merrywhether

You realize that custom, new, cutting-edge APIs (can you imagine the web without xhr?) was what made IE into the IE we talk about. Some they got right, some they got wrong, some were way too tied into IE’s parent’s ecosystem (sound familiar, AMP?). It’s once it stopped getting updated that it became a problem, as no one else had or planned to have some of its stuff, resulting in it being an oddball. Chrome fits the first half of that profile far more than any other browser these days, it’s just that WHATWG being a “living standard” has enabled it to “standardize” any new idea that comes along (other browsers do this too, but not nearly as much as Chrome).

The point is that slowness to adopt new standards wasn’t exactly what made IE into the the IE we all hated; it was going off on tangents without consulting anybody too often that left it out on an island with custom versions of so many things. Fortunately it doesn’t seem like Google is going to lose interest on Chrome anytime soon.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t trying to say that this is an easy attack, just explaining the supposed outline.

Latest Chrome defers out-of-viewport images on its own, or at least tries to.

Say you have a long page that lists “Pre-existing conditions” at the bottom, and near that section is also a unique image or other external asset. If you click on the link and cancer is in your list, the page will scroll and load the related assets instantly. Without cancer in your list, you’d only load those assets through human scroll, which would most likely look different timing-wise. Thus you can determine with high probability whether your target has cancer listed (if you have access to DNS records, as mentioned in the example, and the target is using a browser that delays offscreen asset loading - like this same latest Chrome).

Whereas anchors tend to be generic (#preexisting-conditions), this new scroll behavior can be used to create an existence check for any user-specific text on the page (in carefully crafted scenarios). There are probably other variations that could be devised on this concept, since it allows indirect page interaction that can bypass authorization walls (since the browser would transmit cookies normally and such).

This reminds me of a time when a hiring manager said something along the lines of “We’re trying to find Michael Jordan, not Scottie Pippen.” My colleague and I were pretty shocked by this, since Pippen was also a great Hall of Fame basketball player, just not one of the top 3 players of all time.

I can only see this making traffic worse throughout FiDi and SoMa. Ubers/Lyfts will have a harder time twisting around to get to pickup spots as they are forced deeper into the mostly-one-way streets around market. BART continues to be decrepit with no new capacity nor reach nor increases in reliability. And people will still drive into downtown because SF is incapable of allowing large increases in the number of in-city housing units. All those people from East Bay and South Bay and the peninsula have to get into the city somehow.

I love car-free initiatives and wish SF could be less choked by vehicles during rush hour especially, and maybe this is a start of a bigger revolution, but I’m not holding my breath.

PS As everyone else pointed out, nice carve-out to prop up the taxi industry.

The Hangman’s Daughter book series gives a pretty great look into this same topic, dramatic flair aside. They’re written by a modern descendent of a Bavarian executioner family who dug into his family’s past and then loosely tied some actual historical events into clever stories (basically the definition of historical fiction, I suppose). They were fun beach reads for me that also taught me a lot about 1600s German life.

I’m not saying that things aren’t bad in a lot of places (I mentioned that I’m originally from the East coast, and have seen different status quos in different places), and I tried to be as non-proscriptive in my comment as possible. I was just struck because one of the main subjects lived in Sacramento, and I feel like a lot of these services are “homegrown” to the state.

While I love living in California for various reasons (moving here from the East coast), I can’t help but wonder to what extent the gig economy is papering over the stupidity that is current housing policy, postponing the inevitable collapse until after far too many people have been consumed by innocently adding a “side hustle” or two trying to help make ends meet.

This article is weird journalism. It presents decent counter arguments to the problem, which is nice but also leaves the average skeptical reader confused about how much waste is actually occurring on these floors. Surely _some_ mechanical space is needed, and the wind-flow anti-sway idea doesn’t seem crazy, but it’s really hard to draw a real conclusion. The fire ladder height problem in another comment seems valid, but surely most skyscrapers just aren’t ladder accessible.

But my biggest gripe (at least on mobile, maybe it’s different on desktop?) is why aren’t there pictures off the so-called wasteful spaces? Putting aside the argument that more space is needed for future batteries, let us see an example of what this actually looks like. That would certainly go a long way toward clarifying the wastefulness. I know what the outside of buildings look like, but those are the only pictures I see. At least get the outside of the problematic barbell building, or diagrams, or something!

I’m the case of Brexit, it’s possible that having more frequent engagement with direct democracy would have left the people feeling less ignored by government and less inclined to try to “stick it to them” as a method of voicing their general feeling of discontent. I think we see this around the world, where ossified representational democracies leave people feeling rather disenfranchised and thus taking whatever potshots they find available.

fb.js is Facebook’s standard JS base, with things like polyfills/ponyfills to ensure certain features in a browser environment. It’s imported by React, Relay, etc.

So this might be what you’re seeing, but normally it’s included in a precompiled JS application bundle.

I was wondering recently how government would look if in addition to a minimum age for various posts (at least in the US) there was a maximum age as well. The argument of needing a certain age to have the correct knowledge and perspective on the current issues facing society applies equally well to an age ceiling as well as an age floor. There are doubtlessly exceptions of older politicians who are quite capable, but there are probably the same exceptions in quite capable younger would-be politicians who are currently excluded. It would certainly be interesting to see how that would effect the handling of emerging technologies.

“The fucking article”, from the retort RTFA (“Read ...”), itself derived from RTFM (“... manual”).

