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Apple removes Lebanese village names from Apple Maps as Israel attacks (twitter.com)
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this is misleading: Apple sources external datasets for maps and continuously imports, which used Scala last i knew, so the question is what upstream map source is removing Lebanese sites?
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Well we know that someone does not want to hurt trump and that someone is most probably tim Cook
Apple has removed most of the towns and villages in Lebanon from Apple maps (maps.apple.com)
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Israel is really out there just killing everyone in the middle east
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What’s the point in sharing these articles on HN, when the comment section shows they are clearly just used as an excuse for people to vocally confirm their own biases?
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Willful blindness as a service
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How 1984 of them. "This village never existed, stop asking about it"
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Currently 50 points and is just a link to Apple Maps with an unverified claim. EDIT: I'm at -2 for stating a fact.
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Apple maps used (last i knew) Scala to import externally sourced map datasets continuously, and those may have lost towns and villages in Lebanon.
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I don't understand what using Scala has to do with anything here.
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What purpose would this serve in any way? Could it be that their data source is tied to satellite data that is now being blacked out?
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This reminds me a bit of the Gulf of America fiasco from last year where if you changed your location to outside the US it would go back to showing Gulf of Mexico. I'm not sure why they would do this for US users unless the US government requested it.
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This saddens me and I don’t understand why it is allowed to continue. And I’m not just talking about Apple Maps.
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Any justification given by Apple?
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We all know why, but we're too scared to say.
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Apple does much of their own mapping but they also rely quite a bit on external data sources, whichever one of those they use probably dropped the data for one reason or another.
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They might genuinely not exist any more. The world's attention was heavily distracted by the campaign in Iran and the Hormuz strait while Israel never stopped doing their ...stuff... in Lebanon.
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And if they do, they probably don't want to be found
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This is amid an ongoing bombing campaign by Israel which is primarily targeting civilians.
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Are they just keeping up to date? The bombed town no longer exists so they update the map.
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Those towns and villages will be rebuilt after the war. This is not excuse for what Apple did, it is justification for ethnic cleansing and occupation. Same as with Gaza City. It existed for 3500 years, it will be rebuilt and it will outlive the US/Israel for sure.
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How is removing a city from a map a some sort of sign that apple did it for malicious reasons?
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Are you for real?
Are sugar substitutes healthier than the real thing? (economist.com)
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> In some randomised controlled trials (typically lasting 4-12 weeks) substituting other sweeteners for sugars did admittedly result in lower weight gain. But a number of large, long-term observational studies have found the opposite: people with higher consumption of sugar substitutes—some of whom may be using these to replace sugar in their diets—end up putting on more weight than those who consume the least. These two statements are orthogonal to each other but they're misleadingly positioned to suggest that they're not. Claim A: People who consume artificial sweeteners instead of sugar gained less weight than the people who consumed equivalent sugar. Claim B: People who consume more artificial sweetener in general, with zero relation to equivalent sugar replacement, had more problems than people who consumed less artificial sweetener. But this says absolutely nothing about what health problems would occur if those people had instead consumed sugar equivalent to the greater artificial sweetener intake.
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Emphatically, no. These are industrial experiments, in a similar vein to various Canola oils etc. We have things much worse than aspartame. A chemical byproduct of sucralose known as sucralose-6-acetate has been identified as highly genotoxic, meaning it breaks down DNA and may increase cancer risks. Found in common sucralose-based sweeteners, it causes a "leaky gut" by damaging intestinal walls and poses serious health risks, even at low, allowed consumption levels. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/a-chemical-found-in-common-artificial-sweetener-may-cause-dna-damage-cancer Heart Attacks (Erythritol): The sweetener erythritol, common in "keto-friendly" drinks, has been linked to increased blood clotting, potentially doubling the risk of heart attack or stroke. https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/are-artificial-sweeteners-bad-for-you/ However, high levels of fructose have been engineered in many formerly natural foods, which is also dangerous (though far less so). https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/13ecikd/til_modern_fruit_is_becoming_too_sweet_for_zoo/ Sugar-free drinks are increasingly linked to serious health risks, with studies suggesting they are not harmless alternatives. Key concerns include a 20% higher risk of AFib (irregular heartbeat), increased stroke and cardiovascular disease risks, and potential links to type 2 diabetes. They may also trigger digestive issues, gut microbiome disruption, and tooth decay. Xylitol and Stevia may be exceptions, but they are also more naturally occurring.
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What a terrible article! "Sugar substitutes are a mixed sachet. They include synthetic concoctions (such as aspartame, saccharin and sucralose) and substances derived from plants, including a family of carbohydrates known as sugar alcohols (such as erythritol, maltitol, sorbitol and xylitol) and stevia." So they're all completely different substances, with completely different effects on the human body. Surely the article will address that critical piece of info? "a number of large, long-term observational studies have found the opposite: people with higher consumption of sugar substitutes—some of whom may be using these to replace sugar in their diets—end up putting on more weight than those who consume the least." Nope. There's barely even an article there, and it just makes a giant sweeping generalization. They might as well have written an article about how food is bad for humans, because they studied several kinds of food (including poisonous mushrooms) and some people got sick.
Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS (boringbar.app)
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“$9.99/year”. <closes tab> C’mon, man, there’s not even a backend to support. Want more revenue next year? Release a new version that’s a compelling upgrade.
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One-time fee? I would be onboard instantly. Monthly fee? For what exactly? There is no recurring cost like server space or anything else. Nope, you lost me as a customer. For good.
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Remember when we bought software, and owned the right to use it in perpetuity? Good times those were. Now fucking taskbars are SaaS. There is no end to rent-seeking behaviour. In a decade or two, I suppose we will not only be renting the right to use our computers, but also the mouse and keyboard will be time-gated rentals as well. Mousewheel and numpad only available on the Pro subscription, of course.
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Subscription on something like this is goofy, and extra subscription per seat even for personal is goofier. For free, I can use Alfred/Raycast, Aerospace, and either sketchybar or zebar and have all this functionality executed even more skillfully and ergonomically. If you want to throw money into it, Alfred power pack is £34 and supports a great company with a lifetime purchase. But I also understand I’m not the target audience for this, and some of my coworkers that wanted a Mac because “it’s a Mac” and now compare everything to Windows would probably use it. I’ll just have to feel bad for their wallets.
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Ah, good old Apple, where for only $9.99 a month, you can experience what Linux offered for free 15+ years ago.
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+1 to amplify the voice that hates a subscription to a taskbar. If it was €15 one time I would’ve instantly bought it.
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Looks nice, I'm forced to use OSX at work, but it's a hard no for another subscription.
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it looks great, looks clean, seems like people want it. nobody's paying a subscription for a taskbar. The business model here is a one time sale.
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Is there some more expensive tiers to change the color or do I need to pay a premium?
