gspencley

All I want to know is who tf is Phil Fish and what are his campaign promises?

(if the moment passes, when I checked out the website multiple people had typed messages along the lines of "vote for phil fish")

In order for anyone to be interested in something, you first need prospective "somethings" to exist. It's an old saying that 90% of everything produced is garbage. This applies to 90% of what is on social media, 90% of youtube videos, 90% of books and movies ... so 90% of the small web will certainly not be of any interest to most people. But there is a potential 10% that could help to renew interest in this style of website. We'll never know if it's never created.

And on a personal level ... I don't even care. I just like that people do things that they like. If people are building these websites for themselves and for no other reason than their own personal enjoyment, that's good enough for me.

> Don't get me wrong, I think the modern HCI on mobile phones is remarkably good.

One of the challenges of psychology is individual variation. Humans have more in common with one another than we have differences, but individuality is a major factor that forces psychologists to look at things statistically unless they are specifically trying to understand or control for individual variance.

I bring this up because my personal subjective opinion is that HCI on modern mobile phones is absolutely atrocious and I don't use a smart phone as much as most people as a result.

I think that when it comes interacting with a tool, what you are accustomed to makes a huge world of difference. I grew up with Desktop computers and laptops. With keyboards, in other words. As a coder and a *nix "power user", I like command line interfaces. I like being able to tweak and customize and configure things to my liking. When I have to use Macbooks at work, it has been soul crushing to me while for others they absolutely love the UI of MacOS.

I also remember the shift of the mobile revolution. A lot of us at the time were starting to get very annoyed by the creep of mobile design conventions making their way into non-mobile contexts. At the time it was understood that those mobile design decisions were "forced" as a result of the limitations of a mobile device, and it was clear that applying them to non-mobile contexts was a cost-cutting measure (mobile first, in other words).

Although well designed iconography can transcend language barriers and facilitate communication, I find that the limited resolution of a smart phone screen forcing designers to use glyphs instead of written text is very confusing to me. I mean, don't get me wrong, I would love to learn ancient Egyptian, but it is often far from intuitive or obvious what these hieroglyphs on the screen are meant to communicate to me. In other words, the iconography is not well designed IMO. At least not in a way that creates an intuitive experience FOR ME.

But a kid who grew up in a world of smart phones is going to be able to navigate them intuitively because they have years of learning what those esoteric glyphs on the touch screen are. They've had years of "typing" out text messages on a tiny touch screens.

On a good mechanical keyboard I can type upwards of 117wpm before I start making mistakes. When trying to text my wife one sentence I need to put aside an afternoon out of my day to get it written correctly. I could get started on how awful auto-correct is but everyone knows this to the point where it's become a cultural meme. Sorry, auto-correct turned "Can you grab me some milk while you're there?" into "fyi the police are here with a search warrant."

So yeah, big tangent off of "HCI on mobile phones is remarkably good." Maybe it is in a relative sense and is as good as it can get... I mean we've had years to iterate and make improvements. But I suspect that a lot of it has to do with people just learning and getting used to haphazard design decisions that just became the defacto for mobile because the tech industry (and business at large if we're being honest) loves to copy.

My intro to programming was that I wanted to be a game developer in the 90s. Carmack and the others at Id were my literal heroes.

Back then, a lot of code optimizations was magic to me. I still just barely understand the famous inverse square root optimization in the Quake III Arena source code. But I wanted to be able to do what those guys were doing. I wanted to learn assembly and to be able to drop down to assembly and to know where and when that would help and why.

And I wasn't alone. This is because these optimizations are not obvious. There is a "mystique" to them. Which makes it cool. So virtually ALL young, aspiring game programmers wanted to learn how to do this crazy stuff.

What did the old timers tell us?

Stop. Don't. Learn how to write clean, readable, maintainable code FIRST and then learn how to profile your application in order to discover the major bottlenecks and then you can optimize appropriately in order of greatest impact descending.

If writing the easiest code to maintain and understand also meant writing the most performant code, then the concept of code optimization wouldn't even exist. The two are mutually exclusive, except in specific cases where it's not and then it's not even worth discussing because there is no conflict.

Carmack seems to acknowledge this in his email. He realizes that inlining functions needs to be done with careful judgment, and the rationale is both performance and bug mitigation. But that if inlining were adopted as a matter of course, a policy of "always inline first", the results would quickly be an unmaintainable, impossible to comprehend mess that would swing so far in the other direction that bugs become more prominent because you can't touch anything in isolation.

And that's the bane of software development: touch one thing and end up breaking a dozen other things that you didn't even think about because of interdependence.

So we've come up with design patterns and "best practices" that allow us to isolate our moving parts, but that has its own set of trade-offs which is what Carmack is discussing.

Being a 26 year veteran in the industry now (not making games btw), I think this is the type of topic that you need to be very experienced to be able to appreciate, let alone to be able to make the judgment calls to know when inlining is the better option and why.

