Comments by Andy Bakun
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetThe eventual ability to use a brain to reason about and change your own species's genes isn't evolutionarily selected for? The brain and human intelligence itself doesn't exist outside of evolution. If it turns out that humans being smart enough to modify their own genes doesn't work out, doesn't produce viable offspring, and ultimately loses out to undirected selection, would we say that that's a failing of our capabilities or that evolution didn't select for human control of their own gene selection? Does the answer to this question change over different time scales or if our evolution was to be studied by other intelligent species?
It ceases to be undirected natural selection, but continues to be evolution.
"Intelligent design" assumes an intelligence outside and other than humans. This is part of the "playing God" argument against research in this area. So while I agree that the term "intelligent design" may be more appropriate, that doesn't preclude it from still being "evolution" over the long term (which is largely what evolution is focused on). I'd also rather not have the terms get mixed up; calling this "intelligent design" serves to confuse the ongoing religion vs science argument/debate that is holding back innovation and laws in this area.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetThat's why it's a protip. If you want to avoid the hassle that come with outsourcing some of your core infrastructure, like having to deal with waiting for bugs to be fixed, then self-managed hosting is the only option. But you're just trading one set of hassles for another. And if you're interested in running some niche blogging software, good luck finding a service that will do that. If you want to outsource to a service, you're limited to what services are providing, which is usually those that are popular.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI'm having a similar problem with hotmail currently, although hotmail seems to have firewalled our source IP (can't even connect) anymore, and the various contacts we have at Microsoft/hotmail can't even acknowledge that they are blocking a certain IP range, and keep making us run around asking us to "try connecting with telnet" (how do they think I've been verifying that one IP is blocked and other isn't?) and what our email client settings are, and how we've configured Exchange. And yes, reverse DNS is proper, as is SPF, and we've had this IP for years and hotmail has accepted mail from it in the past, and hotmail correctly accepts and delivers mail when sent from another IP.
I don't mind the blocking, I recognize that as a legit way of controlling access, but what is really frustrating is that the hotmail folks assume that I don't know anything about email and that they can't even acknowledge that they have a certain IP blocked. If they could just say "Yes, we've blocked that, and there's nothing you can do or say to get us to unblock it", then we could move on; but when it looks like no one at hotmail knows what's going on, everyone continuously believes that if they just say the magic words or contact the right person, it can all be cleared up.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI agree that attacks are unwarranted but 1) downvotes are not necessarily attacks so it's folly to interpret them that way, and 2) the universe didn't just blink into existence at the moment of one's own earliest memory of it, and to treat things as such with arrogance and critique is just revealing the speaker's ignorance.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI thought this was going to be a new interview, but I remember reading this interview and discussing it at work back in the 90s. I know, this anecdote doesn't really give this much of an air of legitimacy, but archive.org does confirm that it's been around that long (which of course validates my memory more so than if Bill Gates actually said this stuff).
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI think it's worth making a distinction between "buying" a new version and "obtaining" a new version (where "buying" includes software that is charged for, even if you pirate it and don't pay for it). That is, the difference is between proprietary software and open source software.
When I pay money for software, I expect new features. When I go to download open source software, 9 times out of 10 I want the specific bug I'm dealing with to be fixed (and often it is). Heh, and often the bug I want fixed is that the software is lacking a certain feature -- but I've seen a lot of "issues" and "bug reports" listing feature requests, so the feature gets treated like a bug. Proprietary software is marketed in such a way that the latest version is all that you'll ever need, rarely are its deficiencies mentioned, and they definitely won't be mentioned as actionable "bugs".
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetAverage users are not going to visit a blog to determine if they should use a service or not, or if they should use some random feature of a service or not. FF's blog, or any company's blog, is not their main marketing channel, mainly because the blog is not the reason people know of the site/company or visit the site. So while you're correct that 95% of the people have no idea how it is vastly different than email, the quality of the blog post as marketing material wouldn't serve to inform them anyway. If FF is serious about "marketing" this, if a new feature of this simplicity (removing the restriction on post attachments from just allowing images) even requires marketing, this most definitely isn't, and I agree, shouldn't be it.
