37 karma · joined March 24, 2022
No luck, and not for lack of trying. I’m not entirely certain what feature is missing in WebKit that results in the hamstringed adblocking capacity, but it’s definitely much worse than you’d hope for. You can get adblocking extensions on iOS that will block ads on most websites, but when it comes to the truly shady ads that do not even try to masquerade as being legitimate, iOS falls short. It’s likely something I could handle on the DNS layer if I wanted to dedicate a day or two towards, but I’ve similarly travelled down that rabbit hole to no avail as well.
Their story repeats itself a dozen times over from my now-fragmented friend group from that time. Many young kids getting into ill-fated get rich quick schemes ranging from credit card fraud to refunding (mail fraud) all the way to sim swapping, blackmail, doxxing, and even real life violence and gang activity. A few of my earliest friends were just indicted for home invasions and armed robbery in some scheme to steal crypto. All of them from Minecraft, weirdly enough.
Anyways, those who didn’t end up in jail or “on the run” from participating in these stupid schemes, I tend to notice a common trend towards security related work. I know one guy who went from fraternizing with the same now-criminally-indicted people I hung around to working for the FBI’s cyber crimes unit (fitting, I guess). Another one now works with a defense contractor developing spyware, as far as I can tell. Many more work in different areas of cyber security and programming et al, including myself.
The cyber-crime adjacent to cyber security pipeline is very much so real.
Haven’t fully looked through the features/docs, so forgive me if my question is answered in there, but what does support look like for:
- Exporting to Swagger/OpenAPI Spec
- Exporting to generated SDK (I know some tools exist that can generate SDKs from OpenAPI/Swagger, so maybe some of these tools have licenses that are compatible with your product?)
- Support for URL path variables (e.g. `/users/{user_id}`)
- Support for URL query parameters (and filtering for common “noise” parameters, e.g. Google analytics)
- Support for non-JSON input/output (e.g. an endpoint that accepts multipart form data)
Awesome idea though. I’m definitely going to try this out. Beautiful UI and website too. I’m stoked to play around with this!
``` function foo () {} const foo = () => {} ```
Granted, I can’t see this specific feature really moving the needle one way or the other. But, internally, they might apply some sort of lens to their decision making that asks “does this increase or decrease time spent and eyeballs monetized?”, and if that is the case then there is a real argument to be made that this feature would not meet the standard for a “good feature”, based off that criteria.
Probably more likely that their entire UI is just so deeply fine tuned and A-B tested that any individual change to it has a lot of friction, lest they push an update that decreases watch time by 0.1%.
They must be doing some sort of on-the-fly streaming of these ads? It cannot be the case that they’re trying to actually transcode / edit all those different ad possibilities together.
I suppose the highest leverage card that legislators could play to try to hurt cryptocurrency would be to put a stranglehold on the fiat currency on/off ramps (eg making businesses like coin base flat out illegal), but even after doing that peer to peer markets would survive (albeit likely after also taking some damage to user base, maybe).
For me, there’s two big reasons for this:
Signal chats are E2E at all times, while Telegram is only E2E when you explicitly create a “secret chat” with whoever you’re conversing with. I don’t fault Telegram too much for this, because they still provide the option to use E2E for everything, but Signal gets brownie points in my book because they just do it by default without getting in the way of the User.
Secondly, as far as I know, Telegram uses their own in house encryption techniques as opposed to industry standards. I am not at all knowledgeable about encryption or cryptography— I only know what’s required of me in my job (basically the bare minimum), and so I don’t actually know whether this is anything of serious concern. It could very well be that Telegram’s encryption techniques are just as effective as the established norms, but I do see the general consensus trending towards “roll your own encryption = bad, use established norms = good”, which is primarily what I am basing my opinion on here.
To further detract from my own point, it actually seems like Telegram might be using “established norms” for encryption nowadays anyways [1], although I couldn’t really tell from the brief description I read on Wikipedia.
Overall, I think Telegram is perceived as being less secure than Signal primarily because of the reputation Telegram has for implementing their own in house encryption techniques, even if they don’t use those techniques anymore— their name has become associated with their known history of using ad hoc encryption.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)#Architec...
“PayPal combines your balance with the balances of other users and invests those funds in liquid investments. PayPal owns the interest or other earnings on these investments.”
