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robwilliams

Re:AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making on Monday July 20, 2026 @12:38AM (#48974392)
The article is not a technical overview of AI's failures, it's about the organizational failures that lead to things like token leaderboards. I would argue that this article goes far beyond the "obvious" fact of token leaderboards and into the deeper problems faced by both vendors and companies trying to measure the efficacy of AI.

How would AI writing help in any way?

The ban on replaceable flavored pod vapes caused that. Such a bizarre rule and so wasteful. You couldn’t replace the battery on the pod vapes but at least you could reuse the recharge and reuse the battery.
Re:Let Children Get Bored Again on Monday September 16, 2019 @01:20PM (#20986374)
>A problem for city kids maybe? My parents were smart enough to raise me somewhere more suited for children.

Implying that the only reason people with kids live in a city is because they're stupid? What in the world are you on about? I've read the below thread, and this is one of the most bizarre takes I've seen in a long time.

Re:How Apple's Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls on Monday September 09, 2019 @11:29AM (#20919054)
Tech companies are some of the largest and most influential companies in the world, and people are just now starting to understand what it means to have their lives influenced by wide-reaching algorithms. Sounds like a great topic for journalism to me.

Regardless of the motivation, NYT's recent algorithm-centric investigations (like the YouTube one a month or two back) are really interested and well-researched.

.NET Core is getting MASSIVE adoption in the large midwest city I work in. I expect .NET Framework to go on life support in a couple years.

The ability to build and run applications on Linux is something even old school .NET shops are excited about.

Re:Great developers are raised, not hired on Friday April 12, 2019 @07:16PM (#19649891)
I don't understand. Shouldn't everyone care about their standard of living? Are you implying that junior developers shouldn't?
Re:Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @02:54PM (#13125641)
It would be trivial to test whether a site is blacklisted, that's not why the anti-spam code is private.
Re:A Silicon Valley Dream Collapses in Allegations of Fraud on Thursday September 01, 2016 @11:05AM (#12405798)
What does this have to do with the article?
Re:NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments on Wednesday August 17, 2016 @05:31PM (#12308641)
I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber comment sections.

The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.

Re:NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments on Wednesday August 17, 2016 @03:03PM (#12307394)
The New York Times comments are free from trolls and spam, but it's a frustratingly obvious echo chamber when it comes to politics. I'm a liberal guy but I can't stand it. David Brooks wrote an interesting column (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...) a week or so ago and most of the comments are just bashing him for being a Republican, as if that has anything to do with the subject matter.
With all his talk about planting bombs, I'm sure they suspected that he was wearing a bomb vest to detonate when police moved in. I'm not sure how else they could have handled it.
Genuine question: how should streaming companies protect against their content being stolen/ripped/etc without DRM? What's the alternative? I'm sure it's in the contract of every streaming service that they have to protect the licensed content to the best of their ability. Saying "fuck the greedy media companies" doesn't help the streaming services that need to license content to survive. Considering almost half of all bandwidth (in the US at least) is used for streaming, I'd say it's pretty important to have a well-defined solution to enable streaming companies to do what they need to do.
Re:HTC Vive Headset Nearing 100,000 Sales on Thursday July 07, 2016 @10:02AM (#12049356)
How many units does a new product need to ship to be successful, then? A hundred million? For a fledgling tech 100k units is pretty impressive.
Re:Long Names are Long on Friday June 17, 2016 @05:08PM (#11925565)
>Use a better language instead of caring about the names.

That's not always an option.

