outsidetheparty

This is a good thing you made, and you should feel good about it

My guesses were so consistently wrong that I at first thought the site was making up frog/toad names based on the opposite of my answer.

Then I guessed "toad" for what turned out to be "a false toad (Telmatobufo bullocki)" and my head exploded a bit

Perhaps this is different for logged in users, but I’m seeing a page containing a single tweet and no way to find the rest.

I thought it was a great example of unintended effects in a large complex system... and the CDC asking Blizzard "if they could use data from what they perceived as a planned disease simulation to inform their disease modeling research" was an interesting twist.

The cut in pay is likely to drive you back to software pretty quickly, but: the debugging and problem-solving involved in electrical work on old houses bears a striking resemblance to working with legacy software systems.

(New installation work is maybe less interesting, but if you're the sort of developer who enjoys logic-ing their way through understanding why a complicated, undocumented system is behaving the way it's behaving, and why did the last guy decide to connect this to that, a hundred year old house that's been gradually updated from knob-and-tube might be just the thing.)

Ha! Sorry. This was decades ago, anyway. Right after the sort-of-botched IPO he drove off in his shiny new Ferrari never to be seen again (like, seriously, that exit is the last mention I can find of him online. He made out much better than the employees, I’ll tell you that much)

I should have spotted it but didn't: They took me out skiing one day between interviews (they were courting me pretty hard, and good snow was a selling point for the region) and I met the CEO for the first time on the slopes.

He wore a full motorcycle-style helmet with a mirrored face visor which he refused to open; it was like talking to a member of Daft Punk. It had fake hologram bullet-holes on it.

More importantly, he skied like an asshole: cutting people off, sudden stops or changes in direction without checking if anyone else was coming, cutting ahead in the lift line, stopping to readjust his gloves or whatever directly in the lift exit ramp, shouting at people who he felt were in his way -- just totally self-absorbed and borderline dangerous.

It turned out to match his management style 1000%.

Definitely!

The original post and discussion was an eye-opener for me; before that I never understood why some people would say "yes" to a request but then act put upon anyway, or would act vaguely like they wanted something but never actually come out and say so. I just thought they expected everyone to be a mind-reader.

Once I understood they were basing things on the premise that putting someone in a position of having to say "no" was rude, it all made a lot more sense, and I was able to adjust my own behavior and expectations to better fit theirs.

The original MetaFilter comment lays the idea out in a much more balanced way than this article does, imo. The discussion of the idea here looks to be well on its way to mirroring that on MetaFilter (Ask vs Guess became a major part of that site's culture, it came up in quite a few threads over time.)

https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...

(To me the most interesting thing about the concept is that you can immediately tell from people's reaction to it which category they personally fall into.)

I'm just enjoying the image of wealthy mind-hackers filling their workspaces with a helium-oxygen atmosphere. Sure, they might be able to think nine percent faster, but will anyone take them seriously with their squeaky voices?

The "denatured" part means it contains additives that make it poisonous and foul-tasting.

Yep, I was looking in YouTube settings instead. I wouldn't have thought to leave YouTube to change a setting that affects YouTube, but it's a reasonable-in-hindsight design decision to collect all the privacy stuff for various google apps in one place.

You're absolutely right, thank you. I was so hung up on "preferences" or "settings" being the place to look that I missed the link that was literally named the thing I was looking for!

I'll admit I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of dark patterns involved in turning these settings off:

https://myactivity.google.com/u/1/activitycontrols

Disabling a setting asks if you also want to delete your history for that setting; if you say yes it shows a sample of what you're deleting, you confirm it, and it's done. Nothing tried to encourage me to stick around, keep my data, they could easily have let me turn off collection of new data but not mentioned that they still have the existing data around -- I expected trickery but found none.

(Except for one small detail: I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place; the support update we're discussing contains a link to it, but I can't find it anywhere in the YouTube preferences or advanced settings or anywhere else.)

(Oh, and it had no visible effect on my YouTube home screen, I'm not seeing the empty page I hoped for, just the same garbage videos it usually prompts me with for no clear reason. So there's that too.)

OK! Those are good and reasonable answers, I appreciate the response!

I appreciate the intent here, but these are the immediate issues that leap to mind:

* "Do work, but get paid only if we use it" feels potentially exploitative. You do mention a "base pay" rate but I wonder how it compares to the "merged PR" rate?

* Code quality and adherence to internal code standards is challenging for external contributions. Open source projects, of course, are already used to this, so it's not surprising to see that's where the bulk of your current customer base lives; it's more difficult to see how this would work with other types of organization -- I'd be concerned that I'm spending more time in code review and such than I'd gain in contributed lines of code.

* The whole setup seems to fit in an uncomfortable middle ground between just hiring an offshore developer directly or through a traditional outsourcing firm, on the one hand; and hourly piecework on the other. The only advantage I see to this sort of arrangement on the hiring end compared to regular old long-contract outsourcing is that I don't have to pay for work I don't end up using, but that circles me right back to the "exploitative" part.

Went to the demo, instinctively used `cmd-w` to close one of the "desktop" windows, and was quickly reminded of one of the limitations of building an application like this inside a browser.

