Best IM app?

Orbi · 2 months

Realize this thread is a bit old now, but I'm wondering if there are any other Mac/iOS apps that have a continuous sort of feature. I really like this, but Trillian never really seems done and they still don't have an iPad app.

electronics-engineer · 2 months

I tend to agree although I'd consider that part of the reason for diminishing returns in increasing amounts of law enforcement. But certainly it's a good argument for why more isn't necessarily better.

electronics-engineer · 2 months

It's a good point. Law enforcement doesn't have to be the only method to create order.

electronics-engineer · 2 months

Law enforcement (and safety from crime) should be seen as a societal tradeoff, not an absolute good.

There is a smooth continuum from anarchy (zero enforcement and minimum safety, maximum personal freedom) to a 1984-style police state (absolute personal safety if you perfectly follow the letter of the law, minimum personal freedom). A repressive police state isn't some sort of mistake caused by enforcement gone wrong; it's a natural result. If you want make absolutely sure that crime is prevented or punished, you must treat every person as a potential criminal and punish the most minor of infractions seriously.

I realize I'm just reinforcing the point made by the article (albeit briefly), but I think the bigger picture is often missed because people always think that less law enforcement must be a bad thing. What we should be doing as a society is looking very carefully at the collateral damage of law enforcement and deciding if we think that's a good sacrifice for the safety and order we're buying. I tend to think we've generally gone much too far. Making life more difficult for law enforcement is the only solution, and I for one am comfortable with the ramifications on reduced safety and order.

TheBumski · 2 months

It's not about having your dick in your hand, it's about the fact that urination is a primal time, not a time of conversation. I am concentrating on voiding my bowels, I don't want to chat with you about the weather or some other damn thing.

Also, never whistle while you're pissing. (FNORD)

TheBumski · 2 months

It's Osaka where they stand on the other side (although maybe Kyoto is close enough that it bleeds over). Apparently it started as a thing back in the 70s to show that Osaka is different and caught on. Gets me every time I take a train from Tokyo to Osaka and forget when leaving the platform.

TheBumski · 2 months

Most truckers have crazy good road manners, and have various little gestures like the trailer light flash that most people don't.

The other thing I see frequently is if one truck is passing another, once the passing truck has passed enough to safely merge back to the right, the slower truck flashes the headlights to say "move on over, you're clear". I've gotten in the habit of doing this to trucks who are politely signaling their intent to move over, so they know I'm not going to be a dickhead and suddenly move beside them while they try to change lanes.

On a related note, if you want to change lanes, use your damn signals. It seems like most people don't use them as a request, they use them as an afterthought like "I am already in the process of moving over whether you like it or not".

harpwn · 3 months

I think what you're missing is that the problem is that asians are essentially not allowed to be proud of their race in US society, and are supposed to accept any slight because they're supposed to be the well-off minority. It's the reaction against those shots of excited asian fans that is the problem.

harpwn · 3 months

Normally I'd downvote an incendiary comment like this on TR, but you know what? Fuckin' a, you're right, and the whole point here is that asians in our society aren't allowed to make incendiary comments about discrimination against their race. Upvote from this whitey.

harpwn · 3 months

You know, this article really turned me around. I've been in the "just shut up and watch the man play" camp on this topic because I generally think race is over-discussed in a way that tends to just create more sensitivity rather than reduce it. I think this is where a lot of the knee-jerk backlash against discussions of race in the case of Jeremy Lin is coming from. But that misses the point.

Can you remember a time when a prominent media-seeking personality of the asian racial community was on TV, stridently speaking out against a poorly-chosen word by a politician that indicated a lack of respect for asians? Can you remember a time when election pundits mused about if the mere identity of a candidate might swing asians to one party or another? Can you think of really any public discourse about challenges asians face as a result of their identity? I can't, because the dominant narrative is "asians have no race problem, that's a thing with blacks and maybe latinos". Even now I'm tempted to temper my argument here by saying something about how asians do, admittedly, have it easier as a whole. But the point is that by failing to discuss it at all, real issues of asian discrimination (whether overt or casual, economic or social, regular or "reverse") get completely ignored, or worse, suppressed.

