Know the difference between big-shot news agency journalism and small-scale journalism? The latter links to the exact resource that is the source to establish their credibility. The former relies on its brand and treats the source URL as a trade secret.
So tired of this. How do we get out of this? Regulations?
Does anyone have a link to the actual court order?
The yellow|white|red jacks on the back of your TV are "RCA jacks." RCA stands for Radio Corporation of America. The same RCA launched NBC, which launched CNBC, which is a dominant source of financial news in the US.
You plugged your Nintendo into a TV using jacks designed by the same company that told your parents which stocks to buy and sell.
Gets even weirder when you get into acquisitions, where Ben and Jerry's ice cream is owned by the same Unilever that is famous for its soap.
Then you must have grow up at a particular time which didnt have them. There was a time period where it would be unusual to have a TV or VCR without them.
European TVs generally used SCART cables (a sort of 1970s analog HDMI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART), from the 1980s until HDMI took over. It was, indeed, fairly common for a TV or VCR or games console to have _only_ SCART.
Odd standard; it had both composite and RGB lines, but also control lines, so, like HDMI-CEC, you could set it up so that your VCR couldn’t quite control your TV. It also supported daisy-chaining, a bit like SCSI, so you could connect your TV to your VCR and your VCR to your DVD player.
Even before SCART, European TV equipment tended to use DIN (you may remember this as the IBM AT keyboard connector) rather than RCA.
Oddly, there was a brief period where it was somewhat common for early HD TVs to have component RCA connectors; while SCART did support HD component, people apparently did not trust it.
I feel like the US has a history of inventing a thing and having an early version of it become popular. By the time it's mainstream in Europe, it has been improved and standardized, giving the appearance that Europe has more modern technology.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is magstripe card in the US vs EMV chip cards in Europe. The US had credit cards first, but standardized on swiping magnetic stripes. By the time they were widespread in Europe, the technology had advanced, so someone from the 2000s might think Europe did credit cards better. (The M and the V in EMV actually stand for the American companies MasterCard and VISA.)
In both cases, this is due to government regulation, not first-mover disadvantage. TVs showed up at about the same time in Europe and the US (first working TV was in the UK, and first regular TV station was in the US, but you’re talking about a year or so’s difference). SCART became a thing because the French government required companies to support it from 1980 on; previously European TVs generally used DIN.
As for the cards, again you can thank France; Cartes Bancaires introduced a predecessor to EMV in the 80s, and France moved quite quickly to make chip cards standard and then mandatory. Other countries followed in the 90s and early noughties. However, by the time EMV predecessors launched, there’d been credit cards in Europe since the 1960s (usually national standards).
Incidentally, this is also indirectly why the US was so late to the party with tap to pay. With chip and pin via EMV, it became essential that card terminals be available to the customer; an employee taking the card in the back wasn’t an option. So by the time tap to pay was introduced in the late noughties, more or less all shops and restaurants already had either counter-mounted or portable terminals, so it was an easy transition. In the US, it was more common to have swipe machines not necessarily directly accessible to the customer, which made tap to pay less attractive, and it didn’t really become near-universal until Apple and Google Pay forced the issue (actually, even then it didn’t become universal; I was in SF last year and was in a surprisingly large number of places which only had swipe machines).
Tap to pay felt like it took off in the US as a reaction to the germ hysteria of the pandemic. Swiping a card was arguably more convenient than getting out and unlocking your phone. There wasn't much demand for it here when it was popular in e.g. Singapore.
The amount of time people spend holding (rather than pocketing) their phones is also probably higher than it was in the 2010s, so the cost of digging it out of your purse/pocket is less relevant.
[meta] Having a conversation about credit card and video standards in a thread about managerial layoffs feels apropos to how my brain works about other curious topics. We're basically cosplaying a Wikipedia hole.
