unknown_error's comments

Why would non-technical users want computing under their control? Isn't the market going the other way, more and more towards walled gardens? Seems like a Chromebook or iPad would have far fewer headaches for the typical user who just wants Facebook and email.

The web as an open platform is a dev manifesto; for everyone else it's just a glorified entertainment and information hub, and making it safer and easier for them is what the market wants. Not more openness, but less of it, because less openness means less cognitive mode. They don't want to think about 100 ways to do the same thing, each with a different license and complex venn diagram of incompatibilities. They just want to get on with their day.

"If something goes horribly wrong"... even in that case, the vendors are less likely to fuck up than most users. Google/Apple/Microsoft clouds are much better at keeping data safe against device failures and ransomware than local Windows installs managed by average users ever were or could be.

If anything the future is really dumb computing, where the internet is just another appliance not too different from your radio or the television. Apps with corporate content hubs, not open platforms.

Computing as an open platform was due to the industry by and large being created by engineers. Now with mass adoption, we're seeing a switch to producer vs consumers, with different paradigms/devices/needs for each, like the differences between magazine publishers and readers. Readers don't care what software was used to create a magazine, they just want to pick it off a newsstand and read it. Same with digital entertainment; the underlying stack shouldn't be their concern if their intended usage is simply content consumption. Windows adds only unnecessary complexity to their usage. Stallman is not an average user, and it would be a massive disservice to humanity to design for the average user as though they were Stallman.

Not all freedom is beneficial. Sometimes it's just yet another useless decision to have to make in a world already overflowing with excess information. The human brain did not evolve to make careful cost-benefit analyses for every trivial thing in a post-internet world.

Even devs are moving towards serverless. Content creation might eventually move to "OS"-less, where content creation is moderated by walled hubs like Adobe apps on the iPad and developer experiences happen in virtualized clouds with web-based IDEs. Bare metal appeals to engineers, but for everyday users and developers, again, it's just excess cognitive load. Please don't make people think about useless crap. There are already infinite upcoming crises -- of the global sort -- for anyone born in the last few generations. Computing trivia is just... trivia, no more inherently interesting than the proper type of lubricant to use on the machines in the factory that makes their toaster. Don't make them think without good reason.

If someone is going to naively brute-force your login screen, it's safe to assume they're going to look at the sign-up password requirements anyway. Nobody is just going to throw the whole unicode character set at your password field and go from 1 to infinity characters in order to guess your passwords.

More likely a hashed table gets leaked and they just compare it with existing rainbow tables. Password hints do nothing to protect against that, while inconveniencing your real users.

For a real user trying to guess their password, providing hints (that already match your signup rules) might take them down from 10 wrong guesses to 2 or 3, a huge improvement. For brute-forcing bots, it might take them from 5 years to 4.5 years per password. So what?

If it's another human trying to guess someone's password, again, the requirements are already there in the sign up screen. Also, it's probably easier just to spearphish them with a fake email or try to answer their (not-so) secret questions based on public records and whatnot.

You mean the horribly imprecise date wheel of doom thing? https://i.stack.imgur.com/ms5tX.png

That's the one UI control I hate the most. Please don't do that. It replaces 3 seconds of typing 1 (tap) 15 (tap) 1969 into a tedious thumb game, especially if you have to scroll through three decades of years. Even Apple recently replaced it (https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/08/12/redesigned-date-tim...), thank god.

Pleeeeeeeeease don't do that. The dropdowns are fine, and much superior.

I realize this isn't data. What you call "awesome" I call "nightmarish". I would love to see actual research on the usability of that particular date picker scroll widget... maybe most users prefer it? I dunno.

(Sorry for the slow reply! Your response made me want to dwell on this some more before answering.) One, whatever my replies may be, I am by no means either a purist or an exemplar. I appreciate delicious foodlike products as much as anyone. I just wish it didn't stop there. But I'm also terrible at keeping up with purity. At the end of the day I usually just eat whatever I'm craving, usually mac and (shitty) cheese more than anything pure or whole.

Two, yes, I'd love to meet up in Austin at some point! I've heard good things about it and always wanted to visit. If I make it out there at some point I'll definitely hit you up.

Three, I have to admit I never thought about the First Amendment issues around this, with Schinner vs the meat industry lawyers as to what the word "dairy" means or "cow" or "burger". Miyoko's is (frankly) just aight, but that they're fighting the good fight means a lot. I have mad respect for the idealists.

What would your ideal world be like?

I used to think I knew the answer to that. As I got to know more people and animals, I'm no longer sure I do. Predator-prey gives way to primary producers and decomposers, with humans caught in the middle trying to oversimplify it all.

