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tolmaskyon Simplicity is an advantage but sadly complexity sells better (2022)

There is also a secondary effect where more complex systems generate a bunch of surrounding materials: tutorials, videos, etc. It also creates job security for the people who learn it, as they have a necessary skill and responsibility in the company, as opposed to something that "just works" which doesn't require that.

tolmaskyon Tesla failing to deliver Semi-trucks on time to PepsiCo, Sysco, UPS, and Walmart

I think this is a pretty clear misrepresentation. The entire point of those forum posts is that software engineers are angry at managers promising timelines that aren't connected to reality: they want the unpredictability of the task to be transparent. That is actually entirely consistent, and arguably the exact same frustration, that they have with Musk -- a manager-type promising outrageous deadlines, repeatedly, with apparently zero ability to learn from past misses. The anger is with continuing to promise these outrageous deadlines, and furthermore the frustration of being called out if you are skeptical of them, not with the fact that he misses them. It's a one-to-one, 100%, absolutely identical complaint.

tolmaskyon Apple says it spent three years trying to bring Apple Watch to Android

"We couldn't figure out how to make a bunch of people buy this ugly thing unless they were already neck-deep in the ecosystem. For three years we tried to make it legitimately useful in its own right! Or at least somewhat attractive. You know, so that if you wear it in a photo it doesn't immediately date the photo. Then when you look at a nice photo where everyone is dressed up there isn't this ugly thing on your wrist that screams "2015!" or whatever. But yeah, this is a tough nut to crack. I'd go so far as to say it's an AirPower-level problem in terms of difficulty."

tolmaskyon On Leibniz Notation

Is there a good explanation of u substitution (or any other integral stuff that makes use of the denominator) using non-Liebnitz notation? Is it just that ∂1 is actually ∂/∂1, and thus you can begin using ∂1 the way you would have used ∂x?

tolmaskyon Deciyear Calendar

This is worse than my 365 month calendar since it still has that ugly 5-day “year end”. In my calendar, every month is exactly one day long, no exceptions. Leap years simply add an extra month.

tolmaskyon OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

Perhaps the AGI correctly reasoned that the best (or easiest?) initial strike on humanity was to distract them with a never-ending story about OpenAI leadership that goes back and forth every day. Who needs nuclear codes when simply turning the lights on and off sends everyone into a frenzy [1]. It certainly at the very least seems to be a fairly effective attack against HN servers.

1. The Monsters are Due on Maple Street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_...

tolmaskyon Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

How is it different than someone making a funny video where they impersonate David Attenborough? Those aren’t generally considered disrespectful, right?

Like, I get the potential scale is different. But this is some joke video, not someone trying to actually replace David Attenborough or something.

tolmaskyon I think I need to go lie down

Can someone with an API key try making a rectangle labeled "URL", and a bigger rectangle underneath it, and then see if it is smart enough to make a simple browser out of that?

tolmaskyon HTML Web Components

I can't tell if people who champion web components don't understand why the React model took off, or purposefully pretend to not know why since web components don't really solve most of the things people using React care about, and thus look bad in comparison.

This article is a good example of this. For starters, the "one shell component" thing is kind of a red herring. There's plenty of React components that interact with children, and you can clearly make web components that also "hide all the details". So this seems to be more of a "general" good practice they want to encourage, than anything specifically tied to React or Web Components in particular.

Critically however, the whole idea of "hey, web components still look good before JavaScript!" is either intentionally obtuse or really misses the point of React -- React can have a better non-JavaScript initial render, thanks to SSR, which is significantly harder to do with Web Components. I don't really care if <user-avatar><img></user-avatar> "falls back" to some lame Web 1.0 rendering if my SSR-ed UserAvatar looks identical to the fully "active" component on first paint before any JavaScript runs. That is one of the main selling points of React and React-like systems today. You can't just ignore that completely and expect to convince anyone who's currently using that sort of system. But I understand why they don't address it, since the only real answers involve using some sort of build system with Web Components, which they've also decided to say are the worst thing ever. So their only choice is to compare non-SSR Web Components to non-SSR React Components. And, I dunno, maybe they're better than the way we did things 8 years ago when that was the case? I'd have to think hard about that purely academic question.

