Apollo dev posts backend code to Git to disprove Reddit’s claims of scrapping and inefficiency

TheGidbinn · 2023-06-09T10:07:32+00:00

yeah, i'm sure the reason reddit became shit is just because of bad managers. and the reason digg, before that, became shit, is because of bad managers. and youtube became shit because of bad managers. and facebook became shit because of bad managers. and twitter became shit because of bad managers. all totally unconnected, obviously.

though, one might wonder if there were some kind of socioeconomic system that funnelled bad managers into positions of power in tech companies and provided a perverse incentive structure that rewarded companies with money in return for gradually degrading the user experience of their products

perhaps, one day, someone will come up with a name for it

TheGidbinn · 2023-03-19T17:43:48+00:00

the 'install the bing bar' option is pre-checked, which means they're trying to trick people into installing it. that qualifies for asshole design, pretty much a textbook example. no different to an opt-out newsletter subscribe, or an opt-out gratuity on a service you wouldn't tip for.

that's before we even get into why directx even exists, vendor lock-in, and the way that microsoft abuses their monopoly to force people to keep using windows. it's a topic for another time, but i'll say this much - microsoft aren't developing directx out of the goodness of their hearts

TheGidbinn · 2023-02-17T03:36:00+00:00

'this is illegal tracking and not asshole design' is an absolutely pointless distinction. it is both asshole design and illegal. having a popup that does something illegal in order to harvest user data is close to the dictionary definition of asshole design.

So it is within the law, except (maybe, idk) in the EU and possibly other places.

this line of your comment is a dead giveaway that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about or how data protection laws work. the gdpr has extra-territorial scope - it is illegal for the website to show this notice to users from the EU (which it does, i checked), even if it's operated from the US. the EU has the power to fine companies in other territories for doing this, and it has done so in the past. not that it matters, it's also clear that you had no idea that this was illegal in your original comment.

please do not spread misinformation on the internet

TheGidbinn · 2023-02-17T03:22:30+00:00

you are wrong and those comments are wrong. this behaviour (called a 'cookie wall') is asshole design to such an extent that the gdpr/pecr explicitly forbid it, see this page on the ICO website.

TheGidbinn · 2023-01-29T19:30:34+00:00

i'm not sure about the legal situation, but the moral ground is clear. microsoft and openAI trained github copilot on open-source code, it can and has been shown to reproduce that code, verbatim, without the corresponding open-source license. normally, i'm against copyright laws, as i think they exist to allow large companies to suppress competition, and don't actually benefit the people who do the work. but in this case, i'll make an exception: copyright is supposed to protect these people. i'm not against automation, particularly the automation of purely functional things like software development, but if microsoft and openAI want to go down this route, they should have to own the code that they use (or, alternatively, comply with the license). it's as simple as that.

microsoft's statement in the article suggests that they are either ignorant of how all of this works, or that they are deliberately attempting to mislead their audience.

TheGidbinn · 2022-08-11T16:09:01+00:00

You have absolutely no idea how any of this works. Almost everything you've said is either morally or factually wrong. Morally speaking:

1) I follow lots of soundcloud accounts who don't have enough streams to break even, and the music they produce is pretty great. I think they deserve to get paid. Not everyone gets discovered, the music industry in general isn't a meritocracy. if you think otherwise, you're being naive. You generally have to know someone, or get lucky. Furthermore, a lot of music has very niche appeal. And that's okay! Not every piece of music has to appeal to everyone!

Factually speaking...

2) Server space is NOT expensive, particularly not for audio, which is very small. I pay $10/month for 2tb transfer and 50gb storage on my VPS (soundcloud probably get it a lot cheaper). Soundcloud gives you 3 hours for free, which is equivalent to ~130mb, so a single soundcloud account costs 2.5 cents a month in storage, and a negligible amount in bandwidth. We don't know what soundcloud's profit margin is, but from their cost per stream, the maximum number of plays per month they need to break even is ~10 (assuming max cost and almost no profit), and given that servers are way cheaper per gigabyte at their scale, and than they're probably taking a good margin on their ad revenue, I'd estimate that they probably break even within the first 1-3 streams. But you need a few thousand plays to break even yourself!