Our fatalistic flaw may not even be our selfishness, but our hedonism. We don't plan evil, we just act according to our (base) urges. 99% of us, anyway. We're doomed by genetics, not immorality.

Sorry. I'm pretty drunk. Would love to hear your thoughts, here, or over a beer someday in Austin.

Thanks for taking the feedback into consideration.

It's less about transparency and more about the culture. Developers sell deliverables and marketing consultants sell attempts. As the GP said very few are actually willing to charge based on conversions, because they know they won't make many. Smoke and mirrors.

Distributed, decentralized projects are great, when they build up the infrastructure in a way that respects existing network traffic.

Yes, DNS is distributed and communal, but it's cheap only because it's minimal. Caching a few values for IP and MX lookups is relatively trivial, but if you purposefully start storing content in there, the whole network gets exponentially more expensive for everyone involved, especially once you cross a threshold where you can no longer easily send updates as simple key values and need to start worrying about encoding of larger chunks, network interruptions, checksums, etc. That complicates caching all over the DNS network. And if some DNS provides start supporting certain features and not others it's just going to lead to further fragmentation and user delays and a confusion about where and how to store and fetch data from this system depending on a user's region and likely DNS providers. It also presents authentication and integrity challenges for unencrypted uses, as in the case of DNS hijacking by local ISPs or governments.

It's a shoehorning of data into a poor fit, and only because someone else is paying for it. That's what makes this endeavor selfish, not heroic. You're not "freeing" data, just shoving it into some dark corner of the web and hoping to profit from it.

There have been a lot of actual hard work on the problem of decentralized information, from ipfs to freenet to tor to blockchains to dht... they all have thought about the problem in depth and built the infrastructure to try to make it happen, instead of leeching off someone else's work and pretending like it solves the problem.

Sorry to be harsh. This just seems like a money grab rather than technical innovation.

The digital marketers I've known typically just configure ads in marketplaces not controlled by them, plus use questionable (both in terms of ethics and impact) SEO practices and dubious statistical analysis of poorly verified third party analytics to fool clients into thinking they're doing useful work. It's a lot of smoke and mirrors with a sheen of respectability because it's backed by household tech company names. But there's rarely with a sufficient look at the funnel or actual user/customer/market research or weeding out confounding variables. They mostly just do the sorta stuff you can do yourself after a few hours on LinkedIn Learning. IMO doing this the right way takes someone who both understands the tech stack of it, including tracking prevention nuances, and the marketing side of it, and the statistics side of it, and the business side of it. People like that are rare to come by and don't typically enjoy working for advertising firms for small time small business clients because it's mostly just tedium and limited room for innovation and growth. Like managing the back pages of a local magazine, I imagine.

I've spent years at the intersection of dev work, marketing, advertising, analytics, SEO, etc. for small businesses. Now the I know how terrible a job they usually do, I'd never pay a consultancy to do that work. I probably wouldn't even bother with it myself. It's mostly just faith based prayers to a few ad marketplaces who's interests are inherently in conflict with yours. It's a shitty marketplace all the way around.

Dev work has a higher barrier to entry, for now, so it's less easy to bullshit your way through with clients. The resulting software either does what it's supposed to (with bugs, of course) or not. Whereas the successful or failure of many digital marketing campaigns are largely matters of faith and not evidence.

Wow, that requires a lot of fingers. It's like an OS and fighting game all in one.

I bet Teams secretly used Word xml style tags behind the scenes.

You think Microsoft, of Ribbon and Clippy and full-screen start menu ads, and 20 different control panels for the same settings, does UX testing...? The same Microsoft that can't decide whether normal users prefer Windows, Windows Phone, Zune, or Xbox interfaces, so they just go ahead and add a little of each to all of them?

More likely they were just worried Slack was attacking their enterprise segment and killing Skype so they rushed a shitty product to market ASAP. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has turned into "panic, copycat, repeat".

(edit... sorry, don't know how this turned into a long rant. Started typing over lunch and just couldn't stop... feel free to skip this, just a stream-of-consciousness dump.)

Somewhere between Japanese idiosyncrasies and American exceptionalism, we could learn a lot from other developed societies. We just don't, because we're arrogant, ignorant, and proudly so. We mask our social ills with flags and nationalism, even though there's hardly a cohesive America left to be proud about.

