lstamour (u/lstamour)

lstamour commented on When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order” sebastiano.tronto.net/blo... · Posted by u/sebtron

ploxiln · 3 months ago

I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience that even non-technical users already have.

lstamour · 3 months ago

I might be wrong on this, but I vaguely recall that on macOS back when you could commonly option-click to reveal advanced options, if you held option when clicking a sort it would change how it sorted from alphabetical to lexical or vice versa. I’m not a thousand percent sure of it, though, I think when I needed it I was able to set a directory preference via terminal to change how a specific directory was sorted and it was an option there. MacOS had (or has) a lot of buried options which I presume date back to its origins as a Unix as well as a convenience to its developers. A lot of the command line utilities were hacked calls to graphical settings code though, so it wasn’t very stable version to version as the UI calls changed and nobody prioritized non-UI bug fixes or breaking changes. These days CLI is nearly forgotten or assumed to be an exploit vector - see Screen Time data for example.

lstamour commented on Nest 1st gen and 2nd gen thermostats no longer supported from Oct 25 community.hubitat.com/t/n... · Posted by u/RyanShook

ryandrake · 4 months ago

This should be pretty much true for every "connected" device out there. They should all have a mode that works by directly connecting over the local LAN. Why do device manufacturers refuse to support this configuration?

If I want to change the volume of my "smart speaker" from my phone that's also on my LAN, it shouldn't require a round trip to a server on the Internet, or an account with credentials, or any of that nutty stuff.

lstamour · 4 months ago

It’s crazy that Sonos used to* have local wifi mesh networking and they decided “the cloud is better”.

* technically still does, but they tried to switch before they backpedaled

lstamour commented on I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself skeptrune.com/posts/doing... · Posted by u/skeptrune

lstamour · 5 months ago

And the ability to undo deleting voicemails. And record voicemails client side using AI transcription to deliver thnesss

lstamour · 5 months ago

Meant to say “to deliver the same experience as Visual Voicemail” but accidentally posted it from my pocket before I could finish writing it out.

lstamour commented on I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself skeptrune.com/posts/doing... · Posted by u/skeptrune

Carrok · 5 months ago

Oh wow. Guess I need to get a job at Apple just to add a `Mark all as read` button to voicemails.

lstamour · 5 months ago

And the ability to undo deleting voicemails. And record voicemails client side using AI transcription to deliver thnesss

lstamour commented on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

modeless · 5 months ago

An unfiltered web browser has stuff a lot worse than YouTube. That's on you if you give your kids access to that.

lstamour · 5 months ago

Unfiltered web browsers might be harder to come by these days than when I was growing up, but they still exist. I remember finding out by accident that certain restricted apps would pull up help pages, and from there I could click a link that would take me to an unrestricted web browser due to a bug in the code. I also remember computers where you could show up with pocket apps on a floppy or USB key and bring your own unrestricted web browser. On top of that, just because the web is restricted often doesn’t mean YouTube is restricted. For example, schools need YouTube to show educational content, so it often is unrestricted even when the rest of the web is restricted e.g. by dns.

lstamour commented on The hype is the product rys.io/en/180.html... · Posted by u/lr0

derefr · 5 months ago

> And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii.

I mean, we could totally have done that. There's nothing stopping you from delivering an experience like modern Amazon or Facebook or whatever in server-rendered HTML4. CSS3 and React get you fancy graphics and animations, and fast, no-repaint page transitions, but that's pretty much all they get you; we had everything else 25 years ago in MSIE6.

You could have built a dynamically-computed product listing grid + shopping cart, or a dynamically-computed network-propagated news feed with multimedia post types + attached comment threads (save for video, which would have been impractical back then), on top of Perl CGI-bin scripts — or if you liked, a custom Apache module in C.

And, in fact, some people did! There existed web services even in 1998 that did [various fragments of] these things! Most of them built in ASP or ColdFusion, mind you, and so limited to a very specific stack; but still, it was happening!

It was just that the results were all incredibly jank, with no UX polish... but not because UX polish would have been impossible with the tools available at the time. (As I said, HTML4 was quite capable!)

Rather, it was because all the professional HCI people were still mostly focused on native apps (with the few rare corporate UX vanguards "doing web stuff", working on siloed enterprise products like the MSDN docs); while the new and growing body of art-school "web design" types were all instead being trained mainly on the application of vertically-integrated design tools (ActiveX, Flash, maybe web layout via Photoshop 9-way slice export).

lstamour · 5 months ago

I agree with most of this post, except the part where you could actually do it. I’ll be the first to admit that I was not in server rooms back then but I’ve heard from those who were. The biggest advantage Amazon had, for many years, over their competitors, is that they would take your order and tell you it was completed and wait to charge your card until it shipped because it was cheaper to write your order down than to spend expensive session compute waiting for the payment to go through. That kind of optimization was necessary because all the networks were slower or flaky then, including payment processing, and often relied on batch processing overnight that has become less visible today.

