u/into_fiction

This one came through my feed and I had to fact-check since it sounded far-fetched in the beginning. For some time already Amazon had been working with sound detection, including detecting such sounds as a baby crying and dog barking and performing certain routine actions on their behalf. This new feature assumes that Alexa will be able to recognize adult crying and react in a way that would provide some comfort to the user instead of not responding to the stimulus or misunderstanding the command. This is consistent with the overall trend of creating a more humane voice and more emotionally intelligent Alexa.

I must say that I am somewhat torn about this development. On the one hand, this technology may actually help the person alone who is having a tough time. On the other hand, having an AI listening all the time for emotional stress and responding with predefined messages is quite creepy, especially considering how much of this information will be analyzed or stored somewhere.

It all sounds unreal if one does not know the events from personal experience. Jobs co-founded Apple, was fired by the board in 1985 after losing a battle with the CEO hired by him, and departed leaving nothing to the firm he created. Far from going into hiding, he founded NeXT, the computer company which failed commercially but developed an operating system that would prove much more important than it was supposed to be at the moment. Apple bought NeXT in 1997 simply to gain the technology and to return Jobs in the office rather than to give him control again.

But he returned, and after that, the iMac, then iPod, iPhone, iPad appeared, and Apple grew to become the world's largest company in terms of market capitalization. This is one of those few success stories in high-tech where a man driven out of his company returned and managed to create something even more successful than his first creation.

It is amazing in retrospect at how an idea that was so simple took off the way it did, where all that people had to do was douse themselves in some ice water and tag others, but in about eight weeks' time the ALS Association raised about 115 million dollars, without the need for expensive advertising campaigns or even celebrity telethons, and the money was used for scientific research, one of which being the discovery of a gene that plays a role in ALS development, making it one of the few viral ideas that have done something more than make meme history.

Flew recently and noticed the seatback screen just would not go dark. No option to turn it off completely, it just sits there glowing at you the entire flight. And when I finally went to watch a movie, there was an actual ad playing before it started, like a mini pre roll ad on a screen you're stuck staring at for hours. Felt so out of place for something that's supposed to be entertainment on a flight you already paid for.

I get airlines want more revenue streams, but at some point it feels like they're squeezing money out of literally every inch of the experience. First it was charging for wifi, then legroom, and now even the screen in front of your face isn't ad free. Kind of makes you miss the days of just bringing your own tablet or book and ignoring the seatback screen entirely.

I was at a concert last week where the number of phones held high was crazy. Where songs were being recorded from start to finish not for any reason other than to document them. I understand taking short clips so you can remember it but recording entire songs through your phone camera just seems pointless when it’s an experience you’re paying for. Just wondering how many of those people even go back and watch that footage, but I’d think very few do. It feels as though we’ve sacrificed our presence for the notion of documenting it, and the video quality isn’t even good either way.

Any job listing or business proposition requires proof of previous experience and references or testimonials, and yet when you first start your career, you haven’t got anything of that sort, and it’s quite the classic chicken-and-egg situation. Portfolio websites instruct you to “just make a portfolio” without going into detail of how to do that without having worked on any project for a paying customer. How did each of you get around it?

Google Photos, Samsung, Snapseed, Lightroom, even the stock iPhone editing tools. All of them added some version of AI object removal in 2023 and all of them had the same problem. Works great on simple backgrounds, completely falls apart the moment there's any texture, pattern, or complexity behind the object you're removing.

Remove a person from a crowd and you get a smeared blob that looks like the app guessed what a human shaped hole should look like. Erase a sign from a brick wall and suddenly the bricks are melting into each other. You end up spending more time fixing the erase than you would've spent cloning it out manually in the first place.

The demos always show someone removing a tourist from a perfectly clean marble floor. Nobody shows you what happens when you try to remove a car from a parking lot full of other cars.