IMO this isn't some academic problem like fusion, but a problem of people and politics. Speaking of values, there's a good values overlap between the police, the military, Scouting, religion, gun culture, and conservative politics & politicians. All are hierarchical, patriarchal, heavily focused on in-group loyalty and proud displays of status and power. It's a self-reinforcing good-ol-boys network that's fighting back against cultural extinction. The thin blue line, the whatever %ers, the MAGA folks... all are part of the same general in-group. To them they are the only legitimate America, and everyone else is an outsider, intruder, imposter, hellbent on destroying everything they hold dear. They don't want a multicultural America; multi-ETHNIC might be OK, but only if they fall in line and know their place.

This is not really about the tactics of policing, or training, or body cameras, but about people whose identities rely on power, status, and tradition rather than collective well-being and social innovation.

Japan is on the other side of that spectrum of collectivity. Japan is lucky (in this context) in that they are also overwhelmingly homogenous, so there isn't much of a outgroup to rebel against. They have plenty of social problems but militarized policing isn't one of them.

To the Western world, aside from its bleeding-edge aesthetics, Japanese society is heavily hierarchical, traditional, patriarchal, conservative, orderly... similar to the good-ol-boys we have here, except there, there isn't really much of a challenge to that power structure. There's no Japanese BLM equivalent to put that in sharp contrast with other elements of their society (which exist only on the fringe).

American culture, in contrast, has largely moved on (by % of population) from the good-ol-boys lifestyle, but those elements in our society are still there, and still clinging on, and hold a disproportionate amount of political power and an overwhelming amount of the firepower. Everyday, centrist Americans without significant exposure to violence and crime tend to be more welcoming of outsiders than the conservative elements, but can be easily swayed in both directions by political propaganda.

Long ago the movements veered from discussions about tactical reform and into basically mass marketing with gospel-like, life-or-death overtones and tidy slogans and us-vs-them mentalities. There's no coming back from that... you can go from "police reform" to "culture war", but it's much harder to de-escalate from that and ask about, "Wait, wait, instead of getting rid of police officers, what if we provided community specialists alongside them..."

Trump purposely escalated it into a us-vs-them thing, all the time, everywhere, across any divide he was able to weaponize, because it suited his campaign. We now pay the costs, as a society, with Biden sitting as a lame duck in the middle of it all, begging people to listen to him and be reasonable... but nobody does anymore. There's no one America anymore, just warring factions bound by a shared economy but no shared values.

shrug

Fundamentally a country this heterogenous is difficult if not impossible to govern. Maybe a EU-style model with more local autonomy would be more appropriate than federalism with supremacy. Our real flags now are either black, white, and blue or rainbow-colored, and the ol' stars and stripes are just hanging in tatters in the no man's land between them. Why not just acknowledge the reality and secede into more autonomous, culturally compatible regions and stop fight each other? There's room enough in the world for different societies & values systems, but not if they are forced by external factors to live by the same set of values against their consciences.

> Why do I need an API to convert images?

This is actually SUPER useful because it means you can upload one master image and have the API automatically generate thumbnails, hover states, text overlays, face-detected cropping, effects, shapes, source sets, WEBP versions, etc. And then it manages all the caching, invalidations, CDNs, etc. too. It fits really well into serverless architectures where you don't want to have to maintain and scale your own backend instance of ImageMagick or similar. It turns hours of work into seconds.

But it's also a pretty mature field: Imgix and Cloudinary both do this much more powerfully and much cheaper. 10,000 cropped images (say, for thumbnails) would cost $100 on Micro but be free or nearly so on either Imgix and Cloudinary.

For the more complex APIs (like images, ironically), I would rather trust one of the bigger companies that have been doing that -- and only that -- for years, with more forgiving pricing.

For simpler APIs, I'd just build it as a serverless functions straight in Cloudflare Workers or similar. Much cheaper, probably faster and more reliable infrastructure, and scalable.

You hate your users and love watching them shake a fist at the hardest captchas.

I think you're leeching off someone else's infrastructure and using it to do things they never meant it to do. Sure, the technical capability is there, but your use case would drastically increase their costs. You are essentially cost-shifting your customers' costs onto theirs. Not cool.

It's like building a cloud storage solution off Gmail's free storage. It can be done, has been done, but that doesn't mean it's cool to do so.

Your system would increase costs for DNS providers all over the world, without their consent, just because you're using it as a loophole. It was a problem that wasn't there fixed in a way that leeches from rather than gives back to the community.

Malware/adware authors would love to buy those.

