Thanks for the reply. Sounds exciting, looking forward to the future of Modular!
40 karma · joined June 7, 2019
"The rationale is not to customize the ranking according to the implicit interests of the user, but to offer a mechanism to define multiple rankings, plural, open and explicit, for only if it is so, can it be trusted."
Please put opinions in a blogpost and uphold the (reasonable) norms of the research community, for only if it is so, can your work be trusted.
Good idea. In addition to better metadata for boring titles, penalizing articles which have a low completion rate would probably help
Good luck! I'll keep an eye on the progress
I see you're using React on the frontend. And, you only have an iOS app but not (yet) an Android app. Are you not using React Native? In that case it's fairly easy to target both platforms. I know RN is a bit of a shitshow but not supporting the biggest mobile platform in the world is arguably worse
> We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI.
If you're taking this metadata directly from the articles I'm skeptical about the accuracy/completeness. Anyway, it's better than nothing I guess
> It's not a perfect filter by any means, but keep in mind that even if an article title looks like clickbait it will only rank highly if users are finishing it
This is something, but still high-quality articles with clickbait titles will outcompete high-quality articles without clickbait titles. Incentive still being: write clickbait titles. Anyway, if someone is 0.25x as likely to finish a bad article having clicked it, but 10x more likely to click a clickbait article, you still have a major problem beyond "not perfect", imo
I know it's a big ask for you to solve every single problem with online reading/discussion but this one is so tangled with the rest it's kinda hard to ignore.
Today's AOTD: "If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich?"
From the past few weeks, some selections:
- "Meet the social media echo chamber that is radicalizing you & your friends. - Alexa Rohn" - "Racism Is Terrible. Blackness Is Not." - "A White Woman, Racism and a Poodle" - "The American Press Is Destroying Itself" - "Dear Fuck Up: How Do I Figure Out What I Want in Life When Every Day Feels the Same?" - "You Should Be Feeling Miserable" - "Tom Cotton: Send In the Military" - "The Sickness in Our Food Supply"
I'm sure some of these are great, but be honest: did the title have anything to do with people clicking through?
Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)? Skimming through the frontpage I either have no idea what an article is about or it appears to be some lowest-common-denominator politics article. With reddit I can go read my niche subreddits with topics I actually care about (yeah, I know you don't have enough users to replace this quite yet, but still). With no other hooks for following my interests I feel like this is still abusable with clickbait titles.
Could you have like moderator-written abstracts for the AOTDs, at least? Even better would be an abstract for every article (not sure how you would accomplish this)
Couple questions
1) You mention a paywall, but your video says that users who sign-up before paywall stay in forever. You honoring that (the video was posted 5 days ago)? I see that the median comment count on your site is about 3 so I should hope so
2) How exactly are you paying these authors? We can post articles from anyone and then trust you're able to get in contact with them and hand them their money?
1) Echoing the other comments in this thread about uneasiness with feature creep
2) Wouldn't have been a breaking change if the language didn't have nil from the beginning
Nim interests me but this nil business seems questionable to me.
Just found this comment from the language creator,
https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/6638#issuecomment-487...
"We need the nil state to disarm pointers but that only means these can be nil and so would require a nil check before deref. Doesn't seem to be too hard nor too cumbersome."
Seems a bit dismissive to me
Just checked Github for some of the top Nim projects.
Forum software: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum/search?q=nil&unscoped_q...
Web framework: https://github.com/planety/prologue/search?q=nil&unscoped_q=...
Twitter front-end: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/search?q=nil&type=Code
These uses of "nil" don't appear to have anything to do with systems programming.
You just mentioned using "nil" in a simple example which doesn't appear to be related to systems programming.
Our environment/context influences our behavior. Saying, "well, technically any given person could ignore their environment/context and act however is optimal!" isn't very helpful.
This article is acknowledging the environmental/systemic/contextual reality
What's up with that?
Crowds, for example, behave similarly even if you shuffle around who is in the crowd.
> However, it is possible to find many pages with annotations criticizing the page content for lack of references or sources. I see that as an attempt to implement fact checking.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that if we only threw more manpower at Wikipedia we could incrementally improve it to perfection. That seems implausible to me for various reasons.
From the essay I linked,
"A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I'll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality."
> I would want to have an encyclopedia which compiles facts, rather than opinions. Am I missing something?
That 'fact' and 'opinion' aren't clean categories.
For anyone interested in reading more Wikipedia criticism, I recommend this essay by Jaron Lanier
https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...
Anyway, for fast SPAs, here is a useful comparison: the "RealWorld app" demo.
I would urge everyone to look at the Lighthouse audits for these three implementations:
React/Redux: https://react-redux.realworld.io/
Angular: https://angular.realworld.io/
Vue: https://vue-vuex-realworld.netlify.app/#/
Svelte/Sapper: https://realworld.svelte.dev/
Solid.js: https://ryansolid.github.io/solid-realworld/
This is just a demo, of course, but it is close enough to be representative. From just this simple demo we can already see significant differences: Svelte and Solid.js are much snappier. The author of the article, Rich, created Svelte.
Of course, this is just talking about performance, not yet getting accessibility, navigation, transitions, etc right.
This seems to me to be the key phrase.
I sympathize with all the "JS has gone too far" people in this thread. I also hate bloated JS apps. But, "almost all SPAs are bloated trash" is a distinct claim from "SPAs are intrinsically trash".
In my experience it is possible to have lean, high-performance, accessible SPAs without too much developer difficulty. Svelte (created by the author of this article) is one framework in this space, although I think there are better approaches.
"It's often useful to take context into account when evaluating statistics"
As a long-time watcher of JRE, this just isn't true. He clearly sometimes prepares, and he does push back (especially if it's on a topic he's into). He has explicitly said that he used to push back too hard in the past, leading to argumentativeness, bickering, etc.
For some strong push-back towards a scientist deluded about the effectiveness of Aikido leading into an awkward argument see https://youtu.be/06olLYiMvM4?t=8985
On the recent podcast with Bernie he started pushing Bernie on his drug legalization stance. He didn't push as hard as I would like, but he definitely pushed.
He had a podcast with Jack from Twitter after which he received feedback that he didn't push Jack hard enough about censorship. He apologized for that, got Jack on again, but brought on someone with more knowledge about specific instances of censorship to make that case (Tim Pool).
Etc.