I have no idea whether popular music is good right now.... where would I hear it? Radio? Lol. The mall?

What I can say is we're in a golden age for great new music, and also a great age for discovering older music. I spend less on music than I used to, and get way more enjoyment. The streaming algorithms (primarily Spotify for me) are perpetually finding new stuff for me, digging out B-sides from 80s artists I liked - or repeating a song I liked in 2017 but haven't listened to for a while. There's a million artists producing stuff, and there's 1000s of those that I like.

I listen to music while I work - probably 6 hours a day - and it's usually great.

The only change I want is for them to switch to a more "user-centric" payment model, so that more of my subscription money goes to the artists I'm listening to.

Yeah - when I see the Chinese government do anything, my reflexive response is to suspect abuse, corruption, and self-promotion. And there's very good reason for that, they do a lot of all 3.

But yeah, there's also times where they seem to be making decisions that prioritize long term general prosperity over the short-term returns of a single company - the kind of decision that seems much tougher/less likely in the US. (To be clear, I only have surface-level understanding of Chinese politics, laws, companies, and what not here, so very possible I'm not seeing things clearly).

Man, don't piss off the FCC!

60 years after you start doing something abusive, they'll start a commission - and they'll totally start considering the practices your grandson is still doing. Give them another 5 years.. 20 years tops... and they'll have some toothless regulations for this dying industry.

And if you break them, gosh darnit they will give you such a warning... maybe.

All it takes for echo chambers to develop is people having the ability to select what they want to read and who they want to interact with.

Overall, people will tend to pick sources they agree with, and will choose to interact with people who value the same things. Mostly what has changed with the internet is there's a lot more granular choices, and your choices don't need to be local. You can connect efficiently with the pockets of people who agree with you anywhere around the world.

Unless you actively block people from doing so (which would be awful in a different way), people are going to find their echo chamber buddies to tell them what they want to hear and reinforce their beliefs. And they'll pretty much do so across the political and every other spectrum.

FLOC and cookies and Facebook algorithms are just bumps on this log of normal human behavior.

It's tempting to just say "no third party cookies and no FLOC anywhere"... and wow, we're done, private web. Great.

The reality is that, if that's the approach taken by browsers/users/content-platforms, this will get pushed back the other way. FLOC isn't perfect, but it's better than cookies, and I think it's at least the right general idea for a solution that could keep the "ad supported web" rolling, while avoiding the most egregious privacy issues.

If users/browsers/content-platforms can't come to some kind of detente with ad buyers in terms of balancing privacy and "ad targeting", ad buyers won't just be like "welp, we tried - guess we'll just pay the same money for less effectiveness". No, they'll advertise less - which will hurt lots of the sites you use - or they'll demand content providers provide targeting/ad solutions with even worse properties: stuff like "sign in with Facebook to see this content". Or sites will need more ads (and more intrusive ads) to drive the same advertising value.

Personally, I'd love to see some kind of micro-payment system take the place of the ad-supported web - but that whole idea seems to be a non-starter with most. Barring a significant change like that, I think people are going to reject an imperfect solution (FLOC) in favor of something much worse.

I was just sitting back - you know, just trying to breathe - trying to process this news. Just think of it: an unremarkable new webcam with no new features, from a company that has made a lot of unremarkable webcams that are probably fine - and which I may already own but I don't know because I don't care what brand of cheap webcam I might have.

And then, before I had even recovered from that, I heard Logitech is making a new mouse that's wireless, has adjustable DPI, and connects via a USB-A dongle. Wow, what a day.

What I'm saying is that typing speed is rarely an important bottleneck.

Even when I'm working on reasonably straightforward stuff, I'm not just vomiting out big chunks of mentally pre-formed code. I'm looking around code that's there, doing trial runs, maybe writing down a little bit of stuff, checking a document, or bouncing an idea off someone.

Time spent "deciding what to do" should normally outweigh "time spent typing that out". Like, if I had to code with one finger I would still be 95% as productive most days.

If you're doing enough low-thought text output that typing speed is your bottleneck, that is often a flag that you are not programming effectively. You might need to be making better use of functions, or other program structure and/or making better use of editor features for autocomplete and what not.

Naturally if you have difficulties typing, this balance changes and these kinds of products obviously make sense. But otherwise you should be able to "type faster than you think" for most programming scenarios.

I was against streaming until I tried it for a while. I listen to music while I work - so I'm probably on Spotify 5 hours a day for the last year. Over that time, I've discovered a couple dozen artists I really like, and hundreds more one-off songs that are on my favorite list. Reconstructing just "the songs I listen to often" would cost me hundreds of dollars, and I would still burn out of those songs quickly if those were all I had. I would very much miss the discovery playlists - that's how I find new stuff I like, and usually even the stuff I don't love is close enough to my tastes that it's still enjoyable as novelty. And there is just SO MUCH of it, with new stuff coming out all the time.