That's a good point, and P&T have said as much when it comes to Fool Us. That having a live audience was integral to making the show work.

However, as much as I'm a fan of Fool Us, there are things that bother me about the show to the point where I will walk back how I phrased things. It's not that magic "can't work" on TV ... it's that it is always, without exception weaker on TV.

Fool Us is a show made by magicians for magicians (and I'm not even talking about Penn & Teller specifically... I'm talking about Johnny Thompson, Michael Close and others who have worked as producers to make that show what it is) and even they can't always adhere to not cutting during key moments because the nature of television forces them to have to fit varied material during a rigid time block that can change even up to moments before airing.

Then, if you pay attention when watching the show, they use other editing techniques like "risers" for example (a type of subtle sound fx added in post) during the recording which changes it in ways that makes it different than what you would experience if you saw it live.

And then there are still examples of doing stuff for TV with a live audience, that could only be done in that setting.

I'll give you an example of such a trick that has been done on these types of shows numerous times. The first time I saw it performed by Derren Brown on one of his shows I was completely brain-fried.

The trick is that the magician apparently "steals" a spectator's ability to read.

How it looks is that there is a word printed in large bold letters on a piece of paper (in Derren Brown's case it was printed on a page in a magazine). This word is shown to the wider audience and to the camera so that viewers can see it at home. What's great about this trick on TV is that while it is being shown to the selected audience member on stage, the camera can frame it so that viewers at home can verify that they are seeing the same printed word.

And yet while you can read it fine, the spectator on stage sees jibberish.

This trick has been performed on AGT at least once. It's also been performed on Fool Us by a different magician.

It's a marketed trick that you could go buy from a magic shop and perform yourself. But you won't. Why?

Because it works on optical principle that requires lighting to be very controlled.

The creator of that trick even recommends discussing the mechanics of the trick with the film production crew when doing it on television so that the camera operators and the director of photography know how to make it look as good as possible.

In other words... it's a great trick to perform on a sound stage when producing for television. But it doesn't really work that well in other environments. To be fair, you could do it with a live audience in a theatre and there are a lot of stage illusions that need controlled lighting. So it's not like this is something that needs TV specifically, though it kind of still needs cameras to "sell" the illusion so the audience can see what is being shown to the spectator on stage. And magicians love to have philosophical arguments about what constitutes "cheating." You've got magicians like me who think that the audience can't trust TV, and so we're advocates for live entertainment. And then you have magicians who take the position that TV is just another venue, and that the venue is always a tool that is available to be exploited and manipulated because that's what magicians do. But that leaves room for using everything from manipulative editing to cgi.

This is why, in my opinion, while I will walk back what I said a little and rephrase it as "magic is weaker on TV" rather than "can't work", I still think that magic is way more impressive in person... as a result of knowing what's possible on television, even when there is a live in-studio audience.

> I understand the distinction you're making but I think it's so narrow that these overlap in practice

Entire books have been written about this, literally. So obviously we're taking short-cuts in a HN thread. Teller has said "all magic is a psychology experiment" so you're correct in that regard.

The point that I'm trying to make is that magicians rarely take risks in live performances. It is a job and there is a lot at stake. Obviously anything can, and does, happen, but there is a very important reason that magicians (not me, but magicians as a whole) distinguish between "psychological forces" and "forces."

It is that "forces" are considered to be sure fire... so near to 100% guaranteed that we consider them 100% guaranteed. Whereas "psychological forces" are well understood to be much less than 100% guaranteed.

Do magicians ever use psychological forces in practice? Sure. If, when it fails, there is an "out." Where if you saw the same trick performed several times, it would play out slightly differently each time. For example, let's say that I ask you to think of a card, and then I take a 1 in 52 odds guess at what you're thinking just in case I hit. And maybe I will slightly improve my odds by guessing at commonly thought of playing cards. Most of the time it's not going to hit, and that's fine because there's a fall back. But it's done so that in the event that it hits we have what looks like a bonefide miracle. Magicians do that occasionally.

But most of the time it's not that. Most of the time the magician is executing something that is considered to be close enough to 100% that no fallback ("outs" as we call them) is necessary.

Now obviously you could have some jerk physically grab the deck out of your hands or say to you verbally "I want the 8 of spades" when you extend the cards to have them remove one. That can happen, sure, and an experienced performer will be able to navigate the situation and turn it around "you see the thing is, I could guess what card you were thinking of ... 68% of men between the age of 24 and 35 name the 8 of spades ... we need a RANDOM card for this trick" etc. (And that example is valid, but traditional performer wisdom is once you've recovered get that jerk off the stage and move on as fast as possible because they've just proven themselves to be disruptive).

Yet another dig at Scrum and Agile that, in their very premise, are talking about something that is [at least supposed to be] anti-Agile and anti-Scrum.