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I love that you've made this, but in a world of never ending subscriptions, a subscription to a taskbar is just not something I (or many I imagine) can justify - no matter how low the price. We really have entered the age of everything being a subscription.
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While I don't use a Mac as my primary anymore, I'm surprised I like the look of this! It actually looks quite Mac-like as well. Subscription is a big nope here, though. Especially for Mac software, I'd expect something where you pay for one major version, that is guaranteed to works on specific macOS versions, and gets minor bugfix updates too. But maybe the next macOS version requires a newer major version update to run, in which case you pay an upgrade fee to buy the next major version - or maybe the next major version has new features you might want to upgrade to as well. My old Macs are stuck on 10.13, and I see Ubar mentioned elsewhere in this thread and that it's still compatible with 10.13. I might consider the $30 one off price to buy Ubar and keep it forever, but I wouldn't do a $10 subscription.
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Please don't overindex on this comment OP, $10 a year is completely reasonable and the status quo they describe has killed so much software for so little benefit It's a subscription with extra steps and worse retention.
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Of coarse its a subscription...
I would pay $10 one time for this; a subscription seems excessive to me.
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100%. A subscription is instant death for this. The good news is someone definitely will (or perhaps already has) done this without one.
I am the target audience for this, from a UX and tech perspective. It addresses a problem I have and for which I periodically audition solutions. A subscription for a menu bar, though, kills it for me. I have apps on Macs that are over 20 years old. Some of those companies don’t exist anymore. I’m not going to risk paying $100 for a decade of your app and hope that your company, or your goodwill, stays around that long.
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I think that’s a fair question. My thinking is pretty simple: most people will probably choose the basic 2-device plan, which works out to about $0.85 per month. For an app like this, I think that is a reasonable price. Another reason is that a lot of Mac apps charge a one-time fee upfront, but then require paid upgrades later. In practice, that often ends up being similar to paying for a few years of ongoing support anyway. I also think a low-cost subscription sets a clearer expectation that the app will continue to be maintained and kept working as macOS changes. For software like this, where OS updates can easily break things, that felt like the more honest model.
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Adding on to this, apps that hook into window management and multi-monitor behavior can break in subtle ways over time. I ran into some of that with uBar on my setup, especially around multi-monitor use and waking from sleep, and I wanted boringBar’s pricing to match the expectation of continued support and fixes.
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It's a tiny market. Why would they bother if only 10 people will give them $10?
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Apparently not that tiny, if a competitor has the same product priced at $30 and is currently on to version 4 after 12+ years in business!
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They can set whatever price they want. And in business... for a micro saas? Is that just... waiting?
I use uBar for this: https://ubarapp.com but this looks like a nice lightweight alternative!
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Both are under 10MB, So I don't think there would be much difference.
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https://lawand.io/taskbar/ as well and https://noteifyapp.com/activedock/ , which is less extreme but has a start menu-like launcher option Both have one-time/lifetime purchase options. Taskbar is $25 one-time with a free but expiring older version. ActiveDock's one-time prices are $15 (1 year of updates, but usable forever) and $60 (lifetime updates).
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uBar looks amazing as well, and it’s not a subscription, I really like boringBar but can’t justify a subscription tho
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Most people can't juggle one ball (lesswrong.com)
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Just today I improved my record to 18 minutes. Btw, I noticed my juggling is completely subconscious, I don't move my hands voluntarily where the ball is, the hands move on its own.
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> Another mistake is completely ignoring the ball and staring into the distance. I'm not entirely sure why, but I've seen it a bunch more with *rats* than anywhere else. In any case, I would recommend you just casually glance up at the ball as it reaches the top of its arc Is 'rats' a juggling jargon I'm unfamiliar with? Or do rats stare into the distance often?
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TFA is posted in/for a community where "rats" is slang for the community members.
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Rationalists. It's lesswrong slang.
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I taught myself in junior high to juggle three balls with two hands and two balls with one hand. It's not a huge accomplishment but what amazes me is that I can go years without trying it and when an opportunity comes up I can just do it again, within just a couple of tries. Those neuronal connections just never go away.
Longtime juggler here. Outside of more complicated tricks like the claw and other specialized patterns, the most common juggling patterns (such as the cascade [1]) don’t rely as much on pure handeye coordination as they do on maintaining a consistent, even toss. The key is throwing each ball so it rises and falls in a predictable arc, so it lands approximately in the same spot where your other hand is waiting to catch it. When I teach complete beginners, I actually start with a set of special handkerchiefs. They fall more slowly than balls, which gives learners more time to react and makes it much easier to see and follow the path of each object through the air. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_(juggling)
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Any recommendations for youtube lessons?
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A long time ago (pre-internet) I heard a normal person can learn to juggle in 1 day. It took me 2 days, but I learned to juggle 3 balls. But soon I realized what you said, the need for a consistent toss. Not sure of the reason, but I always make some errors with physical movements, they are never perfect. Even with typing, no matter how much I exercise, I cannot get bellow ~3% errors. Wondering if this is some kind of genetic effect, and how many ppl have similar issues.
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I haven’t tried juggling for decades but I did manage to teach myself basic three-ball juggling when I was at university (any excuse to avoid revising!) I think it took me a couple of weeks though. I’m a bit malcoordinated for that sort of thing in general. I think you’re right that there’s some sort of natural aptitude that not everybody has. Fortunately basic juggling is just about easy enough that almost any idiot can do it.
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Every time I got better at dancing I got better at juggling too. In my folk psychology, juggling is a partially-attached extension of your hands, so it’s just weird dancing. If you think of it like 3 jobs you have to do simultaneously everything falls apart. Internalizing the three balls as a single process that you are participating in makes it a lot more manageable. Of course the only way to get there is some 10s of hours of practice
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
I gave every train in New York an instrument (trainjazz.com)
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I love jazz but it's kind of funny how much this actually sounds like a really experimental jazz recording. But then, jazz is sometimes spoken of as expressing the rhythms, sounds, and emotions of the modern city.
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If I could offer one usability suggestion: darken the text displayed at the bottom when a specific route is selected. Currently it's much too light for the white background. I couldn't tell you the exact contrast ratio but I'm certain it doesn't meet accessibility guidelines.
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classic, crowdsource it to other cities !!
It's interesting that a lot people like this but dislike AI-generated music. The music itself here is completely random to us, yet I can't see how AI-generated music can be worse than random. The idea is novel/fun/cool, but the notes ARE random as far as we can tell. So if you're against AI music, you just like the idea but don't care about the music or... something else I can't imagine. Enlighten me, please.
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A lot has to do with the story. Nobody would likely listen to this as pure music.
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What is "pure music"? Who listens to music with no ideas about it? Of course music can be worse than random: it can be annoying.
