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Dextro

79 karma · joined December 3, 2018

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Dextro··on Who Owns Nebula?
I think the issue is that the marketing is a half truth. Standard is in fact majority owned by content creators, it's just that the marketing makes you assume that the creator saying the line is the owner when that might not be exactly the case.

Honestly Nebula always felt off to me because of this marketing. They never sold it as a place where creators had a more equitable share, or where they had more creative freedom and control (which seem to be true), but they used the idea that they were "fighting the man" by going at it alone. It always felt like a half truth which, turns out, it is.

Also the price always felt too good to be true to me so I always suspected some sort of investment from somewhere to create a loss leader. Though the jury's still out on that. But having worked on video streaming online myself I know first hand how expensive it can get so I wonder how profitable the company is.

Dextro··on The problem with OpenTelemetry
I mean, when you're the one selling the gas to light that money on fire you have a vested interest in keeping it that way right?

I do agree that logging and spans are very similar, but I disagree that logs are just spans because they aren't exactly the same.

I also agree that you can collect all metrics from spans and, in fact, it might be a better way to tackle it. But it's just not feasible to do so monetarily so you do need to have some sort of collection step closer to the metric producers.

What I do agree with is that the terminology and the implementation of OTEL's SDK is incredibly confusing and hard to implement/keep up to date. I spent way too many hours of my career struggling with conflicting versions of OTEL so I know the pain and I desperately wish they would at least take to heart the idea of separating implementation from API.

Dextro··on Sony Pictures to Use AI to Produce Movies and Shows in "More Efficient Ways"
For the current crop of LLM it's more that anything a human has created before, an AI can mimic.
Dextro··on $20k bounty was claimed
Thanks for this. It completely escaped me and all I saw was the changelogs deprecating the very limited set of style rules I've used for years.
Dextro··on Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
Yes! This is called binding in zigbee parlance. I have a couple of ikea bulbs and switches and, if memory serves me, you can bind up to 10 bulbs to a single switch.
Dextro··on Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – Polyfills gone rogue
That sounds awesome. I've dabled with something like that but only for lodash (makings sure all different flavours get aliased to a single thing) but I never went too far with all the other stuff.

You wouldn't happen to have an example of what you're doing laying around would you? I'd be genuinely curious to try stuff like that out.

Dextro··on Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
Devil's advocate here: did we consider that any such exponential back off goes out the window when users, faced with a non-working site, will just refresh the page therefor reseting the whole process?
Dextro··on Growing from engineer to manager
Very much this. And when people give up it can take one of two forms:

Either the person quits.

Or the person resigns to giving mediocre output and coasts.

Neither is good for the business and yet people keep pushing workers (not even just in tech) into that position to the point it's now a cliché.

Dextro··on Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility
Thanks! I had completely missed that development. TIL
Dextro··on Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility
If I remember right, they were forced to sell the theme park business when they were in dire financial straights in the early 00s.

While Legoland still exists, it's now a license and the parks owned by a separate company

Dextro··on You might not need an effect
I agree with this sentiment. I find that most developers seem to be stuck in thinking of their components as imperative. They expect to alter the state (dom) directly instead of describing the dom as a function of state (props).

Because of that, they quickly reach for the escape hatch that useEffect provides everytime they need to change something.

I genuinely don't know how to help my fellow team members grasp the basic concept of components better. It doesn't seem, to me, like it's something everyone gets eventually. I've actually seen far too many developers who just don't seem to get there even after long months working with component libraries.

As a side note: I don't get all the love for class components. All I remember from using them were the endless bugs because we somehow missed something on willUpdateProps or whatever. Class components could have worked but they always felt like the different life cycle methods were all cobbled together with little overall consistency (see Vue for an example of life cycle hooks done better, even if I have plenty of other gripes with Vue's design)

Dextro··on The first Geely was a fake Mercedes-Benz E-Class based on a real Audi 100
Wolfsburg? Doubt it. But Ingolstadt? A bit more likely. The Audi R8 shared quite a bit with one of the Lamborghini models (can't remember the name).

