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Cake day: August 12th, 2023

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  • Thin things look nice in industrial design. It’s why phones stopped being chunky as soon as the battery packs could be scaled down. It’s why EV cars are in higher demand than EV trucks/UVs. Watches became a prestige product when they were thin enough to wear on a wrist instead of fitting in a pocket. Flashlights became a collectors hobby after they shrank down to be palm sized while retaining their brightness. Cameras became ubiquitous once they stopped needing a tripod and flash powder. Smaller things, thinner things, are more attractive to consumers.


  • It’s diminishing customer experience creep, except the company doesn’t understand what the user data means. They run A/B tests of different layouts, seeing what kind of feedback each gets to learn more about design choices and users. Each version should get its own feedback and then that data is compiled by data scientists into actionable feedback, things that can be done to improve the website in the direction the company thinks is an “improvement”.

    Twitter abandoned those data scientists with the initial layoffs. There is no one to tell them what works and what impacts the customer experience, which is why each time the internal question of “how do we open up for engagement?” they answer it the same way, “Use existing user bases by linking their account to Twitter.” The result is several login requests all looking for the same cookie.

    It’s lazy or inexperienced management. Knowing the type of person Elon hires, it’s probably both.





  • The thieves are jamming WiFi systems and the comments on the article and on Lemmy seem to blame the victim for not being tech savvy. The bulk of Nest/Ring customers do so because the app is easy to use and the cameras easy to setup. By definition the victims are far less likely to be able to defend against this kind of jamming attack.

    If the next step in escalation is to shut down the power to the house, will the victim be blamed for not having home batteries and solar panels?

    Why not question the viability of WiFi systems in general? Has video ever been more than a deterrent to those scared of cameras? Fearless thieves who know how to deter the systems get free loot for their trouble.

    Treat security like we did before 2010; improve physical security to defend instead of relying on deterrence.



  • That the obvious part. At this point Netflix is looking at drastic transmission costs in the coming decade. Video is obviously taxing and require huge amounts of data but Atmos is no slouch either.The gamble, is in how customers receive the news and how it impacts playback.

    Audio sync issues, subtitle playback, artifacting on anything over 1080p will all cause customers dissatisfaction. Using a new way to save data is a great idea, almost literally a no brainer, but does a technical solution always work out of the gate?



  • In Tech, an IPO means the business is market ready to be sold off in pieces, ie stocks. The people who buy the product don’t care what it does, they use the product maker as a vehicle to more growth and profit. Typically that means the people who now own the business make poor choices about cost cutting, like off shoring support and removing unuseful documentation while removing people with critical tribal knowledge about processes. Each step the new owner takes will be to make the business more profitable, and in the world of business, the only thing they care about are the numbers and not the environment or people that created those numbers.









  • Google internal politics ousted the last of the OG Google guys and replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo, Prabhakar Raghavan.

    The general consensus is that all of the changes to Google since 2019 were driven by profit instead of trying to find things, like a search engine should. And those decisions were spearheaded by Prabhakar Raghavan, who used the training of a data scientist to run Google into the ground for short term financial gain. Sundae Prichai hired Prabhakar Raghavan directly and then promoted him from Head of Ads to Head of Search after firing the guy who had been helping guide Google Search since 1999.