So I'm with him on this. It's not an issue of people giving Lin too much (or too little) credit for his achievements instead of just shutting up and watching him play. The issue is that there is so much resistance to even discussing it ; people even seem to be made uncomfortable just by asians showing some pride in Jeremy Lin as an asian. Spinning his story to fit a dismissive narrative and expressing disapproval of asians talking about the racial component of that story is incredibly unfair and serves to perpetuate the problem.

electronics-engineer · 3 months

Or more specifically I think the difference is this: until humans, predators directly evolved new methods to hunt prey; humans evolved the ability to invent new methods to hunt prey. This moved our effective predatory evolution from a genetic time scale to a cultural time scale since innovations that worked could immediately be transmitted via language, refined upon, and transmitted again within even a single generation.

It's the thing that has made humanity different in many other ways. Rather than slowly evolving all sorts of behaviors, we evolved a sort of behavior engine that allows individuals to model, predict, and react to the world without having to wait for specific neurological "modules" to evolve. Michael Gazziniga's Human provides an excellent treatment of this subject.

blitzkrieg3 · 3 months

Maybe as the ruling was originally intended you might be right, but in practice today it's not really anything like a true counterbalance.

Imagine a ruling that gives anyone -- corporations or citizens alike -- the right to buy tanks and drive them around as they please without regard for traffic laws. Sure "anyone" can take advantage, but only large moneyed interests are going to be able to afford to go pick up a fleet of M1A1s and cruise around at will. What Colbert is doing here is collecting enough support to buy one tank, paint it with an american eagle, and drive it around with a bullhorn yelling at cars to get out of the way. It serves, at a small scale, to point out how ridiculous the system is.

MonsieurPsychosis · 4 months

Well, I certainly wasn't trying to explain everything about the human visual system -- only a simplified view of what I thought was relevant. This idea of a YUV-like color perception would be news to me, and I'm not sure what your referencing of "neural nets" means in this context. Is there something specific in my explanation that you think is incorrect (especially as it relates to the theorized opponent process)? Is there any reading you could point me at?

As for your assertion of metallic colors not being able to be created by RGB, I don't think that's at all correct. The appearance of metallicity comes from surface properties other than color (such as specularity and reflectivity). There are certainly a lot of ways of creating color: simple absorption, emission, interference effects due to microstructures, etc. But the output is the same: a mix of monochromatic wavelengths. And as far as I know, the human visual system deals with combinations of those wavelengths in basically the way I describe.

MonsieurPsychosis · 4 months

Well, that provides a very slight amount more information than the article here, but I have to say that it still sounds like hogwash. It seems the only evidence for this theory is that particular red/green boundary test and there are other explanations for that result that make a lot more sense (and are founded in better evidence). Basically this looks like a fringe theory, long since discredited.

I'm still certainly open to being proven wrong, but I'm not seeing the scientific backing for this theory.

MonsieurPsychosis · 4 months

This article contradicts virtually everything I know (or thought I knew?) about color. I'm totally boggled, wondering if this is completely made-up nonsense, or if my understanding is just staggeringly incorrect. My understanding is thus:

The retina has photoreceptors that react to three bands of wavelength: red, green, and blue. However, the bands are wide and actually partially overlapping: photoreceptors for red and green overlap, and those for green and blue overlap. Thus we can perceive "secondary" colors between the red, green and blue peaks of maximum sensitivity.

Monochromatic yellow (ie. true yellow made of photons of a single yellow wavelength between red and green) stimulates both red and green receptors simultaneously; we perceive that simultaneous stimulation as "yellow". However that same perception can be tricked by showing monochromatic red (again, single wavelength photons) and monochromatic green to the same spot in the retina -- this stimulates the same two photoreceptors and you can't tell the difference between monochromatic yellow (one wavelength) and a mix of monochromatic red and green (two wavelengths mixed). This is exactly how LCDs work, which only show red, green, and blue sub-pixels.

(As an aside, one curiosity is that magenta is an "imaginary" color. It is created by stimulating the red and blue photoreceptors, but because red and blue are on opposite ends of visible spectrum, there is no monochromatic magenta that would create the same stimulation. The monochromatic color between red and blue is just green!)

So if your eye simultaneously receives red and green (which is what I assume "reddish-green" would be), you should just see yellow. And if if receives yellowish-blue that would be stimulating your red, green, and blue photoreceptors, which is just white. I don't see any forbidden colors here!

Am I missing something critical to the topic?

Disclaimer: I am not a color scientist, but I do work with a number of them.