The funny thing is that these are often the same people that would push for as little JavaScript as possible, and yet Web Components are fundamentally tied to JavaScript. Whereas React-style components can actually generate fully static JavaScript-free pages if you want to. This sort of situation springs up a lot: Web Components go on and on about not being "shells single components", and yet React-style components make it so much easier to deal with children. You aren't forced into the ugly slot system which immediately removes the "illusion" of it being a "real" HTML component, and is easier to deal with in the catch-all case too. Not to get into another huge differentiation, but I also personally prefer a more "functional" approach of writing a single render function vs. dealing with a bunch of lifetime callbacks to track the changing states of attributes and children.

tolmaskyon Mastering DOM manipulation with vanilla JavaScript

These are great. It's unfortunate that if there's any minor bugs there's no way to really keep in sync though, for example the security issue mentioned in another comment in these comments. It would be cool if these examples could be wrapped up into some sort of convenient "package" or something like that, such that you could easily know if there are any updates and grab them, as well as just make it easier to grab these functions whenever you need them instead of copy-pasting them...

tolmaskyon X plans to use payment, phone and ID verification to stop bots, $1/yr fee

The entire post is written in a “had they done this” format, and contrasted to things like charging for Twitter Blue. Clearly this is meant as “why didn’t they do this instead,” not “this is what they should do now.”

tolmaskyon X plans to use payment, phone and ID verification to stop bots, $1/yr fee

It doesn’t have to do that, this is a way to get additional revenue. One of my points listed here is specifically that it is fully orthogonal to all existing revenue streams. My suggestion was not charge for edits and remove ads.

tolmaskyon X plans to use payment, phone and ID verification to stop bots, $1/yr fee

The monetization scheme for Twitter seemed so obvious to me — just charge to edit tweets. Something like $1 for a “5 edit bundle”. I would have easily probably ended up spending more than $8/mo with that. Beyond being just plain bad ideas, each of these new fees they’ve introduced leaves no ability for users to spend a lot of money. They're all one-time payments. And edits in particular would work great because:

1. It’s not functionality people were already used to getting for free, so they wouldn't feel like something was being taken away.

2. It's something people have been, quite vocally, asking for for a very long time, so you know that they, well, actually want it.

3. It doesn't lend itself to complaints because typos feel like they're “your fault,” and so it feels more understandable to pay to "fix your mistake."

4. And it can be billed as a pure convenience: "you can always just delete the post and repost it". Even though this misses the point that you lose your retweets, it just adds to point (3) that it feels like a hack they're allowing you to do to fix your mistake.

5. It doesn't negatively affect any existing user dynamics. When you charge a subscription, it's natural to feel like you shouldn't see ads anymore. "What am I paying for if I still see ads?!" This feature is completely orthogonal to every other existing revenue stream.

If they would have just done this at the beginning, I think people would have actually cheered it on, and it doesn't affect any existing user dynamics. No devaluing of blue checkmarks, no risking losing tons of users by making it a for-pay service, and again, there's no hard ceiling on how much revenue you can generate from a single user.

