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rebeccaskinneron Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

I care, and I've basically stopped using my iphone for anything because the web is an abysmal experience full of ads even with the maximum amount of ad blocking possible on iOS. I hate the iPhone and the only reason I haven't switched back to android is that it seems to manage to, somehow, still be even worse. We are well and truly on the other side of the enshitification event horizon on mobile, and it looks like Google is doing it's best to make sure the web keeps up on the desktop too.

rebeccaskinneron I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and potential treatments are out of reach

I do think that people should have options, especially when there aren't effective treatments, but it's not exactly simple. In most cases, any treatment you pick has the opportunity cost of other treatments, and for life threatening diseases that opportunity cost might be living. Very few, if any, patients are going to be in a position where they can legitimately evaluate the effectiveness of treatments. In most cases, I don't expect health care providers will be in the position to do that either- even most specialists will be treating a wide variety of conditions, and may have relatively little experience with unusual diseases. Even in the best case, this is assuming that drug companies would actually try to make effective drugs rather than looking for other avenues to sell ineffective drugs (or drugs that were only accidentally effective)- I don't that in today's environment that's at all a reasonable assumption. Ultimately, the information asymmetry is vastly weighted in favor of the drug companies, and the cost is lives.

rebeccaskinneron Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative

Using the term Open Source for a product when most of the code is under a license that isn’t Open Source feels dishonest to me. The product you build is certainly yours to release however you see fit, but if I’m looking for open source software and I find this I’m going to be extremely skeptical of everything you say.

On top of that, the license itself is actually incredibly restrictive. I’m not a lawyer, but my read of the section on economic value seems very broad:

> does not include uses where the Software facilitates any transaction of economic value other than on Allowed Networks.

My read of “facilitates any transaction of economic value” means that I would be in violation if I used this to keep track of trading cards, made a grocery list, or tried to keep track of what I want to buy my friends for their birthdays. At least it would if I installed this on my home server and accessed it from the couch on mh phone.

rebeccaskinneron CEO Announcement to the Netlify Team

> All people are inherently good

A strong statement. I think it's more likely that most people are inherently ignorant clannish jerks who care to some degree about the fifty or so people they interact with often enough to see as real humans, and largely fail to give much moral consideration one way or another to everyone else except in ways that signal the virtues that gain them social status inside of their close circle. Some people are better or worse than that, and a few people are on the extremes at either end.

rebeccaskinneron The Anti-Ownership eBook Economy

I’ve been looking into it. Google published the design and software for the book scanners they used for Google books and it seems plausible to DIY them for a reasonable price. You can also buy book scanners for a couple of hundred dollars if you don’t mind turning pages manually.

The main thing that’s kept me for pursuing this is that I don’t really want to own all the physical books in the first place. I prefer physical copies of technical and math books, but for random fiction I am interested in ebooks to save space. Buying the books and scanning them gets me into the same position with books that I’m already in with movies, shows, and music: lots of physical media taking up space so that I could put a bunch of extra effort into getting a digital copy that I could have downloaded for free with far less effort if I were willing to pirate.

rebeccaskinneron The ad-based internet is dying, and it's getting worse in the process [video]

Unfortunately, ad revenue is a poisoned well. Even if you are paying for the ad-free tier, you will be limited to content that was developed with a mind toward advertisements. Once you serve any ads, everything is under pressure to be optimized for ads.

Even if you don't mind the changes to the content, there's a constant pressure driving up costs and driving down convenience to continue avoiding ads. If you're paying for an ad-free experience then you have money, and you're willing to spend it. You are essentially forced into a bidding war for your own attention.

rebeccaskinneron The Code Review Pyramid (2022)

I do a lot of mentoring and I’m not sure that code reviews are really the right place for it. Comments in a code review can be fine for small things like “oh you just rewrote a function that already exists over here- maybe you’d like to use that instead”, but those things don’t really matter much in the end.