Agile was a small manifesto that listed a set of principles, one of which was "people over processes." If the relationship between your PO and the rest of the team is not collaborative, that's not because Scrum has some dogmatic prescription somewhere in the Scrum bible that declares "though shalt grovel at the feet of your PO and accept their every command without question or suggestion"

If that's how your PO and team behaves, it's because that's how your organization set things up.

Ironically, the relationship described in the article describes "waterfall"; the very boogeyman that Scrum and Agile were a response to.

The role of PO is really just to have a final decision maker as far as how product development gets prioritized and represents THE person to ask when there are unclear product requirements. I mean, at the end of the day when you're trying to ship something, you can't always get everyone sitting down at a table to hash out how the product ought to behave, or whether or not a particular defect is severe enough to block the release.

Also as far as backlog prioritization and delegation goes, you could just as easily target the Scrum Master with the same complaints if your team has one. Although sometimes the PO and SM hats are worn by the same person ... I've seen that at a lot of companies.

I wonder if the article's author would take issue with the concept of a lead developer who has final say on what technical solutions get adopted when there are alternatives (including things like code conventions, 3rd party libraries etc.) because certain lead developers might not collaborate in the way that he thinks all should.

I'm still waiting for BeOS to make a come back

I think what you mean by "force" is what magicians call a "psychological force." This is when, through suggestion, the spectator will name or do something that the magician was trying to get them to name/do, while having it look like the spectator had a free choice, through no other means than applied suggestion. These do "work", but as you pointed out they are not sure fire. You get the best results when you can do it on a large group of people and you're upfront about the fact that it won't work for everyone.

Although in Derren Brown's case, one of the things that makes him a genius in the world of magic is that he reversed that dynamic. One of the brilliant things about Derren Brown's "brand" of magic is that by blending stage hypnotism and parlour tricks, he does a lot of things where when you think you're watching a demonstration of stage hypnotism, it's actually a parlour trick that is dressed up to look like stage hypnotism.

In other words, he might use a classic sleight of hand trick to do a "force" while finding a way to frame and present it as if he were using suggestion.

But stage hypnotism and suggestion .. .that's not magic tricks. So if Derren Brown is employing a psychological force, or doing a demonstration of suggestion that will work for the majority of the audience but not all ... that's not a magic trick. By definition, it is not a trick.

What magicians mean when they talk about "forces" are ways to make it look like the spectator, ANY spectator, had a free choice but it was engineered. A card force, for example, where you think you have a free choice of any playing card but the magician "forced" a specific card on you. Those are 100% guaranteed. They don't use suggestion, they use sleight of hand, and there is no person in the world that those don't work 100% of the time on unless the magician makes a mistake.

Back to Derren Brown, although him and Teller are close personal friends and they don't hate each other by any means... P&T have been very outspoken about the fact that they consider some of what Derren does to be unethical, because he presents magic tricks as if they are displays of stage hypnotism or suggestion. Like most "mentalists" he has flirted with a line that many magicians will not cross. Where he claims that by reading body language, or using applied suggestion etc. that he can do or know certain things ... when the reality is those things are executed via traditional parlour trick methods are often just classic magic tricks that most magicians know and can do but are presented with a new/different layer of lies.

So why doesn't magic work on TV ... well, you gave the answer by invoking Derren Brown. If he is doing these "forces" (which to clarify I think you mean psychological "forces") and they work 10 out of 10 times on television but they don't work on 100% of live audience members .. well then you know why magic is weak (at best) on TV ... because all we need to do is go ask 52 people to think of a playing card, and guess that they're thinking of the 7 of Hearts (for example), and then just only air the one take where the guess was right.

There is a YouTube creator named James Hoffman who is a coffee barista. And he was on an episode of Derren Brown's Trick or Treat (if I remember those details correctly). His story of being on that show is very illuminating. He talks about how he was shown 2 different tricks, the first one fried his brain, the second one was "meh." For whatever reason they aired the 2nd one that was "meh", but cut in the reaction to the first one where he was like "OMG OMG that was so amazing."

Why would you trust what magicians tell you, when they say they don't do shit like that on television? This is why, as a huge fan of magic, I kind of hate televised / pre-recorded magic. I have no idea what they did during the editing process. Whereas live, there are so many more restrictions and the audience has a much clearer understanding and impression of what those restrictions are. But on tv... anything is possible through editing and vfx.

My wife and I are part time magicians. In my experience, people who share your mindset become magicians.

At the risk of just repeating exactly what the person you're replying to wrote: The reason that non-magicians often feel let down when they find out how a trick is executed, is that it often feels like an insult to their intelligence. Magic toys with and exploits your assumptions. As soon as you find out that those assumptions were incorrect, and that you were just lied to by a prop (for example), your experience and perception of that illusion goes from "OMG" to "oh, that's all?"

