1,116 karma · joined January 8, 2021
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
However, there's some who predict an existential future risk such as an AI apocalypse. If that's the case, why save a child's life today when we'll all be killed by AI tomorrow? Critics would call this funding pet projects rather than altruism.
But you can even further down this line of thinking. If you're a billionaire and see yourself as the only hope of saving humanity from extinction, why donate any of your wealth? You should be doing the opposite, gathering as much wealth and power as possible. Taxes and laws that get in your way are impediments to the salvation of humanity.
I'm pretty sure most of the criticism is for folks in the latter groups. I wish there were different words to distinguish them better, because I like the idea of encouraging charity but somehow a handful of billionaires have poisoned the word altruism.
But Ali Express is not one of those. It's very feasible to delete the app, or at least turn off the notifications. The quality of TV writing may have taken a nosedive but nobody is forcing you to watch TikTok Empire. If you long for the golden age of television, you can find disc versions of The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos etc. Often they're free to borrow at your local library. The App Store is indeed garbage, but I open it a handful of times per year and probably spend less than a minute to search for the app I want and install it.
The argument about losing control to devices would be much more effective if the examples weren't mainly cases where the user clearly has control.
Problem Details (RFC 9457) are useful and have made an occasional appearance, but actual hypermedia driven APIs with custom media types seem to be non-existent outside of example blog posts. It's much more common to instead see APIs overload lesser-used HTTP status codes with their own domain-specific meanings. But if I'm being honest, this sort of protocol crime almost never caused an actual problem in practice.
The advocacy for "true REST" is missing a compelling argument and useful example of why it would actually be an improvement. Despite its prominence, for over 20 years almost nobody has used this approach. Why is that?
I do still have an aesthetic appreciation for "true REST", but in practice I find the fact that nobody uses it to be mainly useful in ending bikeshedding discussions. Once you understand your API isn't RESTful to begin with, there's no longer any point in arguing if 411 or 412 is the more RESTful status code to use when a user attempts to order a product without specifying a quantity. (Spoiler: neither is correct) You simply send a 400 with Problem Details and call it a day. Ironically, this indifference may make your API just a little bit more RESTful.
Those who favor human writing are looking for writing where the words are the product of a human mind rather than an LLM. The requirement for every character to be the product of a finger pressing a key is not something I've seen. Alternative input methods doesn't make a writing non-human. Spellcheck and probably even some amount of auto-complete are also generally considered to be fine. Anyone checking for keystrokes is using it as a proxy for human creation, not valuing the physical motion itself.
The pro-AI example is a writer spending hours tweaking a single AI output then later re-arranging and rewriting the piece before publishing. While this would probably still set off some AI-detectors, it does at least include some human effort. Presumably this effort will not be appreciated and readers will assume that the poster simply copied the response directly from their LLM of choice. It may seem a bit unfair to ignore the human effort in revising, but it's a reasonable assumption to make because almost nobody is using LLMs in this way.
Perhaps there's a reasonable amount of LLM use which would be considered a writing aid rather than a writing replacement, but the vast majority are simply mass producing slop so I sympathize with those who favor a blanket ban as a response.
Wikipedia is a great resource and I use it a lot, but it is far from a complete solution for topics with any depth. If I read an article on a president, I'll get a brief overview of their administration as well as a few interesting facts and could probably answer a jeopardy question about them, but I would not claim a strong understanding.
I will agree that not every bit of information can be found in a book, but the ability to comprehend book-level arguments and ideas is critical. They are a necessary, but not sufficient component of learning.
[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung... [1] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
The March 2026 issue has 12 ads across 109 pages including the back cover. Ads do not appear within an article. I even sometimes read the ads, because many are about new book releases. I opened the cover story (just one article!) of this issue within the mobile app and encountered 38 advertisements. The ads take up nearly half the screen and there is almost always one visible. These 38 instances were just the same four ads repeated many, many times.
This is just one issue of one publication, but it's representative of the broader problem the author discusses. I want to support good journalism and am willing to pay for good writers and articles but strategies that are so frustrating and disrespectful to the reader make it difficult.
Celsius and Fahrenheit doesn't work as an analogy because the rate does not change over time as it does with currencies.
There are people like yourself who would be happy to donate, but not nearly enough. Replacing MoCo's current revenue with donors would require donations at the level of Doctors without Borders, American Cancer Society, or the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
Turning into one of the largest charities in America overnight simply isn't realistic. A drastic downsizing to subsist on donor revenue also isn't wise when Mozilla already has to compete with a smaller team. And "Ladybird does it" isn't a real argument until and unless it graduates from cool project to usable and competitive browser.
It's not wrong, but this take is kind of tired and well out of date. For about a decade or so left-pad's functionality has been standard in all browsers or runtimes. Plenty of other micropackages have been obsoleted as well and the current zeitgeist is to avoid publishing or using any sort of micropackage.
"Zero dependencies" is now a top marketing term in the frontend world. Unfortunately, their removal is an ongoing process and it's taken way too long already to fully purge the ecosystem of these packages. However, it's not because the JavaScript community has never thought of this issue before. "Add more features to the JS standards and don't use is-number" is not a particularly new idea or valuable insight.
But beyond that, there were plenty of not-tiny packages impacted as well. Continuing to beat this dead horse may be fun, but it distracts from the actual issue here.
> For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.
https://yalereview.org/article/burrough-vanity-fair-graydon-...
There are definitely downsides to renting such as landlord issues or missing out on mortgage subsidies, but maybe a higher proportion of renters could lead to improvements in affordability. And if the well-off are renting as well, there's also more hope for better legal protections for renters.
Some of the players do find this fan/media obsession strange. They may be asked about playing against QB X and reply that they're actually playing against the opposing defense.
There are rivalries between players who are on the field at the same time, but they're less prominent. Those between a wide receiver and cornerback are probably the most common. Throughout the game they are racing, pushing and deceiving each other and fighting over the ball and it can become heated.
However, it's also possible to have a competitive rivalry without directly facing each other on the field. In individual sports like golf this is the only way. But in other sports players can also compete with each other on some individual aspect. In baseball, the 1998 HR chase and Dimaggio brothers are some prominent examples. In Brady's case he had a strong desire to be number one. The threat of Peyton winning MVPs over him, having better statistics than him or Peyton's team winning over his was a strong motivator for Brady to protect his status.
I've also seen solutions where you POST the filter config, then reference the returned filter ID in the GET request, but that often seems like overkill even if it adds some benefits.
- The API returns JSON
- CRUD actions are mapped to POST/GET/PUT/DELETE
- The team constantly bikesheds over correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec
- There's a decent chance listing endpoints were changed to POST to support complex filters
Like Agile, CI or DevOps you can insist on the original definition or submit to the semantic diffusion and use the terms as they are commonly understood.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox - Mozilla should develop cool research projects - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business - Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project
Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles.
Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.