I spend most of my time using a ThinkPad laptop touchpad, but the critical property that makes it usable for me is the physical mouse buttons. I find it incredibly awkward to use any system without physical mouse buttons, or any system where tap-to-click has not been disabled.
I tried, on my current laptop, to see if I could get used to having tap-to-click enabled even without actually using it; I wanted to see how far off I was from being able to deal with any non-ThinkPad. I ended up turning it back off after a few days, after many many clicks I didn't want to click.
Why do you find this better? I find it awkward to have to contort my hand to hold the button down when dragging around. This was already the case with older trackpads with the buttons below, but now all trackpads with physical buttons I've seen have them above (probably intended for the trackpoint).
I really hate the hinge-style trackpads, but even on macs, I always enable tap to click and double-tap-drap to hold. On mac os and linux you can enable a "persistent hold for a short while" which allows to lift your finger briefly without losing the hold. Never found a similar setting on windows, which drives me crazy whenever I absolutely have to use that os.
> This was already the case with older trackpads with the buttons below, but now all trackpads with physical buttons I've seen have them above (probably intended for the trackpoint).
I think they're officially intended for the trackpoint, yes. But I find buttons-above convenient, because if I rest my arm/hand in a relaxed fashion on the laptop palm rest, I can use my pointer or middle finger for precise movement, and click with my middle or ring finger.
That said, I'd take buttons-below over no buttons. With buttons-below, I'm using my middle finger to mouse and my pointer finger to click, and that's still reasonably comfortable.
In both cases, I find it better because: clicking the button requires a deliberate action that won't happen by accident while using the touchpad; there's no delay required to confirm if touching the touchpad is a click something else, it's never a click; there's nothing timing-based at all, motion is motion and clicking is clicking; right-click and middle-click have dedicated buttons (I probably use middle-click many times more often than right-click on any given day, to open links in tabs and to close tabs).
This isn't something that could be solved with a better touchpad or better software.
> if I rest my arm/hand in a relaxed fashion on the laptop palm rest, I can use my pointer or middle finger for precise movement, and click with my middle or ring finger.
Huh, interesting. I just tried this, and it's indeed quite comfortable to use the index finger to operate the trackpad and the middle finger on the buttons. Middle + ring feels awkward to me, probably because of the size difference between my fingers. I suppose it never occurred to me to try it this way because I usually use my middle finger on the trackpad.
Because the purpose of them is to accurately predict events. People often get better at accurately modeling reality when money is on the line. Prediction markets are designed around the idea that you can best make money if your predictions match reality, so if you bet something that doesn't match reality, people have a direct financial incentive to model reality better and take your money. Some people are absurdly good at it. The net result, in theory, is a financial incentive to get accurate answers about the world.
"Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics," Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10(4), 2015.
Consider, hypothetically, that you need to choose between a couple of different possible strategies for solving a problem. (Or, choose how much to invest towards each strategy.)
The vision of people who believe strongly in prediction markets is, for instance, that you could have a prediction market for "if we replace our CEO, will our revenue be higher in X years than the counterfactual where we kept our CEO?", and use that as input to the CEO's performance evaluation. Because people have to put their money where their mouth is, if you believe that a market is incorrectly priced, you can go make money on it.
Whether this works in practice remains to be seen, but it's an interesting vision.
Maybe Kalshi should charge fee for services rendered to the company who wants the prediction, rather than a fee for each contract then. Since you know, they’re providing a valuable service and not profiting on gambling
It is exactly what I'm referring to. I didn't say there aren't still people around. But they're far enough behind CPython that folks like NumPy are dropping support. Unless they get a substantial injection of new people and new energy, they're likely to continue falling behind.
> The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees.
There are more than enough good fonts under OFL that it surprises me people want to commission a custom font primarily for licensing reasons rather than using a standard one.
There is already a set of standards for this: websites can send content ratings to the browser, and the browser can choose not to show content on the basis of those ratings.
We don't need another one, especially one that inverts the polarity by having the browser proactively send information to the site.
Maybe that would work too, but “this device has a child lock turned on” seems like reasonable information to send? It’s a lot better than having to check ID’s.
Ok but I bet that's easy enough to classify the receiving browser behavior when it gets some rating value from the webserver and it cannot show certain content to user because parental control (i.e. it's not going to do more requests from the same browser fingerprint)
PICS and its successor (Powder) both appear to be abandoned. “Voluntary content rating” and “Rta marker” must be pretty obscure since I’m not finding a good web page.
I think these would be better thought of as attempts to create a web standard rather than an actual web standard?
I did a bit of research. Looks like the <meta name="rating"> tag is supported by Google's Safe Search. Most adults probably do Google searches with "safe search" turned on (since we don't want porn sites most of the time) and this will put website owners in a dilemma. What if it's not for kids but you don't want to drop out of Google search results? That's going to discourage usage of this tag by anything other than porn sites.
I asked ChatGPT about browser support for the meta tag. It appears to be an experimental feature in Firefox 146 that's turned off by default [1].
So, there's some work on this feature, but it seems like another signal is needed to say "It's not porn but I don't want my website to be visible on devices that have parental controls on," which would be needed for it to get mainstream usage.
Also, often you won't want to drop out, but just redirect kids to more appropriate content. For example, Lego's website has a popup to redirect kids to the "play zone." It might be nice to do that automatically, but the <meta name="rating"> tag isn't going to do the trick.
It's not a lack of imagination. I can easily imagine why people would believe otherwise. They're still wrong, even if I can easily imagine how they came to believe that.
But mostly, governments are trying to pass such laws because they want control, and kids are just a convenient excuse.
> In software it's the opposite, in my experience.
