> done by apple, with access to their internal documentation
I'm pretty sure there was some antitrust investigation over Microsoft doing the same thing: giving their own software an unfair advantage on their operating system due to the insights the Office team could gain from the kernel team.
Microsoft made a convincing argument that the relevant teams never talked to each other, and the Office developers just reverse-engineered undocumented Windows APIs, the same any other developer would have had to.
Which brands of smart TV show ads? I live in the UK and I've had three different brands of smart TV (Philips, Samsung and Toshiba) and my experience with all of them has been pretty good. Netflix, YouTube, etc. have worked pretty well and I haven't seen any ads that weren't linked to the apps themselves. Perhaps they're tracking me in ways I don't know about, though?
Samsung frame.
Hardware: It has physical netflix, prime, somethingelse buttons which immediately switch to that app without asking if you want to close the current app. Frustrating when you accidentally sit on your remote. So i modified my remote, put tape underneath the buttons to disable them.
Software:
In menu ads, sometimes, for some crap thing like tennistv. I have no idea how to disable it.
The fucking frame store is inbetween apps and starting point of the menu. Alyways need to do 4 (or 5, depending on ad) times to the right before being able to run the app you want.
It started playing samsung tv. After a week. I hate tv. Took me a day to get annoyed enough and then spend an hour to disable the shouting XL Americans.
So, typical Samsung. Software ux just sucks. Luckily a tv is mostly turned off* and that is why I bought it; hardware looks great when it’s off.
*off: it always switches to the frame mode. It is a laughable gimmick. Ever seen a painting giving light? You cannot disable it (i assumed it was possible). Long-hold power off to turn the tv off. Else frame mode. Sucks.
We need to save energy here in Europe. @Samsung: please fix it.
I thought i would not use thr smart functions, but I use it a lot. Tune-in radio and spotify work great. Also a lot of youtube and national tv app are pretty good. Airplay works fine too.
Recommend it? No. Happy with it… just enough to not return it.
>You cannot disable it (i assumed it was possible). Long-hold power off to turn the tv off. Else frame mode. Sucks.
I have this TV; you long press the power button to turn it off. The entire gimmick of the TV is the art mode, as the actual panel isn't very good and you can buy the TV without the gimmick for several hundred dollars less (A regular 65" Samsung Frame is ~2K, while the normal 65" QLED is $1,200). My gripes about samsung software aside - it's an odd thing to complain about.
Since I thought it was a gimmick I just assumed you could switch it off.
The TV is 32” btw. Just big enough to comfortably see the ball when watching football, small enough to not be the centerpiece of the living room.
I do not have any complaints about the panel btw, good enough i guess.
The person you're talking to hates TV, so they bought this one because it looks nice when it's turned off. I wonder if they're really frustrated with another person in their home who enjoys watching "shouting XL Americans" on the idiot box.
My Samsung TV shows ads in the bottom app bar. Or did until it was disconnected from the internet. Crappiest TV I've ever had, slow and just all around a bad experience. I would love a dumb TV with decent panel in UK! Any suggestions are welcome.
That turns all users into a greater threat in the case of any bugs in the server. Makes it easier for the service to get DOS'd by authenticated users, and so on. Allowing on user to be more insecure, makes all users more insecure.
Unfortunately even privileged users (that have authority to change the permissions or possibly passwords of other users) can still use weak passwords.
A better solution would be to have your browser prevent you from reusing passwords (it only needs to keep hashes).
If the web browser is governing the passwords you can and can't have, and forcing you to have unmemorisable passwords, you're better off rethinking the whole thing. For instance, it probably makes more sense to ask the web browser to generate keypairs rather than passwords if we know the passwords cannot possibly be memorised.
I don't reuse passwords, or use a password manager. I just have a system for remembering which password to use for each website, and maintain a list of hints. And I have a pretty terrible memory. But having had the password I used to re-use across a few (non- critical) sites show up on haveibeenpwned it's what works best for me.
Firefox is great in that regard: when you fill in a signup form it will automatically suggest you a long, generated password, and will then store it for you.
This is news for me. I've been using a local password manager for ages and disabled any browser form support since maybe the last century so I missed all those new functionalities. I'll keep using my password manager anyway, it's not only for the browser and not only for one device. I sync the db across devices with Syncthing, I don't login into any browser cloud sync.
That is not really unique to Firefox, right? Safari does it as well and I am pretty sure Chrome does it too (I am not a Chrome user, so I can't check).
It’s still better than using the same few passwords everywhere or having a system with the site name. Because you need only on website vulnerability, which is quite common, to compromise your passwords. It’s better to have a single unlikely point of failure than many guaranteed points of failure in my opinion.
Chrome has a password manager but the key is stored for you, which is less secure because it’s not using a HSM (hardware security module) as far as I know.