Teaching people how to design applications is a lot more useful, but code reviews are really not the time and place. For one thing, making someone go back to the beginning when they have a working (if flawed) PR is going to demotivate people and strip away their confidence. It’s also going to really limit your ability to ship quickly. Even if you put those challenges aside, the review experience for GitHub PRs (which I’d guess is how most people are doing reviews) doesn’t allow you to comment on code that wasn’t part of the diff. This makes it really hard to discuss the broader impact of a change i a PR because you can’t add context inline about things someone missed.

After trying and failing to do good mentoring through code reviews I’ve mostly given up. I do use them as a chance to see where people might benefit from some mentoring, but I keep my reviews quick and lightweight. If I don’t see anything wrong with the PR I approve it. Mentoring happens during dedicated time I put on people’s calendars to focus just on mentoring outside of a PR.

rebeccaskinneron Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://rebeccaskinner.net/

Very few posts so far since I’ve mostly been focused on my book, but I’m hoping to start posting updates more regularly as soon as I’m finished with the extra online content for my book.

rebeccaskinneron National Geographic lays off its last remaining staff writers

I have yet to find a publisher who offers an ad-and-tracking free subscription tier, and I don't pay for ads.

rebeccaskinneron Show HN: Fossfox – paid opportunities for open-source devs

I'm not sure about the other companies, but I see listings for both Netflix and OpenAI that claim to offer remote work. Aren't both companies notoriously remote-hostile? OpenAI in particular seems to have been pretty vocally anti-remote lately. It might be a good idea to allow some way for people to flag bait-and-switch remote listings.

rebeccaskinneron Free Organ

Oh, musical instruments. Nevermind.

rebeccaskinneron Ask HN: Which substacks do you read as soon as it hits your inbox?

None, because the absolute last thing I need is more email and I’m really not sure who ever though that trying to get people to sign up to get more email was a good idea.

rebeccaskinneron Drugs like ritalin, dexamphetamine decrease the quality of cognitive effort

I certainly believe that's your experience, but it's not a universal one. I take Adderall for ADHD and I don't really notice any difference at all in how I feel. The main difference is that when there's something I should do, I just do it rather than procrastinating and dreading it. It's not some stimulant fueled mania or anything, more like "oh, there's some trash on the table. Oh, the trash can is full, I'll remove the bag and take it to the bin. Now I'll continue on with my day" instead of "oh, there's some trash there. Better spend the next 12 hours doing anything else while feeling guilty and ruminating on the fact that I'm a failure of a human because I can't even do something as simple as throw some trash away, before promptly forgetting that the trash exists and ignoring it for the next 2 weeks"

rebeccaskinneron Drugs like ritalin, dexamphetamine decrease the quality of cognitive effort

I agree. I've been frustrated to see a lot of comments about people performing worse on medication. What they don't seem to account for is that, for me, the difference isn't between performing at 80% or 100% on a particular task, taking medication allows me to do things that otherwise I simply wouldn't be able to bring myself to do. Sure, my thinking might be a little bit less creative, but I'm also not dealing with the fact that actually starting any new task is literally impossible, I don't end up spending half the work day procrastinating, and I don't end up "working" 16 hours every day trying to get 8 hours of productivity out of myself.

rebeccaskinneron Tailscale doesn't want your password

As far as I can tell, biometric authentication is locked to proprietary operating systems. On Linux with a yubikey, for example, it seems like you're not only limited to only 25 sites, but you're also at best going to have a pin, and in many cases the hardware alone may be sufficient to gain access. Sure, you need to know what site the key has been registered with, but I'd bet if you found a random key at a conference you'd have pretty good luck trying it with google and github to start with.

edit: after some digging (which was a lot more involved than it should have been) it seems like the current state is:

There is free software to set and manage a pin for a yubikey on Linux. Firefox historically didn't support yubikeys with a pin, but it seems like that was recently merged. Yubikeys still have a 25 site limit per device, and no sync across devices. As long as sites let you register multiple yubikeys as a backup, and support pins, then it's a reasonable workflow. I'm not convinced it's better than passwords + a yubikey for 2fa, but it seems like in practice it's probably not worse either. It still feels like, even if security is a motivator here, there's a lot of opportunity for Google, Apple, and MS to conveniently and "accidentally" cut free software users out of being able to access a lot of the internet with the move to passkeys, and I remain skeptical.

rebeccaskinneron Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore

> if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?

