terracottage's comments

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

If you truly believe what you say, the solution is obvious: commit to letting users store history only on their own device, with no syncing. Not even to other devices, which I don't need 99% of the time.

Local storage exists, let me use it. Otherwise the only thing you are committed to is never giving users autonomy.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Apple to require proof of booster shot from vaccinated employees

It continues to amaze me how people go along with this.

The shots don't do what was promised. For healthy kids and young people, it is absolutely counterproductive to inject them. It will cause more hospitalizations through side effects than they will prevent.

What's more, there is now mounting evidence that omicron favors people who have gotten jabbed. So any notion that you get the jab to protect others is now also in question.

Finally, it is now also clear that these shots could have never created herd immunity, because an intramuscular shot does not create an immune response in the mucus membranes, which is your actual first line of defense. So the entirely sales pitch for the shots is also in question.

All of this is easy to find if you just bother to actually look around.

Stop applauding this, it's unethical and it just serves to cover up the failed promises of shitty politicians, shitty scientists, and their hysterical fans.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: An Inconsistent Truth: Next.js and Typesafety

The one thing I would ask this person is how big and complex a system they've built like this.

Because if you optimize all the slack out of a system, you have no room to manoeuvre. In this case, you need to update all your code and dbs all at once if any type changes. Because it's all linked.

In my experience this is not feasible one you reach a certain size. You need to be able to upgrade parts in isolation while keeping the majority working without touching it.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Circular Programming in Clojure

"Let's define some new syntax for it"

It never ceases to amaze that people write guides where you already need to understand the thing being explained to understand the explanation.

Comment your code ffs

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: ES modules are terrible

The worst part is default imports and the linting nazis who want you to use them.

1 file per thing is midwit code organization strategy for people with no actual sense for it.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Covid-19: How the virus spreads among vaccinated people

"Summer of freedom"

"Here we regain our freedom"

"There will not be a 4th wave"

That's what we were sold. Anyone who questioned it was called an antivax conspiracy theorist.

And the worst part is, the namecallers still think they're on the right/smart side even after miles of backpedaling.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Android 12 is live in AOSP

It is odd that a company so focused on diversity forces everyone to adapt to the information processing capabilities of the stupid. Or maybe not odd at all.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Android 12 is live in AOSP

What's going on is that UI designers keep thinking people care more about balancing negative and positive space than seeing all the information they want. At the same time, UI customizability has gone out of fashion. So we get lowest common denominator mediocrity that looks good in a slide show but is awful to use for serious work.

No company should have full time UI designers on staff. Eventually they look for reasons to justify themselves, and start ruining things that were perfectly fine.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

Funny, when this happens in the other direction it's called harassment.

The guilt by association here is transparent, as is the implication that it's okay because it's hitting the "right" people, i.e. the right. Who are then immediately labeled far-right by fiat.

Far left extremists are far too high on their own supply, and are torching the principles of free society left and right. And they still somehow think they wouldn't have been the baddies 80 years ago.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Reactive Clojure: A web language

This is very cool, and ambitious, but i have one major objection: the claim that web apps are an about unidirectional data flow from a managed data store to a consuming front end.

That's not the kind of apps I want to build. I want workspaces where I can make and edit and work freely. I don't care to be online to do it, and conserving bandwidth is not a constraint that should define how I use it.

The DAG goes from me to me.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Go’s New Code of Conduct Arrives with a High Profile Ban

Funny. People being childish and mean spirited for their own petty complexes is how I would describe the response. They couldn't just let it slide. The idea that intent doesn't matter, and the most hysterical reaction should be validated, is a recipe for feedback loops of drama and cluster B.

Who raised these children? How do they function in the real world, if their response to some snark is to set up a massive campaign to discredit the person responsible and ban them from a community? This is a whole kitchen of pots calling the kettle black.

Luckily this is only about Go. It could've been about a programming language with a future, taste or any good ideas whatsoever. That would've been a shame.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Ebooks Are an Abomination

The software on ebook readers seems awful, and the responsiveness nihil. Years of upgraded models haven't changed this. Reading PDFs was borderline impossible because in addition to being slow, my device didn't even cache the previous/next page... Even though there is ample time to do so while you are reading.

The fact that it didn't occur to anyone involved to do so should be all you need to know to avoid the entire product category.

In a parallel universe, a company would've treated e-ink as a medium in its own right instead of as a webkit front end. They made the same mistake that html/css did: locking in the capabilities before they understood what people needed it to do.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Golang: Code of Conduct Updates

Whenever I hear this sort of second hand and third hand information, I assume it's a wild exaggeration, amplified through a whisper network.

If there is something concrete to point to, with evidence, people do. In the absence of that, I assume it's just malicious gossip.

Hasn't failed me yet.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: TikTok overtakes YouTube for average watch time in US and UK

Kinda. Many Americans run around with a notion of some kind of noble entrepreneur who provides the bounty of endless choice in consumer goods, even if it's a corporation. The fact that many different brands come from the same factory tends to be overlooked. Americans are also unique in their tolerance for constant advertising where other cultures would consider it gauche and intrusive.

TikTok is imo goddamn scary. It is explicitly set up to hook people with gamification techniques, showering likes on new users so they come back for more. Only the subject matter is often politics, activism and intertribal warfare.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: A Year in Deno Land

This self flagellation of privilege is tiresome and entirely beside the point.

If this person thinks the world would be better if their job was done by a woman or a brown person, they should quit and go look for their replacement. We all know they won't.

I wanted to know what it was like to work with Deno. Is this person trying to say the entire community is full of cordycepted progressives?

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: A Year in Deno Land

Yes but they're mostly related to Muslims which means they can never be talked about openly in any sane or productive way. Because that's "racist" too.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Code Runs on People

One person's too-clever code is another person's attempt to prevent O(N^2) lines of unmaintainable noob code from being added.

Problem is, I've seen people with years of experience put this crap in. When you show them how much better it can be, they don't tend to take it well. It implies they're not the "senior engineers" their resumes claim.

terracottage | 4 years ago | on: Don't use comments, use code

People who think comments are a code smell have generally never had to go back to a codebase they haven't touched in 3-6 months.

This cures all illusions.

page 1