Fact is, FF provides structure to content streams that generic email and chat don't (gmail comes close to providing some structure, but it is still in the email paradigm). It's one-to-many, many-to-many, one-to-one, real-time-based and archived, and encourages succinctness in a way that neither email nor chat can be.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetYou can't win, it seems. "Service X will never take off, it's confusing because it doesn't look like anything else anyone knows or understands" or "Service X will never take off, it looks exactly like a service people already use and understand and doesn't look like it offers anything new".
As for how this is better/different than email, I don't know any of the email addresses of the people I follow/communicate with on FriendFeed, nor do I want to know. Getting their email addresses is just another hoop to jump through before I can send these kinds of files to them.
I'm sure someone can write a plugin for <insert your favorite email client here> that sends to your whole address book and limits your message to 140 characters. Then we don't need to use twitter either.
It is a cool feature though, and those who can make use of it will, and those who can't won't. Is this going to make anyone switch to using friendfeed? Not necessarily. Will this make using Friendfeed more meaningful for people who are already using Friendfeed for some of their communication? Definitely. Does this distinction matter for every feature deployment? Not really -- at some point in your growth, you can start deploying features that cater to the long tail. Friendfeed's deployment history is to get something out there, see what about it sticks and iterate. Sometimes simple, organic feature announcement, rather than massive fanfares, is a better method (FF has done both). Especially if you're deploying features all the time, not all of them can be epic.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetThat implication neither confirms nor denies the "difficulty" of deleting your search history; three clicks means it's as difficult to delete your search history as it is to move a file to the recycle bin in Windows and empty it. Fact is, you can't confirm that it gets deleted, whatever that exactly means, no matter what the UI is, but that has nothing to do with the ease of finding or using the delete functionality.
However, does the fact that a cosmetic delete function exists say that Google wants to allow you to actually delete something or just wants you to think that you are deleting something, and is this better or worse than Facebook, which doesn't even have a cosmetic interface to do so, other than perhaps removing your account all together, and has established and known TOS that say they can do whatever they want with the data you give them?
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetDeleting your search history at Google is like three clicks (Web History | Remove Items | Clear entire Web History ) -- however, I've never done this, since I like being able to browse my search history. Now, of course, Google could be keeping the data around even though you've elected to delete it, or may be attempting to anonymize it to use it for a different purpose, but that's another issue.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI don't know if it's so much intuition as it is luck (or, heh, being unlucky). I seem to have an uncanny knack for spotchecking one thing, and while I'm doing that, uncovering a bunch of other problems because something in the things I've chosen to spot check has an association with something that looks wrong. Like, I'll spot check a database update, and I'll display all columns even though I am only looking at one or two. It just so happens that in the rows I chose to check, another field is obviously not being validated right.
I've also experienced some weird premonitions, like I'll suggest a change be made, based on some trend I may be seeing but can't articulate, and then a few days later the very thing I suggest should be changed needs to be changed, usually under time pressure.
I wish I could bottle and sell this, but I'm sure it's closer to being unlucky than having a superpower (like Rob McKenna from HHGTTG), and no one would want it.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetThe best way to learn about management fad du jour is to be subjected to it. And the main, perhaps only, thing worth learning about it is that you want to avoid it.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetDon't let browser market share keep you from doing something you think might be cool. "Not everyone uses firefox" is the inverse logic of "IE6 is still used, so we have to cater to the lowest common denominator". Let the capabilities of your tools be part of your inspiration! Some things are too cool not to do, and some things get done even if there is no capability to do them.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetYeah, a decade ago, one used FUD as a tool, sowing it in those who would listen, used by people who actually did that on purpose despite having knowledge or experience to the contrary. These days, FUD is increasingly less often something you spread, and rather it's something you have, something that keeps you from making good business decisions, it is a myopic view borne from an all-in vested self-interest; it is a response to being backed into a corner, not being able to see, or even conceive of, the next move that should be made, yet seeing the writing on the wall that you are becoming increasingly obsolete and the realization that the only way to remain relevant is to attack the unstoppable competition. FUD used to be used to keep people from trying your competitors; now FUD is used to stop people from using your competitors. FUD used to be telling lies to others; now FUD is telling lies to yourself.
The rhetoric is the same though.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetGood idea on the CDC for viral memes. What's the inoculation plan though? These kinds of damaging things proliferate specifically because finding out what happened to others and making people think logically about them doesn't work.