Yes, because I don't want to get covid.

rebeccaskinneron Tailscale doesn't want your password

I see a lot of claims that passkeys are more secure than passwords with 2fa, but my understanding is that they are strictly less secure. As it stands right now, if someone wanted to compromise a service that I use 2fa with, they'd need to both obtain my physical device, and also get my password. Either one of those things may be relatively easy, but it's harder to do both- especially without my knowledge.

With passkeys, if someone steals my physical device, then they have full access. That seems strictly worse to me. It's just beyond me how there's a plausible claim that moving to a single factor is better than two factor authentication, except that it gives Google and Apple more control over the internet by allowing them to lock people even more heavily into proprietary OS ecosystems.

rebeccaskinneron Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

I’m currently on a grandfathered plan. When that’s up I’ve thought about whether I should look around elsewhere due to the price increase. Ultimately I don’t think I want search to be a race to the bottom. There’s no guarantee that any service provider will remain aligned with users and privacy long term, but kagi is bootstrapped and I’d rather pay more than push them toward needing to look for other monetization strategies that might be more adversarial to my interests.

rebeccaskinneron Haskell in Production: Standard Chartered

Hiring doesn’t really seem to be a problem for Haskell teams in my experience. Onboarding can be a little slower, but there are a lot of developers out there who want to work with Haskell. If anything, I would consider Haskell a hiring advantage.

rebeccaskinneron AI Is a Waste of Time

Play is a path to discovery. There's a lot of hype and vaporware in AI these days. There's also some real value there, but I'm not sure we've really figured out what the real value propositions are. I strongly suspect the inherent limitations in AI means that many of the current applications are doomed to failure. Playing with AI will give people a better internalized sense of the strengths and weaknesses, and it will do that broadly in ways that will let more people with more problems recognize when these tools can actually help them. The real problem we have today is that most people just don't really have a good intuition for that.

rebeccaskinneron Why don’t more people live close to friends?

Yep, thanks.

rebeccaskinneron Why don’t more people live close to friends?

I think "scared" is the wrong word for it. People in the US tend to have very low levels of contentiousness, and that in turn makes people want to avoid strangers. The most obvious recent example is the push back against masking. In a high population density urban setting, even a few people who aren't adhering to masking raises the general risk level for people substantially. In less population dense areas it doesn't matter as much, because you're going to encounter fewer people. Another example is noise pollution. One of the primary reasons my spouse and I decided to leave the city for a more suburban area (and one of the reasons we're thinking about moving to an even more rural area) is to escape the constant presence of unnecessarily loud noise. Loud music is the major culprit. Between unbearably loud car stereos and loud neighbors (especially when living in an apartment building), low contentiousness means that even in a moderately dense area it's nearly impossible to find a moment of quiet.

It's quite possible that we're in a vicious cycle where low contentiousness causes people to be more isolated and more cynical and that in turn may cause some people to be less considerate of others, but if that's true it's still a systemic problem and at an individual level looking for more isolation is the only reasonable solution.

rebeccaskinneron Two types of software engineers

I think a lot of people may be predisposed to one style or another depending on their personality or background but I agree that part of what makes experience so valuable in our field is being able to make good judgement about when to solve a problem with technology, with process, or not at all.