And guess what... a year later, they can still also offer a subscription that gives you 20 edits a month, or 300 edits a year if you pay all year up front, or something like that. So you can still get your subscription payments. And critically, unlike previously, you know what you're paying for. The messaging is simple and you can spin it as a user-friendly move: "Oh wow, the new edits feature is so popular, we decided it made sense to give people a way to get edits cheaper. Our new subscription pricing saves you money!"

tolmaskyon Apple will no longer fix the $17,000 gold Apple Watch

And yet Siri on it remains just as useful.

tolmaskyon Why not punish families? A challenge for consequentialists

If you take the consequentialist point of view ("The suffering you save must exceed the suffering you inflict"), then isn't this trivially ruled out by his own admission that "What’s clear is that when rulers enforce family punishments, the ruled shiver with terror"? If on top of all the excess suffering caused by the collateral punishment, you add that the entire population lives under constant fear, then it seems difficult to imagine that you are "obviously" compensating for this by saving enough suffering to make it worthwhile. I certainly consider the psychological effect of living under such a system as suffering. This is without even getting into the disproportionate amount of "false positive" suffering from identifying the wrong criminal and punishing the wrong family vs. just punishing one incorrect person.

tolmaskyon macOS updates for Apple Silicon Macs are larger than reported

On one of my computers Xcode always seems to download... twice. I can't for the life of me figure out whether its doing some sort of "serial update" where if I miss a version in-between, it first downloads and installs that version, then immediately starts the latest one, or if its just a weird bug where it installs the latest version twice, consecutively, for no apparent reason. I've seen other people report this as well. I find it hard to believe its the "serial" explanation, as one of the few benefits of just downloading the entire program every single time is that it shouldn't need the intermediate diffs. So yeah, I have no idea what's going on. My other computer seems to not have this happen... yet?

tolmaskyon Not Using Zoom

The page suggests using Jitsi instead (https://meet.jit.si/), which is apparently open source and can be self-hosted. I've never used it, just pointing at what the page suggests.

tolmaskyon Apple stole $100s from me, Customer Service says there's nothing they can do

It is a natural consequence of the services being bundled together, and with Apple not telling you what the cause is. The response from the person who says they used to work at Apple is informative: https://old.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/15gechw/apple_ju...

tolmaskyon Apple stole $100s from me, Customer Service says there's nothing they can do

If you read the rest of the thread, its clear the entire account was locked. That's why they were told to get a new account. The expectation is not that he use one account for email and another for... new movies?

tolmaskyon Apple stole $100s from me, Customer Service says there's nothing they can do

No, it isn't true of any other provider, that's the whole point. If my HBO Max account detects a fraudulent charge, my completely unrelated email provider doesn't then irreversibly disable my email account and tell me to just set up a new one.

Yes, if my non-Apple email service "locks me out", then the same would happen as here. The point however is that:

1. Usually this would only happen if something weird specifically happens on that account. For example, if I am paying for an email provider and my card is declined. Notice that with the Apple case, a problem in something completely unrelated to email can cause this (including apparently the card being flagged for a fraudulent charge on some unrelated service).

2. Even then, usually the next step is I am told that that happened. Notice that in the Apple case they won't even tell you what the situation is to give you a chance to remedy it.

3. Finally, you then almost always have a way to remedy the problem. For example, by giving them a new credit card. Notice in the Apple case they insist that the account is disabled forever.

Do you see the difference? It's not in the "what happens if your email stops working" part, it's in the "what leads to your email not working anymore" and "how do you fix your email" parts.

tolmaskyon Apple stole $100s from me, Customer Service says there's nothing they can do

If they disable your account, you're not going to get any new email. So if a website uses your email address for 2-factor-auth, then you are straight out of luck, as I'm sure they also use that email for any sort of account changes. To be clear, "don't use email for 2-factor-auth" isn't a real answer here, there are plenty of services that don't give you an option.

Additionally, you can't send email. That's also a pretty important part of the whole "email" thing. Any ongoing discussions will just be cut off.

Seems pretty walled garden-y to me, considering the entire framing of this is that nothing bad was done with said email. It was because Apple has a unilateral switch that turns everything off if anything bad happens to an associated credit card. That is to say, if your credit card number is stolen, completely outside of your control, this could happen to your email. I'm not aware of any other email service where that is the case.

tolmaskyon Apple stole $100s from me, Customer Service says there's nothing they can do

Forget the movies you lose, if your AppleID is disabled, you also lose:

1. All your emails if you use iCloud for your email, and thus potentially locking you out of any other sites that use email as a 2-factor-auth.

