TravisLS

7 ms·

1.
by TravisLS 5mo ago
I love these incredibly simple and elegant classic technologies. GPS is one of the best. It seems like it would be incredibly complicated and mysterious, but it's actually quite straightforward. I'm working on a presentation now t
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by TravisLS 10mo ago
Worth noting that many people who run from the police also have fake or stolen plates.
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by TravisLS 2y ago
I think you have identified the crux of my objection to this piece. The OP is mostly talking about cases where a truth about someone is so much more widely known than other truths about them that it becomes overwhelming in perception of tha
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by TravisLS 3y ago
I'm not sure where the threshold is for spending. I have an account that was spending over $500K/yr on Facebook ads and we were blocked by AI with no recourse for over 6 months before we finally found a human who was able to rever
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by TravisLS 3y ago
I came here to say the same thing. I've read about 20 of them in the past few days and they're absolutely captivating. The TWA 800 post got me started and is a must-read: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/memorie
6.
Too Many Airplane Systems Rely on Too Few Sensors (2019)(theconversation.com)
3 points by TravisLS 3y ago|0 comments
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by TravisLS 3y ago
This is great! But also, in case you missed it, click back to the homepage. There are a bunch of other equally great diversions.
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by TravisLS 4y ago
A bunch of US zip codes are for PO Boxes only, so this seems to stand a strong chance of working, at least in those places.
9.
by TravisLS 4y ago
So tired of people on HN disparaging Warren G Harding. Seriously, though: several of the Trump campaign's architects (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone) got their start in the Nixon administration.
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by TravisLS 4y ago
You say inefficient. I say mysterious. Who's to say the server always returns the same thing? The only way to find out is to scroll infinitely as the domain name suggests. Beware, your scrolling may have been finite.
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by TravisLS 4y ago
r/whatisthisthing might be your friend here
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by TravisLS 5y ago
NYTimes digital revenue is mostly subscriptions. Other publishers with lesser brand names are much more beholden to Google.
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by TravisLS 5y ago
This (ironically). I often start enforcing a "no pronouns" rule for myself and others when conversations and concepts get more complicated. It (the rule) is awkward at first but makes a big difference in mutual understanding.
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by TravisLS 5y ago
Counterpoint: a friend in Brooklyn was mugged for only around $10 but almost immediately after ran into street police on patrol. They jumped in the car with him and summoned other local cars to catch the robbers successfully. The police wan
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by TravisLS 5y ago
Fair point. If you prohibit everyone, including walled gardens, from targeting based on user behavior or user data, that seems like a plausible solution. It's a purely regulatory solution, though, not technical as the top level comment
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by TravisLS 5y ago
Tracking definitely works, at least in my experience. That's why Google and Facebook have completely taken over the entire digital ad ecosystem. They just have much better data, and your spend is an order of magnitude more effective th
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by TravisLS 5y ago
One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create
18.
by TravisLS 6y ago
I like the Hemingway app, but it is very much designed to make you write like Hemingway (ie short, clear sentences _only_). Obviously most great writing is not in this style. The Hemingway app is good for work emails and marketing copy, or
19.
by TravisLS 6y ago
If I put text into this tool and generate an original and unique image, who owns that image? If it's OpenAI, do they license it?
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by TravisLS 6y ago
There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. But increa
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by TravisLS 6y ago
We in the US spent something like $7000/citizen on stimulus so far though, so $30/test gets you a lot of tests if it mitigates the economic effects of the virus.
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by TravisLS 6y ago
Previous discussion (5 years ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10754194
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by TravisLS 6y ago
I doubt it. These lawsuits would be few and far between and Google still derives a ton of value from its free accounts in the aggregate. They might just get better at terminating the right accounts...
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by TravisLS 7y ago
I would love love love if this gave me a way to run Photoshop or other Win/Mac only apps from my Linux laptop. Let us request Ubuntu! (Although millstone's comment makes me wary to suggest you do anything with Adobe's softwar
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by TravisLS 7y ago
There are tons of examples of this. Basically any company with a real competitive advantage is very expensive to unseat once established. Try to unseat Amazon, Google, Facebook, or Apple with the capital that launched those companies.
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by TravisLS 7y ago
Is it necessary that ad blockers be totally all-or-nothing in their approach? Pop-up blockers didn't kill all ads. They just killed pop-ups. If it's really the privacy violations that are the problem, and not the user experience o
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by TravisLS 8y ago
I'm agreed with you on that point. I wish we lived in that world and I think we should work harder to get there. As long as we don't, though, I'm resigned to recognizing the public costs of these private failures.
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by TravisLS 8y ago
Indeed. I'm not saying the investors didn't have downside. Many did, and many of them lost everything (as they should have). But the public also bore a tremendous cost, and that makes the threat of another such crisis a public iss
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by TravisLS 8y ago
That's a fair point given the way I phrased my reply, but TARP is far from the extent of the cost of the financial crisis. The resulting market crash, credit crunch, unemployment all play a role in making this much more than a private
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by TravisLS 8y ago
You'll recall the financial crisis in 2008, where many of us taxpayers paid massively to bail out these private investors using their own money.

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