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The music all by itself is not particularly enjoyable here. What's great is the concept, execution, and the way data from an unlikely source is directly audible in the music. What defines art will always be fuzzy, but this particular work is a good example of art I can appreciate: presenting known things in an unusual way, playing with perception to create new connections between remote concepts, and sometimes providing a stepping stone to, as you say, enlightenment.
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I think it has to be with expectations. Out of random music we don't expect much, so any result that is nice is good enough. For AI we are promised it's "just as good" but we get generic, soulless music that bring nothing new to the table. Yeah, it's better than a lot of people, but it doesn't deliver the "just as good" part. On top of that you get that now anyone can promp a song and have a deluge of grey, tasteless elevator music.
Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy (the-independent.com)
Seeing so many sub-Saharan countries generating >= 50% of their electricity from renewables makes me smile: https://static.the-independent.com/2024/04/16/11/renewable%20energy%20100%20map%20world.png?quality=75&width=640&auto=webp
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It makes me sad - most of them are fairly poor and so don't use much energy. I want those people to have the wealth to consume as much energy as me. (My city is also 100% renewable but since I live in the us we don't show near as well on the charts overall.
> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total energy usage.
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https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/12mo/monthly
> Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo produced more than 99.7 per cent of the electricity they consumed using geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power. Let's head to electricitymaps.com ! Albania ( https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AL/live/fifteen_minutes ) - On 2026-04-12 16:45 GMT+2, 22,67% of electricity consumed by Albania is imported from Greece, which generates 22% of its electricity from gas. Interestingly, Albania exports about as much to Montenegro as it imports from Greece. Bhutan: - 100% hydro, makes perfect sense Nepal: - 98% hydro, a bit of solar for good measure Iceland: - 70% hydro, 30% geo Paraguay: - 99,9% hydro Ethiopia: - 96,4% hydro DRC - 99.6% hydro So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !! (I'm kidding, but I'm sure someone has a pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startup about to disrupt topography using either AI, blockchain, or both.)
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> So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !! Came to say that, every time you'll see a country running on 100% renewables for an extended period, it's going to be hydro, because it's the only controllable supply among renewables (with geothermal as well, but it's been so niche so far I put it aside, but I hope it will change). Unfortunately most of the hype and investments go to solar and wind power, which fundamentally don't offer the same capabilities. (Solar is fine as long as you're in q sunny place that is not in Europe though because it can be predictable enough to be relied on, but Solar in above 40° North and wind are borderline scams at this point).
Hydro electricity is also one of the most dangerous forms of energy production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure (This is the worst disaster, but could put Chernobyl to shame?) Full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures
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Well most dangerous apart from coal, oil, gas, biomass? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh And that's before you bring into the deaths due to climate change
>So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !! It is a relief that Environmentalists have decided that hydro counts as "renewable" energy! When I was in school, hydro was considered really bad for the environment, and projects like the Hoover dam and Yangzie River dam were "not helping"
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Reminds me of when Bjork was protesting the construction of a new hydropower plant in Iceland, when the Director of Iceland's National power company (behind the project) was actually her uncle. I used to be romantically involved with someone in his side of the family and noticed Bjork was conspicuously absent from any family gatherings he hosted, of which there were many.
I guess somewhat of a fun fact: Albania has rented(!) two floating(!) oil-powered power plants near the city of Vlöre that are there in case of emergency. The last time they were really needed was in 2022 (if I remember correctly), but these days they're not turned on any more than they need to be to make sure they're operating properly. That very expensive backup system is basically the only non-renewable source in the whole country, and most of the time it's just sitting there doing nothing. Being powered almost entirely by hydro means that the system is highly susceptible to droughts, so then they either have to spin up those oil plants from time to time or import electricity from abroad. I think it's also worth pointing out that nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s. The country used to have its own oil power plant that it heavily relied on before that decision, which slowly produced less and less until it was shut down for good in 2007. Some images of it from 2019: https://www.oneman-onemap.com/en/2019/06/26/the-abandoned-power-plant-in-fier/
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Sri Lanka used to rely on hydro, with oil as a backup, and has added a lot of coal. I wonder how many other countries are increasing non-renewable output?
Nuclear seems to be the worst option: You can't quickly change the amount of power it generates. Which is what you need if you want to use it together with dirt cheap solar. It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years. It's dangerous. For millenia. Vulnerable to terrorism. Enabler of nuclear weapons. It takes a long time to build and bring online. It doesn't scale down. Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?
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> It's dangerous. For millenia. See https://www.jlab.org/news/releases/jefferson-lab-tapped-lead-technology-development-exploring-nuclear-waste-treatment > Partitioning and recycling of uranium, plutonium, and minor actinide content of used nuclear fuel can dramatically reduce this number to around 300 years.
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The word CAN is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Let's not pretend like the track record of energy production is free of externalities. We CAN also produce almost all of our plastics from recycled ones. We don't, because those are more expensive than new.
The economics of new nuclear plants don't make sense. They take too long to build and cost too much. By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
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> They take too long to build and cost too much. The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse for not building them for what, two decades or more? It seems to be taking longer to not build them than to build them. > By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch. Neither of those have the same purpose. Solar + battery lets you generate power with solar at noon and then use it after sunset. It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. More than a third of US energy consumption is for heating which is a terrible match for solar because the demand is nearly the exact inverse of solar's generation profile both in terms of time of day and seasonally. HVDC is pretty overrated in general. It does nothing for the seasonal problem and it's expensive for something that only provides a significant benefit a small minority of the time, i.e. the two days out of the year when the local grid has a shortage but a far away one has a surplus. It's also hard to secure because it inherently spans long distances so you can't have anything like a containment building around it and you end up with an infrastructure where multiple GW of grid capacity is susceptible to accidental or purposeful disruption by any idiot with a shovel or a mylar balloon.
Is it unnecessary burden? We've had major nuclear accidents despite regulations and that was before 9/11 and dron wars.
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What's the fatality rate per GWh of civilian nuclear power in the US vs. other forms of power generation?
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The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture. The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred Ina country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers). In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of a tsunami which killed 19000! I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.
You don't need battery storage if you've got hydro. You need solar. Make hydro the backup, fill reservoirs as your reserve and sell extra energy when they're nearly full.
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I can see this makes sense especially for medium term storage. A lot full of batteries is great for the next ten seconds, next ten minutes, even to some extent the next ten hours, but it surely doesn't make much sense to store ten days of electricity that way compared to just keeping the water behind a dam. We know that many of the world's large dams are capturing snow melt or other seasonal flows, running them only when solar or wind can't provide the power you need lets you make more effective use of the same resource.
