Johnwbh

8 ms·

1.
by Johnwbh 5y ago
This is the Syrian government we're talking about here. Recent history may indicate that one shouldn't trust them to be entirely truthful about their reasons for doing things
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by Johnwbh 5y ago
Except a smart scammer won't do it as a hard sell and look like they need you. They know as well as anyone that aggressive sales look suspicious. Madoff waited for people to come to him.
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by Johnwbh 5y ago
All human activity except agriculture and medicine is a waste of time of you want to be strict about it
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by Johnwbh 5y ago
They were a thing a few decades ago not really now. I mostly associate them with the 80s
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by Johnwbh 5y ago
Consumption habits are sticky. It's more effective to get a young person to like your product and they'll buy it across their working life than to try and convert someone already loyal to another brand
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by Johnwbh 5y ago
That's just false. You can do chargeback on debit card transactions fairly easily https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/visa-mastercard-ch...
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by Johnwbh 5y ago
I feel like amazon has gotten much less user friendly in the past few years. Although I can filter by "prime" that doesn't seem to actually tell me anything in particular about the delivery date. And I can't narrow it an
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by Johnwbh 5y ago
Given how many stories there are of IOT devices being hijacked for bitcoin mining or hacked in other ways I am extremely grateful that my smoke alarms are dumb as bricks.
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by Johnwbh 6y ago
Interesting essay. Reminds me of some of the issues that come up in teaching. Even when you think you have explained something at the simplest possible level you are often missing background assumptions that seem to obvious to you that you
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by Johnwbh 6y ago
Interesting. One of the things that ancient China had that other comparable civilizations didn't was an intellectual culture that transcended the political divisions of the time. Which allowed for a lot of innovation, and spreading of
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by Johnwbh 7y ago
It reminds me a bit of the old dinner party rules of not talking politics, sex or religion. You keep things harmonious but at the cost of more interesting conversation. And doesn't help when you're forced to tackle controversial i
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by Johnwbh 8y ago
The analogy with tencent and alibaba seems instructive, but not necessarily in a good way. They are both massive bloated platforms that do lots of different disconnected things not very well. e.g. the wechat messaging app contains subprogra
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by Johnwbh 11y ago
Hello from China. Lantern https://getlantern.org/ is a fairly reliable free option maade by a non-profit. It's slower that the paid options here, but works well enough for gmail, facebook, etc. Also, the more people ou
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by Johnwbh 11y ago
A lot of expats and the upper middle class in China and similar countries use them. Most people don't have the expertise to set up their own
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by Johnwbh 11y ago
You could also potentially specify constraints on a book and have it generated for you, e.g. generate me a book about a gay dutch vampire in the 1800s. Could open up a whole new concept of hyper speciaised books tailored for individuals par
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by Johnwbh 11y ago
Most people like that really just need someone to talk to, so introducing them to eachother solves both their issues neatly
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by Johnwbh 11y ago
> "But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ell
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by Johnwbh 12y ago
Ingress (which interestingly is also linked to google) works something like that. Wouldn't be surprised if they're prototyping for a big game release in the future.
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by Johnwbh 13y ago
I remember loving the original X-Wing and TIE fighter games. Does anyone know why space combat games dropped so dramatically in popularity?
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by Johnwbh 13y ago
Reminds me a bit of Spore, but hopefully not so disappointing.