jasonthevillain

Bigger than both of those groups are the people who don't realize they use RSS but listen to podcasts.

Better yet, I'll only read people who take the opposite approach.

Or that native apps are better.

Their problems with javascript aren't the technologies, its the ways they're abused. That's not a web problem or a javascript problem. I just kicked Facebook Messenger off my phone because every time I opened it, it would demand access to my address book.

Mozilla Persona tried this. It was a good user experience, but it never gained enough traction and eventually they shut it down.

The weird part about this article/thread is that the product didn't suck. It did a thing, and it was as good as the groups in your area.

Not at all. I also go to all sorts of concerts that don't allow cameras. It's the "how" that rubs me the wrong way.

Your state park would indicate "no vehicles beyond this point" and I assume if anyone starting driving on the hiking trail they'd be asked to follow the rules or leave.

That's different than insisting you hand over your keys in order to enter the park. That wouldn't feel quite right, would it?

I was about to buy Jack White tickets today and... I think I'll pass.

Don't get me wrong. I've seen several shows, including Jack White, that politely ask the audience to keep their phones away for part or all of the show. That's fine with me and it basically works.

But as much as I'd like to see Jack White again, I really don't enjoy being treated like a child.

I suspect he's consistently this awesome because he doesn't post that often, and can actually put time and effort into things.

I've learned the hard way to check Babel's output for sanity.

Sometimes its fine.

Other times it's madness or pulls in a massive polyfill. That's sort of inherent to making a transpiler: they need to match the spec. I usually just need one specific behavior that could be written in a 3 line helper function.

What's cool for developers like you and me is the AI/ML technologies are being commoditized.

I have no idea how to build an image processor, or a database, or cloud infrastructure, but I can use Pillow, Postgres, and AWS to build products on top of those capabilities. AI is starting down the same route, where the number of developers who use it will vastly outstrip the number of developers who contribute directly to it.

I've been doing the same, and wrote a small app that combines the feeds into a small daily email newsletter for myself. I wish I'd thought of this years ago.

The worst part about these feeds is they're infinite. Converting much of the same content into a digest that you can read in 30 minutes and be done with makes a world of difference.

Not at all. Most reporters have a beat. They accrue and build relationships with sources around a broad subject. If you're reporting on books (the author does), you'd probably know quite a few a librarians who you keep in touch with just to hear what's going on.

Be careful. A little backlash has been brewing all over the place. Some of it's about privacy. Some of it's about power and influence. Some is about addictiveness. It's not much today, but the gap between a little backlash and a popular one is smaller than we're inclined to think.

This thread is full of comments making wild assumptions about cities they've never visited.

Uber and Lyft made the same assumption about Austin--that they could get away with anything because people love their product. They lost.

Well, that explains the battery life tanking.

Yes (crazy CPU/memory/battery usage). I switched to using it in a browser tab and it's been much better.

I went back and timed it. The overhead is at _most_ 100ms in my use case (there's some ambiguity because of other problems with the async implementation, I suspect it's actually lower than this). Given many of the requests are 1s long and this is a background task, that's totally fine.

Agreed, testability is a big problem, I'll add a note. Thanks.

That's fair.

What got me thinking about these ideas were cases where having a distributed frontend felt overengineered. If you have problems where GraphQL makes sense, this would be a step in the wrong direction.

Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I've seen Jinja code that assumes "Jinja has this feature, so I should use it."

I'm not sure that's the template language's fault and more than Python is responsible for Python code that goes metaclass happy for no reason.

I agree.

Other people are pointing out that soundbites existed before Twitter, but it opened up the ranks of the public babblerati to everyone, and promoted it as a platform for public discussion.

I dropped Twitter years ago, subscribed to a collection of newsletters to fill the gap in technical discussion, and honestly, I think I'm actually more informed for it.

I really think this is a symptom of iOS not supporting free trials.

It depends what you're doing. It shines on low level features like authentication and image cropping, where I need ways to do these things, and I can use them across the board.

It breaks down when you have a lot of views and urls that are trying to stay close to their related models, but are too interconnected to have any real kind of separation of concerns.

I find myself using all of the above. There's nothing wrong with building a small site in a single app, or nesting apps to provide a little more structure for how they're connected or separated.

Well, the worst interview I've ever had was the ones where the interviewer wouldn't deviate from the script, even after he recognized that these questions made no sense for someone with my background (I was self-taught, and had never managed my own memory or written a sort algorithm. They were also irrelevant to the position in question).

It was painfully awkward.

It was also a fantastic way to accidentally discriminate against women and older candidates.

I'm not saying anyone should conduct an interview completely by the seat of their pants, but please don't encourage this foolish consistency.

Well, for example, "According to The Vaccine Research Institution..."

Now I just made up that organization. But how can an algorithm tell if it's a legitimate medical institute that develops vaccines or anti-vaxxer propaganda?

If the algorithm actually had a way to distinguish the two, it could blacklist bullshit just as easily as it could disclose it.

It looks a lot like the early days of commercial radio.

Cool! I usually suggest people pick up a book and try learning enough to build something simple first so they get a feel for what's involved and whether they like it.

I agree.

The open source analogy is actually pretty good. Some projects you know you how to go about right away. But when you're not sure, start anyway; rough drafts are like prototypes. Dropping a few (not all) can be part of the process.

Yes. The last thing the world needs is more half-baked self-promoting drivel.

I love writing. I put more than half of mine in a drawer. A drawer is a wonderful place for of unfinished drafts that aren't ready or aren't working.

I don't know if everyone should write; that feels presumptuous. But if you do, I highly recommend a drawer.

If you consider news only an entertainment product, that's a fair comparison. If you want to know what's going on in the world, it's not.

Nope. They're different tools. They do different things.

I find paper keeps me sane in a hyper-multi-tasked distraction heavy over-Slacked world. What made it work was an idea I borrowed from Bullet Journal -- every task needs gets finished, copied to the current timeframe, or deliberately abandoned.

You could easily do this in a text file or notetaking app, I just spend so much time staring at screens that it's refreshing to have a tool that isn't one.