Meanwhile on the client side, web technologies had a lot of implicit defaults assuming pages on sites rather than apps and experiences. For example, we didn’t originally have a way for JS to preserve back/forward buttons functionality when navigating in a SPA without using hash tags in the URL. Without CSS features for it, support for RTL and LTR on the same website was basically nonexistent. I won’t even get started on charset, poorer support for dates that persists to this day, limited offline modes in a time when being offline was more common, and how browsers varied tremendously across platforms and versions back then with their own unique set of JS APIs and unique ideas of how to render webpages.

It took the original acid test and a bunch more tests that followed before we had anything close to cross browser standards for newer web features. I still remember the snowman hack to get IE to submit forms with UTF-8 encoding, and that wasn’t as bad as quirks mode or IE 5.

Actually maybe I disagree with most of this post. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how it could have been done, but it’s reductive to the extreme to say the only reason web services were jank is because UX polish didn’t exist. If anything, the web is the reason UX is so good today - apps and desktop platforms continuously copied the web for the past 28 years, from Windows ME with single-click everywhere to Spotify and other electron apps invading the OS. I’m not going to devalue the HIG or equivalent, but desktop apps tended to evolve slowly, with each new OS release, while web apps evolved quickly, with each new website needing to write its own cross platform conventions and thus needing its own design language.

lstamour commented on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

modeless · 5 months ago

Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page! It's called "Approved Content Only" and I assure you that it exists, it's a real feature, it works just like you want, I use it myself, my kids watch Primitive Technology and Smarter Every Day and they can't watch videos I don't whitelist.

It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are missing for no reason, other times it will prevent you from whitelisting a video because it contains product placement (why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids). But it is a true whitelist mode and won't show other videos, just as requested.

lstamour · 5 months ago

Edit: I just noticed the list of supported countries (in my link below) includes Canada but excludes the French-speaking province of Quebec. It seems a bit spiteful to go so far as to ensure a service can be legally delivered in such a long list of countries and then exclude Quebec. Hm, I was about to use Puerto Rico as an example, but it’s not in the list as well, but perhaps it’s considered part of the United States here.

Now back to the comment I’d written at first:

It does seem to be, in typical large corporation fashion, a bit too complicated to set up. For example, there are three ways to add parental supervision, including a mode where you can transition from YouTube Kids to the full YouTube experience while still preserving those controls until a child is 13: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=...

That said, all it would take is an open web browser and a not signed in YouTube account for kids to bypass these controls. But I suppose that’s not actually the point - the point of channel filtering is to reduce the harm recommendation engines and spammy content might have. The gotcha is that recommendation engines are everywhere now, spammy content is pervasive, and even AI responses in Google are arguably now a source of noise to be filtered.

I will say, however, it’s great to have an ad-free family plan for YouTube. I wish you could add more accounts to it, but for now I’m getting by with YouTube brand (sub-)accounts to create separate lists of subscriptions, histories and recommendations while still staying ad-free in apps.

And tools adults might find useful, I expect kids and teens would find useful too - for example, browser extensions to customize your YouTube experience.

As long as we have an open web for e.g. YouTube, we do have independent options, if geeky enough to pursue them. :)

lstamour commented on Allergies seem nearly impossible to avoid – unless you're Amish bostonglobe.com/2025/07/2... · Posted by u/aarghh

dinfinity · 5 months ago

The actual answer is pretty much in the article and what you would expect:

"The prevalence of allergic sensitization - the development of antibodies to allergens and the first step to developing an allergy - was six times higher in the Hutterites. The researchers first ruled out a genetic cause; in fact, an analysis showed that the Amish and Hutterite children were remarkably similar in their ancestral roots. Instead, the main difference between these two populations seemed to be the amount of exposure as young children to farm animals or barns.

“The Hutterite kids and pregnant moms don’t go into the animal barns. Kids aren’t really exposed to the animal barns until they’re like 12 or so, when they start learning how to do the work on the farm,” Ober said. “The Amish kids are in and out of the cow barns all day long from an early age.”