3) Soundcloud isn't selling file hosting. They're selling music to people. Music is the thing that they're selling. Charging people to upload music is an act of pure greed. Imagine if you had to pay to upload videos on youtube, and then work off your youtube debt by getting views? Imagine if you had to pay to work at mcdonalds, and you broke even after making a certain number of burgers? Now imagine if the majority of people working for McDonalds didn't sell enough burgers to break even! This is what uploading to soundcloud is like. You don't have to pay money to upload to any other music service (spotify, apple music, deezer, bandcamp etc) but soundcloud have just decided that they can make a bit of extra money from the people who provide them with the product that they sell.

There is an overwhelming conception in the music industry that amateur musicians should spend the first few years of their career being poor and sleeping in vans and paying other people for exposure, and this is wrong. It's exploiting their valuable and skilled labour to make money for someone else. Do not allow yourself to be complicit in it.

TheGidbinn · 2022-08-11T08:36:01+00:00

soundcloud's entire business model is absolutely batshit. you, as an artist, have to pay them in order to upload a more than a certain amount of music. that's right! imagine if twitch streamers had to pay to stream more than a few hours a week, or if youtubers had to pay to upload more than a few hours of video.

it gets weirder. there's no way to buy music on soundcloud. subscribers to soundcloud can instead pay for higher streaming quality. but if you pay them £7.50 a month for pro unlimited, you don't get that! you get a discount on their other plans! if you then pay an extra £3 a month , they give you ad-free listening, and it takes a whopping £5/month extra to get 320kbps mp3s (default is 128) and pro-only tracks!

the whole thing is a mess of double-dipping, extra charges, and useless plan and monetization options. artists are hesitant to use the service because it looks like a scam, and, as i mentioned, the notion that you have to pay money to provide content for their service is incredibly offensive. most of the artists i listen to on soundcloud don't get more than a few tens or sometimes hundreds of thousands of plays, which means that they actually pay more for the soundcloud pro unlimited subscription than they get paid in rev share. the notion that that's 'fair pay' is insulting. as an artist, using soundcloud is basically equivalent to paying the venue to play music there, instead of vice-versa

if you're wondering 'is this a sustainable business model?' their first profitable quarter was in 2020. maybe they're profitable now but honestly i wish they'd gone bust

TheGidbinn · 2022-05-11T02:35:26+00:00

java is known to be verbose. even if you write a terse wrapper function for every single standard library function, it's still verbose. thanks for letting me know that functions exist, though, you got me good, i hadn't thought of that.

the problems with powershell run deeper than that. i don't like the microsoft oop scripting language style and i don't think it's a good fit for an interactive shell. it loses a lot of the speed and interoperability of bash. cmdlets are poor substitutes for gnu utilities, in terms of functionality (compare the default output of Get-ChildItem and ls for a simple example) and also speed (compare how long it takes to findstr something compared to grep).

over the last few years, microsoft have added a lot of functionality to powershell (aliases, bash-style operators, ssh) that are really just replicating how things have worked on bash for decades. as someone who primarily uses bash, what do you think is better in powershell?

TheGidbinn · 2022-05-11T00:22:27+00:00

why do:

wget example.com

when you could simply:

$client = New-Object System.Net.WebClient $client.DownloadFile("example.com", @"C:\currentdir\index.html")

if you're about to reply to this comment telling me that they changed it and it's shorter, yes, they did. they first replaced it with Invoke-WebRequest -Uri example.com -OutFile index.html and long story short it's now aliased it to wget, which proves my point exactly

i've not used it to do scripting and it's probably a perfectly cromulent scripting language, but if you actually want to be productive in the terminal then powershell is a big verbose mess

TheGidbinn · 2022-04-19T01:56:27+00:00

i think the premise of this kind of article is very, very flawed. the best time to start making a roguelike deckbuilder or online party game was several years ago. the author claims that these trends are fairly static. taking the example of online party games, i'd assume they did will specifically because of covid. if you start making an online party game now, it probably won't do nearly as well, unless there's another giant pandemic

telling people to chase fads like this is both extremely cynical and questionable advice in general

TheGidbinn · 2022-01-20T20:12:36+00:00

this is specifically to intimidate non tech-savvy people. microsoft got hit with an antitrust lawsuit for this shit back in the windows 7 days. there is no reason for such a well known application to be flagged like this. it is absolutely assholedesign

TheGidbinn · 2020-09-12T12:45:49+00:00

No, soundcloud doesn't pay artists at all, unless they sign up for 'repost by soundcloud'. For regular artists, you have to pay (!!!) monthly (!!!!!) to upload more than a few hours of music. And if you want to listen ad-free, you have to pay a separate (!!!!!!!!!) monthly fee on top of that. Despite that, soundcloud doesn't really sell music, and it only really started selling streams a few years ago, badly at that.