(I can’t seem to find a way to hyperlink to selected text on iOS, so I’ve also included a screenshot of this quoted statement instead, below [2])
I assume that (unless stated otherwise in their agreements / legal documents) PayPal continues to apply the same policy to funds that are held by them in accounts pending closure for high chargeback rates. I could be wrong though, I just ctrl+f’d for “balance” on the first legal document linked on their site. Also, only applies for Canada, since I didn’t check any other country’s agreements (but my guess is that wherever it’s not expressly illegal for them to do so, they’ll use whatever money they’re “holding” for you as a revenue generating investment vehicle).
———
1: https://www.paypal.com/ca/legalhub/useragreement-full?locale...
Point is, at least this specific gripe, for what it’s worth I can see some valid justification for. And if this is new behavior that they intend to stick with, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did improve it over time (although I also wouldn’t be surprised if it stayed as much of an annoyance as you described— bing search in windows remains an unchecked crime against humanity to this very day!)
Then, as soon as I accept the cookie consent form, the page immediately starts to reload. I cancel the reload/navigation, find the close button for the chat widget, and finally start to scroll and read the content after 20 seconds of fidgeting with the page.
Immediately as I start scrolling, I realize the app bar header banner thing at the top of the page is actually being rendered with position: sticky; or some equivalent, and to top things off they’ve actually done me the favor of including some marketing banner ad about their “video developer report survey” being available, and they went ahead and attached that on top of their app bar, and also made it sticky. I was delighted to see that there was in fact no way to close that ad, as well.
Seriously— why do we make sites like this? The top 1/3rd of my screen is a useless banner and app bar that I have no intent to use whatsoever, the bottom 1/5th of my screen is that stupid chat widget, all I have is… let me do the math here… give or take half of my phone screen to actually read the content of the site.
/rant
I don’t expect that Australians hold a bond with Canada at large, I can’t very well imagine any of the Aussies I’ve met having a fond place in their hearts for Calgary or even the rest of Canada (read: Toronto, Montreal).
For example, imagine there are only three YouTube channels out there, The Spiffing Brit, Pewdiepie, and MrBeast. There’s $1,000,000 USD remaining in the pot for the month (or pay period, I’m not sure how regular the payouts are) after YouTube takes their cut. In sum total, YT Premium subscribers watched 100,000 minutes of content: 50,000 minutes to MrBeast, 40,000 minutes to Pewdiepie, and 10,000 minutes to The Spiffing Brit. The payouts would be calculated using:
revenue_share_ratio = sum_channel_premium_watch_time / sum_global_premium_watch_time
channel_premium_payout = global_premium_payout * revenue_share_ratio
So:
MrBeast: revenue_share_ratio = 0.50 = 50,000 / 100,000 channel_premium_payout = 500,000 = 0.50 * 1,000,000
Pewdiepie: revenue_share_ratio = 0.40 = 40,000 / 100,000 channel_premium_payout = 400,000 = 0.40 * 1,000,000
The spiffing brit: revenue_share_ratio = 0.10 = 10,000 / 100,000 channel_premium_payout = 100,000 = 0.10 * 1,000,000
A bit of a contrived and simplified explanation I’m sure, but as far as I am aware the formulae they use to divvy up the money between creators is as straight forward as it gets. Money out per creator = global money in total * (creator minutes total / global minutes total)
What you could hypothetically make if you were to follow my advice above is a hard question to answer, because it really depends on your skills, how you market yourself, where you market yourself, how much of yourself and your time you dedicate to trying to make online contracting work out for you, and your negotiation skills. Another big part of making better money as an online contractor is building a reputation behind your name (or rather, pseudonym in this case), and gaining repeat clientele / referrals. Personally, when I was trying to hustle with online contracting, it was a slow start— I didn’t make much for the first few months. This was because my skills weren’t very developed, I didn’t have a reputation or repeat clientele, and I didn’t have the best grasp on how to play ball and negotiate with potential clients. Over time, these skills developed, though, and I did make more money before moving on to other things.
For brass tacks specifics, I made piss-poor money the first 3-6 months I think— maybe $1000 a month. I was a new developer though, which definitely hindered my income at the time. Past that, my income slowly and gradually increased by (rough guess, it’s been a few years since I was doing this) around 500 bucks a month before eventually slowing down around 4-5K a month with around a year and a half of experience doing online contracting. I’m sure I could’ve made more if I kept at it and had stronger negotiation and soft skills to help me win new clients and retain old clients better.
