qubex

10 ms·

151.
by qubex 11mo ago
Okay, so here’s the thing: the ‘freemium’ model is always going to cause friction, the user will be using the app and suddenly run into an apparently arbitrary paywall and that’ll almost always solicit some kind of ire along the lines of “I
152.
by qubex 11mo ago
I’d buy this one-time for a couple of bucks, but an 18 euro-a-year “subscription” is simply delusional, sorry. Keep up the good work.
153.
by qubex 11mo ago
I like reversing statements just to put them in context, like for example “up to a ten thousand people are affected” can be converted to “at most ten thousand people were affected”, and in this case it becomes “physicists (except one guy sp
154.
by qubex 11mo ago
I so desperately want this to be a parody like despair.com
155.
by qubex 11mo ago
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." — Mark Twain (supposedly)
156.
by qubex 11mo ago
About a month ago I had a rather annoying task to perform, and I found an NPM package that handled it. I threw “brew install NPM” or whatever onto the terminal and watched a veritable deluge of dependencies download and install. Then I type
157.
by qubex 11mo ago
Call out to World Wide Web (no affiliation) that sets up a web server on an iOS/iPadOS (€9.99 for PRO, https://apps.apple.com/it/app/worldwideweb-mobile/id16230068... )
158.
by qubex 11mo ago
That’s a rather luridly practical view that’s entirely out of sync with academia and basic research that provides tangible benefits much further down the line.
159.
by qubex 11mo ago
I’m furious that there’s apparently no way to even downgrade if you’re an iOS/iPadOS Office 365 subscriber as I am. Co-pilot isn’t only useless, it’s an actively hostile encumbrance I’d pay good money to rid myself of.
160.
by qubex 1y ago
I’m amongst those who used to use em-dashes and now seeks to actively avoid them.
161.
by qubex 1y ago
Another way to put it is that six years ago, some developers unknowingly failed the Turing Test circa 2025.
162.
by qubex 1y ago
Yeah it’s pretty obvious to anybody with even a basic understanding of statics that having a lot of dense water sloshing around high up is going to amplify any oscillations or lists that develop. It’s the exact opposite of what you’d want t
163.
by qubex 1y ago
An interesting question that arises naturally but is entirely unaddressed in the article is “why (and how) would evolution select for this kind of final behaviour?” Given that by definition the process of death occurs well after the phase o
164.
by qubex 1y ago
Tired: the complex number plane Wired: the complex number line
165.
by qubex 1y ago
I came here to say this. It rankled me no end. Good to see that this is the top comment because we’re a scientifically literate crowd.
166.
by qubex 1y ago
Fair enough. I guess that’s a kind of reason. I’d be satisfied with a reason if it specified how it had been outcompeted, and speaking personally from somebody who lived through the era it was kind of clunky and at least when I used it th
167.
by qubex 1y ago
I didn’t really give a reason why I think Friendster died, so how can I be wrong about it?
168.
by qubex 1y ago
No, I’m assuming that social networking follows Metcalfe’s Law, and that there’s no real way to migrate users en masse, so there’s no incentive to migrate individually if there’s nobody you know there to network with.
169.
by qubex 1y ago
You’re projecting a ‘modern’ concept onto a bygone time. Applications could (and in unfortunate cases, would) monopolise the system and if they got themselves stuck in a loop they’d never relinquish control of system resources back to the o
170.
by qubex 1y ago
There was much marketing directed at the fact that as of Windows 95, applications developed with the 32-bit API onwards would benefit from preemptive multitasking. Legacy 16-bit applications coexisted in some kind of virtual machine (maybe
171.
by qubex 1y ago
It was outcompeted two decades ago. Friendster, Google+, Orkut… they were all outcompeted by the Facebook juggernaut, and even that has become stale in absence of real competition as younger generations have migrated to Instagram, Snapchat,
172.
by qubex 1y ago
An old Russian joke: A guy keeps going to the newsagent: he scans the headlines and then leaves. The newsagent sees him do this a few days in a row and finds it to be strange behaviour, so one day he asks him: “Comrade, what are you doing?
173.
by qubex 2y ago
Yes I do use Mathematica. 26€ a month is pricing like a freakin’ luxury.
174.
by qubex 2y ago
For somebody who uses Wolfram Home, it’s incredibly expensive.
175.
by qubex 2y ago
Wow… incredibly expensive… at minimum another 26€ a month. Wolfram really enjoy milking their customers dry (and I’m a customer). I think this is highway robbery.
176.
by qubex 2y ago
This is also true for the large NORAD screens in WarGames (1983).
177.
by qubex 2y ago
Moonbase (1990) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonbase_(video_game)?wprov=sf... Under A Killing Moon (1994) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_a_Killing_Moon?wprov=sft...
178.
by qubex 2y ago
I’ve got this in soft-cover. I think I read it back before the turn of the millennium. As a BeOS aficionado I loved the reference to batmobiles.
179.
by qubex 2y ago
Don’t forget their Fire Phone.
180.
by qubex 2y ago
Greg Egan is a mathematician and has a fascinating Twitter/X account.

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