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_zzaw

1 karma · joined December 20, 2023

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_zzaw··on Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
I mean—your response just now was snarky also. I don't think you were responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what I said, either.

I'd say what's not clear to me is what to avoid in the future. I'm not trying to be difficult here—and dang is one guy dealing with the internet version of a city, to be sure—but I see sarcasm all the time on HN. The really toxic, demeaning stuff, sure, that has to go. In this case, it never even crossed my mind that what I said would be interpreted as targeting the person I was replying to. (While I wouldn't have flagged it, your snarky response, by contrast, was pretty clearly targeting me.)

Looking over the thread—and HN in general—there are no end of snarky posts, including yours, and especially in regards to wealthy tech guys like Musk. The vast majority of them are permitted. That's what I mean by "selectively." Going by your interpretation, no snark would be welcome at all; if that isn't the case, which I didn't have the impression it was, then what was it about my post that warranted a response more than the others?

Genuine question. I can observe consistent rules, but I'm not seeing consistent application of this one.

_zzaw··on Will there be an Article V constitutional convention courtesy of the far right?
https://archive.is/9Cgvp
_zzaw··on Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
I'm a little surprised at this response, dang. I could understand if I was being hostile to the poster, but my sarcasm was directed at Musk (who they're quoting), whose comment about data pillaging I find highly dubious.

As far as snark, I see several other examples of that—also intended for Musk—in this thread. They don't strike me as either offensive or particularly constructive, so it's not clear to me why my comment was called out here. (Especially considering that there are a few other comments that definitely go beyond the acceptable levels of user-to-user snark as I understand them.)

I can avoid sarcastic comments about billionaires in the future, if that's a problem. If the issue was snark directed at another user, that wasn't my intention.

I'll also say that the "snark" rule you cited, while well-intentioned, seems very broad and selectively applied here.

_zzaw··on Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
Yes, it was definitely the "data pillaging" that was degrading service, and not the fact that Twitter is now hosted on a Mac Mini under somebody's desk...
_zzaw··on Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
This feels a little like the shittiest restaurant in town raising its prices. I have an account, and I wouldn't even bother logging in at this point. Why bother? The Twitter experience is so devotedly wretched that whatever I'd get from the tweet I want to see is outweighed by everything I have to wade through to see it.

There was a point when Twitter was good enough that maybe they could have pulled something like this and gotten away with it. At this point, I think all this will do is hasten their irrelevancy.

_zzaw··on YouTube Threatens to Cut Off Ad Blocker Users After Just Three Ad-Less Vids
https://archive.is/aGrYS
_zzaw··on Russian paramilitary chief says his forces will turn around
I don't know about drugs. Ego, messiah complex, and delusions of invincibility? Sure.

Putin got where he was through reality-TV-level ostentatious displays of strength. Prigozhin likely figured he was the only one who could boast measurable gains in the war, and the same tactics would work for him.

My guess is his miscalculation was assuming he was more popular among the rank-and-file Russian military and police than he is, and it's too early to tell if that's actually a miscalculation.

_zzaw··on Liquid metal could turn everyday things like paper into smart objects
https://archive.is/B1JOh
_zzaw··on Top secret U.S. Navy system heard titan implosion days ago
https://archive.is/pSpem
_zzaw··on Brussels to allow installation of spyware on journalists’ phones and laptops
https://archive.is/JohMZ
_zzaw··on [dead]
https://archive.is/NY6Ka
_zzaw··on Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is fighting a losing battle against the site moderators
Put it this way: would you buy stock in a gas station where the owner was getting the gas for free from his friends, and now his friends hate him and aren't giving him free gas anymore?

Now imagine that this station is located on a busy intersection surrounded by multiple other stations.

Reddit is just a dumb pipe; its only real value came from its users. Management doubling down on its increasingly undisguised hostility towards those users doesn't scream "growth" to me.

_zzaw··on New to Hacker News
Hey there. I'd suggest checking out the following if you haven't already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That'll give you a sense of the basics.

_zzaw··on London Underground Dot Matrix Typeface
What exactly were you expecting, a thesis project or documentary or something? As far as I can tell, petykowski just wanted to recreate the typefaces used on the Underground's digital signage. That's fine. Not everything has to be some magnum opus.