Only the white collar professional world insists on knowing who you are before taking you on for a position. You can get away without ever telling anyone your name so long as you’re not trying to work for a FAANG and are okay with working as a contractor for less professional oriented markets or businesses.
I was also able to work without giving anyone my name when I succeeded in bringing a side project of mine to life as a real income source. This isn’t exactly something you can do by following any specific set of instructions or guidelines though, and only works if you have a good idea and can execute on it properly. When I was doing my side project stuff, I started out making around 2-3K a month, gradually increasing my income month over month until a peak of around 20K a month, after which burnout started to hit me and my income fell off. There is good money in “side projects”, but only if your idea is good, your plan is good, your advertising is good and your execution of all of the previously listed things is good. Unfortunately it’s a very hazardous path to walk, and there’s a lot of things out of your control that will aid you or halt you if you try to make something of your own come to life in this way. For me, what really helped the most with my side project was a combination of luck, first movers advantage, a colossal amount of time I was able to dedicate, and my hyper-specific niche I was working in. If you go this route, or try this route, I would recommend finding something very very very narrow in scope, and building from there. My side project was so specific that I only ever had about a few thousand odd customers, but those customers had an average spend that was north of a hundred bucks per person, so it worked for me.
Again, I dunno if this is really advisable for you, but it is just what comes to my mind when I think about ways to make money where your name doesn’t need to be part of the picture.
Good luck man… I don’t envy your position. I hope everything works out for you and your kids.
As a band aid solution, if you have someone or some people you want to get gifts for in the immediate future, I used ChatGPT to help generate some ideas for gifts for a friend of mine this Christmas. I just described the friend, their passions, etc and asked the AI to give me some ideas for gifts. From there, I had a good base to work off of. Taking the human element out of the act of giving something to a loved one is very 2022, anyways.
If you’re not into having a robot help you figure it out, my go-to categories for generic gifts are: cozy / comfort (eg lounge clothes, blankets, space heater), booze /wine, home decor (paintings, framed pictures, whatever).
On the topic of framed pictures, my girlfriend has this disposable camera, an old school Kodak. It’s small enough to fit in her purse so she tends to bring it out with her whenever her and I are on a date or going out with friends, whatever. She took a bunch of the photos she took over the past year and had them developed, then put together a little photo book album spanning all the stuff we did in the last year, which I found very sweet and very thoughtful. Kind of like Spotify wrapped, but less music and more pictures.
Anecdotally, I kind of relate (diagnosed & managed) ADHD as being somewhat similar to Bipolar Disorder, but applied to the attention span instead of to the mood. When I am capable of working (either once in a blue moon off my meds, or anytime I’m on my meds), I can clearly see that I outperform for my experience level. Without the meds, it’s the opposite. When I’m “on”, I’m more “on” than my colleagues, but vice versa for when I’m “off”. The peaks and valleys to my attention span and productivity are far more intense than my peers.
In my personal life, when I’ve had friends mention that they think they might have ADHD, I have always been very adamant that the very best thing they could do for themselves is to schedule an appointment with their doctor and ask for an assessment.
For me, the assessment was very simple— I was given a self-reporting questionnaire of 20 or so questions and told to monitor my symptoms and be mindful of what I was doing during the next week, and bring it back in at the end of the week for my Doctor to have a look at my answers / questionnaire. I did that, and my Doctor agreed that my symptoms were strongly correlated with ADHD, and gave me a two week supply / trial prescription of Vyvanse 20mg.
The first time I took my ADHD medication, it was like a light switch was flipped on in my brain. I was immediately so much more productive, less lazy, more capable, more focused, etc. After I finished the trial I scheduled another appointment and told my Doctor how I felt about it, which was that I felt it provided me a great positive effect. It was at that point that I was then “officially” diagnosed with ADHD, and six years (and a few dosage / medication changes) later, here we are.
Personal anecdotes aside, I highly recommend that you take the time to simply schedule an appointment with your Doctor as soon as you can. Once you have the appointment, the first step is complete and the process is more or less on autopilot from there (provided you show up to your appointment, that is).
If you’d like something quantifiable to help you determine whether or not you’re likely to have ADHD, you can take the questionnaire I took and see how you score [0]. I am Canadian, but I have an American friend who told me he filled out the exact same questionnaire when he was being assessed for ADHD as well, so I believe it may be standardized to some extent, at least for Canadians and Americans.
[0]: https://www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/ncs/ftpdir/adhd/18Q_ASRS_Eng...