(If you're more of an audiophile, other services like Tidal do a better job on that front that Spotify - but Spotify is good enough for "my phone playing through headphones while I work").

Overall, I'm spending less on music, and getting way more enjoyment out of it, than any time (since my teens at least, when I could listen to the same Bjork CD 45,000 times) I'm just happy to be around in the "music consumer golden age" here, where services are so cheap and so comprehensive. I'm sure artists will eventually demand a higher cut and things will fragmentize - but for now it's pretty darn great.

You don't have to imagine Skyrim in VR - Skyrim VR has been out for like 3 years. It works pretty good, and you're right - some of the landscapes are pretty neat.

And it's not in my top 10 best VR games.

To cover off yours and the regular liturgy of complaints, all of which are repeated every time a VR article gets posted: I've never really worried about bumping into things. You clear out a bit of space, then SteamVR warns you when you're getting too close to the edge (though one time I punched my ceiling and had to repair my controller). It has been this way since SteamVR launched. If you don't have any space you can clear out, VR won't work great for you - but it really doesn't take that much space and you get used to it quickly. I felt queasy the first time I used an Oculus DK2 for a long stretch, then very rarely after. Better refresh rates help a lot, as does reasonable game design. I have never felt dumb for wearing a funny looking thing on my head - and of the many people I've done VR with, the only people who worry about this are teens (and only then until they see their friends do it). The most common complaint I get is that it's too immersive/scary (eg. I quite often use an underwater demo, and people feel like they can't breathe).

People without much time in VR think they want to use VR to play games the same way they play games now. They think they want multi-hour sit-down experiences where you use VR as a big screen. Perhaps with future hardware this will work better; for now, playing this kind of stuff is underwhelming. The experiences that are great in VR are mostly very different than normal video games. You want to be standing up and moving. If I'm not doing that in a game, I usually will play it in desktop mode (with some exception for stuff where you're in a cockpit type setup, where looking around can be fun).

There's lots of stuff to criticize about current VR hardware/software. The biggest problem by far is that while the good stuff is great, lots of it is short-lived and there's not enough of it. It's also expensive to get a good setup, and the tier 2 setups are significantly worse (though getting better). But reading through these comments on Slashdot is always super disconnected from reality - like a weird timeward/parallel universe, where everyone is speculating on how VR works like its future prospective tech.

..and I've got a lot of use out of my Vive (and an Oculus DK2 before that). I think a lot of VR detractors are missing out; there's a lot of fun games and cool experiences to be had with a good VR setup.

But I have zero interest in lip tracking, and even if I did want that, having another huge clip on thing would be physically problematic. I've already got a wireless adapter, a cable running to a battery, a fairly weighty display, and a strap with headphones.

We're getting into head piano territory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUzjyzA_H_o)

Yeah... I'm not actually suggesting people try that. I was doing an argument ad absurdum.

Say you're going to buy a house. You and the seller agree on the price. Then you have a revelation: why should we pay commission to these realtors? Instead, you agree to buy the house for $1, so you only have to pay $0.14 in commission. Then, you make a side deal where you'll pay $399,999 for a houseplant. Super clever right? And if the realtor tries to call you on this, go complain to the government - and they'll pass a law saying realtors can't retaliate against you and your clever idea.

I don't like realtors - but if I use one, I accept I'm going to end up paying their commission. If I don't want to pay that commission, then I accept I'm not going to get their services.

Similarly, if you don't like Google's price, then don't contract with them or buy their service (the service here being the Google store). Make your own store, your own OS, or your own phone. And then you can have your own set of abusive practices - just like Epic has in their PC game store.

If they want to legislate that "making your own store" has to be easier (or possible, in the case of Apple), fine. Maybe that's necessary as a hedge against monopoly. But forcing these companies to give away this service seems pretty strange.

I thought someone was using it to track shipping... or something? Who will support their game changing innovation now?

Or did IBM never actually sell anything, ever? Like, is there zero active deployments of this? That's amazing.

Like, over the last month we've heard of many crazy people who built critical systems in Flash. But there's not one group dumb enough to have bit hard on blockchain? That's surprising, and also a bit heart warming.

RobinHood does benefit directly from heavy trading: a good chunk of their revenue comes from "payment for order flow".

I think this generally balances out OK for small investors - but you should probably understand how this trade-off works before using RobinHood.