What weak, counter-productive, messaging. This is like having a bully punching you in the face and responding with “hey man, I’m not going to do anything about this, I’m not even going to tell an adult, but I’d urge you to consider not punching me in the face”. Great news for the bully! You just removed one concern from their mind, essentially giving the permission to be as bad to you as they want.
They could not mention they usually don’t sue and that they are small and “have to pick [their] battles”, which effectively means “there will be no repercussions from our side, we won’t even consider trying, so continue to do as you please and even worse”.
Saying nothing is an option. It is very possible (and the FSF has done it) to put yourself into a weaker position by saying something.
You don’t have to lie, but you don’t have to unpromptedly volunteer you don’t have a hand to play, either.
The rule is fine and clear, it just wasn’t followed here. There’s no reason to have a stricter rule, what you’re complaining about is its enforcement. Two moderators can’t read everything, if you have a complaint, email them (contact link at the bottom of the page), they are quite responsive.
You would be correct, but...and I say this as a subscriber to Apple's "all-in-one" package...Apple News+ is in many ways garbage. Low-rent articles from publications whose time has long passed (looking at you, Popular Mechanics), with Taboola-grade ads interspersed (as Gruber said recently, how many 30-something blonde women need hearing aids?).
That said, stay away from the front page and go straight to your selected publications, and it's a good deal with access to WSJ, LA Times, and what have you. You still get crappy ads (which I can't seem to find a way to block with PiHole), but the content is there. For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it.
I agree that Apple News+ is bad, but I think this is an example of why these plans always fail:
Someone says "I would pay good money for a service that does..." and then the service that does the thing appears and the goalposts keep moving as people realize their threshold for wanting to pay for something is higher than they originally thought.
Popular Mechanics is so sad these days. Like the Discovery Channel, they just had to take something that was good and intentionally turn it into garbage for some coin.
"For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it" has been my take since I got it sometime last year. It's kind of remarkable -- the ads are absolute trash and the apps, while not bad, are a little weird in hard-to-define ways other than "Apple used to do better at this whole UI thing". But if you want just a handful of the paywalled publications it unlocks for you, it's a great deal.
I pay for Apple One and yet the apple news app on my phone is still riddled with ads with weird AI generated people and horrible articles from crappy publishers pushing some other sensationalist garbage.
> With most aircraft now offering wifi, there’s little practical reason not to switch airplane mode on anyway.
What’s that go to do with anything? If you can’t get a signal anyway, it’s not like using your data plan was an option. Airplane wi-fi (which is rarely “offered”, more like sold at a premium) is orthogonal to whether you should use Airplane Mode or not.
And that in turn affects tool adoption. I have dabbled in Lua for interacting with other software such as mpv, but never got much into the weeds with it because it lacks native JSON support, and I need to interact with JSON all the time.
yeah, LuaJIT is one of the use cases I had in mind working on this. JSON is pretty fast in modern JS engines, but in Lua land, JSON kinda sucks and doesn't really match the language without using virtual tables.
JSON has `null` values with string keyds, but lua doesn't have `null`. It has `nil`, but you can't have a key with a nil value. Setting nil deletes the key
Lua tables are unordered. But JS and JSON are often ordered and order often matters.
RX, however matches Lua/LuaJIT extremely well and should out-perform the JS Proxy based decoder using metatables. Since it's using metatables anyway do to the lazy parsing, it's trivial to do things like preserve order when calling `pairs` and `ipairs` and even including keys with associated null values.
You can round trip safely in Lua, which is not easy with most JSON implementations.
What if you suggested something which looks like the thing but is actually different?
For example, instead of having the floating icon on the bottom right which opens a chatbot, have a floating icon on the bottom right which opens a small panel (same size as the chatbot) with opening hours, contacts, prices…
That way the simulacrum is present, the signal is sent, but it doesn’t bloat the website and could perhaps help buck the trend.
There used to be a particular restaurant I ordered from. It was a real restaurant, not a ghost kitchen. It was listed on Uber Eats and similar, but you could also order from them, which was significantly cheaper. We used to have an image of the menu and the phone number but eventually lost it. Because the restaurant was only listed on Facebook, none of us have a Facebook account, and Facebook aggressively tries to keep you out without an account, it was a royal pain to get the number back. But even after getting the phone number, it was WhatsApp only. Which I don’t use. Some of my friends do, so that was taken care of like that.
There was another place which was on the brink of closing and kept shifting its opening hours and days. I went there on occasion but because there was no official web presence I couldn’t trust the hours online (photographs of the schedule). So I called. Sometimes they picked up, sometimes they didn’t. When they didn’t, sometimes they were closed but other times were just busy and couldn’t come to the phone.
So no, you can’t always find a phone number, and you can’t always call and ask. Having a roughly up-to-date web presence is very useful. It doesn’t need to be a bespoke website, you can use a platform, just don’t exclusively use closed garbage like Facebook and Instagram which walls you off from customers.
From my experience, you can't count on businesses to update their website to correctly reflect their working hours at all times either (especially if it's a one-off change, for example being closed for a day)
> It doesn’t need to be a bespoke website, you can use a platform, just don’t exclusively use closed garbage like Facebook and Instagram which walls you off from customers.
> Anybody else being annoyed by all this focus on em-dash use to detect AI?
Yes, the “AI detectives” can be quite annoying, as the comments are always the same. No substance, just “has X, it’s AI”. The em-dashes detectives tend to be the worse, because they often refuse to understand that em-dashes are actually trivial to type (depending on OS) and that people have been using them on purpose since before LLMs.
Mind you, using em-dashes as one signal to reinforce what you already perceive as LLM writing is valid, it’s only annoying when it’s used as the sole or principal indicator.
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