Your single point will be compromised. Someone gets access to your system they now have access to all of your passwords. Your password manager is hacked. Your device dies. Putting your eggs in one basket feels like a smart thing until you lose that basket.
I agree it’s not perfect but what is your better solution? My email and some passwords have been collected at least 8 times according to https://haveibeenpwned.com/
A password manager with multiple factor authentication sounds better to me.
Obviously very good that Chrome was delivered without people doing lots of overtime. However, a lot of his argument seems to be about the age of the management, and surely ageism is illegal and it should be about the person's skills rather than being old enough to have school-aged kids or even how many decades of experience they have
Edit: Okay, I guess the kind of ageism he is suggesting isn't illegal in the US, but it is in the UK and is still generally considered unethical
He frames it in a way that kinda sounds age-ist-y, but I think it's less about age and more about experience (he was using age as a proxy for experience, which isn't always true, but is close enough, often enough).
I had my first "senior software engineer" title when I was 28, and that was after I'd only been writing code professionally for a few years (in my early 20s I had a campus coding job at my university, and then I was doing a lot of open source work through my mid 20s, but not sure I'd call any of that "professional"). At my most recent job, I saw most developers making it to the senior in their late 20s, and many even making it to "staff" (one level above senior at our shop) by 30, or soon after. That's ridiculous. In my mind, most people should be hard pressed to develop the experience to really be "senior" in something before they're in their mid to late 30s.
Now, I certainly don't mind (from the standpoint of prestige and salary) that I somehow ended up with the title of "principal software engineer" (one level above "staff") when I was 33, but... c'mon. When you've nearly tapped out your career ladder by the time you're 35 (unless you move to management), it feels like there's something not right there.
The truth is that these are all meaningless titles once you consider people change jobs. Some people won’t accept ever going to a lesser position and stay at a company(unless forced out by circumstance) but those who switch generally experience some reshuffling in “rank” when they leave.
If you left the company you work for right now(other than to start your own company) you could find yourself as a staff engineer(one level below) somewhere with an accelerated path to the next level maybe, or in an equivalent role, although this is more difficult just because there are fewer positions and more filters to being hired.
I won't try and read into whether or not there's ageism anywhere in the tweet stream, but certainly when talking about hiring the magic words are "find experienced engineers to run it". This is very much legal and ethical in the UK - we're not precluded from setting an experience-based hiring bar. I'm sure if a 25 year old had come along with two browsers under their belt they'd gladly have been hired into a leadership role too.
There is currently ageism within the software industry (esp. startups). Older people (apparently) find it hard to get jobs. Part of the justification for that refusal is that young people will allow death-marches.
His argument assumes you are aware of the youth bias, and is gently pushing against the ageism by pointing out that senior software engineers have a LOT of useful knowledge.
> Part of the justification for that refusal is that young people will allow death-marches.
Where I work the young team are sticking hard to their contracted hours (nothing wrong with that). It's the seniors that pull the extra (but not mad) hours to get shit completed.
I know that this is a real problem, but I also wonder if this perception is also perpetuated by selection bias.
People with established careers in tech often change job through their established networks, and especially when they are highly sought after.
So it may very well be that the strongest senior candidates’ resumes never reach your inbox, while it’s more likely that strong junior candidates have no other option.
Seniority doesn't mean "senior", it's a product of expertise. Obviously there is a strong age correlation because generally going up seniority ladder is going to correlate with time at company, and domain knowledge/expertise is going to be correlated with time spent work in that field.
But I know plenty of people my age (my vintage? :D) with higher and lower seniority, similarly I know people older, and people with more time at the company in the industry with substantially lower seniority, and vice versa.
But also the companies I've worked at (FAANGs, so obviously large) don't treat "seniority" at the IC level as giving some kind of priority over lower seniority ICs. Obviously seniority factors into "how reasonable/accurate is their opinion" but that has never, in my experience, been a blanket override of lower "seniority".
The primary real difference is compensation, which is why companies like to get rid of senior engineers. I assume for a competent company they're doing a trade off "how much do they cost vs. how much value do they add", but obviously where we see this is always poorly managed "get rid of all the expensive people, WCGW" policies.
Maybe the secret is not really about the age or management skills, but rather that Chrome is an insanely profitable product (+ in a monopoly) so the pressure is rather low compared to a startup.
Additionally whether a specific feature is ready or not for a specific cycle is not that important considering that there are releases every 6 weeks and even before for metrics gathering activities.
Does the study recommend antibiotics not be used to treat ear infections? I would think the message is that it's even more important not to use antibiotics when they're not needed, not that they shouldn't be used at all
Ha! Thanks for this idea. When I was on Spotify I already was listening to more music anyway, because Spotify just has more music on it period. I switched to Apple Music (family reasons), but half of what I used to listen to on Spotify isn't found on Apple Music. Apple has more money than Spotify, so why do all these problems persist for years and years?