So in Europe for a long time, tap to pay was normally via _card_, not phone. I don’t think there was a common phone-based EMVish standard before Apple and Google Pay came out (there were a few weird stored value things), but tap-able EMV cards showed up around 2007 (again, there were various local and national proprietary stored value cards before that, but in most cases they never really caught on).
Another factor may be that American card terminals were traditionally quite slow, or at least vendors rarely prioritised speed (I have no idea _why_ this was the case, but it definitely seems to have been the case). Tap to pay really works best if the auth can happen within a second or so.
In Ireland (and I guess the UK), we'd have a lot of TVs with both. Usually they'd have multiple SCART connectors, but only a single RCA connector. It was common for stuff like games consoles to ship with a RCA to SCART adapter.
I will say in terms of physical connectors, by the later years it was quite common to have poor connectivity with SCART - stiff cables leaving the connector at an angle that would gradually lever it out of the socket, the flat pins that would break off after repeated insertions...
> Usually they'd have multiple SCART connectors, but only a single RCA connector
I'm in Ireland as well, but I remember that as a high-end TV thing, mostly, though it did get more common towards the end of the analog connector era, especially for flatscreen TVs. Your generic 21" CRT TV usually just had a single SCART connector and a tuner connector, tho.
I suspect that the reason RCA (especially _component_ RCA) became more common in the flat-screen/early HD era was largely that, while SCART supported component output, the UX tended to be really bad, and there was no way for the TV to signal support to the attached device. So, virtually all set top boxes and DVD players could output RGB component via SCART, but this was never turned on by default, and the user wasn't necessarily aware of it.
Two SCART was pretty common, for e.g. a VHS player and a sky box. We definitely had switcher boxes we needed to use to connect game consoles, (or dvd players when they became a thing) up though.
I think some VHS players also had some form of pass through/switching capability of their own? It's been a while.
Yeah, most VCRs, except for really cheap ones, had the pass through ability. You could theoretically chain an arbitrary number of devices, though at the best of times controlling any of this was virtually impossible.
You’d normally want your sky/cablelink box connected through your vcr, so that you could record off the box, not connected separately to the tv.
One part of the company designed infrastructure, and another part used it. The results feel disparate because they're very separate markets.
Amazon did it on a shorter timeline and shipped the usage before the infrastructure, but it's not as wildly different as you state. The same seed grew branches in different directions, whose tips ended up very far apart from one another.
It seems weird but realizing one supports the other it kinda makes sense.
For example, Discover spun out from Sears attempts at having an in house credit card. Ally started as a financing division of GM. In both cases, you'd think similarly how it's weird one company runs both a bank and builds cars or sells houses.
It doesn't seem that different, in that Amazon started AWS to support its primary business, then realized they could sell it to others.
> I've rarely seen those 10x engineers to bring massive long term added value.
I've seen it first-hand. We ended up building a support team around the 10x:er to keep things working, but it was easily worth it. It worked very well for the life span of the product - about a decade.
Many eventually graduated to pretty fancy places. They learned a lot. This particular 10x:er loved sharing knowledge via pair-programming.
Well, he was always in command of the keyboard (typing insanely fast), but you'd sit next to him and he'd delight in explaining. Eventually you would challenge him on something and then the collaboration/adventure began.
I have had the most intellectually exhilarating times of my life working with this guy.
So yeah, 10x:ers can bring massive value if they are wired to be really nice.
I'm a bit jealous. I currently work with an exceptional engineer but he is very condescending and acts somewhat pissed off by "simple" questions or people asking for help. The product is fantastic thanks to his work and I am learning, I think, what it really means to attempt to write excellent code - he really nit picks the hell out of my PRs - but to be honest I wish I didn't have to work with him. He has really demotivated me.
Now you can use one of your unused Raspberry Pi:s (we have all got them) to cobble together an ADSB unit that may be critical in recording important low-height ADSB flight data points in your immediate area in case of accidents.
And also get free premium accounts on sites like flightradar24 etc.
Based on what you say, I presume that Anna's Archive includes Knuth. For certain purposes, would you want AI software trained only on Knuth or have it 'diluted' with everything else?
