249 karma · joined August 7, 2020
The web is full of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript you can see the source for; and for which you can be sued by copying for your own commercial gain. By your definition, websites are open source; and yet, they are proprietary work. Something having its source open doesn’t make it Open Source.
This kind of doublespeak reeks of Reddit-grade corporate astroturfing.
The Open Source licenses are defined and protected in a certain way. You can’t just say “oh, me and my friends don’t think of it like that” and expect to be correct. I can’t build an app scamming people out of currency by abusing ISO 4217, and then excuse myself under “me and the people I know disagree with ISO”. OSI protects the licenses, the Vegan Society certifies what ‘vegan’ means, ISO does ISO things, and so on.
It’s okay to admit we’re wrong or ignorant, so I won’t pretend I’m an expert in this area. I also wouldn’t call anyone Stallman just because they are defending a term that deserves protection. “Source available” but not under the terms of an OSI license is NOT compliant with the term.
I resent some LLM implementations on principle, but decided to give these code helpers a try. What I found was they’re reasonably bad, and I kept telling them the solution doesn’t work, only to be presented with a little tweak.
So I don’t see the point of outsourcing my thinking, I’d rather remain intelligent and do the search/try/tweak on my own, instead of pretending a half-assed LLM is genius.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have good use cases, or aren’t an improvement on previous tech. But we definitely should stop calling them mind-blowing. Jaron Lanier had long ago predicted we’d willingly downplay human intelligence to pretend AI was… I.
But… in real-life UX, we all know the users will just hit the most obvious CTA to accept all cookies because their experience is being effectively blocked.
The implementation is technically okay, but reminds me of r/MaliciousCompliance.
So a bunch of websites don’t actually need a cookie banner, as long as they’re not using non-essential cookies. You could easily get consent for marketing/tracking cookies in an unobtrusive way.
Instead, a lot of websites must have seen a drop in conversion because no one wants to interact with these awful cookie popups that have a hundred toggles.
AFAIK the page-blocking cookie banners don’t just convert worse, they’re actually not permitted (you can’t block the experience to force consent).
On my end: unless your website is very important to me, I’ll just refuse the cookies or hit the back button and load the next search result.
As an engineer-turned-manager, I am fascinated by how poorly other departments handle planning (at our company). Devs are just amazing at getting things done when left alone, provided they know why feature X is important.
See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35051753-developer-hegem...
It’s also high time the anti-nuclear crowd goes back to school to learn about statistics. I’m sure coal and gas closing at 1k€ are much better for the planet and the citizens of France /s