2. All your backups on iCloud.

3. All your data on iCloud.

4. Every single login you have where you used sign-in-with-Apple.

5. Every app on your phone that you have a paid subscription for.

6. The fallback login mechanism on any of your Macs where you used iCloud as the login fallback.

The list goes on. They ask you to tie your life to iCloud. They tell you to make backups on iCloud. According to the reddit thread, this can happen if there was a fraudulent charge made with a credit card associated with the account... Not even done on the account. So then all of your data disappears?

tolmaskyon Apple stole $100s from me, Customer Service says there's nothing they can do

Something that doesn't also potentially destroy:

1. All your emails if you use iCloud for your email, and thus potentially locking you out of any other sites that use email as a 2-factor-auth.

2. All your backups on iCloud.

3. All your data on iCloud.

4. Every single login you have where you used sign-in-with-Apple.

5. Every app on your phone that you have a paid subscription for.

6. The fallback login mechanism on any of your Macs where you used iCloud as the login fallback.

The list goes on. They ask you to tie your life to iCloud. They tell you to make backups on iCloud. According to the reddit thread, this can happen if there was a fraudulent charge made with a credit card associated with the account... Not even done on the account. So then all of your data disappears? Is that enough wrong here?

tolmaskyon Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

I am not HN, you'll find no comment of mine defending that (despite, for the record, Apple's system being less bad than this one, while still bad).

NOW would be different because, again, this system is worse than Apple's, and because Chrome has a larger influence on the web than Safari (on Desktop, on mobile its a foregone conclusion since you're not allowed a different engine other than Safari anyways, so the real fight there is allowing third party engines).

Does this answer your concerns? I can't tell if you are defending Apple and Google, or are against both but are using this what-about-ist accusation as a way to vent general frustration.

tolmaskyon Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium

Mozilla should call for Google's removal from the W3C over this implementation of Web Environment Integrity. "But Chrome has 65% market share, what good is the W3C without them?” If Google can take unilateral action to fundamentally change the basic principles of the web, then the W3C is already useless. This will give Google a clear choice: if they want to maintain the idea that the W3C matters, they should withdraw this implementation.

It is unbelievable that over the course of 3 days, the potential future of the web has been put in such dire straits. There's already an existing, far less troubling (while still bad), proposal in the form of Private Access Tokens going through a standards committee that Google chose to ignore. They presented this proposal in the shadiest way possible through a personal GitHub account. They immediately shut down outside contribution and comments. And despite the blowback they are already shoving a full implementation into Chromium.

What we need is real action, and this is the role Mozilla has always presented itself as serving. A "true" disinterested defender of the ideals of the web. Now is the time to prove it. Simply opposing this proposal isn't enough. This is about as clear and basic an attack on what fundamentally differentiates the web from every walled garden as possible. If someone drafted a proposal to the W3C that stated that only existing browsers should be allowed to render web pages, the correct response would not be to "take the stance that you oppose that proposal," it would be to seriously question whether the submitting party should even participate in the group. Make no mistake, that is what is happening now.

tolmaskyon Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed

I guess I just don't see this "insane level of fraud"(?) By this I mean that it doesn't really affect my experience on the web, even if I were to entertain the idea that it does, in fact, exist. When I think about my annoyances with the web, they aren't about how I am drowning in link farms or whatever -- ironically my true consumer annoyances are quite the opposite: all the big players have stopped providing me value. Google shows me entire pages of ads before any relevant organic search results. Reddit killed my preferred third party client. Meanwhile Twitter, well, you know. Nothing proposed here does anything for that, and I get that it's not trying to solve that, but my point is that none of my "top 10 problems with the web" are being solved by this humongous change. My problems just have nothing to do with sock puppet accounts or whatever. Perhaps that's a top 10 problem that advertisers have with the web, but that's not really super compelling to me (the same way my problems don't seem to be compelling to them). If anything, as stated in various places, these hyper centralized ID systems increase the likelihood that my problems will never be solved. If it becomes even harder than it already is to make a new browser or a new search engine, then I guess I'm just flat out of luck. The era of "reasonable search results" will be solidified as a temporary blip on the timeline of the web.

tolmaskyon Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed

> a web that is populated by identified humans (and their authorised proxies!) is likely to be the "cleanest", most ideal web space we can see (a web full of sock puppets and link farms is not ideal).

