That’s what I always say. Targeted advertising should be illegal. Contextual advertising is acceptable.

If I’m on the star trek wiki, serve me ads for star trek, sci-fi, and whatever. You don’t need to know anything about me specifically.

We’d still need to do something about like ads that take up too much space, hurt page performance, or introduce malware, but removing the stalking would be an improvement

Healthy parenting would go a long way. See some of the other comments in this thread.

You can also have settings on your local network. If you’re afraid of your kid casually finding something inappropriate, you can set that up stuff locally without involving the government. A determined kid will still find a way to get stuff, so this is more a safeguard against accidental discovery.

Investing in quality education would also benefit everyone.

the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn.

This is false.

Parents have a number of options available to them that do no need to involve the state.

Using AI seems extremely excessive compared to a regular interface or human.

Yes. However, it’s an assumption they honor those requests and don’t try to track you anyway.

Plus Google isn’t the only company trying to do individualized targeted advertising.

First, individually targeted advertisement should be illegal. Instead of trying to figure out who I am and serving me ads based on that, they should only be able to look at server side facts. What is the video? This is how television and radio ads have worked for ages. You have a video about SomePopBand, you advertise concert tickets. You have a video about bikes, you advertise bike stuff. You don’t know who I am. Suddenly, the motivation for most of the privacy invading, stalking, nonsense is gutted.

Some people would still block those static ads. If they showed some restraint, I think more people would accept them. But that’s a sad joke- no profit driven org is going to show restraint.

Secondly, if they can’t ethically run the business at a profit, the business probably doesn’t deserve to exist. That or it’s a loss leader to get people into the ecosystem.

I already barely watch YouTube. It’s mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.

Targeted, individualized, advertising should be illegal. This will gut a lot of the motivations for the privacy invasions and data harvesting. This is how advertising worked for thousands of years. I think it could continue to be just fine.

The amount of resources humanity is spending on targeted advertising is extremely depressing when you consider the opportunity cost. There are thousands of engineers and product managers that spend all day on this stuff instead of anything useful.

I know pre 1.x.x is kind of a wild west for versioning but uh is there any logic to the version numbers here? I’d think a new feature would be a minor version bump, not patch

I’m out of the loop. What?

People need to stop using Instagram.

I forgot last.fm existed. I sort of used them years ago.

They did not handle separate artists with the same name gracefully at all. The page for a riot-grrl adjacent band and an Australian rapper (?) got merged and the fans were going at it on the page.

Looks like it’s still kind of a problem

Still happily buying music on Bandcamp. Their discovery stuff is pretty good, too.

There was an article going around a while ago that was arguing most users these days, including the youth we often stereotype as “digital natives” who “get computers”, don’t understand file systems. They might not even know they exist as a concept.

Which makes sense if you’ve only ever really used modern UIs. You don’t have to know anything about files and folders. I bet a lot of people don’t even know they exist in any meaningful way.

Most users are shockingly ignorant, and a lot of them are not really paying enough attention or interested enough to learn much.

Opportunity cost is a pretty well understood concept.

Like, inagine you have 100 gallons of water. You could use all of them to water a single water intensive plant that will feed one person, or you could use them to water a whole farm that will feed a community, and also let people drink and bathe and stuff.

The resource is limited.

Sure, we could try to get more of the resource and make it less expensive, but we should also not squander what we have.

I’ve done a lot of “then go get approval from the stakeholder to go ahead with this bug/problem”.

If product wants it out now now now they can sign off on it not working on mobile, so when their boss has a fit about it I can point to the conversation where Ryan said it was fine.

I’ve mostly worked at smaller companies though.

I was a full time test engineer / QA person for a while. My motto quickly became “nothing ever works”.

Pretty much any ticket behind a static copy change would have some problem or oversight. Sometimes even those would (did you account for very narrow view ports?)

Good developers would take this feedback gracefully. “Shit, you’re right, I need to account for mobile users.”

Bad developers would get defensive and upset. “We barely have any mobile users (me: did you check?). Alan already approved so I’m merging. I don’t want to waste time on this”

Been seriously thinking of switching to linux for my desktop. I mostly use it for games. Today I was looking at mods for Mass Effect, and the mod manager says in all caps - LINUX IS NOT SUPPORTED :(

There’s probably going to be a lot of that sort of annoyance for years.

Here there’s main. You branch off. Do your work. Make a PR to main. Build passes and someone approves, merge to main. Production release is done by tagging main.

The branches are short lived because the units of work we select are small. You have like one pr for an endpoint. You don’t wait until the entire feature with 20 endpoints is ready to merge.

Seems to work fine. I think this is different than trunk based development but honestly I’m not sure I understand trunk.

I already commented somewhere else in this thread, but I’ve been just buying music via bandcamp and I feel pretty good about it. If I buy about one new album a month for $8, it’s cheaper than spotify and after a couple years I have a large library of music I own outright.

This works with my listening habits, which are something like “I have like one new (-to me) album on heavy rotation every couple of weeks”. Someone who’s more of a “i never listen to the same song twice” extreme wouldn’t have as good a time.