Reddit is unfortunately a major thing in my life. There's an eternal battle between left and right politics in my small European country's relevant subreddits.
Not very healthy - it's like a never ending feed of "someone is wrong on the Internet".
For the record: "right" here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party.
Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I do take a break, I see that the other side "wins" to a noticeably larger degree. Again, small country.
What finally helped me break out of those bad habits was reframing who I was trying to convince of an argument. Let's face it, it's highly unlikely you're going to ever convince someone you're directly arguing with online just by the simple fact you're arguing, which often suggests some sort of impasse.
Instead, argue as if you're trying to convince the bored reader who has climbed down through the comments (for some reason), who has found value in this discourse and is trying to get more or better perspectives. That is someone you can convince of your position.
It's been a lot easier to engage in text discourse ever since I had that epiphany, because instead of taking every bait and trying to correct every wrong, I'm only engaging with folks arguing with data, with perspective, with good faith more often than not. That leads to better outcomes, I believe, instead of just contributing to so much noise.
I try to keep a few things in mind whenever I'm arguing with somebody that I think are helpful (hopefully):
1. Most arguments come down to defining words, even if you may not realise it.
2. Don't follow rabbitholes. Don't deviate from arguing your core premise.
3. You're not trying to prove the other person wrong, you're trying to find the truth.
On #1 for example; I watched a video of a conservative arguing liberals (or something) about a few premises, including "gay marriage does not exist". It was immediately clear to me, but apparently not to the people in the video, that this guy has a different definition of "marriage" to me. That's the breadth of the disagreement. That's all people should've argued with him about. But not one person did. Even when he described his definition of marriage, and how his premise comes about from that definition, everybody immediately became sidetracked. There's just no chance of finding common ground behaving like that.
4. It's not that unlikely that you are arguing with an actual child who has picked up enough terminology to be dangerous but completely lacks any deeper understanding.
I would love to completely cut reddit out of my life but would enjoy a smaller, more positive alternative that aims to provide the benefits of reddit when it was at its best but without the inherent flaws of the system's design and the dark patterns it is now known to encourage. I'm a bit put off by lemmy from my initial, cursory glance for a variety of reasons, but maybe I'm just using it wrong. Would love to hear suggestions that people have used for an extended time and would personally vouch for.
I've quit Reddit off and on over the years, and one of my fears the first time was missing out on news or helpful tips from small professional/hobby subreddits. I ended up building a tool that would email me the top 3 posts from a list of subreddits every day, and that was all I needed to quit without feeling like I was missing out. My tool eventually broke after Reddit's api change, but now I use one called redditletter¹ which does the same thing.
This was exactly the same kind of motivation that prompted me to create a RSS project to allow me to interact with platforms like Reddit/HN/Lemmy in a more low-volume and healthy way, subscribing to just the top posts in my RSS reader with rich custom feeds.
Lemmy was founded by tankie Reddit expats, and the project has had super weird issues in the past like a hardcoded blacklist and no RSS feed support for a while. So, I can't say it's for me either. Would be nice to have a viable Reddit alternative. Although Reddit does still have RSS feeds, and Hacker News does scratch the itch for certain topics.
If you happen to use Reddit in a browser, Safari, then check out Protego for Reddit. You can add keyword filters to hide posts based on keywords, such as political terms. Makes browsing Reddit more positive for sure.
It's fascinating, and being "The Subject" of the fascination and never truly "Objective" is a particular conundrum! Good luck with the "unfortunately" aspect -- totally possible to stop. (sexual humor warning: https://imgur.com/dont-touch-girls-m0Qk8)
I think it's part of being human.
I invite a brain specialist to step in here and comment which regions of the brain compelled us to agree with those whom we also feel we "need".
EDIT: .. cut to ncr100 proceeding to open youtube.com ...
So tired of this. How do we get out of this? Regulations?
Does anyone have a link to the actual court order?
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