What we want the methods to be is some grandiose Ocean's 11 like "heist" with tons of sneaky maneuvers and difficult sleight of hand ... but MOST magic tricks, including the ones that Penn & Teller fool you with (not the ones where they tip the method) are not that.

Penn & Teller have said themselves that (paraphrasing): "if the method is more interesting than the trick, the trick is not very good ... and that's when we show you the method. But the tricks we actually want to fool you with are just a bit of gaffer tape and a lie."

The fact that you say that you appreciate magic tricks that involve a lot of sleight of hand, or require technical mastery, kind of supports what we're saying. Most magic tricks aren't that.

To understand why, look at it from the point of view of a professional magician trying to pay the bills.

I can do card manipulation. I have a card manipulation act that I perform. It is by far the most technically challenging routine that I do and it has literally taken me years to get to the point where I can execute it and perform it. It's closer to juggling than it is to what most magic is (though it's still magic because I'm producing playing cards and fans of playing cards at my fingertips in short sleeves).

Now imagine that the majority of my act was that type of trick. I have bills to pay. I have crowds to entertain TODAY... and if I make just one mistake in a performance, the trick falls flat.

Penn & Teller tip cups & balls because the methods employed in that trick are genuinely entertaining to watch.

And the "let's have the audience lie"... I'm pretty sure you're referencing a segment in their 1990 TV special "Don't Try This at Home" where they had a large semi trailer truck run over Teller while surrounded by an audience who could see how it was done, which they tipped at the end. I wouldn't call that "lazy", I would call that using a medium to convey a message.

Magic doesn't work on television. You need to see it in person to really appreciate that it wasn't done with stooges/actors and camera tricks. That's a thesis that they have carried with them over the years. No one would do that "trick" in any other venue than in a television special. You can't get a big truck up on stage... and if you're doing "instant stooge" type of work, where people on stage from the audience are in on it ... at the risk of getting philosophical, they didn't even experience a magic trick. So it's not so much that the method was "lazy" ... it's that it was completely ineffective, and thus not even a magic trick for a certain group of people. Which was the entire point of the segment.

Agreed but even data sync wasn't unheard of before everything became a "web application."

I mean not to get really low level or abstract, but there's a reason that operating systems have the concept of a virtual file system. Where and how your data is persisted is something that can be abstracted from the rest of the system. Add CRDT or another conflict resolution solution to that layer and, I don't want to pretend that it's simple, far from it ... but it's not new tech is all I'm really saying.

Distributed systems were a very hot topic in the 90s. We even went through one very awkward and short-lived fad where we toyed with the idea of having a single application distributed across a network of computers ... not to persist data across multiple systems per se but for computation performance. This entire concept got abandoned when people realized how unnecessarily complicated it was (all cost / very little reward). But it was a thing for a while.

Even RAID distributes data persistence across physical devices and needs to care about data integrity as a result.

It just seems like the longer I'm in the industry, the more I realize that there is very little that is actually new ... despite the fact that we have a large number of enthusiastic young software developers who are looking at these concepts with starry eyes and youthful ignorance because they weren't around decades ago when this stuff was being researched, developed and experimented with.

It's funny how this newfangled "local first" thing is what us old fogies used to call just "applications."

I get that there is networking and integration that a modern application will typically need to do (depending on its core purpose), and syncing state to and from servers is a special concern (especially if conflict management is necessary) that native desktop applications rarely had to do in years past.

But at the end of the day, it sure does feel like we've come full circle. For a long time, every single application was "local first" by default. And now we're writing research papers and doing side POCs (I'm speaking generally, nothing to do with the author or their article) trying to figure out how to implement these things.

It looks like you got down-voted but I'm not sure why, because you're technically correct.

Rewind 20 years and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, TikTok, Discord and what we think of as the "contemporary Internet" didn't really exist. Google existed, and even back then SEO was a thing and people were talking about not putting all of your eggs into Google's basket when it comes to your business model (which I remember vividly because I started a business in 2003 running a for-profit website that would continue to exist until 2022).

Fast forward to the present and yeah users are opting in to "platforms" that require accounts that keep content within the walled garden. And Google search has declined in quality so much that I and many others don't use it anymore.

But the world wide web, as a technology that is accessible to everyone, that existed 20 years ago still exists.

You can still build a website

You can still create opt-in email newsletters

And there are a lot more people online today than there were 20 years ago, which in many regards makes it easier to reach an audience today than it did back then... even if how you would choose to go about it might differ because of user behaviour.

It's fashionable to be pessimistic towards the tech industry.. and I myself get pessimistic about it all the time.

But when I look back at the fact that I was able to, beginning in 2003, create an online business that allowed me to work from home and feed my family for 15 years at a time before YouTube existed and when the dominant social media platform was still MySpace ... and now I see content creators getting millions of views and some of them are just talking heads in a bedroom ... yeah the world changed but in many ways it's easier to reach people today than it was before this modern era of walled gardens and a google search that sucks.

