kbenson

If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend reading The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”. It's not that it maps to reality perfectly, but it's an interesting lens through which to look at work and your relation to it. It helped me soften my view on some of my coworkers by understanding their motivations better, and also helped me to accept a point of view much more similar to yours about the work I do. Also, if you're a fan of The Office, it's fun to revisit it and examine it in a new way.

1: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

With regard to proof of work systems that provide revenue:

1) Making LLM (and other) scrapers pay for the resources they use seems perfectly fine to me. Also, as someone that manages some level of scraping (on the order of low tens of millions of requests a month), I'm fine with this. There's a wide range of scraping that the problem is not some resource cost, but the other side not wanting to deal with setting up APIs or putting so many hurdles on access that it's easier to just bypass it.

2) This seems like it might be an opportunity for Cloudflare. Let customers opt-in to requiring a proof of work when visitors already trip the cloudflare vetting page that runs additional checks to see if you're a bad actor, and apply any revenue to a service credit towards their monthly fee (or if on a free plan, as credit to be used for trying out additional for-pay features). There might be a perverse inventive to toggle on more stringent checking from cloudflare, but ultimately since it's all being paid for that's the site owner's choice on how they want to manage their site.

If attackers only made ~$40 fora good amount of work, seems like it would have resolved itself if the scheme was left to run itself to conclusion before people started blocking coinhive in (what sounds like from your description) a knee-jerk reaction.

Then again, I'm sure there's quite a bit of tweaking that could be done to make clients submit far more hashes, but that would make it much more noticeable.

Yes, I'll admit I was a bit strong in my "anyone would" wording. I'm fairly confident in saying that while some people might opt for delayed payment when pressed and discussed with most if not all would admit to doing so because of their own inability to follow through on what they would acknowledge as the financially smarter option. In that case, it's still obvious what the better option is, even if you feel you can't take advantage of it because of other factors.

They have, as much as they will try to convince you they haven't, because they've spend so long trying to shift any blame or negative feelings towards resellers. Here's some supporting information to that point:

- Ticketmaster is known to add additional fees to tickets which are actually given in part or in whole to the artist or venue, allowing customers to blame Ticketmaster for high ticket prices so Artists can claim they wanted cheaper tickets that were only $25 (but are actually $40 when you get to the final check out). This has been covered by the major news outlets a few different times and discussed here, so shouldn't be hard to find information on.

- Ticketmaster runs their own secondary exchange now, which verified re-issuing of digital tickets out of their own back-end and guaranteed entry. Can't embrace it much more than that. They get a cut of the sale price on the secondary exchange like all the exchanges do.

- Ticketmaster also reserves a portion of their tickets for dynamic pricing and their price will adjust on the fly during the initial sale period based on demand and what they see them showing up on the resale market as (some tickets show up on the resale market almost immediately).

- Artists want to side with their fans, or at a minimum appear to side with them. That means releasing tickets for "cheap" or at least in a way they can claim they did. Some artists care, some pay lip service. Kid Rock actually seemed to care, as he would play Detroit for seven consecutive days or more to make sure his cheap tickets stayed cheap by providing enough supply that demand was never too high, at least for most seats. I'm sure he would rather not do such a grueling schedule though, which is why he's always been very active trying to get legislature passed targeting resellers.

To me, having worked in this industry in the past, it's always been very clear that the industry does embrace the secondary market, to a degree, while also using it as a convenient scapegoat. If the secondary markets were to be shut down tomorrow, everyone would find at least some aspect of that worse than the current status quo. Some might ultimately find is better, some worse, but it's not nearly as simple as secondary markets just being a problem (for example, they're not just rent-seeking, they're offloading risk and providing liquidity).

> The assumption that it's $100 now vs. $100 later just seems unfounded. What if it's $100 now vs. $110 later?

The actual situation is that it's $100 now or maybe $110 later or even $90 later, because you don't know what the market is going to do. That is the risk the resellers are taking on. The demand for the product is not static. At the time of sale, a lot of effort goes into making the artist appealing and interesting to audiences so they are more interested in buying a ticket.