IMHO only -- I don't claim to be representative of any other planteater but myself -- it sought holistic, transformative change. Rather than just "eat less meat" (like Meatless Mondays, which is supposed to be a stepping stone), it was maybe more aligned with the Slow Food movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Food) in that it wanted people to think about how our food systems are connected to not just animal treatment (factory farms, tiny cages) but our communities, our economy, our politics, and ultimately our view of our place in the world (atop it, or within it). I'm not going to dive too deep into that because it would easily be an hours-long discussion, but suffice to say that it viewed animal suffering as the symptom of a systemic disease, the tip of a rotten iceberg, resulting from a disconnected and exploitative experience rooted in modern capitalism. It's not just about whether laying hens have enough space, but the workers behind them, the communities that host the farms, the politics that arise from urban-rural divides into food production vs consumption, agriculture as an economic sector and political force, and ultimately how we as a society treat not just animals but each other and the lands we occupy.

Fast forward to 2021, you have meat conglomerates like Tyson creating brands like Raised & Rooted, which sells nuggets that are half-chicken and half-plant. Ostensibly this decreases the need for as many chickens (or else they're producing only half-dead chickens), but it doesn't really work that way; AFAIK (and I admit I am not a market expert, just an interested bystander) their chicken production is still growing (https://craft.co/tyson-foods/metrics), and the Frankenuggets are just an additional snack item on top of their existing product lines. It supplements the cruelty, the icing on top of the torture, rather than seeking any sort of transformative change.

And by and large the market is headed more and more that way, towards industrial food conglomerates buying up or creating in-house vegan brands to add a greener sheen to their bloody enterprise, without actually changing the way they do business or the way they treat any vulnerable part of the system.

Veganism as its core was, in my opinion, about consuming LESS so that others may live more. Plant-based foods, as a health & diet craze, is more about supplementing your existing diet (and profit) with more manufactured products that ultimately come from the same industrial giants that made it all fucked up to begin with.

It's the difference between back-to-the-land whole-food farming/eating and Soylent, the vegan artificial meal drink.

But that's just my interpretation. Others are free to disagree.

Within that bigger context, though, are plant-based foods still a net improvement even if they don't drive transformative change? It's dubious to me. I think it encourages a mindset akin to recycling: "just do it, don't think about it" in that both are minimally impactful in and of themselves, but make people feel good that they're doing it. I forget the scholarly term for it but there's a body of research suggesting that if you can provide a small action for people to take to alleviate their guilt over something, they're less inclined to make bigger, transformative changes to their lives. Anybody can pick up a package of Frankenuggets and think they're doing the world a favor, and that's enough. But does it result in a net decrease in meat or dairy production? Not as far as I know, but if there is an analysis on this, I would love to be informed.

Regarding the dairy bankruptcy, actually I did not know that, and reading more (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/06/borden-da...), they do cite the rise in plant-based alternatives as one factor in their continuing decline. So maybe it does help? I know that would contradict my earlier points, but data is data. Personally I would be skeptical of too quickly attributing plant-based foods as the major determining factor in that, but time will tell. It's easier for capital to introduce new product lines that match consumer fashions than for executives to reexamine their values. But if I'm wrong, just let me know.

It was meant in jest, but if you must take it seriously, my opinion is that veganism as a movement has largely been coopted by high-gloss, low-impact "plant based foods" marketing that follows all the aesthetics and few of the values of older movement. There isn't a measurable decrease in meat production or consumption, just a noted increase in overpriced prepackaged vegan food products.

I say that as a vegan of more than a decade. Its recent popularity is more indicative of successful marketing than consciousness raising. It's just another fad diet to folks, not a lifestyle change resulting in better livestock conditions.

TLDR to be happy, one simply must be a kidnapper in Brazil with a good family and set schedule.

They can actually choose whether they want to be milked every morning.

One line leads to a tiny milking station. There, retired surgeons use designer nanopumps to relieve silk gland tensions. The spiders appreciate it and get a tiny block of tofu fly treat afterward.

The spiders who don't want to be milked that particular day can instead enjoy a relaxing day. They other like goes to the relaxation area, full of empty corners ready for cobwebbing and prismed sunbeams that emulate natural variances in brightness. When the surgeons are done with milking, they provide enrichment in the form of RF nanodrones, made from recycled cat toys, to stimulate web strands and act as nontoxic prey substitutes.

Unfortunately accidents do happen, since even the tiniest drone tends to be several orders of magnitude larger than the biggest spider volunteers. Sometimes they exhibit something more akin to a panic reaction than relaxation. Steps are taken to minimize these irregular adverse events, but a balance towards profitability must be enforced.

All in all, like with most vegan products, the quality is much lower but the price can be much higher. It all works out as long as nobody asks too many questions.