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By that logic we should require DNA testing because, you never know, someone might go to a polling place and lie about their name and have a fake ID too.

You never can be too careful!

Also, maybe someone inside will take their ballot from them.

IMHO this voting thing is too risky. We should just go back to having a ruling family /s

The office icons are rather subtle but do sorta illustrate what they do if you look carefully - the word icon is a list, the excel icon is a spreadsheet, and the powerpoint icon is a pie chart.

That you have to look closely is kinda crap lol. Whoever designed the icons was more obsessed with consistent branding instead of making icons that make sense.

Looking at the start menu, some MS icons are great. Paint, Notepad, Calculator are all fantastic.

The current icons really aren't that good. Looking at apple specifically: The facetime and messages icons are almost completely indistinguishable. Get angry and say I'm blind, but so is a lot of the userbase - like legitimately, legally blind people.

The camera icon on iOS is just a fucking camera lens with a grey background. No context.

The calculator one is actually pretty good.

The photos one is also bullshit lol.

I agree with your conclusion that the sweet spot is in the middle, because I could easily explain to my mom "click the icon that has a pen and paper" and it would be very obvious. The current icon is completely ambiguous crap.
Microsoft has never been an end-user-focused company. Almost every successful product they've ever made was to sell to a business for their employees to use. Everything else they seem to either half ass or screw up or lose their passion for at some point.

I think I first came to that realization with windows phone 7/8? The UI was cool looking, but functionality was half-baked and third party app availability was dismal. HOWEVER! You could sign a windows phone into an active directory/365 account and manage the bloody daylights out of it via group policy and the tools to do that were SUPER WELL MADE.

Same is/was true of Microsoft Teams - an utter abomination of a chat client, the search is garbage, the emoji and sticker variety sometimes weird, the client itself randomly uses up 100% CPU for no reason and is just generally buggy... but gosh darnit, MS made sure sysadmins could ban memes and use of certain emoji via policy and gave insane amounts of detail to auditing and record keeping. So sure it's a pile of shit to use, but awesome if you wanna spy on your employees and restrict their every move.

Windows is fun because with the enterprise version, they give all that control to the employers, but with the consumer version they give all that control to advertisers, developers, and themselves.

I think this is also why every consumer-focused product they make either fails instantly, or ends up rotting on the vine and failing after whoever evangelized that product leaves the company (possibly being forced out for not being a "culture fit"). Do I have to go on about zune/windows phone/xbox? Or surface? Or the way they randomly dumped their peripherals product line on another company? lol.

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026) on Friday January 02, 2026 @05:35PM (#46470315)

    Location: USA (Southern California)
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: No (maybe Northern California)
    Technologies: Python, C, C++, Linux (heavily), MacOS (obj-c, swift, iOS), Kafka, ZeroMQ, HDFS, Apache Spark, oldschool css/html/js (jquery lol)
    Resume/CV: 11 years experience as an embedded software engineer for a space company. Degree in computer engineering with a bit of experience in iOS mobile development and some experience with ML and HDFS/Hadoop/Apache Spark/Kafka.
You could say I have embraced the "full stack" experience. I've worked on mobile and web software AND embedded software running on really cool linux-based platforms (and other RTOS platforms but mostly linux!).... at the same time before!

I'm looking for something new, and would love to hear from you!

email: kya.in.space at gmail dot com

Re:What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail? on Thursday October 23, 2025 @09:13PM (#45689588)
> The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.

But it IS Apple's choice. The problem is they have a mixed up conflict of interest, and it's even worse when Apple themselves is trying to sell you their own services.

IMHO the company making the hardware, the company making the software, and the company selling the cloud services shouldn't be allowed to all be the same company. There's too much conflict of interest.

Re:What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail? on Thursday October 23, 2025 @09:10PM (#45689564)
> How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line!

???? ctrl+a and ctrl+e? That works on most Linux setups, too. Only Microsoft screws that up. I love how in Mac Office apps, Microsoft also makes ctrl+a and ctrl+e do what they do in windows lol.

Re:Do not download the app, use the website on Saturday July 26, 2025 @12:34AM (#44691364)
> Say you order food online — you’d want a notification to update you, instead of having to manually refresh a webpage

Browsers have a notification feature where websites can send you notifications, and it's usually enabled by default.

What's messed up about red light cameras is they can actually be useful - if used correctly!

The correct use case is "We seem to have a problem with red light runners at this intersection, so let's find out why by temporarily deploying red light cameras here."

I've seen this done and the city in question found out. They were able to make some changes to the light timing and at several intersections, that caused the amount of red light runners to drastically drop. (It was stuff like the left turn light not turning green when the straight forward light did).

Those things should just be illegal. I can't even imagine how much energy and plastic/paper/food goes to waste in those damn things.
Re:Honeywell H316 Kitchen Computer (2023) on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @07:55PM (#44372312)
"If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute."