> The payer is can factor in the time value of money, inflation, etc. just like you do; why would they completely ignore that and blindly pay the same amount they would at two different points in time?

Of course customers would prefer to pay at the last possible moment. With a static inventory that's released all at once (which isn't really how it's done most times now) they don't really have that luxury for popular events, resellers or not.

My point is that there's no guarantee the value of tickets. Depending on the event, they often reduce in cost. Selling a large amount early reduces risk exposure. These days there's a bit of everything going on, and usually there are certain amounts of inventory released initially, and more come in clumps over time, possibly at different prices depending on demand and what the secondary market looks like, as well as there being a subset of inventory from the very beginning that has dynamic pricing to respond quickly to market conditions and serve some of the need of the secondary market. As Ticketmaster started tun run their own secondary market they quickly utilized the data that gave them to change how they functioned on the primary market.

> We're not talking about free money, we're talking about payment in exchange for work. You're taking out a loan that comes with obligations. ... And I don't know about you, but I sure as heck don't enjoy being perpetually in debt to someone. I'm not saying it's bad if you're fine with it, I'm saying it doesn't seem remotely true that everyone is fine with it.

Importantly, there are many links in this chain, and people taking their cut along the way (although less than there used to be since Live Nation /Ticketmaster has serves the role of multiple parties in many cases). This is how the industry works at the large tour level. You contract for a lot of work over a long period, sometimes more than a year, and then proceed to execute on that plan. As someone that gets a normal paycheck, I admit it's not that appealing to me either, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it's strange. All sorts of small businesses work on this idea, and when you're doing fixed cost work, you would rather have the money up front, as it allows for more options. Any tradesperson that does large projects has to deal with this to a lesser degree. General contractors, electricians, etc. It's a normal part of contract based work. Most people are forced into what the industry has settled on as acceptable practices and can't dictate difference, so for the vast majority "if you're fine with it" is a foregone conclusion because if you're not you've probably found some other way to make a living.

>> it's obviously preferable to get paid for the entire tour on the day it's announced

> it's only obvious to "private equity" type people.

No, it's obvious. Anyone that has to choose between getting $100 right now or $100 trickled in over months would opt for it right now for many reasons (inflation, the ability it invest it, the ability to use if it needed for unexpected situation, etc).

Wanting events to be populated by people that are primed for an experience and part of that priming bing they don't feel like it was too expensive to go might be another thing the artist or venue wants to encourage.

You can combine these things and make specific trade offs, but that doesn't mean all other things being equal that it's not entirely obvious that you should prefer money now to later.

> So giving up (or even worse, cooperating) to scalpers is like selling your business to private equity - you get some money, they get some money, and your customers/fans are fd.

It depends, probably a whole lot more than you think. Sometimes fans like to know they can go to an event if they care enough. In a world without resale markets that would be entirely dependent on the artist deciding to play more shows, because once tickets are sold they're gone. Secondary markets provide liquidity.

Also, sometimes tickets are available for cheaper* on secondary markets than they were on the initial sale (and this was true even before Ticketmaster started changing prices as the sales went on). That's because brokers take on risk buy buying for an event when it's not entirely sure it will still have demand when it's the event date.

For example, I just went to Stubhub (because I'm not sure Ticketmaster's own exchange will allow you to list for less than sale price) and looked for events starting soon. I found a rock concert in Napa where the Orchestra tickets are cheaper on Stubhub ($94 for two) than on Ticketmaster ($115.40 for two). There are plenty of tickets still on Ticketmaster, and some brokers just want to but their losses.[1][2]

There are plenty of ways to look at reselling to make it seem horrible or to make it seem beneficial. It's neither, it's just a normal function of markets, and the more people try to prevent it the more weird problems we'll have. Want to fix ticket prices? Convince artists to take on risk by playing larger venues (which they might not sell out) or add dates (meanind some days might not sell out). Artists don't want to take on that risk, so we have resellers and higher ticket prices.

1: https://www.stubhub.com/zepparella-napa-tickets-5-31-2025/ev...

2: https://www.ticketmaster.com/zepparella-the-led-zeppelin-pow...

