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lovegoblin

497 karma · joined October 8, 2014

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lovegoblin··on Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
Asking questions is obviously fine. "Just asking questions" is a specific bad-faith rhetorical tactic: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
lovegoblin··on Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development
Yes, but I think this is what they meant by

> Making watch logic for that sometimes is too complicated or changes the outcome (race conditions especially).

lovegoblin··on I Got a 'Mild' Breakthrough Case
> we're going to need much more difficult driving tests.

Sounds good to me. Let's require regular re-testing while we're at it.

lovegoblin··on Why can’t I go faster than the speed of light?
> The Alcubierre drive “beats” the speed of light

The Alcubierre drive is only a thought experiment that requires "exotic matter" (aka fairy dust) to work.

lovegoblin··on No More Medium – Build Your Own Site (2019)
> In my book, it's wrong to pay if original authors don't get that payment.

Wait, are you under the impression that the authors don't get paid?

lovegoblin··on Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
> > How often do people really plan trips? ... probably once or twice a year if you're lucky.

> Many many people use travel planning software as escapism

Heh yeah I caught that too. My wife plans many, many trips per year - but we certainly don't go on all of them, hah. The planning is a hobby in itself.

lovegoblin··on 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
> the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time.

Which is still a good outcome, because you don't want to overwhelm the healthcare system to the point that it can't handle anything that isn't COVID.

That was the whole point of the early-pandemic "flatten the curve" campaigns.

lovegoblin··on Ruby Is Still a Diamond
Oh, huh. Yeah, you're right. Really showed my whole still-on-2.7 ass here haha
lovegoblin··on Ruby Is Still a Diamond
An old joke: any sufficiently advanced Sinatra app is indistinguishable from Rails.
lovegoblin··on Ruby Is Still a Diamond
> Mutable strings by default was a huge mistake in Ruby

This was changed in 3.0. String literals are now frozen/immutable by default.

lovegoblin··on Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
> I'm genuinely curious to know why you feel the need to point it out.

I haven't seen it in this thread either, but it's been a very common [false] talking point in the conspiracy/anti-vax circles.

lovegoblin··on Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
Exactly. Getting vaccinated is not just about you, but everyone you come in contact with - especially those who may be at higher risk than you are. Maybe even people you care about?

I'm in my 30s and in good health. I've not been particularly concerned about dying myself from covid[0]. But I do have a mom and grandparents. I do have immunocompromised friends and family. How could I live with myself if I got one of them sick and hadn't taken even that simple step of a shot in the arm?

[0] though long-covid is another story, or even short-term "being sick for days/weeks" doesn't sound like a particularly good time.

lovegoblin··on Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague
> I wouldn’t be surprised if linguists find a new “internet dialect” of English in the future as well.

You might be interested in "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" by Gretchen McCulloch. McCulloch is a linguist, but it's a light/layperson's book. I really enjoyed it.

https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/

lovegoblin··on Responsible Monkeypatching in Ruby
> Activesupport is hugely widespread, yeah. It's a bit unfortunate since it provides so much

Even this is becoming less and less necessary as more of the commonly-used syntactic sugar gets pulled into Ruby core.

lovegoblin··on Responsible Monkeypatching in Ruby
> or example asking whether a variable is present? (truthy, so empty str and empty [] should return false)

Actually this is kind of the whole point of #present? - it's not just a truthiness check.

The only falsey values in Ruby are `false` and `nil`, but in the context of a Rails app you might want to treat things like "" and [] as "not present" (e.g., a user leaves a text field blank).

lovegoblin··on OnlyFans drops planned porn ban
Yeah, and marc also skipped over the part where the creator actually gets paid.
lovegoblin··on OnlyFans drops planned porn ban
> But the payment processors are the unspoken guardians of internet commerce, and without VC level backing good luck getting them to touch something like adult content.

You're completely correct here. The only other real option in this space is CCBill - and they:

a) only do payments - not hosting and everything that OF does

b) still take a ~18-20% cut, in addition to annual flat fees

c) are really fucking unbelievably terrible

lovegoblin··on OnlyFans drops planned porn ban
> When are we going to see a Medium or Substack for pornographic content?

That's...what OnlyFans is?

lovegoblin··on OnlyFans drops planned porn ban
> It's not expensive

It absolutely is, because you still need to get paid, and unfortunately 18-20% fees are completely normal for adult-content payment processing. And OF clearly does a lot more than just payment processing.

lovegoblin··on OnlyFans drops planned porn ban
> Besides adult content, what else is considered "high risk"?

Off the top of my head: gambling, medication, gift cards...stuff that's legal but more-likely-than-average to chargeback or default.

lovegoblin··on OnlyFans drops planned porn ban
> People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content

They want a solution for distributing adult content and getting paid for it.

By far, the single biggest hurdle here is payment processing - as evidenced by this whole OnlyFans fiasco. It's Visa and Mastercard who are pressuring OF - they've been doing this to sex workers for decades, but finally picked a fight big enough that it's getting real media backlash.

lovegoblin··on TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app
> Watching other people do it is not.

Are you equally as dismissive of reading books other people wrote?

The heart of TikTok is video creation and remix. That's why memes spread so quickly there.

lovegoblin··on TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app
> That "No no no" song that is on every other video

Oh, every generation of internet users has made repetitive memes like this; we just have more bandwidth now.

lovegoblin··on TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app
> Maybe the medium is the message still holds?

Was there ever any question? Your whole comment here is a perfect demonstration.

lovegoblin··on TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app
> it's obviously popular stuff on the platform and it just doesn't seem like very positive content for me.

This is true of everything. If I look at the front page of YouTube in a private browser window, it's all bullshit too, obviously. But there's plenty of quality stuff on YouTube that I do like, ya know?

The point is that the well is deep and broad enough that there is probably a whole community of people making content you'd like, and TikTok is extraordinarily good at finding that stuff for you sooner rather than later. I watch tons of diorama-building tutorials and recipe videos, for example. And I'm better both at painting and cooking as a result.

Look: I'm not a shill, here. I'm not trying to convince you to get into TikTok (I mean? who cares, honestly) but I find a lot of talk about it tends to boil down to "kids these days" dismissiveness.

And yeah I don't post anything there - nobody wants to see my grizzled old-ass face.

lovegoblin··on TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app
So...don't post? Every platform has (read: is primarily) lurkers.
lovegoblin··on What makes an interview podcast good or great?
> they have guests on that have some sort of contrarian viewpoint ... but it can quickly devolve into having a bunch of crackpots on the show.

Joe Rogan has entered the chat.

lovegoblin··on Common UI/UX mistakes devs make
I think the idea here is that people who are designers first are much less likely to make these beginner mistakes - but someone who's primarily a dev and putting together a simple web page or whatever might not realize they're make mistakes with the basics.
lovegoblin··on Discord Launches Threads
> it's gotten to the point where choosing one over the other is barely even a statement about your identity anymore

Why on earth would I want it to be?

lovegoblin··on Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-detecting AI
Exactly. Hence

> It would be more honest

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