Also, I don't find the language OP linked syntactically challenged. C# has a similar syntax and it's much more readable than what you've provided:

people.Sort(p => p.FirstName);

Re:Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round on Friday May 27, 2016 @10:12AM (#11786143)
You've made a negative comment in nearly every thread on this post - do you really hate Snapchat that much? Do you not see how some people might enjoy using it?
Re:Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round on Friday May 27, 2016 @10:09AM (#11786123)
I just recently got into Snapchat. My fiance and I just snap each other during downtime at work, nothing major. It's a lot of fun but I'm not sure how they could monetize it beyond the sponsored filters they have now.
Re:Chrome removes Backspace to go back on Thursday May 19, 2016 @10:35AM (#11730507)
I use the first feature constantly. If I'm reading reddit comments at the bottom of the page, I can scroll to the top and a part of the original post and then snap back to where I was. I think Chrome actually removed this for a day or two and it really annoyed me.
Re:Proposal: Go should have generics on Thursday April 14, 2016 @02:21PM (#11499183)
C# generics work beautifully and they were retrofitted. Later language additions like LINQ and extensions take advantage of generics as well.
Re:Reddit for iOS and Android on Friday April 08, 2016 @12:12PM (#11455757)
Inserting ads into the Alien Blue feed would have been easy. You may be right about the different target user, though.
Re:Reddit for iOS and Android on Thursday April 07, 2016 @07:49PM (#11451613)
Well it was the official app before this one. Considering how good AB is I think there's some technical reason to redo the app. Who knows.
Re:Reddit for iOS and Android on Thursday April 07, 2016 @07:48PM (#11451605)
I'm sure they are but I like not having to click every time I want to see a picture.
Re:Reddit for iOS and Android on Thursday April 07, 2016 @02:18PM (#11449355)
Well everyone is using the official Twitter app so I think it did. No one cares about API availability except a very small subset of developers.
Re:Reddit for iOS and Android on Thursday April 07, 2016 @02:14PM (#11449327)
I agree with a lot of your points, especially comment flair and swiping gestures (I used the quick swipe left to collapse comment threads 100s of times a day). I'm not a mod so I never used those features of Alien Blue.

However, I like the organization of the app more. Pictures are automatically displayed in the feed and require no clicks (gif/gyf support is badly needed, though), it has infinite scrolling, and there are essentially two browse sections: one for the front page and the other for browsing individual subreddits. It's nice to be able to switch to a specific subreddit and then go back to the front page exactly where you were.

It also seems faster than Alien Blue. With AB I would encounter "dead" links that wouldn't load many times a day, and I haven't seen one with the new app. Pages and images load much quicker than AB.

I'm switching to the new app and hope they add new features soon.

>plus the horrifying visual ads (for playlists and new albums) make Spotify a product I kind of love to hate

You mean in Browse, where you go to discover new music? Is there a streaming service that doesn't have a Browse section with recommended playlists/albums/etc?

It's not like they're advertising Dove soap or Coca Cola, they're showing you new music.

Re:Microsoft Acquires Xamarin on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @03:33PM (#11170020)
Considering Microsoft is pushing to support devs on Linux and that the probability of Visual Studio being ported from Windows is near 0, I don't think Microsoft would kill off MonoDevelop.
MS employee here. Most of the older employees use Windows phones and most younger employees use iPhones. I was honestly surprised how many people own Windows phones.

And no, bosses/execs don't care what phone you have.

Re:CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents on Tuesday January 26, 2016 @12:39PM (#10974633)
This was likely the work of the web master or a PR person; I doubt a CIA agent wrote it.
>Second, they picked an old car built before seatbelt introduction and emphasized that aspect.

How is that cherry picking? Seat belts are a huge safety improvement and it's a difference that applies to all old/new car comparisons, not just the specific old car they chose.

>Third, they picked an accident type -- frontal offset -- which recent modern cars have been specifically engineered to handle.

Why do you think they were specifically engineered to handle those accident types? They must be common enough to warrant the engineering expense to protect against it.

Re:Why I quit my dream job at Ubisoft on Friday January 22, 2016 @04:19PM (#10955671)
CD Projekt was accused of abusive work conditions for Witcher 3, and stories about Rockstar's death marches surface after almost everything they release. I think good conditions at AAA studios are outliers. Game development is my dream job but I'm glad I didn't go down that path.
Re:Project Rider – A C# IDE on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @03:44PM (#10897340)
All but the first bullet point deal with something other than autocomplete, and (as another user mentioned) CTRL+, takes care of many of your other points.

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