Someone I knew fell down the stairs while home alone and couldn't get up. He was able to call out towards the kitchen and tell Alexa to call for help. If he wasn't able to do that, he would have been lying there much longer before anyone could find out. It sucks for privacy, but those types of devices do have some legitimate helpful uses.

It depends on the place and the cop that is present, but jaywalking isn't often enforced. It's a law to try to protect people from crossing the street and getting injured by cars that may not see them crossing. Instead of crossing anywhere, they are supposed to cross at a specific area where cars already are supposed to stop. Since jaywalking is against the law (even if it isn't enforced well), it will stop some people from crossing the street in the middle of a road, and it may save a few lives. It's kinda dumb, but if it helps a few people, I have no problem with it.

You're correct on the two thoughts you listed. Wishlisting also makes the game more visible before release. For example, highly wishlisted games appear in the "Popular Upcoming" section, along with some other spots. This increased visibility before launch then feeds into the two points you made. I believe games that are highly wishlisted before launch are also more likely to appear on the frontpage right after launch.

I haven't used it often, but the few times I have asked it very specific programming questions, it has usually been pretty good. For example, I am not very good with regex, but I can usually ask Copilot to create regex that does something like verifying a string matches a certain pattern, and it performs pretty well. I don't use regex enough to spend a lot of time learning it, and I could easily find a few examples online that can be combined to make my answer, but Copilot is much quicker and easier for me. That said, I don't think I would trust it past answering questions about how to implement a small code snippet.

I have two that flip for my favorite depending on my mood at any given time: "There Will Be Blood" and "Blade Runner 2049". They are both kinda slow and require attention to really appreciate, so probably my favorite movie to turn my brain off and have fun is "Mad Max: Fury Road".

For a physical book, I'm reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez. I'm not too far in yet, but I'm enjoying it so far. I am having some issues keeping track of names, which usually isn't a problem for me, and I'm not sure why.

For my drive to work, I'm listening to "Words of Radiance" by Brandon Sanderson. I'm not sure if I'm really enjoying it or not, but I'm giving it a chance. For the first book, I thought it was just okay until about the last third of the book, so we'll see how this one turns out.

I'm from the US as well, and I can verify that very few average people use those types of messengers primarily. It is almost exclusively iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS texts as the main form of messaging. I will admit that quite a few people will use the messaging features that are built into social media apps (like messaging in Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, etc). At least to me, it seems like those are moreso used for sending memes or messaging people you don't interact with regularly and are still secondary to the other forms of messaging.

Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren't great. I wouldn't hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.

I watched a video a while back about this, but the details are fuzzy. I think it was the one I linked below if you want to look more into it. In essence, there aren't a ton of cases where kids are actually being forced to work. However, there are strong incentives for kids to work on Roblox projects that the developers themselves push. The devs want a constant stream of content and money coming in, but they don't want to pay adult workers at adult wages, so they offer Robux to players who make games. It is difficult for people to convert Robux to actual cash, and the money they receive is often significantly less than they would if they put the effort into any other form of work, so many of these kids are essentially making content for the developers for free or significantly less than they should earn. If there was no payout for content creators and the kids were doing that development just because they had passion for the game, it might be a different situation, but there are quite a few kids that believe they can make serious money doing this and don't understand that the developers are exploiting them and paying very little. Adults can probably do more research and better understand the situation they are getting into, but kids often don't have the same critical thinking skills as adults and will accept the lie being pushed by the developers and community that they can get rich by contributing to the game they love.

Video: https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ

Follow-up: https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

I'm sure most people knew it was Russia from the start, but I saw a comment earlier today that apparently Russia was saying that it was a Ukrainian defense missile that fell out of the air. They are likely just confirming that it was indeed Russia.

I'm not sure why these comments are so negative so far. If I'm understanding the article correctly, it is an optional setting to automatically open the app as soon as it is done installing. The Play Store isn't just installing and opening apps on its own.

To add onto this for anyone interested, the reason it and many businesses are incorporated in Delaware specifically is because it has a very pro-business legal and judicial system. Many businesses benefit from choosing that state over others and can find loopholes that allow them to save money (though there have been efforts to eliminate those loopholes in much of the country).

Phil Edwards recently released a video on this, which is how I found out about it: https://youtu.be/b4q99EuZF_Q

And this is the article that inspired the video: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/corporation-trust-center

I had an issue where a client reported a crash on login. The exception and stack trace reported were very generic and lent no clues to the cause. I tried debugging but could not reproduce. I eventually figured out that the crash only happened for release (non-debug) builds that were obfuscated. I couldn't find the troublesome code, so I figured out which release introduced the issue, then which commit, then went change by change until I was able to find the cause. It turned out to be a log message in a location that was completely unrelated to login. That exact log message was fine a few lines up. Other code worked fine in that location. For some unknown reason, having that log message in that specific location caused a crash in a completely different area of code.

I've used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google's (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.

It was obfuscated only in the release build. The issue is that they have a system to send certain logs to an API so they can refer to them if a user has an issue that needs further investigation. Unfortunately, their target audience is not very tech literate and have a hard time explaining how they got into a situation where they experienced a bug, so the remote logging was a way to allow us to try to retrace the user's steps. Some of the logs that get sent to the API have JSON values converted from class data, will refer directly to class names, etc, and those logs had the obfuscated names.

I have a somewhat related real world story. I had a client that was convinced that tons of people were going to decompile their application and sell their own version of the program, so they insisted that they needed their code obfuscated to protect company secrets and make it harder to reverse engineer. I tried explaining to them that obfuscation wasn't that big of a deterrent to someone attempting to steal code through reverse engineering and that it would likely cause some issues with debugging, but they were certain they needed it. Sure enough, they then had a real user run into an issue and were surprised to find that their custom logging system was close to useless because the application was outputting random obfuscated letters instead of function and variable names. We did have mapping files, but it took a lot of time to map each log message to make it readable enough to try to understand the user's issue.

I have a Funko Pop of the "This is Fine" dog on my desk at work because there are times where I'm really feeling that way.

What's going on with Nike and their uniforms? The MLB ones are pretty bad where you can basically see through the pants, and now this.

I can't remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn't load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?

User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I'm talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.