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Except that in many cases there's people living downstream doing agriculture using that water for irrigation. There's just this tiny dispute about that in the nile delta between Egypt and Ethiopia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Dam
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Except for very short term peaks (less than 15 minutes-ish) it doesn't make any sense at all to use hydro to charge batteries. You've got a dam, you might as well let water through later than incur the losses of a round trip to batteries and back to the grid.
> But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free. The trick of course is that if you electrify heating and transportation they'll need much less energy. Your average car with an ICE has an efficiency of 20-40%, electric cars have 60-80%. Heating your house with gas has an efficiency of around 100%, heat pumps have 300%-500%.
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In theory gas boilers for heating are above 90% efficient. Not 100% because to achieve 100% what you'd have to do is keep the exhaust gases (which are hot) inside, where the people are, and unfortunately the exhaust gases are poisonous so that's a terrible idea. To hit 90% the boiler needs to be designed to condense water vapour out of the exhaust gases, this way we'll get back the energy needed to turn water into a vapour which is a large portion of the energy embodied by the exhaust gas. And to do that the vapour needs to pass a low temperature fluid, so we use the input fluid we were about to heat with the boiler anyway, we want this fluid to be about 55°C but that means if we're using the boiler to heat a home with radiators, rather than to make fresh hot water for cleaning etc. we need our return temperature from the radiators to be less than 55°C which means we need our flow temperature to be lower (than the typical 70-80°C programmed by builders, not lower than 55°©) or else the radiators can't possibly radiate enough heat to hit that number, which means we're actually doing much of the same heating efficiency work we'd have to do to use heat pumps anyway...
I think we're going to see a lot of grid defection, and not just from little consumers. Corporations won't wait for grid connections and will roll their own microgrids.
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There will be serious pushback to that by lobbyists. This is already happening in the form of mandatory participation in 'the market' while at the same time (you can't make this up) having to sell to that market at some kind of arbitrary price that you don't get a say in as producer. I'm a small step away from going off-grid again, the biggest stumbling block is that - predictably - you can't do any practical small power windmill installations. I've considered a windlass in the basement but my kids wouldn't hear of it ;)
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Sure, but large corporations have a lot of influence (read: money) to stop that sort of thing, so I don't see it going very far. Those building data centers can always play their trump card: just build the data center somewhere else.
Tell HN: OpenAI silently removed Study Mode from ChatGPT
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How would they remove it loudly?
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By announcing it?
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I think its prob enough to do a prompt. Isn't that what these things are? Probably had some extra scaffolding before but now engine is good enough where just saying help me study results in the same results. I personally dont want modes. It should be smart enough to infer my intention and act accordingly
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They do stuff like that. They also killed "Robot" personality last year which was my favorite. The replaced it with "Efficient" or something, but it isn't the same. Robot was terminator-esq, appropriate for the new age we are entering IMO.
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This. They recently made "efficient" even more verbose, my custom instructions can't suppress it properly anymore. These "little" changes are incredibly annoying.
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they are trying to burn your tokens on purpose to make you spend more... like introducing limits but making it so API requests continue, at cost...
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Ehh... can't really hit "chatbot" limits on the $20 plan. Pretty sure the limits are not token based for that in the first place, and if it spews out a ton of stuff, it takes me longer to go through it and I end up asking it follow-up questions in a way where it replies... _relatively_ concisely. Still, gimme robot back. On a good note, it almost managed to call me stupid. Codex has also been fine, but I'm guessing they know better than to tweak it like that, given their target users.
Your comment made me ask myself: "Then why remove it? If it really is just a system prompt, I can't imagine tech debt or maintenance are among the reasons." My best guess is this is product strategy. A markdown file doesn't require maintenance, but a feature's surface area does. Every exposed mode is another thing to document, support, A/B test, and explain to new users who stumble across it. I'm guessing that someone decided "Study Mode isn't hitting retention metrics", and decided to kill it. As an autodidact, I loved the feature, but as a software engineer I can respect the decision. What I'm wondering about is whether there's a security angle to this as well. Assuming exposed system prompts are a jailbreak surface, if users can infer the prompt structure, would it make certain prompt injection attacks easier? I'm not well-versed in ML security, and I'd be curious to hear from someone who is.
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Re: product strategy Honestly, it probably led to long conversations. The tokens/GPU time for one long conversation is more expensive than multiple short conversations. They’re trying to shore up their finances, and they’re moving away from the consumer market and towards enterprise, and students were probably a bad demographic to sell to.
Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage (github.com/anthropics)
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If the Claude team care for feedback for the free model. I'm using the free model via chat from the beginning. This is the first time, I'm seriously considering moving away from Claude. Before last month, Claude's Sonnet model was consistent in quality. But, now the responses are all over the place. It's hard to replicate the issue as it happens once in a while. I rarely encountered hallucinations from Claude models with questions from my domain however since last month I have observed abundance of them.
Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. We've been investigating these reports, and a few of the top issues we've found are: 1. Prompt cache misses when using 1M token context window are expensive. Since Claude Code uses a 1 hour prompt cache window for the main agent, if you leave your computer for over an hour then continue a stale session, it's often a full cache miss. To improve this, we have shipped a few UX improvements (eg. to nudge you to /clear before continuing a long stale session), and are investigating defaulting to 400k context instead, with an option to configure your context window to up to 1M if preferred. To experiment with this now, try: CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=400000 claude. 2. People pulling in a large number of skills, or running many agents or background automations, which sometimes happens when using a large number of plugins. This was the case for a surprisingly large number of users, and we are actively working on (a) improving the UX to make these cases more visible to users and (b) more intelligently truncating, pruning, and scheduling non-main tasks to avoid surprise token usage. In the process, we ruled out a large number of hypotheses: adaptive thinking, other kinds of harness regressions, model and inference regressions. We are continuing to investigate and prioritize this. The most actionable thing for people running into this is to run /feedback, and optionally post the feedback ids either here or in the Github issue. That makes it possible for us to debug specific reports.
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Have you tried asking Mythos for a fix?
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As another data point, I pay for Pro for a personal account, and use no skills, do nothing fancy, use the default settings, and am out of tokens, with one terminal, after an hour. This is typically working on a < 5,000 line code base, sometimes in C, sometimes in Go. Not doing incredibly complicated things.
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Wait what? If I get told to come back in three hours because I'm using the product too much, I get penalized when I resume? What's the right way to work on a huge project then? I've just been saying "Please continue" -- that pops the quota?
We are taking it seriously, and are continuing to investigate. We are not trusting the metrics.
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The quantitative ux research team at Google was created for exactly this problem: a service which became popular before the right metrics existed, meaning metrics need to be derived first, then optimized. We would observe users (irl), read their logs, then generate experiments to improve the behavior as measured by logs, and return to see if the experiment improves irl experiences. There were not many of us and we are around :)
Cool, are you going to be transparent and explain the metrics and costs as a postmortem? And given the inability to actually audit what you produce, why should we trust Anthropic?