Oh my goodness it's a satirical ad. I don't know the proper marketing term for it, but I've seen these in magazines before plenty of times.

It's pretty funny that some people took this seriously.

Re:GOP omnibus bill would sell off USPS's EVs on Sunday June 22, 2025 @09:02PM (#44351590)
> Amazon already has their own custom electric delivery trucks

The vast majority of amazon's delivery vehicles are random vans, and amazon themselves doesn't own them; they franchise out like fedex ground does.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonDSPDrivers/comments/17l2gue/a...

Re:Google restricts Android sideloading on Thursday June 05, 2025 @05:20PM (#44195909)
That problem plagues every OS. Fortunately, my 14 year old canon networked printer/scanner/fax works in fedora 42 without any configuration at all. As long as it sees it on the network. Scans too! I was surprised about the scanning lol.

The brother wifi laser printer I have works on everything without any installation at all. Windows, mac, linux, my phones.

Re:My AI skeptic friends are all nuts on Monday June 02, 2025 @11:18PM (#44165936)
Trash Driven Development :D
Re:GM Is Pushing Hard to Tank California's EV Mandate on Saturday May 17, 2025 @11:05PM (#44018702)
GM just making some fucking cars people want to buy. Nobody wants to look like a fat grandma driving a Tahoe or a racist uncle driving a Silverado lol.

I mean I wouldn't mind a corvette if they didn't cost 80 fucking thousand dollars.

Re:GM Is Pushing Hard to Tank California's EV Mandate on Saturday May 17, 2025 @11:04PM (#44018700)
RAM IT THROUGH! Like a drunk ram 2500 driver lol.
Re:Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war on Sunday May 11, 2025 @05:11PM (#43957196)
Having an AC problem in death valley in the summer could be troublesome.
What's really going to happen is IT people will enforce this by default because good users aren't supposed to take screenshots, apparently.
Re:Leaving Google on Sunday May 11, 2025 @04:28AM (#43952308)
I have never worked at google, but when I was in college 10+ years ago the allure was that they were making all kinds of cool new stuff, and they had enough money to not just pay you well, but they (could afford to) have 80/20 time where you could work on developing cool new stuff while on the clock!

But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol.

In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle.

But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.

Re:Getting Older Isn't What You Think on Wednesday May 07, 2025 @03:17PM (#43919594)
AFAIK lots of new remasters of classic albums are auto-tuning the vocals as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/1bfxj2d/w...

What if the picture does have historical significance but you don't know it yet?
I'm with you here! I take lots of pictures. I picked up that stupid habit when I was a teenager with my family's digital camera. Eventually got a small canon for christmas and kept it in my pocket until I had a smartphone.

I'm not the kinda person to hold my camera up in the air filming a concert or whatever. But pictures of family! Pictures of random food I enjoyed or found cute. Pictures of random cute things in the store. Pictures of friends and cars and the beach and whatever else.

So much changes in the world. I love looking back at old pictures. During covid my mom and I would get together and dig through and find old stuff to post on facebook. It was a lot of fun.

I mean. I have pictures of random old cereal boxes I found amusing at the time. I have pictures I'm quite proud of, and others that just capture random happy moments.

I don't know what people mean about change? Things change a lot. People change, things change, the world changes. I have pictures of vegas casinos that were demolished years ago. Foods that aren't made anymore. I have a random picture of a quarter pounder meal from like 2005. Why not? XD

Those sorts of things cost me no time or effort really. Whipped out the camera real quick. Click. Put it away. Go back to enjoying my life. :)

Re:The side hustle from hell on Monday April 28, 2025 @02:10PM (#43824275)
Just over 10 years in space stuff, I have noticed exactly the same thing.
I had a college professor who used "basically" and "essentially" so much that it was awfully distracting.
The old shitty clay lines are what you find in most rentals in SoCal. Then one day none of your toilets flushes and the landlord says you flush too many wipes down the toilet. You argue and they make you pay for a plumber who's like "yea they all do that DONT USE WIPES!!!!!One!!!" And then finally after getting to know every other plumber in town, one offers to run a camera for free and shows you that the main line is fucking falling apart and that's why it keeps plugging up.

TBH sewer main inspections should be required any time someone wants to rent a house out.

The neighborhood that I have to drive through to get from where I live to where I work hates that their precious little neighborhood is used as a commuter route by a lot of people, so they stuck stop signs EVERY. SINGLE. BLOCK.

I make sure to come to a complete fucking stop at every one of those signs. Partially because I hate the feeling of rolling through stop signs, but partially out of spite lol.

Or if you don't want ugly ass external boxes cluttering up your desk.

I don't get why they couldn't be arsed to stuff a few m.2 slots in there. They could keep the main nand their weird soldered on BS with the firmware stuffed in a special partition if they want. Just give us more room!

Hahaha I guess it's time to bring back rear projection TVs!

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