Yup you misunderstood. I would be just as much opposed to inline styles as using class="" attributes.

With frameworks like Angular, you can create a component and bind CSS styling to that component in a way that you can select just your HTML tags directly ... like style div {} instead of styling .my-card {} etc. And those styles are not "global", they are scoped to only those elements that are referenced in your component's markup.

There are two ways that this can be implemented and frameworks often let you choose which one you want to employ: Shadow DOM or emulation. With emulation, the classes and selectors get generated for you at compile time so if you inspect the DOM you'll see tons of class="" attributes that were auto-generated ... but the developer never had to write them or think about them.

The result is code that is so much nicer to read and work with.

> and that's why that form of separation won out.

React won out because it has a low barrier to entry and is very unopinionated. That's not a bad thing. But don't pretend for a second that it won out as any kind of industry standard because it was technologically superior or was a better designed "framework" (again, it's not and never was a framework, it's a view library for creating components).

There are 3 broad concerns when it comes to programming for the virtual machine that we call the web browser:

- Semantic demarcation, which is what markup does: this is a paragraph, this is a header, this is card etc.

- Visual decoration and styling, what CSS does. This is how a paragraph looks, this is how a card looks etc.

- Interactivity and control flow: what JavaScript does. When the user clicks the button this is what happens.

Those are all distinct responsibilities which the browser handles separately natively.

We don't need to even start talking about MVC or OOP design patterns when talking about spearating your concerns. That's a basic engineering concept of isolating your moving parts to keep things simpler and allow you to change things in isolation without acccidentally breaking something else, which is the bane of software maintenance.

The notion that diluting separation of concerns is a design innovation that makes software development and maintenance somehow easier is truly baffling.

> In my view the only thing we should retain from the React era is JSX (for many reasons, true type-safety, autocomplete etc)

Warning: opinion incoming.

JSX is one of two reasons that I never liked React at all and wish it would go away.

I've been developing "web applications" since the latter half of the 90s. I've worked with everything from an in-house built dynamic template language (very similar to what PHP did in the early days) developed in C++ and served using CGI in Apache, to developing with PHP to Java Spring MVC to Django to modern frontend frameworks including both React and Angular.

JSX reminds me of what PHP was like in the 90s and early 00s. People adopted it widely because the barrier to entry was extremely low. We had all of these static HTML websites and "developers" could just go in and start adding control flow to those documents in order to add dynamic functionality. It was easy ... and it quickly turned into a complete mess so big that PHP ended up with a reputation as being a toy language that "serious programmers" wouldn't be caught dead touching. That reputation was a bit unfair but also kind of earned.

With the rise of PHP's popularity, the PHP "community" itself came to realize that they had a decent turing-complete programming language that they were working with, but that this idea of mixing business logic within HTML documents was a massive anti-pattern. It's ironic that what began its journey as a template language eventually realized that the best thing for the language was to stop using it as a template language, and to adopt different template languages such as Smarty in order to promote a separation of concerns between view / presentation concerns and business logic.

React was never created as a "framework." There are actual frameworks that are starting to come out that use React for its view layer, such as NextJS, but React itself is just a library that allows you to create custom components and then choose your adventure when it comes to what other libraries you want to mix and match. But because people reach for React to start throwing together dynamic frontends quickly, everything is compononent-first. So it actively encourages you to put business and integration concerns in what really ought to be your view / presentation "layer."

And JSX magnifies that problem by just being JavaScript. So, again, it's PHP all over again. You've got a very powerful turing-complete programming language that you intersperse with your markup and you get messes. Even in the most well-written, concern-separated React projects I still see a lot of "ugliness" that comes through with JSX.

I did mention that it was one of two reasons I'm not a fan of React, the other is that - again because it was only conceived of as a component / view library - there is no inbuilt view encapsulation / scoped styles. This problem is somewhat mitigated by CSS modules these days. But view encapsulation is something that I've always seen as Angular's killer feature - the ability to just style your tags directly and create component markup that is completely devoid of class="" attributes. Angular and VueJS actually trained me to hate 99% of class="" attributes and to think of them as a type of code smell... just because it is possible to create higher-level components that don't have any at all but still styling when needed.

I appreciate your response, and largely agree with you. But you can take security seriously without having a program in place to pay non employees for work they did without you asking them to.

Also, while I love companies that have bug bounty programs... I don't think any company without such a program is under any obligation to pay someone just because they volunteered their time without the company knowing about it or soliciting the work in any way.

So the fact that they did in this case, despite having no program, is what I'm choosing to focus on.

