Suboptimal

The British poet and academic Holly Pester’s debut novel is about how easy it is to lose yourself when you don’t have a place to truly call home. In The Lodgers, an unnamed narrator returns to a town where she has arranged to sublet a flat. It’s less than ideal: the living room is “an absurdly awkward corner shape” and the whole place smells of “men’s shower gel and repeated nights of instant noodles”. The woman has chosen this flat because it overlooks her mother’s house, though her mother, whom she calls Moffa, is…

YouTube has admitted to intentionally creating a suboptimal experience for users employing ad blockers. Reports of a deliberate five-second delay in loading video pages on Mozilla’s Firefox have emerged on forums like Reddit and Hacker News. Despite initial speculation about browser specificity, YouTube has clarified that users across all platforms may encounter loading delays. This deliberate delay is part of YouTube’s ongoing campaign to…

YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers earlier this year, but it escalated things this month when it locked out anyone trying to watch YouTube through apps, add-ons and extensions that skip its ads.It’s even affected a lot of YouTube viewers not using workarounds though, with Firefox or Edge users reportedly having to wait around five seconds every time they load a video. In screen recordings shared on Reddit and other online forums, users show how their screen goes blank for a short period when they click on a…

Google seems to be pressing heavily on YouTube users to stop using an ad blocker for the video streaming service and instead subscribe to the company's premium…

Google is pushing a YouTube ad crackdown to convince users to buy into its premium services to remove ads instead of relying on ad blockers. It’s part of an ongoing fight by Google and many other companies to get users to drop their ad blockers. Google’s latest attempt appears to be causing issues for some users, and the company even said it may cause “suboptimal viewing” experiences if you’re using an ad blocker. The fight against ad blockers isn’t exactly a new one. Whether you’re trying to avoid all the…

Some YouTube viewers who use Firefox or Edge instead of Chrome have reported having to wait around five seconds every time they try to load a video. In screen recordings shared on Reddit and other online forums, users show how their screen goes blank for a short period when they click on a YouTube video before the page loads. But when they switch to Chrome, that waiting period seemed to be non-existent. Android Authority and 404media, which reported on the users' complaints, weren't able to replicate the phenomenon. We…

A 3D rendering of a cross-section of the spine showing bone loss due to osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a progressive bone disease characterized by low bone density and increased risk of fractures, commonly affecting older individuals, particularly postmenopausal women. It is often asymptomatic until a fracture occurs, making early diagnosis and preventive measures crucial in managing this condition.The Fracture Risk Assessment Tool (FRAX), frequently utilized in assessing fracture risk, incorporates self-identified race…

Examining the limitations of the SQL interfaceWritten by Kevin Kho and Han WangThis is a written version of our most recent Spark Data + AI Sumit talk.Shiba Inu Piloting an Airplane — Image by AuthorIn our last article, we talked about the limitations of using the Pandas interface for distributed computing. Some people quickly assumed that we are pro-SQL, but that is not exactly true either. Here, we’ll look at traditional SQL and the pain points of using it as the grammar for big data workflows. None of these will be too…

A deep look at the assumptions of the Pandas interfaceWritten by Kevin Kho and Han WangThis is a written version of our most recent PyCon talk.Photo by Jukan Tateisi on UnsplashOver the last year and a half, we’ve talked to data practitioners who want to move Pandas code to either Dask or Spark to take advantage of distributed computing resources. Their workloads were quickly becoming too compute-intense or their datasets would not fit in Pandas anymore, which only runs on a single machine.One of the recurring themes in…