That's been my experience as well: ten hours of doing will definitely save you an hour of planning.
If you aren't getting requirements from elsewhere, at least document the set of requirements you think you're working towards, and post them for review. You sometimes get new useful requirements very fast if you post "wrong" ones.
I think what they meant is you “can save 10 hours of planning with one hour of doing”
And I think this has become even more so with the age of ai, because there is even more unknown unknowns, which is harder to discover while planning, but easy wile “doing” and that “doing” itself is so much more streamlined.
In my experience no amount of planning will de-risk software engineering effort, what works is making sure coming back and refactoring, switching tech is less expensive, which allows you to rapidly change the approach when you inevitably discover some roadblock.
You can read all the docs during planning phases, but you will stumble with some undocumented behaviour / bug / limitation every single time and then you are back to the drawing board. The faster you can turn that around the faster you can adjust and go forward.
I really like the famous quote from Churchill- “Plans are useless, planning is essential”
> I think what they meant is you “can save 10 hours of planning with one hour of doing”
I know what they meant, and I also meant the thing I said instead. I have seen many, many people forge ahead on work that could have been saved by a bit more planning. Not overplanning, but doing a reasonable amount of planning.
Figuring out where the line is between planning and "just start trying some experiments" is a matter of experience.
I'm pretty sure I've literally never seen planning deliver value. But interestingly even the environments where planning was most obviously useless rarely diminished people's willingness to defend it.
Beyond was available well before Impossible was. I used a combination of Beyond and Boca as my primary substitutes for ground beef, until Impossible came along, and now I use almost exclusively Impossible.
I don't feel like they have a niche anymore, but there was a time I considered them my top choice, before impossible dethroned them.
Yes “open weights” conveys the reality more clearly: merely having the parameters is very different than able to run a process that creates them. Without openness of the full process start to finish, much is hidden.*
Remember, language is what we make it. Dictionaries are useful catalogs of usage but we make the judgment calls.
* Even with the process, much is not well understood! / The ethics of releasing an open weights model at some capability level is a separate discussion.
You delete the rest of your spam database and replace it with `fn can_send_spam(_: Email) -> bool { false }`. You delete the "can we spam you" checkbox from your checkout page and replace it with "return false".
For legitimate newsletters and similar: you delete any and all forms that allow signing up to receive emails without affirmative consent from that email address that they want to receive mail, and you offer a one-click effective-immediately "unsubscribe" to retract that consent at any time. Then, you can tell if you can send someone mail based on whether they're in your database of people who have explicitly consented to send you mail, and you don't ever send email to anyone else other than one-time consent requests and order-confirmation-style transactional mail.
The only legitimate database of emails is "these people have explicitly confirmed to us that we can email them"; any other database is radioactive waste, delete it.
>The only legitimate database of emails is "these people have explicitly confirmed to us that we can email them"; any other database is radioactive waste, delete it.
That's not actually how HIPAA compliance works. You're required to keep 7 years of communications, and part of those communications is who you sent it to. Amazon SES sends complaint notifications and you're not allowed more than 1 complaint per 1000 emails or they shut you down too. People who are repulsively anti-spam have ruined email as a medium.
I'm merely pointing out the technical aspect of this bill is ridiculous and everyone sending transactional emails will fight you, killing any bill you might have.
> People who are repulsively anti-spam have ruined email as a medium.
That is a ridiculous attitude. Spam has ruined email; anti-spam is the attempt to keep it usable. Anti-spam wouldn't be needed in the first place if not for spammers.
> Amazon SES sends complaint notifications and you're not allowed more than 1 complaint per 1000 emails or they shut you down too.
Good, that sounds like a reasonable step.
Now if only there were existential-level fines for sending spam, too.
Yes, I am aware of people who use the "report spam" button because they can't be bothered to hit "unsubscribe". Which wouldn't be as much of a problem if 1) they felt like they'd subscribed in the first place, rather than being tricked by a default-to-spamming "do you not not not want us to not spam you" checkbox, 2) spammers didn't act like having an "unsubscribe" link was all they need to do to make it okay to send unsolicited commercial email, and 3) unsubscribing reliably worked.
> transactional emails
Transactional emails have never been the problem. People buying lists of emails and sending email marketing spam and trying to defend that as in any way a legitimate practice have always been the problem, along with phishing, scams, etc.
>That is a ridiculous attitude. Spam has ruined email; anti-spam is the attempt to keep it usable. Anti-spam wouldn't be needed in the first place if not for spammers.
Spam didn't close port 25 to residential ISP customers. Repulsive anti-spammers did that. I can't set up and run email on a rpi in my house without paying ridiculous fees to become "business" internet. And all you really get for that is port 25.
I've run my own email server at work. I doubt you have the experience I do. I sent 50,000 emails a day to patients for over a decade. Important emails, about their health. And repulsive anti-spammers come up with solutions like "you have to solve this captcha to send this important email to your patient on Earthlink!" So after a time, we simply had to give up running our own email server and run email through SES and let Amazon worry about the Earthlinks of the world for us. 99.9% no complaints sounds really really hard, but we actually cleared that bar pretty easily. Except that one day one of our doctors dumped hundreds of our emails, which HE PAYS TO RECIEVE, into the spam folder by accident.
I have ZERO empathy with repulsive anti-spammers. NONE. For they are the reason that email is the centralized shitshow it is today. We have AI now. AI should be able to tell us if email is spam very quickly now. Can we please have our port 25 back?
I tried, on my current laptop, to see if I could get used to having tap-to-click enabled even without actually using it; I wanted to see how far off I was from being able to deal with any non-ThinkPad. I ended up turning it back off after a few days, after many many clicks I didn't want to click.
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