People used to post Piped/Invidious links all the time, but that eventually became a problem because it meant the link often went to a different proxy than the one that might be a user’s preferred server, and it made it harder to copy the link for use with a preferred server. After some discussion, the consensus became that people should just post the YouTube URL as the main link so users could utilize the preferred proxy they likely already have configured, and then (optionally) include a Piped/Invidious link in the body text for those who don’t currently use a proxy but would like to try it.

Having not watched the video, was the leak a real accident or one of those times where governments decide to experiment on their own soldiers without telling them they’re in an experiment?

I haven’t paid much attention, but I had some myCharge units I bought at Costco last year get recalled. I suspect a lot of these have cheap batteries from suppliers that don’t put much effort into consistent quality. That’s “okay” with alkaline batteries where the worst that happens is they leak and maybe ruin the device they were in. Have poor quality with a lithium battery and you get a fire or even explosion. I suspect with Anker or some of the other brand names at least you’ll actually get a recall if there’s a problem. A lot of the other no-name, fly-by-night brands on Amazon or elsewhere probably don’t even give you that.

TIL Zynga still exists

I’ve had a Kindle for a long time and considered upgrading to a non-Kindle device but was concerned that they don’t seem to get manufacturer updates for very long. This could make that more attractive!

All the abovementioned practices were facilitated by Delivery Hero’s minority shareholding in Glovo. Owning a stake in a competitor is not in itself illegal, but in this specific case it enabled anti-competitive contacts between the two rival companies at several levels. It also allowed Delivery Hero to obtain access to commercially sensitive information and to influence decision-making processes in Glovo, and ultimately to align the two companies’ respective business strategies. This shows that horizontal cross-ownership between competitors may raise antitrust risks and should be handled carefully.

I suppose it can work if they still face robust external competition, like how Hyundai and Kia own stakes in each other and use their combined efforts to compete on the global market, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if even that has anticompetitive implications in their home market of South Korea, both for consumers and workers.

I read an article a while back highlighting how many “tech bro” products seem to be about eliminating human interaction, like grocery or meal deliveries, or self-checkout in stores. There is a convenience factor for these things at times, of course, but with the way many of these executives seem to be pushing exclusively using their services and having zero direct interactions with other humans it starts to raise questions about perhaps their own interpersonal skills and why they want to eliminate the human interaction. This feels like more of the same.

That’s fair, and I think a lot of the problems with that software was the internal developer/administrator for the software (I think it marketed itself as Open Source but was probably more accurately Source Available to customers) had taken it hostage with no one else allowed to touch it. I think it had become the proverbial million lines of undocumented spaghetti code that had guaranteed a permanent job for this guy because if he left the entire business would fall apart, including an inability to bring in revenue. Everyone knew he was a problem, except perhaps his boss, the CFO. When our companies merged they were originally supposed to join us on NetSuite (not without its problems of course but definitely better than the other software) but the hostage taker supposedly convinced the CFO that NetSuite wouldn’t be able to produce a report the CFO liked and we wound up moving to theirs instead. It was also supposed to save money by having lower user licensing costs. They brought in an outside consultant for our transition because the internal guy was too busy but then it turned out the internal guy was doing a bunch of non-standard stuff that didn’t work with the consultant’s design and the internal guy had to redo it anyways. When I left two and a half years later the company had spent millions on the transition and two different additional major pieces of software (the second replacing the first) trying to replicate what we’d had in NetSuite but was still lacking much of that functionality.

The advantage browser-based ones have is it’s generally easy to copy/paste any text you need. I used one that ran as its own desktop software and made many of the key text fields uneditable, instead of letting you copy text from them but refusing to save any changes to those fields that must not change. Want to grab the order number for this customer? Too bad! Type it yourself or export it to PDF and copy it from there! I was so happy when I discovered a little program that lets you copy any text on the screen by effectively taking a screenshot, running OCR on the screenshot, and putting the output onto your clipboard. Still took more effort than simply right-clicking the text and hitting copy, though, or double-clicking and hitting Ctrl-C.

Sadly not even the worst I’ve ever used as an end-user

internet.website is available to register but I checked a couple registrars and they all seem to have it as a premium domain that costs several thousand to register.

It’s hard to imagine any way this doesn’t throw a huge wrench into the adoption of sustainable car technology for the USA.

I think that’s goal

I couldn’t find specs skimming through the article, but it doesn’t look like it would fit in any normal parking space. Driving around might be as unwieldy as a motorhome or box truck, without the height advantage when you inevitably drive over a curb while turning. Doing that might also make it un-airworthy.

This looks to me like yet another in a surprisingly long line of airplanes that are also designed to be driven on roads in someway, but they’re basically all noticeably worse at either task than vehicles designed specifically for one of those tasks. It also invariably ends up more expensive than two specialized vehicles, so there’s never really any reason to build these.

Way more expensive than most private aircraft, though.

Should be torrenting “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift

If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.

If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.

The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded its marketing contracts in 2023, followed by its customer service team in 2024, which it proudly began replacing with AI agents.

A few months after freezing new hires, Klarna bragged that it saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. It likewise claimed that its automated customer service agents could do the work of “700 full-time agents.”

As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, “cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality.”

Also, just want to recognize this gem:

Though executives in every industry, from news media to fast food, seem to think AI is ready for the hot seat — an attitude that’s more grounded in investor relations than an honest assessment of the tech — there are growing signs that robot chickens are coming home to roost.

Yeah, I’ve never played Madden online. That’s very much a couch game to me still. Not that I’ve played it much in years. I picked up my first copy in over a decade a couple years ago when it was on sale at the end of the season.

I haven’t seen it mentioned and feel like it should count, since it really just had a solo programmer working with a graphic designer and musician, but RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 took a big chunk of my gaming time.