And don't forget the SUVs

Dextro··on PBS SpaceTime
I believe they did it on this video called "Can You Trust Kurzgesagt?". They also removed a few of their older videos at the time because they had this exact issue of presenting as fact some things that were not at all certain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtUAAXe_0VI

Dextro··on Winamp
Shout out for WACUP. Just found out about it recently and was pleasantly surprised to see Doctor.O was behind it. Now there's a name I still remember from the old winamp forums. He was a developer for Winamp until the end of the AOL days.
Dextro··on Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs
It takes less than 5 seconds to upload personal data to a server from a compromised extension.

Not saying you're doing this but it was the first threat scenario that came to mind and it's not even something particularly uncommon in the browser extension world.

Dextro··on How to Pay Programmers Less (2016)
"As a rule we don't want our developers talking to our partners" was something some I know was once told. Luckily that friend no longer works there
Dextro··on NULL license plate not such a bright idea
I remember that Microsoft got stuck with a 16 character limit for a while thanks to hotmail.
Dextro··on US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers
Agreed and they tend to get worse with age for cheaper models since the already low contrast symbol tends to fade away with time.
Dextro··on History of the broken vertical bar, being the ¦ form of |
It's interesting that codes for the Nintendo eShop have certain similar looking characters blocked off even in the keyboard you use to input. That way there's no question even if it's a zero or the letter O for example.
Dextro··on What’s New in ES2019
Yes, this is a real problem and I've been bitten by it more times than I can count. Now I always keep this handy website ready: https://doesitmutate.xyz/
Dextro··on What every computer science major should know (2011)
And I've spent far too much of my time in my last project explaining double entry bookkeeping to coworkers to little effect. I had to watch has they re-invented the wheel.

Sadly I'm not that good point 1 (actually terrible at it).

Dextro··on Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
To be fair the system already has something like that. If you complain to the Home it'll ask if you want to provide feedback and give you a few seconds to verbally explain what went wrong.

I'm not sure if humans will then review that feedback of if it goes through a speech to text algorithm first but the mechanism for feedback is there.

Dextro··on Show HN: A minimalist Mac app that helps track, allocate, and plan your time
I usually forget my shortcuts and rely heavily in tools like alfred (or the Jetbrains find action shortcut). It reduces the amount of shortcuts I need to remember. It also reduces the likelihood of shortcuts conflicting if I only need a couple of them :)
Dextro··on Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies
For steam at least I think the problem would just go away if Valve would allow trusted third parties to activate a key without ever revealing it to the user. Then publishers could sell on any marketplace and the key would never be visible.

Sure, it's "fixing" the problem by making a massive move to control the market but if the games industry in general really wants it it's the only way I reckon.

Dextro··on Show HN: A minimalist Mac app that helps track, allocate, and plan your time
It would be pretty cool if there was a way to add tasks straight from Alfred
Dextro··on Jailbreaking Subaru StarLink
The author actually expanded a little bit on that by mentioning he doesn't know of any head units that will come out without plastic tabs breaking.

While you wouldn't fully void your warranty the dealer/manufacturer would be under no obligation to replace parts you broke.

Dextro··on PBS Launching Streaming Service on Amazon Prime
PBS Space Time is in part crowd funded via Patron though. I know I backed it for a long time
Dextro··on Programming Books You Wish You Read Earlier
Code Complete is a great book that thankfully my first boss required me to read when he hired me but I personally feel that Clean Code covers most of the same and is an easier read. Just my two cents thought.
Dextro··on Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break
I just created an account to thank you for making this game. I have been looking for a game just like this after reaching all the limits in Airport Tycoon ages ago.

And I mean literal limits. That game had a bug where flights were limited by an internal variable that was smaller than the capacity you could build so after a while the game would just stop and you would be unable to get any more use out of your airport. You could easily test this by cancelling one contract which would immediately make a new offer pop up.

Anyway your game looks just the thing I've been looking for since that old early 2000s game. I'll be throwing some money your way for sure.