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I personally hope they stay well away from fitness stuff. I think all those big companies having a go at it for years has sufficiently proved that a wrist device can not be accurate enough at tracking steps, sleep or even heart rate. While GPS is better served by a phone which has a more accurate chip and also the battery to sustain it.

And orienting towards fitness means compromises for size, weight, comfort and battery life. The original Pebble was slim, light, didn't have a sensor bump, wrapped nicely around the wrist.


The reason they don't is they have a narrative they want to push. The entire thing is deeply flawed, from sitting vs standing when in fact it's white vs blue collar. There's plenty of sitting blue collar jobs that are brutal. Then not differentiating qualified vs unqualified blue collar work. These days qualified blue collar has similar pay to white collar and arguably more job security. But in the end there's no point digging to deep, it's just another race bait.


This comment has me puzzled for so many reasons. Which candidate or party wanted Romania to get into a war with Russia? I don't think this issue was mentioned at all during the entire campaign because nobody is even thinking about that possibility. And what do you mean Ukraine "got into a war"? They where attacked.


A bit of context: the presidential candidate in question was predicted below 1% on all polls days before the election. He declared a campaign budget of absolute zero. He had no posters, no tents, no apparitions on TV, absolutely nothing. After a massive presence on TikTok in the last couple of weeks he won 23% of the votes, placing him first and wining a spot in the final elections where just the first two placed candidates run.

Currently the elections in Romania are in an total chaos. The Romanian Constitutional Court ordered an unprecedented recount of the votes, even though the count was sanctioned by all the parties through their observers. Also the country's Defense Council declared they have proof of cybernetic attacks which influenced the elections.


That sounds like either the pollsters or the people running the election have significantly bigger problems than whatever that candidate might or might not have done. How did they not find any of the people swayed by TikTok? Why are they even looking at TikTok at that point?


"It didn't go as we wanted, someone else must be to blame!"

If TikTok (or any other platform) can have this kind of real impact then other political forces should consider using it as well.


This is not a really easy thing to do:

Lets analyze a bit just on the top of our heads what kind of content goes viral on social media?

I so far almost (I write here almost just in case I missed one case) NEVER saw any rational, sensible discussion.

So no, not all parties or arguments get the same amount of exposure even if they use TiKTok. Only the simplest (as in ignoring the complexity of situations), conspirationist, false and sometimes stupid challenges ones go viral.


It's not hard to create content for TikTok (also, I don't think it's hard to do "debunk shorts" if they wanted to). They should just do it as this new "short video" form clearly works.

edit: Were you perhaps replying to someone else?


I personally tried a lot of dev fonts several times over the years but keep coming back to dejavu sans mono, which is always missing for some reason from showcases like this. I find all the others to be imbalanced. Too wide, to skinny, too short, etc.


"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I am sure there are plenty of people who misunderstand or misinterpret statistics. But in my experience these are mostly consumers. The people who produce "science" know damn well what they are doing.

This is not a scientific problem. This is a people problem.


I haven't found this to be true at all. In fact, I'd say the majority of studies I read - even from prestigious journals - is fraught with bad statistics. I have no idea how some of these studies were even allowed to be published. Some fields are worse than others, but it's still a huge problem pretty much across the board.

People conduct science, and a lot of those people don't understand statistics that well. This quote from nearly 100 years ago still rings true in my experience:

"To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of."

- Ronald Fisher (1938)


> I am sure there are plenty of people who misunderstand or misinterpret statistics. But in my experience these are mostly consumers. The people who produce "science" know damn well what they are doing.

As a statistician, I could not disagree more. I would venture to say that most uses of statistics by scientists that I see are fallacious in some way. It doesn't always invalidate the results, but that doesn't change the fact that it is built on a fallacy nonetheless.

In general, most scientists actually have an extremely poor grasp of statistics. Most fields require little more than a single introductory course to statistics with calculus (the same one required for pre-med students), and the rest they learn in an ad-hoc manner - often incorrectly.


Psychology is IMO in the state alchemy was before chemistry. And there's no guarantee it will evolve beyond that. Not unless we can fully simulate the mind.


