house was out of session was being done for purely political purposes, something that C-SPAN was created to avoid.
Nonsense. The whole of Congress exists for political purposes. Speeches made by Senators and Representatives are all political. The first amendment protections of speech and protest are for the purpose of protecting political speech. And CSPAN is there to record ongoing politics. The purpose of the rules in Congress are not, or at least should not be, to silence the opinions of those who disagree with the political party in power.
So you're fine with the freedom of speech being infringed upon, so long as you disagree with the people whose rights are being taken away? It seems like that's only serving to validate the concerns about social justice.
Even assume that's not going to happen, it's a pretty disturbing proposal, especially considering it seems to be in response to this:
But after the sit-in, led by John Lewis (D-Ga.), Ryan called a recess, effectively ending the C-SPAN broadcast. That is when Democrats used their phones and took to social media.
So Democrats staged a public protest. Republicans shut down the broadcast. Democrats resorted to broadcasting online by streaming from their phones. Republicans respond by trying to make streaming illegal. That's pretty fucked up.