"Changing between A and B requires a device reset."

Most people are going to flat out refuse to wipe their device for a phisher, especially since it'll log them out of everything and trigger all sorts of "new device on your account" warnings everywhere if it's done without their knowledge.

Sure, this is mildly annoying for the 1% that have good reason for A — but it's annoying once per device rather than losing A for good as is happening now. Sure, Google will deny service to A. They're doing that no matter what, either b/c they remove A or b/c they deny A, but this forces them to construct and defend a case for why users who went through the hassle of wiping their device to switch to A ought to be denied access to the app store, and that's a critically absent case in regulatory circles right now. (See also Graphene vs. the EU age check app.)

That's all it would take to protect B from A, but no one asks for it, and no one presses Google publicly for it, and so of course Google isn't doing it. No megacorp will help you walk off the Golden Path without some sort of extrinsic pressure. I see a great deal of clamor around wanting A, but absolutely none of the 'here's a mild annoyance that we came up with as a valid and safe compromise' clamor that would make them look incompetent in the public eye, provide further leverage for EU antitrust steps regarding Android itself, and give them a way to continue to protect users who need B for safety, while allowing those of us who want A to pursue it.

Perhaps other styles of compromise exist, too? As far as I can determine, no one else is thinking about this in terms of "what compromises will developers offer that continue to protect non-developers?", and so I have no other examples to offer. I'd sure love to see more ideas, more effort invested into offering serious and real compromises rather than inflexible resistance of every real safety improvement.

HBO’s priority was to tell excellent stories with big budgets and charge slightly more than average.

Netflix’s priority was to tell stories excellently with big budgets and charge as much as was necessary to accelerate growth in revenue y-o-y.

HBO was really damn good at picking great stories to show us. (Maybe not so great at winding them up before they jump the shark, but we have the trope because humans suck at that universally.) Netflix seemingly believed in its recommendation algorithm so strongly that they let it pick stories for them — but most recommendation engines wear thin, and trying to make a movie from ‘Latinx Moody Deadpan’ or ‘Cooking Biography 4K’ only works so many times before viewers realize that the content is just like the recommendations: a ‘false front’ designed to make Netflix seem like it can pick an entire theater full of stories, that wears off rapidly once you exhaust the algorithm’s top picks. Today, I cannot think of any modern flashy topic-generated Netflix thing that is as strong a story as HBO’s Westworld — or Hulu’s Palm Springs. Whatever their flaws, they’re compelling stories, that you can’t just pick out of an algorithm envelope; Netflix’s are, uniformly, not.

Letterboxd exists now as an immune response to this artificial theater, proof that humans are better at picking recommendations given a starting point than Netflix’s billion dollars of algorithms, and that humans are willing to congregate around something made with good taste. It used to be a sign of social status to have an HBO subscription, and now it’s a sign of social status to earn lots of likes on Letterboxd. In both cases, that social status stems directly from the excellence of curation, whether of what movies to make or of what movies to see. For the categories of curation and respect and social signaling, Netflix and The Algorithm doesn’t earn a single nomination.

Don’t be involuntarily incapable like your peers, kids. If your school didn’t teach you cursive, teach yourself ASAP. Not calligraphy, not oblique italic roundhand, just pick a cursive and do an entire drill book end to end and make sure to take hand breaks whenever it hurts for 5min.

* AMD’s ‘Pluton’ HSM BIOS option is referring to AMD having embedded the Microsoft Xbox Pluton chip’s functionality into silicon, to make clear just how many years ago Microsoft started laying the bricks into this path. https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/products/pr...

Consider your personal capacity to Learn, Witness, Exist as a circuit: simple chores braid your copper strands together, and water shunts any excess to circuit. It’s hard for others to read your circuit’s state, and they may confuse the joy of carrying peak load with the misery of copper-melting overload. Braid often and ground excess, so that your strands solidify and your load rating increases.

It won’t engender the feelings of ‘spiritual awe’ slash ‘belief entrancement’, the preferred method of enlistment by second-gen 80s cults and 90s gurus, but it’s also a much better platform from which to launch into a more composed blog post than the ‘may as well have been a twitter link’ quality we have here.

CPU bound games examples: Chess, Go, Final Fantasy XIV, Elite Dangerous, and any competent Civilization / 4X or turn-based strategy game. Yes, you can dial up the graphics on these to force them to be GPU bound, but they’re each CPU bound in their own unique ways. Perhaps none such games appeal to you, but as with above, extrapolating from personal preferences is a non-starter.

Non-tech people teach each other to force-quit apps to stop their battery drain. Websites aren’t apps, so their phone ‘randomly’ gets hot sometimes and they either have no idea why or just try closing all tabs in a vague hope that it works. Sometimes a webpage uses up all their data for the month downloading ads and so they stop using the web over cellular at all.

This is the baseline level of competence that improving the web must be aiming for — not ‘web developers will understand that the tab is using lots of battery and must be closed’. Making the web better is not about making the web significantly more battery-hungry, no matter how pretty it might seem. No visual advancement in radio button UX is worth a continuous repaint in JavaScript.

All this work to replicate the animated blobbiness of Liquid Glass. I thought everyone hated it! So, then, why is this a thing?

> food waste generation is not decreasing as required to make significant progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 [which] calls for halving per capita global food waste at retail and consumer level

Sadly, their general analysis found that:

> for most companies, for every $1 invested in reducing food waste, they saved $14 or more

And another in restaurants specifically found a median of $1 invested, $6 saved; so this is an unusual case where businesses are ignoring potential profit gains. The industry-specific analysis found "that food waste is not typically measured as part of a restaurant’s standard operating procedures" and "that information is not always communicated back to food service teams", with the outliers who had prevented their food waste having all implemented those exact two things:

The business case for reducing food loss and waste: Restaurants (2019) https://food.ec.europa.eu/document/download/a618c472-602e-45...

Blame for this issue is placed squarely, and deservedly, on management rather than line workers (who often spoke up and were disregarded) for failing to make this a priority over competing interests. Once the EU intervened and offered small investments to bait managers into compliance — "average cost to invest in food waste reduction was only 0.4 percent of annual food sales" — food waste dropped by +/-50% and total COGS dropped by 2%.

One of their test companies was IKEA, which saw -20% waste in 12 weeks; 3 years later, IKEA crossed the -50% waste threshold voluntarily.

So I think that a large part of this is that trickle-down voluntary regulation doesn't work: the EU didn't issue binding regulations onto its states, so the states were unreliable at delivering meaningful regulations to their industries, so the businesses were unreliable at realizing or caring about 'investing in future cost savings' when they see only drawbacks in direct staffing costs and temporary reductions in service efficiency for process redevelopment.

Glad to see the EU hold the states' feet to the fire on this all. They started with food and apparel, but once those are being properly addressed there's more waiting :)