It is just a question that always makes me blank out every single time. If you say something too low, then you have sold yourself short for the next year. If you say something too high, then you will be afraid that they will go ahead and ignore you. It is not possible to know whether you are at the correct range at all.

Then there is the question about why you should be hired.

Typical developer-written docs take for granted that you are 80% there, already. They will describe all parameters in some function, while not describing at all why you would want to call this function in the first place. Perfect as references, useless as onboarding material.

One way to recognize them is when the whole getting started guide consists of mere installation instructions, with no explanation whatsoever of what you are installing, and what it will do once installed. Correct, but useless.

Good documentation describes the problem being solved before explaining the solution. It assumes lack of knowledge and understanding instead of assumed expertise. This is the complete opposite of software development mindset, and most developers are not really fond of it, which is why documentation is often considered the last step of the process. The documentation of Stripe is often cited as the golden standard for good reasons.

I have been trying my hand at cybersecurity for some time now. I have a fair knowledge of how web applications function, a few programming languages like HTML and JavaScript under my belt, and some knowledge about basics of networking. I am not a beginner by any means, but I do lack the experience to even figure out how to begin with bug bounty hunting.

After looking at various companies like HackerOne and Bugcrowd, the sheer volume of programs is mind-boggling. Is there an appropriate learning route before even going on to these programs? I have heard about sites like TryHackMe and PortSwigger Web Academy being good ways to start out, but I am not sure whether they are sufficient enough.

Linux powers most servers. OpenSSL encrypts basically everything you do online. curl is in billions of devices. PostgreSQL runs more databases than most people realize. None of the people who spent years building these things got rich from it.

Trillion dollar companies ship products built on top of software some developer maintained in their spare time for free. Log4Shell was the reality check nobody wanted. A library maintained by a handful of volunteers was embedded in thousands of enterprise products and when it broke, suddenly everyone cared deeply about open source sustainability for about two weeks.

The value is enormous. The compensation is not. And nobody wants to fix it because the current arrangement is too convenient.

So apparently those panic inducing messages on Booking.com were just made up. The UK and EU both investigated and found that the low availability warnings and "X people looking at this right now" counters were misleading and in some cases had no real data behind them at all. They literally got fined for it. Every other travel platform runs the same thing now because it works, Expedia, Agoda, Hotels.com, all of them. You're not actually racing 17 strangers for that hotel room. You're racing a number some product manager A/B tested until it made enough people panic book.

MapQuest began in 1996. It remained the only online mapping service for about a decade and everything that people associated with it were printed from it, businesses revolved around it, and it was the thing.

Google Maps arrived in 2005 and within a few years, MapQuest had become obsolete. But it did not happen due to some innovation by Google as such, rather it happened because of superior execution of an already existing idea. Interface was better, there was satellite view, faster loading, and integration with other Google products.

MapQuest had everything going for it. It had name recognition, users, data. It just got complacent and ceased to innovate while Google looked at maps as infrastructure worthy of massive investment.

Jenkins was always the definite default choice. But now it seems that half of all new projects that I come across are now using GitHub Actions as a default, without even thinking about alternatives, since it is readily available within the repository itself.

GitHub Actions takes the lead when it comes to ease of setup. There is no infrastructure required, just a YAML file configuration and everything you need is available via actions in the marketplace, and it is free for most common use cases except heavy compute jobs.

However, Jenkins takes the lead when it comes to custom complex pipelines. Self-hosted runners, complete environment control, no vendor lock-in and it deals with large-scale enterprise tasks which could be costly or difficult to handle in GitHub Actions.

Sounds contradictory but it is the truth. The US government possesses close to 200,000 BTC, which are primarily seized through operations like Silk Road. They have never sold out majority of these coins.

The irony cannot get any bigger. It is the very same organization that had been considering Bitcoin to be a tool for criminals for years turned out to be an unexpected holder of cryptocurrency. Each and every sale by the government has the power to impact the markets. What do you think they will do with this cyrpto?