I'm speaking as a graphic designer who's been obsessed with typography for decades. Craft and taste are qualities I ordinarily pay a lot of attention to, and if petykowski had talked to anyone affiliated with these typefaces, I'm sure it would have been fascinating. But it's also important to remember that these faces are not in the same category as a high-end serif or something. They serve a bluntly functional purpose. The medium for which they're designed is entirely different. Of course they're simple and easy to copy; that's the point.

So I'm not sure how you are defining "craft" or "taste" here. These designs are crisp and legible. Your comment feels a little like somebody looking at an icon of Clarus the Dogcow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow) and saying "Ah, but where's the dimensionality? Where's the realism? Can this truly be considered a rendering of an animal? How lazy."

I personally love pixel/dot-matrix typefaces. I hadn't known about this project, so I'm grateful that somebody went to the trouble of doing this.

_zzaw··on China's Xi tells Bill Gates he welcomes U.S. AI tech in China
Haha I'll bet he does.
_zzaw··on Instagram is reportedly working on letting users generate comments with AI
I mean—like 97% of users just post comments that are a single emoji anyway, so I'd say the level of discourse on Instagram is barely a step above that "Yo" app that was a thing a while ago, if anyone remembers that.
_zzaw··on /r/startrek/ migrates to lemmy
Reddit buying third-party apps to adopt a few token niceties and then kill them wouldn't be a middle ground. Anybody who uses those apps would see exactly what the game was and be just as outraged. It would still be a tantrum, figuratively speaking, just a more expensive and passive-aggressive one.

"Incompetence and lack of awareness" is what you get when management starts taking their community for granted.

_zzaw··on Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
I think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there.

The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.

The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.

I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.

And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.

tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.

_zzaw··on Ask HN: What are some life optimization tricks you have discovered?
If you're on an iPhone, turn on "Website Settings > Use Reader Automatically" for any Substack site you browse to.

The next time you visit, you won't have to bother dismissing the "plz subscribe to my shitty newsletter" box that Substack forces on you.

_zzaw··on Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
There is only one appropriate, effective response to disrespect, and that is to not reward the offending party.

I made it a matter of principle to not use the Reddit app. Even if they removed all ads and made it an acceptable user experience, I'll never use the app as long as they are harassing me about it.

It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.

Sometimes, denying obnoxious people something they want means denying yourself something you want.

_zzaw··on Step-by-Step Guide for Distributed Crawler to Scrape Millions of TikTok Profiles
https://archive.is/N6olG
_zzaw··on “World has lost battle to stop glaciers melting and sea level rising”
https://archive.is/5C6OR
_zzaw··on Kaczynski Is Said to Have Died by Suicide in Prison
https://archive.is/DLd08
_zzaw··on The baddest lawyer in the history of Jersey
https://archive.is/efioO
_zzaw··on r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes
Yeah, that comment doesn't make a damned bit of sense, unless there are 50 million people out there who are like "man, I'd totally switch to Reddit if their shitty app had more ads, there were no third-party apps, and the site was worse. I had no idea their CEO was such a scumbucket! This revelation makes their company and product significantly more attractive to me."

Social media users are notoriously fickle. If you have a vast, devoted community of longtime users, the last thing you want to do is drive them all away.

I think Reddit just got too entitled: forgot how much they rely on their users and figured they could get away with anything because they're just too indispensable to fail. It happens.

_zzaw··on The culprit behind the 1871 vandalism of the Paleozoic Museum
https://archive.is/MKRbF
_zzaw··on What does headless means in software?
loads page

first thing I see is full-screen popover with client testimonial

second thing I see is fixed-position nav at top, fixed-position cookie notice, and fixed-position bubble of some guy's head in the lower right of the screen

sees "ad" in URL

starts to suspect this is a shit site that's more focused on analytics than useful info

leaves

_zzaw··on A True Crime Obsession Leads to Murder
I think that title needs an "A".
_zzaw··on Something with ATC at SFO
That stuck out to me also. Reading it again, though, the pilot is talking to NorCal, not the local ATC, at this point. I think the NorCal person is being sarcastic rather than stating a policy:

"That’s great. Apparently, aircraft on the ground have priority over aircraft in the air."

(basically taking a swipe at the priorities of the local ATC, who both of them seem pretty pissed at)

_zzaw··on Apple’s Vision Pro Is a $3,500 Ticket to Nowhere
Agreed. "There's no obvious market for X" could also mean "all versions of X have sucked so far".

I'm not a VR enthusiast—I don't own any headsets, and will probably not be buying this one—but this is a profoundly lazy article, and not one I'd take seriously as far as judging the merits of Vision.

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