DamnInteresting

It's true that some kind of monetization change was inevitable, but I wished at the time they had executed differently. I just wanted fans who wished to see our posts to see our posts, no more, no less. The only options FB gave were to reach far fewer people (do nothing), or to push ourselves on an unwilling audience (boost posts into ads). No option to just pay a monthly fee to have it like it was.

So, while inevitable, I think it's still a good example of why one mustn't trust big corporations with one's work.

There are a few considerations. One is that the 'Give a Damn' system only aims to collect about $1,800/month, an approximation of our monthly expenses (not just hosting, but author payments, subscriptions to archives, research expenses, etc). And most months it barely collects the target amount. I've tried nudging the goal upward to see if I can slowly push it into actually-make-a-living territory, but it seems to have plateaued; increasing the goal there just means we usually miss our goal.

There's also the fact that the 'Give a Damn' system is supporting the site, to the benefit of all of its contributors, not just me. Changing that dynamic could be detrimental to morale.

There are lots of other small things making it very difficult to just update the existing system, not least of which being the same time shortage this fundraiser is trying to relieve. I'd need to make a bunch of changes to a very sensitive money-handling chunk of code, which requires careful coding and testing.

> What will happen if this experiment fails?

I have a series of decreasingly appealing follow-up plans if this one falls too short. But it's already earned enough to get me through at least a few months, so I'll have a chunk of time to take some positive action. Maybe that means I only get 6 months off before I'll have to resume full-time work, but I'll take what I can get.

Ah, you must mean the one embedded in this article:

https://www.damninteresting.com/the-martian-express/

Originally, in 2008, it was 100% Javascript, but a few years later I updated it to use CSS transitions for a much smoother animation.

That cycler simulator actually led to a very cool life experience. An administrator at NASA contacted me wanting to use it for a presentation. Of course I said yes! Then he invited me to be his guest to watch an early test of the SLS rocket that was happening about 90 minutes from my home. Of course I said yes!

I got to meet a bunch of astronauts, see a big rocket engine fire horizontally in the desert, and got a NASA SLS pin. The fellow ended up not using the animation, as that part of his talk got edited out, but nevertheless niftiness.

> I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term

Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket. In the early days of Facebook we had a page with 20k+ followers, and we got a lot of engagement there, people followed us to be informed of when we published anything new. Then one day Facebook introduced 'boosting,' and overnight our posts were hidden from all but a fraction of our audience. Paying to boost each post would convert them into ads, which is not how we wanted to reach our readers. Our site traffic plummeted. I would have happily just paid FB a flat rate to retain access to our audience, but that option was not on offer.

I was already a proponent of the "own your platform" philosophy[1] (aka "Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms"[2]), but that misguided reliance on Facebook really cemented it. It's nigh impossible to own everything we rely on, but I'm reluctant to give any company that much power over my project again.

[1] https://www.chuck.is/platform/

[2] https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...

> I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam.

It's understandable that you thought so, though the opposite is usually the case. There are a lot of creators who poach our catalog; if you compare publication dates you'll usually find that ours was published first. While I'm out there scanning the microfiche, reading the dusty old books, filing FOIA requests, and hiring researchers at the National Archive, these lazy creators just yoink the gist and earn 100x more than I do. It's a lot to grapple with sometimes. But I enjoy doing it, so I ignore the parasites most of the time.

> FWIW, in this new age, patronage might be the only way. Allow people to pay on a sliding scale, with an uncapped upper end.

That's not far from what I'm attempting with this fundraiser experiment. There is a modest goal for the year, but no cap on contribution, so if someone(s) with vast resources is inclined to make a generous contribution, they are able to do so.

One problem is that I don't know how to reach such people apart from this omnidirectional signal. Another is that I would not be amenable to string attachments. Maybe I'm broken, but I'd rather shut down the site than allow a wealthy benefactor to call any shots, and most wealthy entities won't like that (I expect).

> And give them access to a tightly moderated, thoughtful community.

We kind of have that in our comments sections, but a more unified place might be an interesting exploration. I'll ponder that, thank you for the suggestion.

> 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab

It's funny you mention those three in particular. We've collaborated with Stuff You Should Know several times, and we almost worked with both 99PI and RadioLab on separate occasions (i.e., I pitched ideas that got some traction, though they didn't ultimately materialize). I still think my pitch for RadioLab is a good one, though it's a throwback to when they did episodes with three stories around a central theme (e.g., Blood).

> I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.

Thanks! If this fundraiser works out, you're part of the reason we get to keep going.

Heavens to Betsy. My server alerted me that traffic was far exceeding a median Thursday. For the record, I am a fairly active user on HN, but I was not responsible for sharing this link here, directly or otherwise. I have little stomach for self-promotion (probably to my detriment).

One thing you can do is store a word profile in your database, which is a string of all of the letters in the word in alphabetical order. So the word profile for 'apple' is 'aelpp'. Then you can just include all of the words that match the profiles of the real words. For example, 'quiet' and 'quite' both have the profile 'eiqtu'.

I've built a some word games over the years (e.g., wordwhile.com, omiword.com), and one thing I've discovered is that players find it very unsatisfying when they enter a real, valid word and the game rejects it. I imagine that the timer would amplify that sense of unfairness.

Granted, there are also people who get annoyed when the game seems too accepting of unusual words, but if you can point them to a valid dictionary definition for that oddball word, they usually accept it without argument.

As a non-fiction author, I find myself reading a lot of non-leisure material for research--books, old newspapers, and that sort of thing. A few years ago I noticed that my leisure reading was on the decline, so I decided to delete all of the social media, news, and gaming apps from my phone, and replace them with an e-reader app.

