Aren’t you a little bit touchy yourself? During the Cold War espionage is the core mission of any intelligence agency. Anything can be acquired - bought or stolen, would be acquired. That wasn’t bad or a sin. That was the reality. Whether they became products is another matter.
The US was well ahead of the Soviets on technology advancement. That was indisputable. So KGB had to work harder than CIA on this front. Doesn’t mean the concept is foreign to CIA
I saw a story a while back where someone made their personal number premium rate to reduce nuisance calls (it was successful); that may also be an option.
Not a great one as the problem is Google rather than the callers, but I guess you could also have an immediate route to voicemail with the message "this is not, repeat not, google".
Sure, $50 is enough to file a court claim saying Google owes you £300 because of the cost of sorting out this mess.
It might work pretty well, Google can choose to say oh yeah, that's about right, here's £300 or they can make this into a big deal whereupon their in-house legal team are immediately going to spend far more than £300 just showing up and making their position in court, and they might well lose if you tried to get it fixed and they were useless.
How do you win a race against Usain Bolt?
Just run faster than him!
Every time one gives the other a technically correct but perfectly inapplicable advice, we just answer "yeah, run faster". It's our own private joke of a shortcut keeping our BS in check.
The thing is, when you are giving advice, you are usually missing a lot of context. Context you may not know exists, and that the other person won't or can't share with you. Maybe the other person doesn't even realize this context is needed or is aware of it.
But if you had this context, you would understand how unpractical your advice is to this particular situation, because it's too generic. Too theoretical.
After all, most smokers know they should quit, most fat people know they should lose weight. If it was just about hearing the right path, we would have little problems we can't solve.
But knowing where you should go tells you less than expected about the path ahead because of the aforementioned missing context, such as where you start from and the obstacles in your way, whether you'll be alone on the road or with friends or wild animals, if you have to carry a big bag, if you need to forage for food and if it rains.
That doesn't make advice useless.
But you should not expect to see the effect right now. Rather, they may contribute to a self-realization that the person has to build for themself, adapted to themself. It takes time, it's hard, and there are a lot of other things that fight for being a priority.
Assuming it was good advice to begin with of course, and there are not that many good advice to go around.
I've been writing react for years, and going back to templates, I wish I could never have to write a react rendering function again.
Components are overrated.
Their best feature is that they help build a fantastic ecosystem, which is the biggest react strength.
But for your own website?
Their cons and pros balance each other out, and all that is left is the terrible API that react exposes.
Eventually, you gain locally some reusability (provided you actually need it in your project, because there are not that many components that need reusability, and even less that couldn't be a template tag in django), but every single dev writes react code differently.
So you get a heterogeneous mess anyway.
My last SPA project (in vue), we had one component that was worth making reusable.
One. For a month and a half of work.
Turns out vanilla functions are quite reusable themselves already.
No need for cameras outside to report what's going on to you inside, you can see through.
HUD (E.G: for cars), augmented reality on phones, monitoring for things like patients, babies...
If they manage to deal with the ambient luminosity problem, it can even change the architecture of your room. No more big screens, just windows letting light in, that you can switch to displays when you like.
Even for class room it's better: students will be visible behind their screens to the teacher.
The whole American language is normalizing toward exaggeration and the use of superlatives for even the most mundane things.
As a consequence, nuances as lost, debates are instantly polarizing, and words lose substance and meaning, so you get little information out of many discussions.
It's not just the bots that make the noise/signal ratio go down. It's also the people.
I hear words like fascists/communists, friends/hilarious, amazing/shit used in such a large spectrum of situations they eventually convey nothing more than what tribe the speaker wants to be identified with and what gains said person hopes to get from talking.
On top of that now, when you need to talk about the extremes, you are lacking the tools to do so, and all things seem to be more or less at the same level. Minor inconvenience and deadly risks, all in the same plater.
And don't get me started on the constant virtue signaling and sale speeches.
From my European point of view, the US communication looks like a circus.
Well, we might not understand the US (how could we — and what would that even mean?), but your parent commentor sure does understand how they perceive certain phenomena and how they feel about them.
I will never be able to create music like, idk, Boy George for example, and I therefore don’t “understand” it, but that doesn’t mean I cannot dislike it.
Establishment politicians in Europe, on the other hand, pretend to be nuanced, tolerant, resolute... But it's all a charade for midwits. It's as disgusting and dishonest as as American politicians' partizanship.
Dark times when "authoritarian" Chinese sound reasonable in comparison.
The hard part is the replication and up time, because you can serve a ton of images from a VPS for pennies on the dollar.
But even then, images are quite simple to deal with compared to big files like videos because you don't have to chunk them. So just copying them several time and putting a load balancing in front of it will get you 99% there for half of the price, dev time included.
Founder of Gumlet.com here (we serve more than 2 billion images per day).
Here are the reasons image processing on VPS is hard.
- Reliability and uptime is a huge concern. If service goes down, images can show broken
- When you build it yourself, you pay for image processing, bandwidth AND developer time. image processing at multiple terabytes and half a million image processed is not trivial ( inputs can be crazy and output needs to be modified as per the requesting platform)
- Images form a big part of Google web vitals so slow image processing can hurt LCP score.
- Newer formats like AVIF and JXL are increasingly complex. They need way more processing power than plain old JPEG.