I want to share a personal anecdote to put my opinion into more perspective. I owned a small business operating a for-profit website for 18 years, for 15 of those years it was my primary source of income. I had no employees other than myself. It was just me on my own working from home. I earned enough to pay the bills, but I'm currently earning 2x what my business earned at its peak traffic by being an employee. So it's not like I had money to be paying people... it was pretty much an average software engineer's salary in terms of what I brought in.

Anyway, over those 18 years I had a few dealings with some white-hats who were very nice and clued me in to some issues. I thanked them and when they politely asked if "we" (because they didn't know any better) had a program it was a non-issue when I explained that I'm too broke as a one-person shop trying to feed a family to be paying out anything substantial but I could PayPal a cup of coffee or something for their trouble. But then I had a few dealings with complete shady assholes who tried to extort money out of me by threatening to exploit what they had found and go public and basically drag my reputation through the mud.

Experiences with the latter group make me sympathize a lot more with companies that decide to have a policy of just blanket not dealing with outside security researchers, to take the information and then deal with the fixes internally and quietly.

I've got a different take. If they're in the VC phase, that means they are not self sufficient. The amount of funding that they've raised is no indication what-so-ever of a) how much of that funding has actually been realized / received b) what their overhead is and c) what their overall financial picture looks like.

I do wish that more companies would take privacy and security seriously. And bug bounty programs are great. But they're not always within the budget of companies and the fact that they decided to award this security researcher regardless of having no such program is a massive win in my opinion and shows how much they value this particular contribution.

Even the USSR tolerated small business like mom & pop shops. Historically what we've seen in communist countries is that major production is under extremely heavy government control. Things like raw materials, shipping, energy, banking, agriculture and manufacturing are what the dictators care about.

This is echoed by contemporary left-wing thinking in "the West." Small business is often championed while "big pharma", "big tech", "banking" and other industry giants are derided and viewed as shady at best, criminal at worst (note I'm not calling all left-wingers communists! I'm just saying that this dichotomy in left-wing thought is very common... heck, it's even common among many right-wingers).

I'm not defending communism by saying that, while "black markets" undoubtedly exist, small trade is not typically looked at as "black market capitalism." As I understand it the idea isn't to prohibit trade itself but to "control the means of production" in an attempt to achieve prosperity by removing the profit motive from industry.

> While that is a crappy thing to do,

I haven't watched this particular channel so maybe it's obviously shady, but I'm curious: why is this conceptually a crappy thing to do?

I mean, if you take the IP of others and redistribute it verbatim then I definitely see the ethical issue. So if the claim is that he's reading peoples' comments or posts verbatim without credit then yeah that's crappy. Don't get me wrong.

But if all we're talking about is "mining" websites like HN for topics and then creating original content that covers those topics in a different format for a different audience... where's the issue?

A few years ago I was feeling pretty burned out in the tech industry and created a tongue in cheek "luddite" channel called TechPhobe where I took an overly pessimistic view of the industry. At the time Elizabeth Holmes was on trial and a lot my videos involved me reading ArsTechnica articles on the subject (credited) while offering my personal opinions on the matter. While not successful, those videos got more views than anything else I ever created. Was that a crappy thing to do? I didn't think so at the time and I don't think so now.

I didn't stick with the channel because I realized pretty quickly that if I'm dealing with burnout the last thing I should be doing in my spare time is focusing on tech content lol

Interesting. That might explain why I dislike it so much. As a middle aged person who grew up with an early iteration of the world wide web for a decade to a decade and a half before Twitter even existed, both smart phones and social media mark a turning point for me from what the Internet "used to be."

Twitter, in my mind (and maybe this is perception and not reality), ushered in infinite scroll and short bites of information. Twitter is to forums what TikTok is to documentaries. I see Twitter and the "mobile revolution" going hand in hand (something that left me behind because I still dislike using a smart phone, generally, and rarely do compared to most other people).

But I guess if you're a great deal younger than me, and you grew up with an Internet where Twitter just always existed, then it might represent some earlier version of the Internet that is drastically different from what you consider to be "contemporary" (though, putting the TikTok mention aside, I'm still not sure what that view of the contemporary Internet is if Twitter is what we're comparing it to).

I guess I'm just so old that I still see Twitter as a relatively new phenomenon. Very different from the nostalgia that I feel for what the world wide web used to be when I was young.

I've tried to "get" Twitter since the early days. I've created a couple of Twitter accounts over the years to support various creative endeavours but I've never found myself getting much value out of it as a user.

I heard that it's original use-case was that back 2008 there were no good ways to do group messaging over SMS on a cell phone. That's a problem and solution that I can understand.

But as a broader social network? I don't get it.

Things that bother me to the point that they are deal breakers:

- The character limits (there is nothing worse in life than reading through a x/N self-reply to read something long ... I'd rather file a tax return)

- Showing me posts from pages I don't follow in the feed (in 99% of the cases I'm aware of that page/profile already and have chosen not to follow it because I don't like them)

- Ads in the news feed

Some have said that they like Twitter for getting news. I have way better options for that.