It's much more complicated (and worse) than that.

Ticketmaster reserves some seats during sale to be dynamic pricing, which they start higher than normal and then depending on demand and what they see on the secondary market they re-price those as the initial sale or presale is ongoing, just minutes after it starts.

Also, promoters, artists and venues might get their own allotment of tickets to do with as they want, likely negotiated in contracts. Those seem to find their way onto secondary markets often as well.

> They do other things that's baffling like selling tickets a year ahead of time, which is kind of weird considering very few people, even big fans, would be really on top of buying tickets a year out. It's obviously designed for scalpers.

Yes, I've commented on this here before. In some cases it's because tours go on sale at the same time (to generate buzz), and the early events are relatively soon and the last events are quite far out. They also often do release chunks of ticket inventory at later stages. That said, I'm convinced that often brokers are used as a simple way to provide immediate cash and reduce risk. Why would a promoter want to sell out over months when they can sell out immediately and know that regardless of whether the brokers make money (they don't always) they have sold everything and can say the event is sold out and they have cash in hand now and not months from now.

I used to work in this industry and there's a lot of shady stuff that goes on, and it's not all on the broker/scalper side.

> You can easily solve this by having the ticket tied to a name and requiring you to show ID

That's been done for a long time and you can still get around it if the margin is good enough. You just have to either want to go to the event yourself or be willing to one ticket out of the maximum you can purchase as the cost of doing business. You can't really make every seat have a name initially because not everyone actually knows who they're going to invite for sure at time of purchase, so if you want to really make it effective you have to limit the number of tickets per transaction to 4 or less. Even then, people will be incentivized to buy the max and have people go with them to use the extra tickets at cost or more, it may not be brokers but the regular public will do it too.

The actual solution for this is fairly simple. It's supply and demand. Play more shows at a location and the ticket prices will drop. Kid Rock has done it for decades at this point. Artists don't like having to put the extra work in for less money (tickets will be cheaper) and don't want to take the risk that the demand won't be there if they book the venue early. That risk is pushed out to brokers.

I don't think most here would disagree about the perceptions that each side has. The problem is that is imperfect a lens to reality they are, it sure seems like the one side has embraced much of the fundamentals of QAnon even if most haven't realized it.

I'm not sure how to make sense of this in the context of what we're discussing. Access to the web is exactly what's in question, and emulating the internet to a degree you don't actually need to access it to have the information is very expensive in resources because of how massive the dataset is, which is the point I was making.

If it takes a model and database with a large chunk of the internet to compete and win, then that says something, as that's much more expensive and complex than just the model, because models have problems "remembering" correctly just like people.

It's important to have fair and equivalent testing not because that allows people to win, but because it shows where the strengths and weaknesses of people and current AI actually are in a useful way.

Funnily enough, I have indeed have had part of a tooth (an impacted wisdom tooth) come off when eationg something, and was kind of grossed out that my food could contain this small white hard stone-like thing... until later that day I realized I was missing a part of a tooth.

Actually, it's happened twice, as about 15 years after that I had a bad cavity and fracture in a forward molar, and a few days before a scheduled root canal it happened again, but this time I suspected what had happened as soon as I encountered something hard all of a sudden while chewing something that shouldn't really have bits as hard as that in it.

Which is to say, their response that perhaps it was your own tooth may not have been as out of left field as you might have thought. It's probably a somewhat common occurrence.

You don't even have to make the argument that Apple is untrustworthy. The stronger argument is that you can't know what Apple will be like in the future, or even if they will still be independent (which seems far fetched since they're so big) or a division that deals with user data won't get sold off with the data even if it's to a respectable company, because that company may eventually sell if to a slightly less respectable company, and repeat.

The risk for PII being utilized nefariously never goes away as long as it exists, so the only same stance is to not allow it to exist in others handle if at all possible. It's the same reason you don't share your banking credentials with your friends. Sure, you might trust them, but you can't know the future, so why even expose yourself to risk you don't have to?

> Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor.

> This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit

This is the important thing I'm always trying to note to people that think incentives are enough (as I used to). You can never know what the incentives of the company will be 5, 10, 15 years from now, or whether that company or division will exist or have been sold to some other company.

