Giving app developers bogus data would make it harder to use* and maintain, so that's a clear win, IMO.

* use as in use for the intended business purposes, not harder to write the code

The problem is not just app developers. Telcos sell it to.

I've definitely run in to those types at meetups. They're there to ruin the event for everyone (although I'm sure they themselves have a good time).

Thankfully it's possible to convince a smaller group to ignore them (don't feed the trolls etc) so you can have interesting conversations.

Folks are sad that Hetzner, like most mainstream providers, has a policy against running crypto software and port scanners.

"eBay gets away with selling random junk from random sellers, how can we get a piece?"

I’ve had much better experiences getting what I order from eBay than I have from Amazon. Random junk is fine, but I at least want it to be the random junk I ordered.

I order a lot of new-old-stock auto parts from eBay. Best of both worlds while it lasts.

Yeah, the good thing about eBay's design is that their listings are (mostly) seller-centric rather than product-centric. There's no dice roll (or obfuscation) of where the product comes from when you order a product. The feedback rating that you see above the fold on the majority of listings is the seller's feedback.

In my case my impact plummeted. Sometimes going in to management means having your hands tied -- you are the ones allowing higher ups to scale their impact. It was awful.

I'd love to be able to find folks that can do what I do -- it's probably our #1 issue holding us back -- and direct them to meet some business and technical goals, but I've yet to work at an organization that supports that mode of management.

You say trend like it is a recent phenomenon and not something that has been happening for centuries if not millennia.

That’s true. Identity politics is just a new name for it, but we did use to burn people at the stake for the same reason.

it would be dishonest to ignore the fact that "contemporary identity politics" kicked fully into gear as a direct response to #Occupy—and its objective was & continues to be successful

Contemporary identity politics are at least in part a response to the contemporary "occupy" movements, sure, and that's pretty much by definition.

Do you still have to go through interviews with clients? If so, how onerous are those?

I do, it really depends on the client. I like working with small businesses and most of those are just a quick conversation about what they're looking for.

If the authors of the article are right, being able to beam power through "inclement weather" could be a huge win on its own.

I wonder if there's some patent issue preventing them from using LiDAR and by extension preventing Musk from admitting its superiority.

You didn't include the laugh track and yet I still heard it.

The producers swear up and down to this day that they did not use a laugh track. That that was legit audience reaction.

Is that really true? Or did they simply mean it's a group of real people recorded laughing, having been prompted to laugh?

Which is still lame but very easy to believe

Well, I have no idea. But I attended a taping of a sitcom once, and the way it worked is they had mics hanging above all the parts of the audience. Before they show they had a warm up comic, which both put us in the laughing mood and gave them a chance to record our particular audience laughing really hard.

Then when the show was recorded, we actually did laugh pretty hard. You know how you laugh louder when you're at a comedy show or at a movie theater than when you're home alone watching the same thing? Because of peer pressure? It was like that. You laugh harder in the audience.

And then they would "enhance" the laughing by taking the recording of us from earlier and playing it over the spots where we laughed live, especially if they end up using a second or third take, since were didn't laugh as hard.

Also I remember in our episode there was a joke where as the live audience we could see the payoff right away, but on the TV the camera did a slow pull back to reveal the joke. They added in our recorded laughter for that. I remember because I laughed at home but not in the studio.

So it's sort of a combination. But except in those rare cases they don't really add in laughter where there was none. They just enhance the live audience.