Note to developer: you may want to add an `onbeforeunload` handler

The one where I struggled the longest was trying to put together the right webpack configuration to generate multiple static files based on input in markdown format. It kept switching which plugins it wanted me to use, or mixed up functions from conflicting plugins, and often mixed up syntax from different versions of webpack itself.

I finally gave up on that one when it got caught in a loop somehow where it apologized for giving me the wrong line of code for an import, gave an obviously wrong explanation for why it didn't work, then "corrected" it to the exact same line of code.

Another attempt I was asking it to compare different ways for measuring the amount of difference between data trees -- it did give me the names of a couple of different algorithms, and very wordy, plausible-looking descriptions of how each of them worked... neither of which was terribly helpful, because they both boiled down to "recursively examine the tree and tally up the differences."

Asked for an implementation example, it gave me code that expected input arrays of pre-calculated edit costs, and suggested I write my own function to convert the tree data into that array format.

So that one was extra weird, in that it wasn't wrong, just unhelpful, like here I'll do the easy part for you and leave the thing you asked about as an exercise for the reader.

I dunno, maybe with practice I could learn how to drag it towards helpfulness, but for now RTFM still seems easier.

When I've tried using it I've generally found that it leads me in circles between incompatible versions of a framework or tool -- it'll give me syntax that's correct for one version, but wants to use it to call a function that only exists in a different version, that sort of thing. They're not even hallucinations, each step is technically correct, but can't be used successfully with the other steps.

The few times I've tried using ChatGPT or another LLM as a coding assist, the "confidently wrong answer that looks correct" was the entirety of my experience. (Mostly the failure mode was mixing up incompatible instructions from various versions of the framework or toolchain: even if I specify a version number it'll still often want to use syntax or functions that don't exist in that version.) I did not find it to be a time saver.

Personally I go back and forth on whether the hostile, aggressive gatekeeping is part of why stack overflow is failing, or is part of what kept it functioning as long as it did. Probably both. Both is good.

But this one terribly accurate line included in the alternatives to SO is worth the whole price of admission:

> ...you can even go to ChatGPT, where it’ll give you a confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you’ll spend another 7 hours debugging why your code doesn’t work.

For sure. And their overall shiftiness whenever anyone calls attention to their plans ("oh, that FAQ's out of date," "oh that's a future feature," "oh that's not what we planned, even though it's exactly what we said," etc) doesn't exactly help make them seem like a trustworthy partner.

The parts that could most safely be described as "scam", to my point of view, are

* lying to users about protecting their privacy, while gathering and reselling more information than was possible with existing 3rd party trackers

* lying about "giving back to publishers", while actually coopting those publishers' revenue streams

Your "Websites are not entitled to showing ads" statement gave me a moment of thought, I have to admit: I don't see anything wrong with ad blockers, but I do think the ethics of ad replacers is pretty problematic. At best it makes Brave a parasitic entity feeding off revenue that would have otherwise gone to the content creators.

I'll reluctantly agree that that part on its own doesn't rise to the level of "scam" but I certainly don't think it's admirable.

> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.

The original intent was absolutely a scam. They wanted to hide the ads that were already on websites, replace them with their own, then give a fraction of the revenue they just effectively stole from those websites back to them (but only if they knew to ask for it).

Also they were going to take over all the third-party tracking data for their own, while branding it as “privacy” — so much hand waving about "we don't run a MiTM proxy" (while hoping we didn’t notice it’s because they don’t need to be in the middle when they control the browser itself).

Absolutely brazen, and they kept changing their story in real time whenever people started to notice hey wtf is this. Happened to be able to find this in my posting history for example; in hindsight I wish I hadn't been so cowed by the fact that I was arguing with Brendan Eich Himself, because man what a load of horsepuckey he and his guy were delivering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271

"HTML First" versus "HTML Only" aside, I hadn't heard of this one before, and it looks promising.

I've been looking for simpler frameworks that do less, because I'm tired of coming back to projects I've set aside for six months or a year and having to basically relearn and rewrite them to match all the updates and incompatible changes the framework made in the meantime.

At first glance this looks like it handles the essentials and doesn't try too hard to handle anything else; I'm going to give it a try.

Oh, bosh. Don’t be absurd. Elon demonstrably isn’t “favoring free speech over censorship.” He’s just choosing different speech to favor and to censor.

Oddly enough, he tends to favor hate groups and dictators: “Twitter’s compliance with government demands for censorship or surveillance has risen [during Musk’s tenure] to over 80%, from around 50%.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-...

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna81961

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/elon-musk-free-speec...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zm9q/elon-musk-twitter-naz...

Because he keeps having these late-night binges of bizarre, brand-destroying decision making. Twitter is underperforming as a result of his previous rounds of bizarre, brand- and product-destroying decision making. Twitter wasn't dying until he came along to "fix" it.

Yeah, his personality is plenty objectionable too, but it's mostly the way he's seemingly intentionally running the company into the ground that I object to.

Count me as one more person who did not realize this until after playing the full game and then coming back here to read the comments.

One more arrow in the quiver of "users don't read"

It did seem extremely petty, yeah -- on both sides tbh. As an outside observer who just wanted to be able to build a feed and have it work, it was really disheartening to watch.

I always favored `self = this`, personally