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Comment by selfie | Hacker News Reader

The website is something else! https://something.pink/. It is really fun to use. Privacy being the bathroom is funny!

I gave up after watching the cake loading animation for 2/3 minutes. Might be a HN hug of death or something

It's working now, but it may have been a hug of death indeed. The website is running on a tiny server as it usually doesn't get a whole lot of traffic. :)

The privacy policy is also well written. I didn't know you could not have a cookie pop up.

That’s sad and frustrating that we’ve come to this point. I posted a web service I’d done and someone questioned that. I was told “you have to have a pop up - it’s not legal to run a site without that!” (Paraphrasing). I despair of what we’ve turned the web in to.

If you want to link a high profile example, GitHub doesn't have one: https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/

Thanks!

Im not sure if youre joking but I get a cookie popup when visiting this link.

Ohwow, they walked back on it. I guess their analytics were worth more after all.

github.blog ask for cookies, but github.com does not

Apparently you only need the popup if you are doing something nefarious. Otherwise it's not required! Yikes!

Yes, and it's why European privacy conscious people get mad when people complain about the EU making the user experience on the internet worse: the EU isn't mandating cookie banners at all, it just requires user consent before doing fishy things with their private data. But if you don't do anything fishy with those data (like selling it with 678 “partners”), there's no consent to get.

This does not appear to be accurate.

The official EU GDPR site says that consent is required for anything except "strictly necessary" cookies.

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

"To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:

Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies."

There are no exceptions for not "nefarious" or "fishy" - only if there is no way your site can function without every cookie.

Legitimate reasons to use cookies that are not strictly necessary include analytics, optimization, user experience, social media sharing, sign in with (third-party IDP), incorporating content or code that is hosted on other sites, and more.

I recognize and agree with the dislike for this, but if it's inaccurate, I'd love a correction.

I mean, you can write a website that doesn't require any of that. social media links for authentication (if the website requires authentication) are strictly necessary.

Analytics and optimization are things the eu is trying to prevent, so of course you get a popup.

It is possible, yes. It just hampers much of what people expect modern websites to do (though it hinders abuse, as well, which is good!).

But even GitHub, who proudly declared they had removed all non-essential cookies https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/ added them back https://github.com/github/site-policy/pull/582/files and now if you click either "Manage cookies" or "Do not share my personal information" at the bottom of the page, you'll see they have the common "Required", "Analytics", "Social Media", "Advertising" categories.

(Bummed that they have the Advertising category.)

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, the company that's putting ads on your start menu, I'm not sure why people are expecting anything less. Whatever they had in terms of culture before acquisition is not the same afterward, even if it changed gradually.

"Analytics and optimization" is where all the nefariousness goes down IMO, even if it's "for the user". When a site predicts things for a user, some users are delighted by the UX while others are put off by being spied on. So even in the "to improve our UX" case, it's up to the tracked to decide if it's nefarious or not - if they consent or not. It makes more sense to always prompt when using them.

Also, I'm seeing headlines like "Are Internet Cookies About To Crumble?" (not really, but you know how tech media is!) but I wonder how much longer cookies are even going to be relevant.

When's the last time you did this:

  document.cookie = "username=John Smith; expires=Thu, 18 Dec 2013 12:00:00 UTC; path=/";

For most modern developers, the answer is never! They're not really used in modern development by us. Apparently about 40% of websites use cookies, and it's almost always for ad re-targeting - the only reason they make you auth again after clearing is really to auth you with the cookie, your auth with the site is usually just HTTP requests and doesn't require cookies.

TLDR I think they're going away anyway, they're passe and it makes too much sense for Google to obsolete competitors by suddenly dropping them. GDPR calling out cookies is like the American law that bans "magic mushrooms" - they should have been more specific in identifying a specific unlawful behavior.

Upvoted for the good info btw (it just didn't do anything lol) thanks for sharing

Headquartered on Webgasse no less. I wonder if that's intentional or accidental!

That is accidental and we actually didn't even realize. :D

The potential for puns is infinite. INFINITE!

Hey that Broomrocket stuff looks interesting. And nary an LLM in sight.

janosdebugs, could you comment on the tech behind it?

Well spotted, no LLM in sight. We published an academic paper on Broomrocket[1]. Currently, it uses spaCy[2] to process the sentence into a semantic data structure and then uses the placement algorithms to create a list of volumes and placement preferences in 3D space. My wife is currently working on replacing spaCy with a custom NLP library in Rust working purely based on formal methods. This will become a larger product suite in the future.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3648233 [2]: https://spacy.io/

Thanks! Well, if you folks are interested in formal methods and learning, then you might be interested in Inductive Logic Programming. Here's a link to my work:

https://github.com/stassa/louise

The referenced papers include some examples on learning a simple CFG for a small set of Magic: the Gathering examples. More recent work looks at solving mazes and taking names (under review).

One of our PhDs is working to implement all this in Rust btw.

Sorry for advertising my work on your post :)

Awesome, thank you, we are definitely going to take a deeper look!

Connected to this I laughed at the piles of toilet paper packs in the "contact" entrance.

This may or may not have a connection to reality.

I enjoyed the names and headlines on the bathroom reading materials. The free look mode on the cam is fun.

I hated my wife when she made me build the textures for the reading material. I guess I was wrong. :D

+1 really well made. I wonder if there's a framework for making these kind of websites?

found in the sources that babylon.js (https://www.babylonjs.com/) is in use.

BabylonJS indeed. We had a tutorial up on our previous YouTube channel, if there's interest, we'll reupload it.

I’d love to see it

We'll upload it here today or tomorrow: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXF--ktsN0t97W9R0GN6_3Q

looking forward to it!

It's up: https://youtu.be/Qw22utZ8IlY

Awesome, thank you very much for the reupload!

thank you so much

Ha the hamburger is genius. How has nobody done that before? (afaik)

"Privacy policy" in the toilet! Nice.

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