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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Yeah, from what I remember of what Web 2.0 was, it was services that could be interactive in the browser window, without loading a whole new page each time the user submitted information through HTTP POST. “Ajax” was a hot buzzword among web/tech companies.

    Flickr was mind blowing in that you could edit photo captions and titles without navigating away from the page. Gmail could refresh the inbox without reloading the sidebar. Google maps was impressive in that you could drag the map around and zoom within the window, while it fetched the graphical elements necessary on demand.

    Or maybe web 2.0 included the ability to implement states in the stateless HTTP protocol. You could log into a page and it would only show you the new/unread items for you personally, rather than showing literally every visitor the exact same thing for the exact same URL.

    Social networking became possible with Web 2.0 technologies, but I wouldn’t define Web 2.0 as inherently social. User interactions with a service was the core, and whether the service connected user to user through that service’s design was kinda beside the point.



  • That’s never really been true. It’s a cat and mouse game.

    If Google actually used its 2015 or 2005 algorithms as written, but on a 2025 index of webpages, that ranking system would be dogshit because the spammers have already figured out how to crowd out the actual quality pages with their own manipulated results.

    Tricking the 2015 engine using 2025 SEO techniques is easy. The problem is that Google hasn’t actually been on the winning side of properly ranking quality for maybe 5-10 years, and quietly outsourced the search ranking systems to the ranking systems of the big user sites: Pinterest, Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit, even Twitter to some degree. If there’s a responsive result and it ranks highly on those user voted sites, then it’s probably a good result. And they got away with switching to that methodology just long enough for each of those services to drown in their own SEO spam techniques, so that those services are all much worse than they were in 2015. And now indexing search based on those sites is no longer a good search result.

    There’s no turning backwards. We need to adopt new rankings for the new reality, not try to turn back to when we were able to get good results.



  • Yeah, you’re describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user’s previous likes. I’m saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.


  • All the other answers here are wrong. It was the Boeing 737-Max.

    They fit bigger, more fuel efficient engines on it that changed the flight characteristics, compared to previous 737s. And so rather than have pilots recertify on this as a new model (lots of flight hours, can’t switch back), they designed software to basically make the aircraft seem to behave like the old model.

    And so a bug in the cheaper version of the software, combined with a faulty sensor, would cause the software to take over and try to override the pilots and dive downward instead of pulling up. Two crashes happened within 5 months, to aircraft that were pretty much brand new.

    It was grounded for a while as Boeing fixed the software and hardware issues, and, more importantly, updated all the training and reference materials for pilots so that they were aware of this basically secret setting that could kill everyone.





  • Windows is the first thing I can think of that used the word “application” in that way, I think even back before Windows could be considered an OS (and had a dependency on MS-DOS). Back then, the Windows API referred to the Application Programming Interface.

    Here’s a Windows 3.1 programming guide from 1992 that freely refers to programs as applications:

    Common dialog boxes make it easier for you to develop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. A common dialog box is a dialog box that an application displays by calling a single function rather than by creating a dialog box procedure and a resource file containing a dialog box template.



  • Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.

    Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.

    One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?

    It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.




  • I don’t think it would be difficult to get the IMV up to compliance with US regulations. If they’re selling it in Mexico, it’ll be required to have airbags. The hood looks long enough to have engineered in proper crumpling in a crash. Things like backup cameras might require a little bit of retooling, but that’s not actually super expensive compared to the other expenses of officially bringing it in: the 25% import tax, a parts and service network, etc.

    So it’s a business decision not to even try to get it into the U.S., informed by those regulations.

    In contrast, something like a kei truck wouldn’t be easy to get street legal as a new car in the US: no crumple zone and higher center of gravity are more fundamental safety issues that can’t easily be engineered around.


  • Stingrays don’t do shit for this. That’s mostly real time location data focused in by tricking your phone into reporting its location to a fake cell tower controlled by an adversary. That doesn’t get into the data in your phone, and even if someone used the fake tower to man in the middle, by default pretty much all of a phone’s Internet traffic is encrypted from the ISP.

    The world of breaking disk encryption on devices is a completely different line of technology, tools, and techniques.