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HN sometimes talks about pathological customers who will never be happy. Boris is probably the single best rep in the community, possibly ever. The way your tone and complaints come across reminds me of this. As a paying customer ($5k spend per month in my corporate job), I’d rather anthropic keep doing what they’re doing — innovating and shipping useful stuff at blinding speed — and not index on your feedback. I think the tradeoffs they would cost far outweigh the consequences.
Why are you all of a sudden running into so many issues like this? Could it be that all of the Anthropics employees have completely unlimited and unbounded accounts, which means you don't get a feeling of how changes will affect the customers?
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Because it’s completely vibe coded? And the codebase goes through massive churn, which means things that were stable get rewritten possibly with bugs.
Thanks for the report! This was fixed in v2.1.92. Please: 1. Upgrade to the latest: claude update (seems like you did this already) 2. Start a new conversations (resuming an old convo may trigger this bug again in that convo)
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Is it just me, or is 2.1.104 higher than 2.1.92? Did someone actually read the issue description or is this automated as well?
Yeah I hadn't been aware of that change previously. I'm also ET, but perhaps I just don't use it enough to hit the limits. They could definitely do to be more transparent, maybe instead of percentages, show a "credit" allocation such that the time-based variation in 5-hour windows is visible.
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I am also not a heavy user, it's just so frustrating because nothing is ever defined. Something is always under one promotion or another. Abd the vagueness about weekly limits remain unchanged is they refuse to clarify whether that means tokens or number of 5hr blocks per week (that now get used faster during peak).
We have a 99% email reputation. Gmail disagrees (blogfontawesome.wpcomstaging.com)
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A lot of people blaming the poster, but I can say I've seen the same thing on completely opt-in lists that aren't doing anything shady. Reality is if you're only sending one email to your list a year, even when people want to receive it, it becomes really hard to send it to gmail. Especially if you're not using a shared IP with other senders. Gmail basically forces you to send messages on a quarterly (or better) cadence, even if you have nothing to say because otherwise it forgets who you are. I am convinced Google has a vested interest in making it hard to send newsletters and product announcements so companies will use their advertising products instead.
Users definitely click "report spam" in large numbers on things that are not spam. At work we've long had problems of getting reported for spam when the only things we send are: • A receipt when a person comes to our site and purchases something. • Their license key if what they purchased requires a license key. • Replies if they send email to customer support. • If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews or a notice that it was declined if the charge does not go through. This is required by the major credit card companies. • If they have an automatically renewing subscription and they are on a plan other than monthly we send a reminder before it tries to renew. This is required by the major credit card companies and by the consumer protection laws in many jurisdictions.
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> If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews (..) This is required by the major credit card companies. The problem here is that "we are legally required to send it" and "our customers want to receive it" aren't necessarily the same thing. I'd probably be pretty annoyed by those if I had more than a few subscriptions!
I've long noticed an old trend where subscribing somehow works instantly, but unsubscribing takes "60-90 days to process."
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Yeah, the spin on that used to be "that's because we plan our campaigns in advance and use partners to handle them and we have to submit a final list and..." (insert several different types of horseshit here that might survive a passing glance but little more than that).
I basically give companies 0 strikes anymore, and assume the "unsubscribe" link is at best, a dark pattern that only unsubscribes me from that 1 out of their 100 "channels," and at worst, confirms my E-mail address. "Report Spam" immediately.
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I unsubscribe twice (allowing for one possible bug), then spam. And, as others have noted, unsubscribe cannot involving going and logging into their system. If I need to do that, it generally goes directly to spam.
#1: Was this article written by an LLM? The phrasing implies there's a high chance #2: Is your company sending spam emails? I don't know how Gmail's system works, but I will mark any unsolicited email from businesses as spam. Perhaps Google uses that as a heuristic?
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No question this was LLM. It absolutely stinks of it.
Fun quote from the OP: > But here’s the part that really gets us. At our CORE, our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share. A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time. I would prefer not to give my email address to a company that thinks that this should give them a good email reputation. If you email me because you are excited and I’m not, I probably think of it as spam.
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I don't mind if a company sends me emails if I gave them my email address. As long as, when I click "unsubscribe" to the email, they stop. I don't want to have to go log back into their system and unsubscribe. I just want to click the unsubscribe button and have it be done - forever, not just until they add a new category for email. I have a fair number of companies that send me emails (because I signed up for their service) on a "slow" basis (ie, when they have something interesting.. not just "every week, so you don't forget us). I don't mind those. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don't. I don't unsubscribe and I don't mark them as spam. I'm not saying you should be the same as me. I _am_ saying that, just because _you_ don't like it, doesn't make them "clearly in the wrong". Because there are people that feel like the way they are acting is reasonable.
I don’t know if this is true with Font Awesome, but more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings. So, I mark any unwanted email as spam in Gmail immediately, and even leave bad reviews. Having my email address is not the same as having my consent. Stop trying to roofie us with malicious EULAs.
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It is shameful behaviour (their). There should be “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of such an unsolicited mails… Marking unwanted email as spam should be used for real spammers only if they slip thru Bayesian filters… Just sayin’, no offense.
Are you an entrepreneur or an employee? Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business and how shameless you have to be in the face of adversity to make it work? It sucks. You have to do this stuff to get a customer relationship. The thing Apple and Google get for free and try so hard to snip you out of. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we regulated market monopolies and caused them to break up. More money to go around. Font Awesome is a good business, but you know the gettings are tough when they have to do this. A lot of y'all complain about this, then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under. We can't all be advertising behemoths like Google. Google, which by the way, used monopoly power to take 92% of "URL bars" and turn them into proxy bidding wars for brands and trademarks they do not own. Totally illegal horse shit that passes costs onto consumers and makes it easier for big business to squash small brands (I've had big business spend ads on my tiny little trademark). You're all angry at the wrong people.
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> Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business This reminds me of a local bricks and mortar small business that closed down and the wife posted a completely tone deaf: "It is a horrible shame that our long sought out dream had to die because the local "community" was not willing to support it." I missed the part where "community" meant we are obligated to expend our own resources for your profit. Doubly galling was the fact that there was generally "his n hers" G Wagons parked out front of their business. Doing better than 95% of the community and still pissed that the community wasn't giving them more.
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But that same exact logic applies to "it's really hard to succeed, so I'm going to just mug some people to get the money I need". I'm sorry, but "its hard to succeed, so I'm justified in being unethical" is _not_ a valid excuse.
Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"? That's a bit carried away, don't you think? There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work. Meanwhile hyperscalers are constantly in your eyes and ears and they have a million ways to bypass those regulations and get into your headspace regardless. Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads. Dollars are spent on attention. You don't make it in this world without securing some attention. Some have worked themselves into a place of eternal captive attention, everyone else is either climbing the mountain or running the treadmill. And all those employees' livelihoods depend on it working. Otherwise they starve. Be thankful you, as presumably an engineer, don't have to be exposed to this game. It's Darwinian and adversarial, zero sum, a fight to survive. Maybe you're happy working for someone who does all this work for you or figured out a tiny niche where it isn't necessary. But reality is much different.
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> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"? I purchase a product from company X. They require an email and will not let me buy without it. I actually do want an email confirmation that the order went through and even that my product shipped. I do not want emails about "we released a new thing" or "we have a sale" or "it's Tuesday and we want you to remember we exist". Signing me up without an explicit opt-in using information you required me to provide is absolutely. "X is even worse" does not make Y ethical, good, or acceptable. What your least favorite corporations do isn't relevant. Other people are inconsiderate monsters who litter in national parks and abandon mattresses on the side of the road. BP and Exxon did more damage to the environment than I ever could. It's still unethical if I drop my garbage on the ground.
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> Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads. How do you define ads? Those are not ads in my book. An update is not an ad, I can't think of any valid interpretation of that other than "existence is an ad because people who interact with it might want to do do again" but at that point the word "ad" has lost all useful meaning.
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> An update is not an ad To be fair, I think echelon was calling out that there are absolutely ads in browser updates now. "Try Firefox VPN!" "Look what's new in Chrome!", etc.
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> There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work. They don't. Period. Full Stop. There are tons of companies that I have told to stop sending me emails that just... continue to do so. And some that won't _allow_ me to tell them to stop (I need to create an account to tell them not to email me... but they shouldn't be emailing me if I don't have an account). So no, they don't work.
> Other parts of Google can't stop themselves from sending spam from what are supposed to be gold-plated VIPs. Seems like a badly run company. (Insert that caricature of the MSFT org chart with guns pointing in all directions.)
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MSFT has same policy. Office365 does not treat Microsoft.com emails any differently. Only exception is Office365 transactional emails. This seems logical, you don’t want your service to get a bad rep because some internal division marketing team goes dumb. Also, security in case individuals get hacked.
Tell HN: docker pull fails in spain due to football cloudflare block
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Welcome to the club, buddies! Here, in Russia, the government doesn't care about collateral damage at all when shutting down whole Internet in cities. They turn on white list mode, when only approved sites and IPs work. Businesses stop working and start losing money? They don't care. Important IT systems stop working? They don't care. People can't communicate with each other? Don't care. And seems like it will happen everywhere else. Sad to see the whole world goes down apart.
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Just to confirm it is true. This is LaLiga bringing down essential country-wide infrastructure on soccer hours if your internet access is through main ISPs.
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I had to Google why this happens, blocking cloudflare during football games seems.. Arbitrary, to say the least. Maybe something to do with hooligans trashing entire cities when their team loses? I could almost get behind that, if I thought it would work.. But no, it's apparently to stop piracy!? Turning off half the internet, and mostly the legitimate parts at that (since when do pirates use cloudflare?) seems like probably the worst method to go about it. Someone ought to start streaming those games illegally without using cloudflare just to demonstrate how stupid this policy is
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Cloudflare could resolve this without negatively impacting fundamental services... just place all newly registered sites (e.g. <30 days) on a dedicated block of IP addresses. That way, Spain's government-ordered censorship could be limited to (mostly) pirate sites. Or they could invest money in vetting customers properly. But of course, Cloudflare rather prefers to hold their actual large customers (who don't have much of an alternative to CF) and everyday Spaniard users hostage.
Interesting alternative. Cloudflare (market cap $58B) buys La liga (market value $5 billion), drops suit.
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Less headaches, free futbol matches!
You can't fight political issues with clever technical solutions
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That became a popular refrain at some point but the truth of it varies. In fact many political issues are brought about by technical changes so obviously the reverse must be possible as well. What technical solutions can't change is the underlying social dynamics.
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You totally can, that's why bittorrent still exists and works fine.
In my country (Russia) the politics followed, now the ISPs block the OpenVPN and wireguard packets. And sometimes the white list mode is enabled, so you cannot connect, with your clever custom VPN solution, to a host outside the country
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And eventually even a worm will turn.
> But we had successful global networks before the Internet (the PSTN, telegraph) These were ripe with espionage, wiretapping and sabotage. Access to it used to be highly restricted as well, up until the 90s for example you were only allowed to connect government-licensed modems to the German PSTN directly.
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There was also no way for a normal person to easily and cheaply communicate with 20 million people in realtime.
Whenever I get a little down over how much power unelected corporations have in my country, I can at least cheer myself up a little by being thankful that something as stupid as football doesn't have enough power here to control whether or not I have internet access.
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It would if it were bigger business in your country. Try torrenting an MCU movie and see what happens to your ISP account.
I know this is an unpopular opinion among freedom maximalists, but: It’s precisely because CloudFlare isn’t responding like other CDNs to reasonable demands to cut off pirate origin sites that this mess exists. If they reacted quickly to remove configurations that are obviously facilitating copyright infringement, Spain wouldn’t resort to full scale ASN blocking. How do we know it’s CloudFlare? Because other CDNs like CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, etc. respond to takedown demands and aren’t being blocked. (Those also cost money and require customer identification.) In an escalating war between the state and a corporation, the state will always prevail if they have the public’s backing. In Spain it’s clear that most people are happy to watch the match through legitimate channels even at the cost of blocking CloudFlare.
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> It’s precisely because CloudFlare isn’t responding like other CDNs to reasonable demands to cut off pirate origin sites that this mess exists. If they reacted quickly to remove configurations that are obviously facilitating copyright infringement, Spain wouldn’t resort to full scale ASN blocking. Apropos of anything else, CF is (reasonably) requiring a court order to remove offending material rather than just "well, company said so, so eh, just do as they say". La Liga complains that "oh, that's too slow for what we want" and just got a blanket ruling. I am not a fan of CF but your argument seems to be "CF should just roll over any time someone says "hey, delete this", because, obviously, everyone knows it's problematic, right? Right?".
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At least the DMCA in the U.S. has guardrails: not just anyone can send a takedown demand for everything. The requester has identify the works and declare under penalty of perjury that they are operating on the behalf of the owner. I imagine the equivalent EU law has similar requirements. Cloudflare uses legal chicanery to try to subvert the DMCA by claiming that because they’re not the origin server, they’re not subject to takedown demands. So far no court has told them to knock it off. I expect that day will eventually come.
The football league would rather not have pirates livestream their ~90 minute games. Pirates would rather not be blocked, so they create a new, disposable website for every game. Any blocking must happen fast. Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked. The courts would rather not create a special fast lane through the courts, just to resolve a squabble between two huge corporations.
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The US is captured by the Israeli lobby. Spain is captured by the football lobby.