I know that I'm not representative of the typical person, generally speaking, but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular. And it's not that I'm hating on something I don't know anything about ... I've honestly tried to use it and get value out of it, but I've never found anything of value on offer.

> Are there people who are not on said spectrum?

Yes.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD for short) is a neurodevelopment disorder. I'm quoting verbatim from Wikipedia:

"characterized by symptoms of deficient reciprocal social communication and the presence of restricted, repetitive, and inflexible patterns of behavior. Autism generally affects a person's ability to understand and connect with others, as well as their adaptability to everyday situations, with its severity and support needs varying widely across the spectrum."

Within this spectrum you have "high functioning" individuals who are capable of living self-sufficient, productive lives on their own (individuals with what we used to describe as having asperger's syndrom) and on the other end of it you have individuals who will always need constant supervision because they can't communicate effectively enough to hold a job, nor can they be trusted around kitchen appliances.

Common characteristics of ASD are:

- Regular difficulties in social interaction or communication (note the word "regular", everyone struggles from time to time. Someone with ASD experiences this permanently)

- Restricted or repetitive behaviours (examples: not using hand gestures when speaking, rocking motions etc.)

- Resistance to disruptions in routine (many people don't like routine disruptions, someone with ASD usually finds this to be crippling)

- Restricted interests (getting obsessive about hobbies but also really not giving a shit about things that most other people care about, like small talk or even major life events in the lives of loved ones ... like I couldn't give the slightest crap that my sisters got married or that I'm an uncle, and I like my sisters and their kids)

- Not enjoying human touch. I don't like being hugged or kissed, even by my wife or children. Even as a 42 year old adult, I hold my breath when I'm in the company of strangers because I find the idea of inhaling the air that they just exhaled to be gross.

There are more. But someone who is "on the spectrum" will exhibit many of these characteristics and exhibit them permanently throughout their lives. Whereas for "neurotypical" people, these may be fleeting or they may experience one or two in isolation... whereas ASD is a prolongued pattern of many of these characteristics together.

I don't expect to get a reply given how popular this article and discussion was and given how late I am but ...

What are the ethical considerations here?

The opening reply that kickstarted this particular thread was:

> You could say that about literally any shady business

But that user never bothered to qualify what exactly they consider to be "shady" about Mr. Beast's business.

Other than the fact that he has a hugely successful YouTube channel, I know next to nothing about him. I don't watch his content. From what I gather it is mass appeal entertainment.

I've read in some of the replies that he does philanthropic content and there are some un-cited claims that he "pockets" donations (that would be shady if true, but again - those claims were void of any links that would give them credibility).

Others seem to package-deal him in with all of YouTube creators, and they will cite shitty things that other content creators have done for clout as if Mr. Beast himself (or his company) did those things.

Most of the postings here seem to hate him for being successful at creating YouTube content that they personally don't like.

If you want to convince me that a YouTube channel is unethical, then point me towards the victims. Show me who he is hurting and make a clear case for how he is directly responsible for hurting them.

The irony is that the proposition that "someone wrote a book that proposed waterfall as the best software method" is itself a strawman argument.

To my knowledge, that has never been claimed.

Waterfall is what many of us old fogies in the industry experienced as the "defacto" methodology for a long time. It made intuitive sense that in order to design a build a project that you would first, you know, DESIGN it. Then you'd kick over that design to software developers that were expected to implement it.

Iteration in the design and development process, the idea of "people before process" and getting designers and engineers to collaborate early on etc. was not obvious. That's where all of Agile's "waterfall" talk came from. The fact that for a long time what companies were doing, while never exactly the same process as each other, was always waterfall-like because that's what made the most sense in an industry that was very new and in which no one knew wtf they were doing... so they took knowledge from other domains and tried to make it fit. That's a large part of what Fred Brook's The Mythical Man Month talks about.

It's only now that a new generation of developers has come up in a world where all they've ever known was "Agile" and "Scrum", that the world they know is so far removed from the "non-Agile" world that these books describe.

A colleague of mine the other day was talking about experimenting with something using the browser's `postMessage` API 8 years ago. My initial reaction was "did postMessage exist 8 years ago?" And then I remembered that 8 years ago was 2016 and it's already 2024. Many "experienced" people coding today have 5 years experience... and then they talk about concepts that were a reaction to how things were being done in the 80s and 90s as if those decades never happened ... because if they had even been born yet they were still children, so they weren't there to live that reality and the pain that what came later was a reaction to.

> Humans are the only animal who have the ability to destroy all other animals,

Even that is only theoretical. Let's say that we were to wipe out a great amount of life on earth with a thermonuclear war or something, a lot of life would remain, even if we are talking about bacteria and other microorganisms. But even deep sea life that exists below a certain depth would likely remain largely unaffected.