rebeccaskinneron Subscription fatigue and related musings

I actually look at this from the other direction: the need to somehow justify a monthly subscription fee has encouraged developers to add further user hostile features, including a move toward owning customers data and forcing customers to share data (often with egregious privacy invasive policies) and makes it harder for customers to interoperable with other software.

rebeccaskinneron Stanford faculty say anonymous student bias reports threaten free speech

> If the accused were guilty, then they'd already know who the victim is and already know who the accuser is

That’s only true if the accused knows the potential accusers and there is a small enough number of potential accusers that it could be reasonably narrowed down.

rebeccaskinneron Amazon officially becomes a health care provider after purchase of One Medical

I’m not a fan of Amazon generally but it’s clear you haven’t used Instacart in a while if you think ordering from Whole Foods is worse. Instacart these days is the absolute worst experience I’ve ever had with any shop. The day my Covid risk profile allows me to go back to grocery stores is the day I order a large 3D print of the Instacart logo, find an empty field, and recreate the printer scene from Office Space.

rebeccaskinneron World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

Funnily enough, I find myself the exact opposite. Give me a really hard engaging problem and I can work 16 hours and barely realize any time has passed, but spending even 1-2 hours on something rote saps my energy for the entire day. My tolerant is even lower for the particularly challenging combination of tasks that are both uninteresting but also tedious.

rebeccaskinneron The haunting brain science of long Covid

And yet people look at me like I have two heads when I explain that I’m still actively making every effort to avoid getting Covid.

The long term brain damage is going to be a massive impact on companies who are forcing RTO and causing their employees to deal with repeat exposures to Covid from co-workers.

rebeccaskinneron Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

My honest question is: What's the alternative.

I'm not an apple fan. Most of my personal devices run Linux, but I feel essentially trapped on an iPhone. It doesn't seem like there's a truly useful open phone out there. I don't like Apple, and I don't trust them or their ostensibly pro-privacy stance much, but I want as little privacy invasion and as little advertising as possible on my phone, and I think as bad as Apple is, they're still better than a fully Googled version of Android. Unfortunately, a lot of people, myself included, need at least some apps that require either an iPhone or a fully Googled version of android.

I suppose there's always the option to dual-wield and use a Linux or de-googled android phone for daily use and keep a second device around for the apps that won't run there, but that is both a pain I don't expect many people to buy into. I'm just about at the point of going this route for myself, but it does feel more like admitting defeat than anything else.

rebeccaskinneron Twilio is laying off 17% of workforce

I get that perspective. There aren't a lot of people who agree with my risk assessment. I'm _mostly_ not going to tell other people what they should or shouldn't do (I do wish we'd go back to universal masking in a few locations, like doctors offices and government buildings. Higher risk and more cautious people can avoid restaurants and bars, but you can't just not show up if you get summoned for jury duty, or need to get treated for cancer).

Ultimately, either I'm wrong and the opportunity cost is the extra years of quality I'm losing to continued caution, or other people are wrong and the cumulative effects of infections are going to greatly impact their quality and quantity of life. If everyone chose to take some extra precautions, like masking, better ventilation, and staying home when they were sick then I'd have to give up less, and other people might not be risking so much, but I know that's just not going to happen, and I'm going to deal with the world as it is rather than as I think it ought to be.

My guess is that, although covid isn't going away, in a few years I think things will improve. Long covid is real, and it's having a real economic impact already. It's going to have a bigger impact in the coming years, and there's going to be real incentive to do something about it when it becomes clear that it's a huge drag on productivity. Prophylactic nasal sprays, better post-exposure protocols, next generation vaccines, faster and more reliable testing (preferably something that detects covid in the air rather than relying on individual testing), improved ventilation- all of that is being worked on, and I think eventually a lot of things will be low enough risk that I'll resume some activities.

In the mean time, I'm lucky to be far enough in my career that the impact of a harder line stance on this isn't too bad. Technical collaboration has always been largely remote for me, and there are ways I'm able to maintain connections with friends and family even though we rarely see each other in person.