Incentives based on current conditions only matter for outcomes that don't have ramaifications far into the future. That's definitely not data collection and privacy, where you could find that 10 years worth of collected information about you has been sold at some future date.

And lest anyone think they can predict the stance a company will have on a topic a decade or two later, all I can say is that any example someone can point to of a company that has stayed the course we can easily look at point in history where a series of events could have gone the other way and they would be close to being bought out if not defunct. Even Apple had a period where they were bailed out by investment from Microsoft, and many other large names of that period were gobbled up.

Always keep in mind, Sun was an amazing company with amazing products and engineers that embraced open source and competed with Microsoft in the enterprise market, and eventually after declining they got bought by Oracle.

If it's posted through a publishing platform (not just a commend on one or on a public site), it's very possible they do an automatic conversion of some of the common cases. That could also be filtering down to comment boxes and stuff, I'm not sure.

That's not to say that generated content doesn't use them, just that using them as an indicator might require a bit of nuance based on where you're seeing them.

Automatic conversions have been happening for a long time. In fact, a few years ago there was some combination of settings on my terminal locale settings and man (well, troff/groff most likely) was converting hyphens in param definitions to some sort of dash character, meaning I couldn't copy and paste out of the man page. I think it also affected perldoc for the same reason.

I don't doubt there are publishing platforms that do it automatically as well, so I wouldn't count on seeing them as an indicator of generated output, even if it may be processed in some manner.

I've lived in suburbs where I had a good idea of who lived in each house, talked to some of them semi-regularly, and kids ran around the neighborhood together every day, and I've lived in neighborhoods where everyone stays inside and nobody interacts with each other and even the few group things explicity set up (neighborhood street potluck, chili cookoff at the attached park) couldn't be sustained. I moved directly from the former to the latter, so the difference was stark.

I think it has much more to do with demographics and type of people that happen to be living there, and whether there's an existing community. The more lively neighborhood in my case was in a "worse" neighborhood with cheaper houses, while the new neighborhood was all newly build housing. We were all starting from scratch with each other, with some people maybe having a year or so more history than others (as they staged builds 5-10 houses at a time). Community is a frail thing, and needs to be tended or it will wither, and sometimes it dies before it even has a chance to flourish.

His articles are very long, but I find the narratives they present to be compelling. This one is a bit different than the prior two, in that it's summarizing them and putting them into context, while also doing a lot of explaining (maybe too much) about why he is a skeptic and why he thinks it's important, compared to being cautiously optimistic (which he excoriates with justifies his reasoning for doing so).

Ah, yes. If you want to take advantage of piping commands together through the shell as a subcommand of your program, then a way to make params behave more consistently regardless of content is useful.

That requires you quote the param in the sintr to ensure that params are groups as expected. E.g.

    # cat pvars.sh
    #!/bin/bash
    echo "\$1=$1"
    echo "\$2=$2"
    echo "\$3=$3"
    # sh -c './pvars.sh "$1" $2 $3' -- 'a b' 'c d'
    $1=a b
    $2=c
    $3=d

The whole point of passing in an array and using something like exec (or system(), if provided as it handled the fork and wait for you) is that you avoid the overhead of the shell starting up at all and parsing the command line, and it lets you define each param exactly as needed since each param is its own array item. You don't need to worry about splitting on space or the shell splitting params on space, or quoting to group items. If you want the param to be:

    foo "bar baz" quux

as one singular parameter, you just make that the contents of that array item, since no parsing need be done at all.

If you have an array of params and you're jumping through hoops to make sure they're interpreted correctly by the shell you call execute a process, you're likely (depending on language and capabilities) wasting both cycles and over complicating the code when you can just call the program you actually want to execute directly and supply the params. Alternatively, if you have all the params as one long string and you want it to be pased as a shell would, then execute the shell and pass that as a param. e.g.