Now, when I have a few idle moments away from my computer, instead of checking something like reddit, I read a few pages from a book. It's great, I recommend it! I'm back to reading a couple of novels per month, and I don't have so much of that queasy wasted-time feeling that social media tends to give me. I've even learned how to pause reading mid-paragraph and resume easily later; that part took some practice.

Here in Salt Lake City, a prolonged drought has made it a tinderbox. Home fireworks are prohibited, and there's signage up all over the place warning of the danger. And yet, the firework stands popped up in grocery store parking lots like they do every year, and people lined up. Bananas.

Luckily no new fires started around here, but we also have the local "Pioneer Day" on July 24 that starts up a fresh round of pyrotechnics.

I was in my car with my seven-year-old when the Paul Simon song "You Can Call Me Al" started playing. She saw it pop up on the infotainment screen, and wanted to know why anybody would want to be called A.I. (our household has a low opinion of A.I., largely due to the unending firehose of slop aimed at children on YouTube).

Good song though.

This is reminiscent of Coley's Toxins[1], an early experimental cancer treatment using Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria. Coley and other practitioners claimed some substantial success, but the mechanism of action was not understood, and the treatment varied so much that scientific verification was elusive.

(Note: I am affiliated with the linked website, but I didn't write the article in question)

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/coleys-cancer-killing-concoc...

And they got Rick Moranis out of retirement to reprise his role as Dark Helmet, which is just delightful. I hope we see more of him in movies now that his children are grown.

I've been building sites on WordPress for over 20 years, and it's fine, but if I were building a new site today, I'd probably use ClassicPress[1]. It's a fork of WordPress that eliminates a lot of the cruft that WordPress has accumulated over the years.

[1] https://www.classicpress.net/

When I was kid, I was playing Nintendo games with my cousin, and my very straight-laced Mormon mom kept calling for me to come upstairs for dinner. I kept replying, "Just a sec!" as we tried to finish the stage. After a few times through this loop, she yelled "NO MORE SECS!" It's been a running joke in my family ever since.

One recalls the Pentium FDIV bug, where an estimated 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results[1]. A small subset of Pentium users would ever encounter the problem, yet it was considered a major controversy, and Intel ultimately replaced $475 million worth of CPUs (in 1994 dollars)[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/its-been-30-...

Most of the time it's also necessary to put quotation marks or similar formatting (e.g., box, pullquote, or indentation) on the cited text to make it clear a) that it is a citation; and b) where the citation begins and ends.

If one does that, assuming citations are not the bulk of the work, one should be in the clear.

> I prefer to toggle the dots to avoid seeing them when I’m driving the car.

Please do not look at your phone screen while driving the car.

Unlike many other apple varieties these days, SweeTango are only available in traditional "apple season" (Autumn months through November in the USA). I've long been a fan of HoneyCrisp, so I tried SweeTango, and while it was quite good, I still prefer HoneyCrisp. I had a similar experience with Cosmic Crisp--not as good as HoneyCrisp, but nice for some variety.

I've started working on a new browser-based word game[1], it'll be my third so far. I'm also sketching out the next one after that. I didn't know this kind of thing would be habit-forming.

[1] I'd link to my first two, but I'm not a fan of self-promotion.

Video overview of the technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8yRlA7jqEQ

Ordinarily I don't prefer video, but the visuals are helpful here.

Also, an online interactive, but it seems to only work in Chrome: https://superspl.at/scene/ff1d0393

All my life I've gone by my middle name, and it's turned out to be useful in a similar way. When I receive a message or phone call and they address me by my first name, I immediately know it's someone who doesn't really know who I am.

I received the exact same email, except they offered me 50% of earnings, so the message sending script probably has some randomization built in. My guess is that their true objective is to get you to install their "interview support app" which is mentioned at the end of the email, I anticipate that it makes your device remotely useful to them, or installs ransomware. But it could be a more involved scam.

No, money down![1]

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/102sh8/one_of_...

I've had my writings directly plagiarized by other people--people who made word-for-word copies of my work, replaced my name with their own, and made a tidy profit on it. They profit more than I ever managed, because they have more resources. In the aftermath, my writings are still "there", not "stolen" in the physical world sense, but my ability to make a living is damaged, and the plagiarism is deeply unethical.

LLMs and "AI" are just one small step removed from straight-up plagiarism. They are massive moral injury[1] machines.

[1] https://moralinjuryproject.syr.edu/about-moral-injury/

It was so long ago that the specifics have faded, but I remember I was coached to use a variety of positive responses. "That's a great question," yes, but also things like "I'm glad you brought that up," and "I was hoping someone would ask about that!" It wasn't my cup of tea, too artificial, but the advice was contemplated.

The next question (which is a great one, from what I understand) is: Why do LLMs use these phrases so much if humans rarely use them in written form? Maybe a fair portion of training data comes from lecture transcripts, where such responses are common when responding to direct questions? And/or system prompts are just instructed to be like that?

That's a great question! Ahem.

I remember being advised to do this ~20 years ago when I was going to be answering questions from a group of people. I was told that it's good practice to say something like "that's a great question" every time someone asks anything, as a form of social lubrication, to encourage others to ask questions. I can't say whether it works, and it was advice for a spoken context rather than written, but I don't know how to finish this sentence.

Thanks for the kind words!

I've been running websites on WordPress almost as long as WordPress has existed, my oldest site has been running on it continuously for 20+ years[1]. Between forcing Gutenberg into the core (it should have been a plugin), Mullenweg's recent unhinged actions (e.g., the ACF fiasco[2]), the increasing number of naggy subscription-based plugins, and now this contemptible AI integration, I'm going to start the process of migrating my sites, probably to ClassicPress[3].

Oh well, we had a pretty good run.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828958

[3] https://www.classicpress.net/