Edit: Another thing that sets off my bullshit detector is the statement in both the article and the wikipedia article that the "forbidden color" of reddish-green is different from the brown you get from mixing red and green paints. Of course it is! Mixing paints is subtractive color (ie. paint absorbs certain wavelengths and so a mix of two paints absorbs everything the two components did) while mixing light is additive color. Failing to even note that simple mixing of monochromatic red and monochomatic green absolutely produces yellow (or else your monitor would be unable to produce yellow) makes me highly suspect of the theory that there is some sort of other kind of mixing of these colors that produces a different effect.

krebsicle · 4 months

I think there are two separate issues here: One is that, yes, the costs of manufacturing in China are a huge huge draw. The other is that, as things stand today, the scale and expertise of high-tech manufacturing in China simply isn't available in the US anymore.

So it's a matter of opinion what you consider the true cause of Apple's manufacturing in China (because they have to, or because they would have anyway for cost?) -- but the fact remains that there isn't a clear way to bring manufacturing back to the US even if you're a company that can accept the increase in cost. So to pohatu's point, as wages in China eventually approach US levels, it still leaves us in a position where we're at a disadvantage and that's a real problem. We should be finding ways of hanging on to "high value" manufacturing at minimum (as Germany does) while the income inequity situation worldwide levels itself out over the coming decades.

ChaplainTappman · 4 months

I don't disagree with your point, but I'm not sure the author of the article would either. The situation you describe isn't "large-scale, unimpeded, commercialized digital reproduction". The vast majority of the public doesn't understand how to use bittorrent, and probably don't even know how to side-load books onto their eReaders. Basically pirated methods of obtaining works today are -- again for the general public -- confusing and of unpredictable quality. The situation the author described would be if there were a completely unimpeded version of iTunes selling an enormous, well-sorted, easy to use swath of content at lower prices than available otherwise. Even for me, who is very comfortable with bittorrent, I choose to buy virtually all my content because it's just a more predictable experience, and I prefer to support things I enjoy.

As the author mentions, you want pressures in place so that doesn't happen. In order to argue that those pressures aren't sufficient, you better be able to show that there is a real impact. I don't disagree that it is possible for a person to pirate on a massive scale today, but that isn't actually translating to overall piracy on a massive, industry-threatening scale. Hell, the author doesn't even touch on the fact that for many people, being able to obtain things via piracy builds enthusiasm that turns into sales down the road, which I think is actually a very significant effect.

ChaplainTappman · 4 months

Not to be pedantic, but I don't think we generally want comments based solely on the title of articles. Please take the time to read the article if you want to comment on it.

SolInvictus · 4 months

Right. And separate from the issue of keeping up the duration of the boycott, there's the issue of breadth. Some number of internet savvy people who will see that site might, if it became a thing, support a serious boycott. I would wager that the total of those people amounts to a negligible percentage of the revenue flow of the companies on that list. Godaddy kind of worked because a) it's userbase entirely internet savvy people and b) all they had to do was release a few words retracting their "support"; the problem Maddox is talking about cuts to the core of how these companies do business.

I agree with Maddox statement of the problem, but I don't think a boycott is viable given the scale of the foe. I don't have any better ideas, frankly though.

InconsistentTriad · 4 months

You should do yourself the favor of reading beyond the first paragraph. His answer is not, in fact, natural selection.

dont_get_it · 4 months

To directly answer your question, this is kind of what Reddit was like years ago. There were many good articles that were upvoted, but not very commented-on, just because they were good but not very controversial. I kind of like that the articles on TR that have comments are the ones where there's something to talk about. In fact I always sigh a bit inwardly when something from TR makes the frontpage, as indicated about several hundred comments, because I know it will be 98% garbage.

allwittynamesaregone · 5 months

I agree with you. However while approaching death doesn't suddenly give you privileged wisdom, it does (I imagine) cause practical concerns to melt away and leave only that which is actually fulfilling. Of course many foolish decisions can be made while healthy in pursuit of fulfillment at the expense of practicality -- and people who make those decisions may often not make it to old age! -- but I do think it's a useful reference perspective to measure your life by. I wager that far more people lose track of fulfillment in pursuit of stability than vice versa.

jonnyw · 5 months

I think the point he's making is that when you put a word in quotation marks in a title, it generally means that it is a quotation from the article.

reddit4 · 5 months

What sort of infrastructure do you mean?

reddit4 · 5 months

But I'd see that educational cost as a national investment, not a burden on the system. We pay for education because we want educated people in our country (who will incidentally later hold better jobs and pay more in taxes) -- so congratulations, we just gained the opportunity to educate 2.8 more kids.

I really think that more immigration will lead to more economic benefit. Yes, maybe there's a short-term drag, but it seems vastly outweighed by the long-term contribution.

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