    # perl -E 'system("./pvars.sh","a b","c d");'
    $1=a b
    $2=c d
    $3=
    # perl -E 'system("./pvars.sh","a b","c","d");'
    $1=a b
    $2=c
    $3=d

Neither of those are equivalent to variable binding, which is what most SQL libraries provide, specifically because they don't actually solve the problem since they're still doing string substitution. Putting a double quotes in $1 in your "good" execute example will allow you break out of what's expected and then you're Bobby Tables.

Your python example at the bottom is correct, in that each separate element is more correct in that it allows each arg to be passed as an element, so there's no option to break out through quoting characters. SQL binds are like that in most ljbraries, even if they don't look like it. The parser knows a single item below there so if it passes it along as such. You cannot escape it in the same way.

OpenSSH is an implementation, SSH is a technology and/or protocol, it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare them that way. Although from later comments RDP seems to have a history in Citrix prior to it's life as RDP, so there are likely clear reasons why it didn't use the SSH protocol (namely that the underlying technology RDP was built on does predate the SSH protocol).

> An early lesson was not to melt it and incorporate fuel on a kitchen stove.

That was, indeed, an aspect of the problem I alluded to before. I have made it a few times before, and I was going to use the gas grill outside, but it seemed to be acting up, and I didn't trust it, so I thought it would be "safer" to move inside.

Combine that with me iterating on a few different batches with "improvements", such as lining the bottom of the pan with tinfoil so I could lift it out, and then next making an extra large batch... well multiple lessons were learned that day, including how to deal with insurance companies from some shrewd negotiating from my parents, given most the entire kitchen needed to be replaces and the entire house needed to be scrubbed floor to ceiling.

> Not sure how we made it through our youth without learning what the inside of a jail cell looked like, but I suppose things were different before 9/11.

Ha, probably true, especially since my recipe came from a copy of the anarchist cookbook my older brother happened to have (and I wouldn't be surprised if you happened upon it the same way). It's got a lot of dangerous stuff in it, but honestly, as a tool for sparking curiosity it works pretty well.

> Something in my childhood I presume.

LOL, I can empathize quite a bit, as someone that has a nasty burn scar on my hand caused by a glob of melted saltpeter and sugar from an accidental ignition of a concoction I was cooking one fourth of July in my youth.

Probably. I created my account almost 13 years ago, but I read for years before creating it. I didn't create a reddit account until 2014, or a twitter account until 2015. I was reading Slashdot in the 90's though, to give you a sense of my age and how long I've been following stuff. I'm just a very late adopter...

It's definitely used in slot machines as a lucky number. Which came first I'm not sure (but I suspect from a sibling comment in the same thread it's based on perceived commonality and primeness historically and became "lucky" in the past because of that).

I think the fact I said they are rightly confused makes that explicit, does it not?

I don't think they were equating the US to North Korea (where is China mentioned?), but saying that since the US can no longer be relies on for protection (instead of the sheriff we're at best the anti-hero that will maybe protect you if there's something in it for us). This means countries need to put up a stronger front themselves since there's no larger stabilizing force to rely on.

It's interesting, because I'm sure Trump and Musk take advantage of the benefits that the regulated market provide (even when they just ignore it to their benefit because most others don't), but I'm not sure they've really considered what it means when that stability and security is gone, in more than a "I'm the biggest so I'll be okay" type of sense. There's a lot of positive externalities from that stability that maybe they are discounting too much (such as a relatively peaceful world, since it's been a while since we had a World War).

Yes, it seems like Mozilla has long had a problem of marketing getting in the way of communication. This keeps happening over and over gain. They make changes for marketing reasons, and then people are confused when they make policy changes because they've solidified their naming so much in the pursuit of brand recognition that their audience (rightly) is confused about what they're actually saying when they use that brand name to refer to a singular component of their offerings.

I think what was being asked is if there's something like Brave that doesn't use a webkit derived back-end. Good defaults and a good stance on privacy is one reason to use Brave and historically Firefox, but another is that it keeps the browser ecosystem from being too homogeneous. Firefox is the last browser with over sub-percent market share, and even then it's less than 3%, so it's almost gone.

A case can be made that many of the browsers split from webkit (or split from things that split from webkit) long enough ago that there is competition, but IMO that's a far cry from a fully independent solution.