Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nearlyfreespeech.net does. I’ve used them for many years to host static sites.
I’ve been tinkering around on nearlyfreespeech.net for about an hour now, and I love it. Thanks.
You bet! They’ve been good to me.
Companies must stop using Google Analytics
421–430 of 672 posts
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
While true, it’s very fair to say that many (possibly most) meetings in a corporate environment contain a lot of absolutely pointless time wasting. I say this with the perspective of someone who has slowly had to have many more of these meetings added to his calendar over the years. Some are very important, some are reasonable but often bloated, but so many are a waste of time. At the very least: they’re 5-10 mins of…
I find that a lot of engineers don't understand good communication, and definitely don't understand the value of relationships. When I was really junior, I'd go to meetings and think that the vast majority of the time was wasted. As I became more senior, I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment. You may not need those things for your current task, but yo…
Looking down on, yes. Suffering nonsense meetings silently? No.
My entire point was that there is a major difference between the two & that while the instinct to look down on others for this organizational symptom is immature, it’s not unfounded or without basis to highlight the issue: they’re blaming the wrong thing however.
And I often find that in those types of meeting communication & relationship building is the absolute last thing that is happening. Most of these meetings are CYA, checklist, type meetings.
Meetings that literally only exist to allow someone to demonstrate they had a meeting about something.
Worse, the actual communication that is happening is usually in side channels.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
This level of dependence on certain tools is neither rare nor unprecedented. Your run-of-the-mill business drone will be trained on Word/Excel/Outlook and be hard to impossible to retrain on anything else (either because of actual stupidity or resistance to change). This already starts at school where "Informatik" is often just learning where to click in Microsoft products. Similarly, tradespeople often specialize in…
There’s actually a far better reason they don’t retrain. There aren’t better tools. Or the tools are basically carbon copies (Google Docs and Sheets). Show me a product that provides so much more value for my team than Excel that it would be worth a retrain.
Mathcad is the only thing that comes to mind. It is very unique and a massive productivity boost for engineering calcs.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is why a lot of American centric sites block us from accessing them, they want your data, and they don't want to ask for it. Or they just think that the costs to adapt their solution, or any law infringement implications don't worth the effort.
You say "or" but then just give examples of what I said. > law infringement implications They comes from using people data in ways that you have no asked permission for. They don't want to ask for it because it's quite hard to spin "we want to mine your data for a Cambridge Analytica style social manipulation". Adaption isn't that difficult, the cost comes from people saying no. They don't want to give that option.
yes, well I dont assume bad intention from every single website there, for some just dont justify the costs and possible headaches.
> You say "or" but then just give examples of what I said. > law infringement implications
No, you mean law infringement implications, like they actually selling your data, I mean some law office, running behind companies not compliant and trying literally money extortion against them.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are missing at least one important point. The reason the mechanic can’t work on the other brand of car is not knowledge or skill, but equipment. It costs money to buy the full suite of equipment required to correctly service a particular manufacturer’s vehicles. It often makes much more sense to specialize and make more use of fewer expensive tools than to have tools for everything and have only marginall…
Well, that's a very American way of doing things that most places simply don't do. The norm is for tools to be compatible with all brands and at best it is an added option to unlock or a pay per use. You can do 99% of the diagnostics with a Wish Bluetooth dongle and a free android app if you wish, since by law it is an open standard. Most specialty equipment costs less than a mechanic can earn in a day. You even orde…
Diagnostics yes, but try to reset the warning light on a German car after fixing the fault. This can apply even when replacing seemingly purely mechanical parts (I think some suspension parts on bmw/Mercedes). You will need vag-com for any vw/Audi and something else proprietary for Mercedes or bmw
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#426One could still use Google Analytics by proxying the tracking events. Afaik only the IP is considered private data. So one could mask or (non-reversibly) hash the IP, remove anything else which might be considered private data and then send the event to Google. A simple PHP script with a few lines of code could do that. But Google lost me by: A) Making it impossible to convert your old data into the new Analytics ver…
A, especially, is atrocious and caused multiple small companies I know to ditch GA entirely. They had years of GA data that is impossible to export without BigQuery shenanigans.
It is impossible to believe a team as well-funded as Analytics could/would not find a way to automatically migrate gtag.js to GA4. They should have made the upgrade transparent by simply converting requests behind the scenes so legacy analytics properties could exist perpetually, while forcing new property registrations to use GA4.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. We're taught that for everything from investing to dating.
This gets far more difficult as one competitor in an industry nears monopoly status. Lets say for example that you somehow make $120,000 a year over expenses with instagram (don't ask how, it's just an example). This is far more than you previously made in your last job by double. The problem is it takes nearly 100% of your working time to make this income on that single platform. Any less amount of effort and your i…
If you save half your income, then for every year you spend on Instagram, you can spend another year figuring out what to do after Instagram collapses.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There aren’t better tools. Or the tools are basically carbon copies LibreOffice, free open source software. Just as good as Excel and... free.
LibreOffice is a perfectly functional spreadsheet for basic spreadsheet tasks. It is, however, not in the same league as Excel for more advanced spreadsheet tasks. Sometimes as a user you just want to be able to use the software that works better, you know?
Yeah, that is the trade-off; if you keep using the proietary software that you're familiar with, you don't have to relearn, but you'll be more dependent on 1 company. But if you spend some time up-front into learning a free software alternative, you won't be dependent on a single company.
But yeah, for some things there are not yet complete free software alternatives, but the gap is really getting small these days. I think for most common use cases for most people, LibreOffice is more than enough. If you need more advanced features that are only available in the propietary variant, try to find ways to not be dependent on that feature, or find an alternative way to do it with free software. If you are creative, there are usually many ways how you can do your work using free software.
But yeah it does take some dedication to this idea. But what you get back is probably, on the long run, gonna be of more benefit to you for the future than if you would invest it in learning the propietary software. Unless you really have a special love for the propietary software company, and you are sure you want to grow more and more into their ecosystem and have no need to have any personal freedom over the software you use.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#429My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…
For practical things it's hard to teach in the abstract - you have to do - and doing means choosing some sort of toolchain - typically the most popular is a frequent choice. As an example imagine learning programming - without some real world practice. And if you do some real world practice you have to choose which tool to use. I take your broader point - but I think it's inevitable that most courses of this type are…
Choosing a tool doesn't mean locking yourself into it forever and refusing to ever use anything else though.
Well before I even started my first development job, I had used BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Assembler, C, Euphoria, Java, C++, Javascript, and Visual Basic.
My first dev job didn't use any of those, however. I had to ramp up on PHP, SQL, Perl, Python, and a little Ruby. Took two weeks to become productive, albeit not a master.
Over the years since then, I've used a wide variety of other tools (languages, frameworks, compilers, editors and IDEs, etc.) I can't imagine where I would be if I still insisted on using BASIC and writing code like
10 PRINT "Hello!"
20 GOTO 10
In the end, they're all just tools to do the job. You don't refuse to use a screwdriver just because you learned to use a hammer first.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#430My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…
This is almost like U.S. high schools, which almost exclusively require students to have Texas Instruments TI-84 series calculators in math class.
I had a TI-85, which was just a little different than the required calculator and didn't do everything quite like the book described. That was good. It meant that I had to learn to program it to do the things it didn't do like the 5 number summary and something else. Which meant I actually learned that stuff pretty well.