TACD
TACD on Hacker News
MiniDisc would have been an ideal successor to the floppy disk if only Sony had unclenched their fist just a little bit. USB sticks are higher capacity but there's utility in having media you don't have to keep track of; especially in the early 2000s it would have been very handy to give somebody a MiniDisc of data and just say "don't worry too much about getting that back to me, I have a whole box at home".
We had rewriteable CDs but they were so awkward, large, and unreliable that it never quite filled that need.
I don’t see why “truthful, nuanced, well reasoned” is the long-shot vs cagey and evasive.
Seems like this is even more reason to set a good example and follow the style guide.
Soccer is not destroying the planet and making basic computer hardware unaffordable.
I categorically do not love the timer. Timers should be a fixed-width typeface so the numbers don't jiggle.
My pet theory about why the Minis sold poorly is that the 12 Mini was released just a few months after the SE 2; I suspect a lot of the would-be Mini purchasers had just bought an SE 2 instead (not knowing the Mini was just around the corner), and are also not a demographic interested in upgrading their phone every year.
Something quite similar to this is a theme in Greg Egan's
Diaspora[1]. Specifically the various "flesher" societies and "bridgers" who facilitate communication between vastly divergent groups.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
I would love to have a bit more detail on why this is a non-starter, though I appreciate it’s likely that the answer is too complicated for a layperson to really understand.
> According to the bear's owners, the Cocaine Bear has the authority to officiate legally binding weddings in the mall where it is kept due to Kentucky's marriage laws. This claim is only partly true; the bear does not have the authority to solemnize weddings, but the state of Kentucky cannot invalidate marriages performed by unqualified persons if the parties believe that the person marrying them has the authority to do so. As such, it is a belief in the Cocaine Bear's authority that allows it to officiate legally binding weddings in Kentucky.
*Wiping away a tear* God bless America.
So why not incorporate blocks as a signal for the ranking algorithm? The simple version is every person that blocks $USER causes a -
n modifier on all of $USER's content; more complex versions could scale the modifier with the number of people (or the combined "reputation" of the people) blocking $USER or shadowban them once
x% of posters block them.
Open to abuse? Potentially, but so are a lot of community voting features, and reliably muting serial trolls would be a useful feature for a lot of social sites.
Go to Settings > Accessibility > Display, and scroll down to "Pointer". You can select the outline and fill colour separately. (At least on Ventura; I don't know which macOS version first introduced this option.)
As an aside, the Accessibility settings in both macOS and iOS are generally worth looking through, whether or not you consider yourself disabled. There's a lot of general quality-of-life settings and some neat features hidden there!
Subscriptions for simple usage only make sense for a true service with an ongoing cost to the provider; cloud storage, email, movie streaming, etc. A subscription for a general-purpose application is incongruous; you’re purchasing a finished product with no ongoing costs, like a pair of shoes or a book, and it should cost a one-off fee that reflects the cost that went into producing it.
What subscriptions are theoretically paying for is *updates* — the ongoing cost of supporting new technology, fixing bugs, and adding features. Requiring additional payment for additional work is totally fine, and some apps successfully use this model (Agenda (https://agenda.com) and Nova (https://nova.app) are two that come to mind, and I’d be interested to hear of others).
Requiring ongoing payment just for continued usage is predatory and leads to a perverse incentive where developers don’t actually need to provide updates or new features; they’ve got you as long as you still need the app’s basic functionality. It’s rent-seeking behaviour and it will prove to be as toxic in the digital realm as it is in real life.
This is exactly what we did. Our ‘television’ was never hooked up to actually receive broadcast signal, we’ve always just used it as a big screen for the media/gaming PC set up in the lounge, and at some point I realised if I’m going to spend my evenings staring at Good Screen I might as well upgrade from this 40” 1080p TV with a dead pixel row.
So I looked around and eventually bought a Philips 559M1 55” monitor instead. The price difference compared to an actual TV is a little tough to swallow (~£1,200 vs £?00), but the size, the resolution, and the overall picture / sound quality upgrade is very nice. The HDR leaves a lot to be desired but that’s probably inevitable when getting an LCD panel instead of OLED (which was not considered because of the likelihood of burn-in).
Worth it? Eh… maybe. When compared against the available market for “TV-sized monitor” or upgrading from 1080p, absolutely. But if you’re coming over from an equivalent-sized OLED TV, you’ll be paying a hefty amount for a visual downgrade, just to escape the ‘smart’ features.