> There are hundreds of ways that different websites ask you to pick dates
Ugh, date pickers. So many of these violently throw up when I try to do the obvious thing: type in the damn date. Instead they force me to click through their inane menu, as if the designer wanted to force me into a showcase of their work. Let your power users type. Just call your user’s attention back to the field if they accidentally typed 03/142/026.
No no, I find that having to click back through almost 40 years’ worth of months to get to my birthday allows for a nice pause to consider the fleeting and ever-accelerating nature of life.
> You can usually click the year and then pick that first.
Even then, clicking the year will often lead to a tiny one-page list of 10 years, which you can either page back in or click the decade to get shown a list of decades to pick from. So: click 2026, click 2020s, click 19XXs, click a year, click a month, click a birthday.
Such an interface makes at least some sense for "pick a date in the near future". When I'm booking an airline flight, I usually appreciate having a calendar interface that lets me pick a range for the departure and return dates. But it makes no sense for a birthday.
This is still a partial solution as the user needs to know that their locale is being used and know how their locale is configured to understand the format. This is most problematic on shared computers or kiosks, especially when traveling.
Is is the device display language, the keyboard input language, my geo location, my browser language, my legal location, my browser-preferred website language, the language I set last time, the language of the domain (looking at amazon.co.uk), the language that was auto-selected last time for me on mobile or... something else entirely?
I mean, once in a different country, you either experience the locale shock once then adapt, or you've seen it before and kind of know what to expect.
And for the rest of the users who have no idea about locales, using whatever locale they have on their computer might be technically incorrect for some of them, but at least they're somewhat used to that incorrectness already, as it's likely been their locale for a while and will remain so.
This is the equivalent of requiring all your text to be in Esperanto because dealing with separate languages is a pain.
"Normal" people never use YYYY-MM-DD format. The real world has actual complexity, tough, and the reason you see so many bugs and problems around localization is not that there aren't good APIs to deal with it, it's that it's often an after thought, doesn't always provide economic payoff, and any individual developer is usually focused on making sure it "looks good" I'm whatever locale they're familiar with.
I hate how websites that are trying to verify my age make me scroll through 13, 18, or 21 years that I could not legitmately select if I want to use the site.
It's one of those topics that's evergreen for a perennial article. If there's a slow month of ad revenue, just write up a "Who is Satoshi" article, end it with "we may never know" and collect the paycheck. Honestly, I expected better from the NYT.
I mean, yeah? We can wag our fingers about what people find interesting but it is what it is. Bitcoin is an important technology in the world, and people are interested in who the inventor is. You may think it doesn't matter, but clearly a lot of people disagree.
I’ve been learning Gregg Shorthand (Anniversary) since the start of the year. It’s a fun challenge even if it feels fantastically obsolete at this point with transcription models getting better and better every day. I’ve always liked paper-and-pen notes, so the idea of basically learning analog Vim was appealing :)
I just learned about Postcrossing from a small bookshop owner in Iceland! I was buying some postage to send some postcards back to family in the US. We talked about how fun the format is (and challenging! You don’t have a lot of room!).
Today, you get the more streamlined experience of push, 3 clicks to restart CI & container build, push 1000 yamls, click to restart the build again, cry when it all fails.
If your ticket was in the form of a piece of music that you had to perform on your violin to gain entry, would you feel the same way? Keep in mind, it’s only in the last 15 years that playing the violin in this world became commonplace and only in the past 5 that these performances became required to access common goods and services. Violins also still cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
No. The seasoned gambler can not learn things that measurably increase their chance at the Roulette, whereas they definitely can do that with an LLM. And the LLM itself becomes smarter over time through hardware upgrades, software updates and even memory for those who enable that feature.
Usually this results in approvals to approve the approval to approve making the change. Everyone signed off on a tower of tax forms about the change, no way it can fail now! It failed? We need another layer of approvals before changes can be made!
“Rebuild” is also a four-letter word though at this stage too. The customer has a panel of knob-and-tube wiring and aluminum paper-wrapped wire in the house. They want a new hot tub. They don’t want some electrician telling them they need to completely rewire their house first at huge expense, such that they cannot afford the hot tub anymore. They’ll just throw the electrician out and get some kid in a pickup truck (“You’re Absolutely Right Handyman LLC”) to run a lamp cord to their new hot tub. Once the house burns to the ground, the new owners will wire their new construction correctly.
It’s simple, reliable, and effective. Shortwave receivers can be made fairly compact. They’re also very prevalent in most countries (every ham transciever), so there’s nothing suspicious to pack. People find numbers stations interesting, so they are often streamed online. One time pads have their logistical shortcomings, but are still the best encryption possible. The OTP can be compromised in known, visible ways, where a phone has myriad invisible ways to be compromised.
You could probably cheat with the one time pad and use a book as a key, pick a pre determined starting point go diagonally down accross the page convert the letters to numbers and xor that against the message. It would be near enough to random and less conspicuous than a pad of random numbers when searched.
You could probably do something to increase the apparent entropy like xoringing it with an irrational number like tao or pi starting with a digit determined by the date.
Ugh, date pickers. So many of these violently throw up when I try to do the obvious thing: type in the damn date. Instead they force me to click through their inane menu, as if the designer wanted to force me into a showcase of their work. Let your power users type. Just call your user’s attention back to the field if they accidentally typed 03/142/026.
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