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/RTFA

How could Facebook ever lose this case in a country where Equifax faced no punishment? Regardless of what you think about Facebook, DeepFace is seemingly mostly theoretical harm whereas Equifax definitely provably harmed people’s privacy and then (initially) charged those same people to help them protect themselves (via credit freezes). Not saying I don’t want Facebook held to the law, just thought of the comparison.

Does the GDPR allow sites to have a “pay real money or subsidize your experience through tracking” option?

This post literally came at the right time for me as I was just looking into options for this exact functionality for my side project. Excited to give it a whirl.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/merrywhether

Just as a hypothesis: is it possible that the sheer number of people we're putting through increasingly bureaucratic college curricula (do this busywork, now go sit in this room listening to a topic you don't care about for a while, etc) is creating a feedback system that encourages the creation of tedious drudge work since that's what we've "trained" people to be good at? Though I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg in this situation.

How relevant is this to a single person wanting a corporate front to make small amounts of side money from a website or app? Is an in-state LLC more preferable in that situation? Is any type of incorporation even necessary?

> it wouldn't be a problem at all

I have trouble believing this is true in the long-run. There are several examples that seem contrary to this idea.

Lodash was supposed to be a drop-in replacement for underscore, and that was fine and all until contributors felt like they had to duplicate any new features into both libraries. On the bright side, this lead to their upcoming merger, but not without years of wasted effort duplicating work and ink spilled arguing over which was better. You could argue that underscore could have been more willing to merge in more-performant implementations (though I think they preferred readability over speed), but it seems like this fork-first mentality in the JS world somehow makes that almost looked down upon.

Others like Zepto or other jQuery-alikes seem to reach moderate uptake at best but don't necessarily move the community forward either.

Ultimately it seems like the best you can hope for is to get enough attention / stir up enough of a hornet's nest / make dual-contributors lives hard enough to then get merged back in to the original library, and it seems like this is much more pronounced in the JS community[0]. But looking at Node vs IO, CoffeeScript vs JS, or other like-X-but-better situations[1], it sure seems like more community input into and improvement of the already existing frameworks would go a long way.

0: I'm totally willing to admit that JS is one of the things I spend more time doing so I just might notice it more. 1: I know there are nuances to these situations, but I'm being a little reductionist, and they were still stand up to the point.

Reading this, I had an idea for a new law that could counteract this stupid reaction to security research:

Particularly for protected patient information (but maybe for other classes of sensitive data as well), it would be interesting to somehow classify having this information breached as a crime by the holder of the information (I realize this might be hard to do given the reality of security these days, so there would need to be some nuance of course). The crux of my idea would be to automatically count any access that results in prosecution as a breach of said data, thus meaning that prosecuting a security researcher would automatically put the information holder under separate prosecution. I wonder if something like this could be feasible.

> Unless the government connection you're trying to assert is that low interest rates drove more money into VC funds in order to seek higher returns.

This is a constantly overlooked factor in what's been driving the VC climate for the past few years. "Cheap" money (in the form of low interest rates) pushes more money into riskier positions, and the VCs have to give that money to someone. It's no coincidence that the correction is coming at the same time as interest rates finally rising again.

Ironically, while at least some of the motivation for this is to prevent animal suffering, once we figure out how to grow meat directly, we will have little use for many livestock species and this could actually cause them to greatly decrease in numbers if not disappear entirely. I'm interested to see what we do with pigs, etc if we aren't going to eat them.

Which a cynic would say means they had an opportunity to save tons of money over the course of their life (relative to those who paid for having kids).

I'm sure that some of the treatment cost involved the doctor's time as well. And unless single-payer means that patient's sign away their ability to make liability claims, that is also a huge part of any anesthetic-like procedure cost.

Testing windows? As basically the lone user of Safari on the various teams I've worked on, I've learned that you're lucky if people test on anything but Chrome for Mac.

I agree with the other comments: we don't have a free market now and health coverage comes with huge amounts of moral hazard for both providers and patients.

Veterinary medicine is something operates in a truly free market environment, and it seems to work towards efficient outcomes, so I'm curious if the same could be done for humans.

One way to push ads into a more palatable direction would be to have a browser that goes much farther beyond current ad blocking. I'm thinking closing all 3rd party domain connections after 2 seconds of loading time and/or turning iframes into click2flash-style empty boxes. I don't care so much about ads showing up, but rather the endless cascade of ad-reselling that happens during page loads and makes my phone have poor performance while the page self-flagellates with ad calls. Get your ads in quick or render them on the server or whatever. I feel like something like this (with white lists where necessary) would help people get to a happy middle ground.

After working in healthcare myself for a while, I've always wanted to see it be a service that was paid for by the customer directly (at least hypothetically). This concept of not knowing costs would be completely unacceptable in any other industry, but it seems that people are reluctant to price things partly out of a fear of being able to do cost-benefit analysis on care and thus on human life. Direct billing would force hospitals and other care givers to be able to give cost estimates up front, and then market forces would help bring costs down as providers would compete and patients could shop around. I'm aware that this might not be optimal in all situations (eg emergency care), but runaway costs and opaque cost-benefit relationships are not helping things.

I remember hearing that 20% of total healthcare costs are spent in the last 2 weeks of people's lives, and perhaps having more transparent costs would help avoid these costly, frequently unpleasant, and ineffective interventions.

Of course, transitioning to this would be impossible overnight, but it's an interesting thought experiment. There would still be the option for catastrophic insurance, but otherwise it would be interesting to see market forces play a role.

As someone about to make this decision from outside of SF and with less knowledge about the market there, I'm curious to know what you think an SF "market-level" salary would be. Would you mind elaborating?