Depends on your definition of "ideal", and whether you even want to strive for such an "ideal". To me this sounds more like a "sterile" web. If we temporarily assume that humans won't do what they're experts at (finding ways around that system too), and take at face value that this will lead to this "cleanest" web space, we are still assuming that that's what consumers want. I would argue that the very existence, and success, of the web in the face of approximations to this "ideal" space in the native-app-world disproves this theory. We have the App Store, we have lock-down control and identifiability for apps, and yet the web still manages dominate commerce in the face of this. Consumers still end up going to the web, and arguably increasingly so with things like Figma. So where are the cries for this "sanitized" web? The demand certainly doesn't appear to be on the consumer end, that's for sure.

tolmaskyon Safari 17 Link Tracking Protection

Can't trackers change to using a credit-card-scheme-style "dynamic" tracking ID system (you know, the same way you can tell if a credit card is Visa or MasterCard)? For example, if instead of looking for "gclid", a site looks for "f(query-key) == 39", where "f(query-key) = char1 + char2 + ... + charN % 64". Under this system, each advertising provider simply needs to own a mod number instead of a query-key (Google would look for 39, Microsoft for 23, etc.). You can then have infinitely many tracking keys, that don't even need to be consistent within the same session. At this point, you would probably feel a lot less confident about arbitrarily removing these from the URL, since it becomes increasingly difficult to know for sure that you aren't breaking a legitimate use-case query parameter.

tolmaskyon Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

> Remember the G4 Cube? Remember MobileMe? Remember Ping?

I think it's weird to compare failed products within a company (and minor products at that) to failed companies. I think you may have not even listed some of the more notable ones (The Apple LISA, the iPod HiFi). But he wasn't betting the company on the Cube, or MobileMe, or even Ping. These were low-stakes (and arguably low effort) bets taken within a company that was simultaneously having insane success in other departments. The G4 Cube came out between the iMac and the iPod (2 years after the iMac, 1 year before the iPod). That seems like a damn good product-line, and if you could choose any one to miss on, it'd be the niche prosumer device, not the two consumer devices.

> Remember NeXT? > Remember he got kicked out of Apple?

These could be interpreted either way. It seems all part of the larger "Apple story arc", and more comparable to Tesla's shaky middle period, than as binary successes and failures void of any surrounding context. However, I do mean that it could go either way. I wouldn't fault someone as judging them as true failures separate from the later Apple success.

tolmaskyon Has Xbox lost the console wars?

To be clear, “mobile” is a distinct category from “handheld”. I am not OP, but to answer your question, I think the idea is that to bridge the gap with mobile gaming the Switch would have to… actually compete in that space. IOW, it has nothing to do with sales. Not many people are considering whether to buy a Switch instead of Candy Crush on their phone. If you ask me how many toasters you have to sell to prove to me you’re in the mobile gaming space, I’d reply that you’re committing a category error. You could sell 1 trillion toasters and still not succeed in “bridging the gap between making toast and mobile gaming”. This is of course a hyperbolic example, and gaming is a gradient with more grey areas and plenty of overlap, but arguably “mobile gaming” in particular is so different from the rest that it is fair to categorize quite differently. There is a good argument that it should if anything instead be compared to gambling from a business model perspective, or social media / content consumption given its expected use environment (on the bus, waiting in line, in bed, etc.).