I work in IT and have found that the issue impacts my work but not my ability to stream sports from sites of questionable legality. Of course, I don't pirate La Liga matches but that's primarily because I don't give a shit about soccer. But the point is that the measure does more to block legitimate use than illegitimate (in my experience). And next they want to go after VPNs. Wonderful.
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But think of the children ... and futbol!
Bring Back Idiomatic Design (essays.johnloeber.com)
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We've lost some common features: * Undo * F1 & context sensitive help * Hints on mouse hover * Keyboard shortcuts & shortcut customisation * Main menus * Files & directories Revelation features when they first became common. Now mostly gone on mobile and websites.
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At some point UX became a synonym of manipulating users into doing things, and I wonder if it can ever go back. It might have started in an innocent way, all those A/B tests about call-to-action button color, etc. But it became a full scale race between products and product managers (Whose landing page is best at converting users?, etc.) and somewhere in this race we just lost the sense of why UX exists. Product success is measured in conversion rates, net promoter score, bounce rates, etc. (all pretty much short-term metrics, by the way), and are optimized with disregard to the end-user experience. I mean, what was originally meant by UX. It is now completely turned on its head. Like I said, I wonder if there is way back of if we are stuck in the rat race. The question is how to quit it.
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>using GMail is nothing like using GSuites is nothing like using Google Docs G Suite (no s) was the old name for Google Workspace. Google Workspace includes GMail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, etc., so it doesn't really make sense to say that Google Workspace has a different UX than Google Docs, if Google Docs is part of Google Workspace. Disclosure: I work at Google, but not one of the listed products.
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If GSuites was a typo for GSites (informal for Google Sites classic), then the sentence in TFA could work. In that case, the claim would be that Gmail, Google Sites (classic probably), and Google Docs have different enough UX to be considered distinct/heterogeneous. IDK if this was the intent, of course. Which makes sense for historical reasons. Gmail being the OG, Sites Classic being an acquisition, and Docs/Sheets/Slides being presumably having been a fresh effort.
With some irony, one thing Substack doesn't afford is zooming in to images on mobile.
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Firefox on Android can override this via a toggle in the Accessibility settings. Maybe other browsers have something similar?
Decades ago, Return and Enter were two different keys for that reason: Return to insert a line break, Enter to submit your input. Given the reduction to a single key, the traditional GUI rule is that Enter in a multiline/multi-paragraph input doesn’t submit like it does in other contexts, but inserts a line break (or paragraph break), while Ctrl+Enter submits. Chat apps, where single-paragraph content is the typical case, tend to reverse this. Good apps make this configurable.
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don't get me started on backspace vs delete...
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Carriage return and line feed go way back. Tty stands for teletype. A computer was the job description of a person. It’s turtles all the way down.
Teams does both - normally it’s Enter to submit and Shift+Enter for a new line, but when you open the formatting tools it switches. They at least do have a message indicating which key combo inputs a new line, but it still gets me on occasion.
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The Signal desktop app does both too, I guess, but in a way that actually makes sense . Enter sends a message since IMs tend to be short one-liners. Shift-Enter inserts a line break. But if you click an arrow on the top of the text box, it expands to more than half of the height of the window, and now Enter does a line break and Shift-Enter sends. Which makes a lot of sense because now you're in "message composer" / "word processor" mode.
The author may have identified that "the idioms come from the use of system frameworks", but they absolutely got wrong just about everything about why apps are not consistent on the web (e.g. I was baffled by their reasons listed under "this lack of homogeneity is for two reasons" section). First, what he calls "the desktop era" wasn't so much a desktop era as a Windows era - Windows ran the vast majority of desktops (and furthermore, there were plenty of inconsistencies between Windows and Mac). So, as you point out regarding the Win32 API, developers had essentially one way to do things, or at least the far easiest way to do things. Developers weren't so much "following design idioms" as "doing what is easy to do on Windows". The web started out as a document sharing system, and it only gradually and organically turned over to an app system. There was simply no single default, "easiest" way to do things (and despite that, I remember when it seemed like the web converged all at once onto Bootstrap, because it became the easiest and most "standard" way to do things). In other words, I totally agree with you. You can have all the "standard idioms" that you want, but unless you have a single company providing and writing easy to use, default frameworks, you'll always have lots of different ways of doing things.
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Conventions already existed in DOS (CUA) and MacOS. The point is, every operating system had its user interface conventions, and there was a strong move from at least the mid-1980s to roughly the mid-2000s that applications should conform to the respective OS conventions. The cross-platform aspect of the web and then of mobile destroyed that.
Well, and worse, Windows was itself a hive of inconsistency. The most obvious example of UI consistency failing as an idea was that Microsoft's own teams didn't care about it at all. People my age always have rose tinted glasses about this. Even the screenshot of Word the author chose is telling because Office rolled its own widget toolkit. No other Windows apps had menus that looked like that, with the stripe down the left hand side, or that kind of redundant menu-duplicating sidebar. They made many other apps that ignored or duplicated core UI paradigms too. Visual Studio, Encarta, Windows Media Player... the list went on and on. The Windows I remember was in some ways actually less consistent than what we have now. It was common for apps to be themeable, to use weirdly shaped windows, to have very different icon themes or button colors, etc. Every app developer wanted to have a strong brand, which meant not using the default UI choices. And Microsoft's UI guidelines weren't strong enough to generate consistency - even basic things like where the settings window could be found weren't consistent. Sometimes it was Edit > Preferences. Sometimes File > Settings. Sometimes zooming was under View, sometimes under Window. The big problem with the web and the newer web-derived mobile paradigms is the conflation between theme and widget library, under the name "design system". The native desktop era was relatively good at keeping these concepts separated but the web isn't, the result is a morass of very low effort and crappy widgets that often fail at the subtle details MS/Apple got right. And browsers can't help because every other year designers decide that the basic behaviors of e.g. text fields needs to change in ways that wouldn't be supported by the browser's own widgets.
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“Brand” and “branding” is arguably the most important thing -not- mentioned in the article. The commercial incentives to differentiate are powerful enough to kick a lot of UX out of the way. Now that all we do is “experience” a “journey,” it’s more about the user doing what the app wants instead of the other way around
> You don’t want to have to remember to use CTRL + Shift + C in certain circumstances or right-click → copy in others, that’d be annoying. laughs in linux wouldn’t that be nice.
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This is the kind of thing why I still prefer Windows as a UI.
Most software is not designed by intelligent and thoughtful people anymore. It is designed by hastily promoted middle manager PM/Product type people who, as has been mentioned elsewhere, simply were not around when thoughtful human interface design was borderline mandatory for efficiency’s sake. There is incompetence and there is also malevolence in the encouragement of dark patterns by the revenue side of the business.
