> Thalidomide never even made it to use in the USA.
What? It was initially blocked by the FDA, but was later approved for use in cancer, where it is in fact a front line drug for some myelomas, albeit with significant usage warnings.
It was never approved in the US for the on-label use for which it gained its reputation (it's a potent teratogen and was prescribed --- never officially in the US --- for morning sickness).
Fair, I was talking more the initial pregnancy use, but even still that further pushes my point that those examples have either never been considered perfectly safe, or have been in active normal usage for so many years that you really have to squint to say it's unsafe.
I never found it to be overly reliable. It was reliable... for a while. Then would silently fail/stop working, or just tell you that it had stopped working and that whatever you had in it was no longer accessible.
And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.
So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.
It was unreliable over SMB. Not surprising when you look at what it was doing. It would create a virtual drive on the share, map that and backup to it. There was too much going on for that to be reliable.
Yeah, you may be right. I have fond memories of it from around 2008, but those might be from the initial experience and not all the "you need to recreate your back from scratch" errors that would crop up after a while.
> Everything is increasingly integrated for dust/water proofing, components are integrated to reduce the power envelope and push performance. Repairability is the tradeoff.
This is a fair point. But when I hear "you can't repair your device" I also think "you can't take it to someone of your choice to repair", which is often true, too, even though that limitation is artificial - witness the Rossmans and others of the world who can absolutely repair these devices. There's a whole YouTube channel of a guy who makes ASMR videos of him doing things like removing iPhone/iPad/MBP storage and replacing it with large capacity chips.
> I also think "you can't take it to someone of your choice to repair", which is often true, too, even though that limitation is artificial
This I think is a fair enough criticism. Screen and battery replacement by 3rd party professionals should be easier. Both of these things would tackle the biggest reasons that iPhones become useless before Apple drops OS support which is quite long compared to Android OEMs.
Take a photo on your iPhone and wait for it to sync on your Mac. You might get lucky and it syncs nearly immediately (which is still typically a minute or so, even if your phone and Mac are on the same network and have gigabit internet). But you won't know when. And it might not be immediate.
Both sides will tell you they're up to date. You can't force a sync. They'll be synced when Photos is ready, not you. And if that's ten minutes or more later? So be it. You'll just deal with it.
This is a very good example of a disruptive bug that destroys the ability to work. I’m making a document on my laptop and using the phone as a camera to take pictures, I am working on, now. Same WiFi, same person, same cloud, inches apart. No work.
In a very different direction. Photos are almost a second class citizen on IG now. Stories. Reels. Shit, a quarter of my feed is (very repetitive) ads.
It's absolutely grown, but the concept of IG was definitely "de-prioritized".
I haven't been to SmugMug in years (decade?) but wow, holy early 2000s big bold brash neon web design. Then there's this huge scrolling ticker in 72pt text at the top, "free festival passes for the next 50 subscribers" that has been there ... for a few days now. Gives total "You may already be a winner!" vibes.
> At the peak of its popularity, Flickr was an interesting glimpse of the coming age of algorithmic homogeneity. In the mid-2010s, most of their top photos looked basically the same: heavily shopped, oversaturated HDR landscapes.
I agree with that. And then I moved to 500px, and it was the same. Started off promising, became very homogenous. Landscapes like you say, and the People sections were heavy with Eastern European semi-soft focus nudes in nature.
One thing I can say about 500px is that it's one of the few Internet properties I made money on without really having to do anything more than just use it (newsvine was the other)
I uploaded a bunch of photos once, forgot about them, and then a year or two later got an email asking to license them for commercial/stock use
Even so, Australia still has the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) so there's that funding and research too, which actually has, per capita, about a similar funding (equivalent of US$9B adjusted), though they generally do most of that research 'in house' versus funding it externally.
What? It was initially blocked by the FDA, but was later approved for use in cancer, where it is in fact a front line drug for some myelomas, albeit with significant usage warnings.
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