When analyzing samples of Amish and Hutterite house dust, they found a microbial load almost seven times higher in Amish homes. Later experiments showed that the airways of mice that inhaled Amish dust had dramatically reduced asthmalike symptoms when exposed to allergens. Mice that inhaled Hutterite dust did not receive the same benefit."

lstamour · 5 months ago

Good points. And it probably isn’t formaldehyde. The only thing I’ll add is that formaldehyde can inhibit or kill bacteria. And I also recently learned the hard way that limonene or other terpenes (from fruits or cleaning products or air fresheners for example) can react with ozone and produce formaldehyde even in the absence of combustion. And I’ve a strong opinion now that science and society ignores the dangers of formaldehyde and VOCs about as much as we used to ignore germs and other things we can’t usually see. Until heat pumps with fresh air exchanges are considered standard or specified by housing code, we will probably always have to deal with VOCs as we don’t have an accurate way to measure them and identity their sources except in industrial contexts. Saying this because while an open window is the cheapest way to get fresh air, it often isn’t the temperature or humidity we expect.

lstamour commented on Allergies seem nearly impossible to avoid – unless you're Amish bostonglobe.com/2025/07/2... · Posted by u/aarghh

lstamour · 5 months ago

Electronics and tightly sealed houses, both of which the Amish might avoid, together allow for a lot more formaldehyde build up indoors. My pet theory (with no proven evidence except my own two eyes, as someone possibly affected by formaldehyde, which means the details are just guesswork right now) is that formaldehyde indoors is responsible for the increase in reported allergies, poor vision (glasses), asthma, ADHD, and possibly increases in divorce rates or staying single - by which I mean that it can cause irritability.

I figure it is the primary cause of road rage, that it can possibly bind to and release microparticulate of metals like iron and aluminum, that it can store itself not just as a solid at room temperature but also in the rubber parts of a scooter while it charges or silicone or foam parts of a CPAP as you breathe in and out (you naturally produce formaldehyde, but increased presence in your exhaled breath has been associated with cancer, for example).

It also causes insomnia and can cause very low humidity in an enclosed space, which might both increase static shocks but also possibly break electronics when combined with its effect on certain metals mentioned earlier.

I’ve an even crazier pet theory that in the presence of other VOCs and sunlight, formaldehyde can multiply, but I don’t have anything to back that up. Formaldehyde with CO2 and UVA can react to become ozone, but ozone with UVA and other VOCs can become formaldehyde. As a result, on a particularly sunny day, I think even outdoor formaldehyde levels can rise and cause the day to feel even warmer than it otherwise should, and that it’s the formaldehyde that can then cause more inattentive accidents.

I’ve another theory that if you take something on to a train with micro metal particulate offgassing and formaldehyde, that it will bind itself to the heat of the wheels over the tracks and be released along with microparticulate from the metal rails every time the train runs by.

I could give more evidence of why this might be so, such as increased rates of emergency repairs of train tracks in my area, Toronto, and a study from 2017 that says Torontos subways have the most metal particulate in NA, but since it’s just speculation right now, take everything I said with a grain of salt, please.

I should add that burning natural gas indoors without appropriate airflow is a wonderful way to introduce a lot of formaldehyde to your living quarters over the years. If I could ban all forms of combustion indoors, I would, I really would.

lstamour commented on Rising graduate joblessness is mainly affecting men edwardconard.com/macro-ro... · Posted by u/andrewstetsenko

mdorazio · 5 months ago

In general, women get paid the same as men, within the error of measurement, and have for many years. The trope of women making less than men comes from an apples to oranges comparison. Women choose less lucrative careers, leave the workforce more often to care for children, and care more about work-life balance. The result is that on average across the workforce, women make less. But if you look at an individual career track and control for hours worked/overtime, years of experience, etc. it’s generally quite even.

In fact, there’s a recent trend of young women making more than their male counterparts, as per the link in this thread.

lstamour · 5 months ago

Isn’t it possible though, that if a role is gender stereotyped or if senior managers are a particular gender, that those of the other gender might need to prove themselves more to get the same job? That managers tend to hire people who appear to fit in, which usually means they are more like themselves, or those who already have the job? Also, it seems weird to suggest that only women have the failings you’ve noted, as men can also have the same shortcomings. In a way, this entire discussion is really highlighting that while some get hired, some do not, and somehow blames those who do not get hired as failures who should not get hired rather than as disadvantaged individuals due to circumstances partly or fully beyond their control.

An interesting point about choosing to leave the workforce to care for children is that re-entry into the workforce or even the ability to work and care for children is something a social net could be established to support. If we have networks that allow army recruits to enter the workforce after their service, we could do the same for parents, but instead social nets seem to devalue the act of raising children, maybe because they are driven too much by short term profit. Taxpayers accept that too, preferring tax breaks for families with children over support networks and job opportunities to re-enter the workforce full-time. One imagines it again is about hiring those like you - managers hiring individuals who worked from home are unlikely to have worked from home - they needed the time in industry to become experienced managers.

Edit: upon rereading my last comment, it is possible that work from home norms established under covid might be the best thing to happen to stay at home parents and their continued full time employment. This could then boost the number of relatively younger parents who could continue in the workforce after mat leave while also providing child care. But it’s not a replacement for better social nets and better social norms.