You're making an assumption.

I owned an operated a "free" adult website for 18 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income. During those years I always got a kick out of "there is so much free porn online, why would anyone ever pay for it?"

The way that my website worked was that it was very content-rich and content-focused. The content came directly from the affiliate programs that I was advertising for. Despite it being all advertising, I often got compliments that my website was "ad free." That's because I didn't push banner ads or anything intrusive. It was free content plus a text link that you could click on if you wanted more of that content.

The website shut down in 2022, and the bank accounts are all closed. But many of the affiliate accounts are still pulling rebills.

Most of the subscription based websites that were advertised were not websites that promised any sort of interaction with the performers or models. It was very obvious that you were paying for content, not social interaction and if anyone were ever confused as to that, the rebill numbers would have reflected otherwise. The fact that an indivdual subscription rebills is not a conclusive indication of a happy customer. But when so many in the aggregate rebill, it doesn't really paint the picture of a large number of people feeling duped. It's also worth noting that chargeback rates were nearly non-existent. I could count the number of times that happened over 18 years on one hand.

Now, if you've read this far thanks, I will acknowledge that we're talking about OF specifically.

At the risk of TMI, I subscribe personally to one adult content site: suicide girls. I am happily married, I'm not looking for any social interaction. It's purely eye candy. Many of the models on that site promote their personal OF pages, and while I haven't subscribed to any, I will admit that I've been tempted because they produce content that I like and I'm curious about what else they offer. I'm not at all interested in DM'ing them or trying to start some kind of parasocial relationship. I've watched a few live streams on SG, have even had some interaction in the chats in those ... but there's no desire what-so-ever to try and have some kind of "relationship." I've never tipped them or sent them money or gifts. Just the annually recurring subscription to the SG website.

People who are in difficult situations in life, have mental illnesses or physical disabilities may try and use online porn to fill a void in their life, and for some it may be unhealthy. People also stalk celebrities for the same reason. Yet we seem to make more assumptions and talk about it a hell of a lot more when it comes pornography for some reason. I'm not saying that there aren't social issues that are important to look at and talk about. But when it comes to porn there's such a taboo and willingness to shame others and make mass assumptions about their motivations even though we have very little idea of what we're actually talking about.

I miss forums too, and I blame the "mobile revolution" for their demise.

Forums are ideal for long-form discussion in text-format. But they don't really work well on mobile devices where typing is cumbersome and reading a lot of text to catch up on a thread isn't all that enjoyable.

And you remember when forums were trying to be mobile friendly by introducing things like infinite scroll? It just didn't work. Meanwhile "the masses" were flocking to sites like Twitter where content was delivered in short bites and they could doom scroll until they got bored.

Forums still exist they are just niche now and it's harder to attract a user-base when so many people prefer to use social media for their "discussions" because that is better suited to small talk on a smart phone.

> I comment everything that I think would be useful for me when revisiting the code a year later.

Do you code solo or do you work with a team? If so, how large is the largest team you've worked with?

I used to be a dogmatic "all comments are code smells" person and, to a large degree I still am. But working on a very (and I mean VERY) large code-base that is actively developed and maintained by hundreds of other software developers, I have relaxed my position slightly into the "if you need to do something weird, explain why" ... because a large legacy system that lives in a business environment of tight deadlines means that there are often weird things that need to be done to keep things moving at a pace that the business is willing to pay for.

Anyway, one of the many reasons that I argue AGAINST code comments is that the comments become part of the code and therefore require maintenance. But few people read comments unless they are stuck trying to understand something. This "psychological invisibility" is even enforced by the fact that most code editors will grey out comments in order to make them less distracting.

And therefore, comments can easily become outdated.

So I'm curious about your situation. Since you say that you like to give yourself useful context for "future you", what context does this process serve? Do you find it useful when working on a shared codebase with lots of other developers? Or is it something that only works well when there are few developers touching the code?

I don't like the idea that my car comes with a bug installed in it. By bug I mean the spy device.

While I can think of certain things that you might want to be able to do hands-free, these are mostly activities that don't have anything to do with the car itself. Hands-free radio controls, hands-free mobile calling etc. And I'd prefer that these features not be integrated into the car in a way that I can't choose to buy a car with, say, a different radio that doesn't have those features.

In other words, I can't think of a reason that a car should necessarily come pre-installed with any sort of microphone what-so-ever.

But the idea that there is not only a microphone, but that it is sending what it picks up to some remote server, is a notion that I am deeply uncomfortable with.

Most people view the inside of their car as being somewhat akin to the inside of their home. While people might expect less privacy in a car than in their homes, there is still an expectation of privacy to a degree. And that privacy expectation is typically more auditory than visual (of course you can get tinted windows but people expect you might be able to see inside of a car, but not necessary hear what two people are saying to one another).