A long time ago I operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".

I am not saying anything about this case, I just notice people on HN always take these post as 100 percent true. When money is involved, people get caught and their revenue affected they are capable of spinning the wildest tales.


A while back, I operated the postfix mail servers for a B2B app. AFAIK the only way to get email from these servers was to work at a company using our product, add your email to the app, and explicitly opt into getting notification emails. And even then, the only emails they'd send were transactional emails; the marketing dept did their own unrelated thing. In spite of this, we semi-regularly found our servers blacklisted for allegedly sending spam. Since then I don't just trust by default when people add things to blacklists.

All this is to agree with the sibling comments; maybe your priors give you a particular default view, but it's not universally shared, and even so Google rather suffers from a long history of banning people in ways that sure look arbitrary and then refusing to say anything about it to anyone, which rather assists in the banned party looking sympathetic.


> they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!

I tend not to believe the "no reason" part, but I still stand on their side when their privileges are revoked without human intervention and without a human customer support agent available by phone.


I tend to always assume that when people say absolutely no reason, they mean no reason provided. What makes it worse is that there is usually no way to know because they cannot even get to talk to someone. I understand that fraud detection people don't want to let their methods public but this became the norm for most/all companies.


I myself was wrongly banned more than once by automated systems. Google even identified gmail pulling email over pop3 from another gmail account as an attack! Hilariously bad.

But think about it from the other perspective. Can they involve a human in every ban? Can they offer human support for appeals? You have nefarious actors with automated systems submitting malware and then automated appeals. How would Google or any other company cope with providing human support in every case?


I get that life experiences give you biases. Those of us who've been blamed for things we definitely didn't do might have the opposite bias.

Either way, organizations that cannot communicate why they took certain actions are not to be trusted.


I could understand this worldview if talking about some random unknown person. But this is creator of Anti Idle - a game with million+ players and a pretty sizeable TV Tropes page.

Similar situation with the creator of uBlock Origin (8+ million installs on Firefox and 39 million on Chrome) Being treated like shit by Mozilla (uBlock Origin is sole reason people still use Firefox)


> operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust

Curious how much you could share more details about what you discovered during that time?


> Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".

Email shenanigans and the shenaniganiers will quickly erode any sense of faith in your common man. That said, it's easy to believe these stories after dealing with support at any number of big tech companies.


Yeah, some of these stories that get posted here definitely have more going on than the author admits. Some, not all.

But like with email blacklists, false positives do happen, and are probably quite common. Mistakes happen and that's okay because all of this is a hard problem. For email this is usually not too hard to rectify this. For Google Play ... not so much.


A bit off-topic but the number of IT workers still using small 1080p monitors in 2024 is absolutely shocking to me.

If you are one of the "I don't want a monitor that is too big" people: a larger (30+ inch diagonal) monitor allows you to place it further from your eyes which is the number one eye health and comfort factor. So the relative size of the display does not change, you won't have to move your head to see all of it. And you can scale up your display to >1 factor so the text won't be small either for hidpi displays. There's absolutely no downside to having a large diagonal large dpi display, aside from needing a wider desk if you have a very narrow one now.


So you want me to go spend money on a fancy new monitor... because by having a big enough desk and with a lot of tweaking, I can negate the extra pixels and get back to what I have now? (A lot of tweaking also includes having to jump through hoops when doing screen shares)


> aside from needing a wider desk

And possibly a deeper one. My 24" is pushed as far back as my desk will allow and a bigger monitor would be too close to me for comfort. At least it's not 1080p, although at 11 years old, I'll be looking to upgrade it fairly soon.


Type of article: country X or company Y or city Z has it bad for such and such decisions, policies, culture. My rule of thumb for these kind of articles: if they don't mention external factors they are not worth reading.

An entity's situation is influenced by much more than its agency. There's competition from other similar entities, historical circumstances, geography, weather, happenstance, the list goes on and on and on. We like to think that everything depends on what we decide when in reality it's far from it.

These observations have been triggered in myself by reading history. Leadership is always blamed in difficult situations even if they were not (or not completely) responsible for the situation.


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