if you appreciate books, you don’t buy them from amazon. that’s been true for a number of years now. of course, if someone is tight on budget and wants to get a book, I wouldn’t go at them for getting the cheapest option available, which in 99% of cases, amazon is. but for people that can afford it? no excuse. I find it to be immoral to buy from amazon. my wife and I have switched years ago: small local libraries > dussmann > amazon
Often local booksellers will have the ability to order pretty much anything in print too. Here in the Netherlands there are only a few exceptions I can't order¹ locally, and even then I can usually find them on the national Amazon alternatives (i.e., Bol.com, which sucks, but isn't nearly as evil as Amazon).
For affordability I would recommend anyone interested in reading to visit secondhand book fairs for the breadth of titles available, and yard/church/jumble sales for the chance finds. Instead of buying a book immediately when you come across a title you like or got recommended, maintain a wishlist spreadsheet and sync that to your smartphone or print it when you go hunting for books. The author of this article follows Umberto Eco's philosophy of book hoarding (as they should, and as I do), so they will have quite the collection to pick from already. Delayed gratification for any desired title is totally compatible with that.
And obviously: if you can't afford local booksellers, join a library — that is way cheaper than Amazon, and better for all concerned.
1: Frustratingly, this includes the mass paperback editions of Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive series.
If you order from your local bookstore a book which is being sold on Amazon as a PoD copy by a major publisher, what do you think happens?
They don't have a separate manufacturing process for mom-and-pop bookstores. Amazon do the printing and the logistics but deliver the book to the store instead of to your house so that the store can hand it to you and collect a very small amount of money.
> If you order from your local bookstore a book which is being sold on Amazon as a PoD copy by a major publisher, what do you think happens?
Nothing. Local bookstores (not just 'mom-and-pop', but national chains or cooperatives) would tend not to have that title available. Is that a US thing that they would order from Amazon? Printing-on-demand is potentially interesting, but just not a thing for most titles.
I hate that the Internet thought me now to distrust everything. In this case, I have the feeling that the author chose those words carefully to click bait us somehow without actually lying
I read it for you. Spoiler alert, remained uninteresting until the end. I agree with the notion that we will have to adapt our workflows now that coding is getting cheaper (at least for now), but the author is suggesting to forgo PRs entirely and demonises humans for being slow and some sort of bottleneck. The author is suggesting that you can let agents go crazy on your codebase and that if you don't do it you are some sort of dinosaur that doesn't accept change. It's complete nonsense in my opinion.
I don’t follow Stranger Things, so I cannot speak about the quality of the show, but I clicked on the link to see which settings the guy was talking about and I was surprised about how awful the CGI of that shot looks like. It’s hideous. Looks worse than 10 year old video games. What is that about? Am I going crazy?
It does look terrible in that video, but I watch on a projector and it actually looks good on it, so I think this is simply an artifact of watching a phone recording of a TV.
you cannot know. that’s why the post elaborates saying (paraphrasing) “if you realize it’s taking longer, cut your losses and move on to something else”
Good for you, Mark! I had a nice chuckle.
On a more serious note, I really feel for the people that cannot get any kind of support and try to get some help by messaging "the owner" of the social network they are in. With big companies, you used to be able to get someone to talk to you when you had a problem. Not anymore. The best you can get is a well trained LLM
A couple of years ago when I still was on Facebook, I had a problem with my account being falsely accused of hacking. I believe it happened because I had been chatting with my friend about computer malware.
All my chats were gone, and I couldn't write to any of my friends. "Okay, I will just reach the tech support, and solve the problem" - silly me back then. I was genuinely shocked that there was no "Facebook support". Just a bunch of FAQs, general help, and that's it, no way to talk to anyone. I felt completely helpless and lost, really unpleasant feeling.
My account got back to normal after one day or so, but that was the day I decided to begin the process of leaving that platform.
Facebook will ban you for the most odd of reasons, but report actual gore etc? Well now, that doesn't actually violate our TOS/community guidelines/blah
Gmail/Google has the same problem but I suspect and correct me if I'm wrong that it's less surface area to ban you - unless that did happen to people on Google+? But Google+ also didn't have its founder famously tell people "...they 'trust me', dumb fucks"
Depends on the company. Mail to the CEO is a well known customer support escalation path.
For companies that do generally support their customers, usually it gets you into an 'executive support' queue with people who are empowered to understand and solve problems that are mostly solvable --- you should be able to get money things made right, but don't expect product changes (but it can happen).
For companies that don't support their customers, it gets overwhelmed and may get dumped into the same usual support channels where reps aren't empowered to get anything done.
I mean another theory is that those people are misguided and vexatious, and that this correlates with them not actually checking which Mark Zuckerberg they are sending their urgent complaint email to.
same. sensitivity of the camera is just too high. it handles ok but so much sensitivity creates this motion sickness. had to quit after 30 seconds and I still can’t recover. but beautiful game though!
yes. why do we listen to this guy compared to any other 90 years old person? most people would listen to him because he is monetarily successful or because “he made it”. but as he points out, most of it was luck, so there’s really no point in paying closer attention to him than to any other older person that would like to give away his or her advice. number 4 is literally “I read a meme on fb that said that you should be happy now”. great advice. i was hoping he would say something like “i saw this quote and that triggered an interest in buddhist philosophy or meditation”. instead he ends that advice with “i saw another post on fb that confirmed this idea”
i understand he has no obligation to give any good reason for his advice, he just felt like giving it, and that’s nice of him. i would just suggest younger people not to waste too much time listening to “successful people” (whatever that means) on advice because it’s usually not applicable anymore or at all and is just entertainment with no real value
Whenever I open one of these sites that asks me to confirm tracking, if it doesn’t have an easy way to cancel or reject, I just leave the page. The banner had hundreds of different companies listing “legitimate” reasons to track, and after turning off around 10, I noticed that I had hundreds to go. Sorry, I hope people enjoy your website. I just cannot see a reason to accept that amount of tracking. I don’t care that much about C++ anyway
None of it makes it through a pi-hole filter. Website is clean and coherent, no popups. What that implies for the attempt to track is slightly unclear to me, but I don't have great faith in the pop up box being honoured even if it loads.
reply