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This is reductionist and myopic. I've personally been through building forms online and it's hell to try to find consensus on perhaps the most common forms used online. Let's take a credit card form: - Do I let the user copy and paste values in? - Do I let them use IE6? - Do I need to test for the user using an esotoric browser (Brave) with an esoteric password manager (KeePassXC)? - Do I make it accessible for someone's OpenClaw bot to use it? - Do I make it inaccessible to a nefarious actor who uses OpenClaw to use it? I could go on... Balancing accessibility and usability is hard.[0] [0] Steve Yegge's platform rant - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
Is 03/04/2026 March 4th or the 3rd of April? If you have an international audience that’s going to mess someone up. Better yet require YYYY-MM-DD.
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> Better yet require YYYY-MM-DD This is the equivalent of requiring all your text to be in Esperanto because dealing with separate languages is a pain. "Normal" people never use YYYY-MM-DD format. The real world has actual complexity, tough, and the reason you see so many bugs and problems around localization is not that there aren't good APIs to deal with it, it's that it's often an after thought, doesn't always provide economic payoff, and any individual developer is usually focused on making sure it "looks good" I'm whatever locale they're familiar with.
This is why you need both. Icons are faster to recognize, but words tell you what the icons need. So you need the words at first to discover the icons, then the icons serve as valuable tools for scanning and quickly locating the click target that you are looking for.
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> This is why you need both. Icons are faster to recognize, but words tell you what the icons need. So you need the words at first to discover the icons, then the icons serve as valuable tools for scanning and quickly locating the click target that you are looking for. Only if there are few icons. If every item in that menu in the screenshot of Windows had an icon, and all icons were monochrome only, you'd never quickly find the one you want. The reason icons in menu items work is because they are distinctive and sparse.
Internet outage in Iran reaches 1,008 hours (mastodon.social)
Iranian here! I want to see the regime answer for its crimes. They act like an occupying force, taking the country hostage. With that being said I don’t like/want the war. I understand and sympathize with the emotional response from my compatriots because they see the oppressors are getting the bloody beating they well deserve. But I don’t really think that the current war brings anything good for the people. I wish it did but it doesn’t look like it. I wish the regime would fall but they haven’t and we now have ~2000 more innocents dead on top of thousands that government killed in January.
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I am guessing you're not a supported of Reza Pahlavi? How in your mind do we get to the regime answering for its crimes? What is going to dislodge them? If they are not dislodged and continue to indoctrinate more people where does this go? If they have more weapons where does it go? Is any chance that some elements within the current regime will change sides? What percent of soldiers or militia are die hard fanatics vs. people who will jump ship if there's a good chance of that "ship" sinking?
> But the thing that gets them rioting is economic failure. Which the strikes have exacerbated. Past riots were related to women rights or election fraud. The last one were related to the economic situation, but there is a large young population in Iran which aren't religious anymore, and living in an oppressive theocracy
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They'll have company soon https://gtnm.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-theocratic-authoritarianism
> No? Lost a loved one / a friend / a classmate? Perhaps when people see this (as I have) Sorry to hear that. Are you currently in Iran now? Or have contact with people in Iran?
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> Are you currently in Iran now? Tel Aviv perhaps? Wartime is the worst time to stage a revolutionary for anyone,specifically because its a induces a state of emergency, and any activities can be construed as aiding the enemy.
This is the thing that is so curious about the concept of the general strike/siezing the means of production. The workers already have seized the means of production. I mean truly. Owner does not have the keys. Some manager unlocks the building for the day. Workers show up to the farm. Everything gets done every day whether the owner is there or across the globe or some dubious llc entity. The only thing the owner functionally does, is to be an address on file to send their cut of the profits. Nothing more than a specially designated furnace to burn a subset of the monthly revenue, at least in terms of their actual interaction with their business and their businesses interaction with themselves. Socialism is as easy as people waking up, going to work as usual, and not mailing that check to the owner. And having the owner go to the police, who in turn tell them "Awe shucks." These are the only conditions for socialism in 2026. Same as they were in 1926. So tantalizingly possible if people were just on board with it and not beholden to capitalism. Propaganda is why there are a subset of workers who will continue to diligently burn revenue for the owner, and why police will ultimately make the choice to sacrifice their own lives for the petty profits of this ownership class versus consider their own position in this world.
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Usually socialist revolutions fail because nobody can agree on who the new leaders should be. Workers seize control of the means of production...and then what? Who determines what they should do with it? Who do they look to for guidance? If you elect/appoint/select someone, now they are the new capitalist. If you don't, the machinery sits idle while various factions fight amongst themselves. We saw this with Occupy Wall Street and the CHAZ in the U.S - these protests didn't fail because they were crushed, they failed because local police basically let them win and then once they won different factions had different ideas of what to do next. We also see it at the state level with the Soviet Union (where a strong dictatorship did eventually emerge - the communist revolution didn't mean everybody was equal, it just meant some people were more equal than others) and in Vietnam (which became intensely capitalist less than 15 years after the communists won. The function of the business owner, CEO, or other executive figure is simply to be a symbol of which direction the organization needs to go. They don't do any work themselves, and they are selected for their ability to look pretty and shout platitudes that other people follow. But that symbol is needed to actually get the people moving in one direction .
The Physics of GPS (perthirtysix.com)
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Do the satellites broadcast their own position, or is that all held in a database on your phone? Also why is it so draining on your battery to get GPS location, if it's just solving a simple calculation.
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Both: they broadcast not the location but the orbital characteristics (ephemeris), and devices can save the last received value. As the satellites get 'perturbed' in orbit, their orbital data is updated and re-broadcast. * https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/GPS_Navigation_Message * https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog862/node/1737 * https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/GPS_and_Galileo_Satellite_Coordinates_Computation * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeris
> With one satellite, you won't get a circle on the earths surface, but a sphere. With one satellite you get a sphere in 3D space , but if you are on a surface (like that of the Earth), that gets translated into circle. If you are in a plane in the sky (3D space), then you get a spherical 'location fix'.
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True. But the GPS receiver doesn't know whether you are on the surface or not (and at what elevation), so it must always assume 3d space, hence a sphere.
A slightly related question, if anyone knows - has phone GPS gotten worse in recent generations? More reliance on local wifi networks or something like that? I ask because I do a lot of backcountry hiking, camping, and foraging and rely on true GPS-only navigation. My most recent two phones (iphone and pixel) have noticeably worse GPS performance than previous phones, and I even changed OS ecosystems mostly hoping for better GPS, but it didn't help. Maybe I've had bad luck, but two noticeably bad phones in a row seems like it may be a pattern. And is there any way to find phones with very good GPS performance?
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Aggressive battery saving, thinner phones, competition between multiple radio transceivers in a small device - these can affect GPS performance. Try disabling battery saving measures as much as possible and see if it helps.
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