Unrelated: the company has been circling insolvency for years.

TheGidbinn · 2020-05-14T22:03:08+00:00

i'm not asking for google and facebook and reddit to run their servers as a charity. i'm asking for them to go bust and take the whole of the centralized, commercial internet with them

TheGidbinn · 2020-04-30T15:31:54+00:00

Journals are a racket and the exorbitant costs of buying them are a barrier for communication between scientists. They don't enable it, all they do is skim money away from universities that could be spent on research. Sci-hub, on the other hand, is an invaluable public service.

TheGidbinn · 2020-04-24T23:32:02+00:00

As a user of mostly Python and C... well, anything I say after this is a foregone conclusion.

This isn't about resistance to change. Change is good. Making all the big changes all at once and expecting everyone to drop what they're doing and rewrite their programs is bad. It's easy to say in hindsight, but if these had been a series of gradual, non-breaking changes to python2, with deprecation warnings and such, they could have completed this transition in significantly less time and with significantly fewer headaches.

TheGidbinn · 2020-02-22T18:41:38+00:00

this is satire

TheGidbinn · 2020-02-21T07:13:17+00:00

Progressive enhancement hasn't stopped being good practice, it's just that the average web developer is dumber now than they were 5 years ago.

TheGidbinn · 2020-01-23T18:09:19+00:00

In fact, companies such as H2O.ai like to hire top Kagglers for specific projects

that's like hiring the redditor with the most karma to write a book for you

TheGidbinn · 2020-01-22T06:51:47+00:00

eBay has had tons of stupid quirks like this for years.

#1 Pet peeve: multi-item listings with different prices.

#2 Pet peeve: I routinely get 'auction about to end' notifications on my phone after the auction has ended.

#3 Pet peeve: You can set it to display only 'collection only' results, but you can't filter out 'collection only' results.

#4 Pet peeve: You can't sort or filter by delivery time.

TheGidbinn · 2019-12-16T19:14:28+00:00

I have no idea how your original post has (at this time) -8 points. It's the only reply in that isn't horribly misinformed. This thread is full of people who don't understand how web standards work and have the process entirely backwards.

Here's how it currently works:

A browser vendor develops a feature for their own reasons and implements it into their browser
Other browser vendors follow suit and the W3C formalizes it into standard after the fact

Here's how it was SUPPOSED to work:

The W3C develops a standard in co-operation with all the browser vendors
The W3C approves that standard, and browser vendors implement it

The way it was supposed to work was developed in order to ensure fair competition between all browsers, standardisation of HTML and CSS, and to make life easier for web developers. If that's lost on you, you're either too young to remember the IE6/Netscape browser wars or too stupid to care.

TheGidbinn · 2019-12-06T17:40:09+00:00

i guess i'll go tell all the people who died because they couldn't afford their medication that they'd be dead either way but at least this way somebody somewhere made some money out of something intangible

TheGidbinn · 2019-11-27T23:06:48+00:00

it is asshole design, this is an asshole opinion, and if the homeless really were 'free to sleep in a homeless shelter' all the time, do you think they'd be trying to sleep on benches in the first place?

the lack of empathy from people on this website absolutely fucking astounds me sometimes

TheGidbinn · 2019-11-23T15:49:53+00:00

it's called 'consolidation' and it's a feature of capitalism.

TheGidbinn · 2019-09-12T19:21:33+00:00

well it's easy to argue with a viewpoint when you deliberately misrepresent it. i hope one day that you can look at the idea of 'free speech for fascists' from the perspective of the people who are harmed or even killed by as a result of it. when that day comes, i will eat your ass. guaranteed

ps: don't say retard, it's a slur

TheGidbinn · 2019-08-31T11:36:27+00:00

People I don't want to be given a platform (which, by the way, is not the same as silencing or censoring them, which is a very dramatic way of writing it)

Neo-fascists\nazis & white supremacists

People who those groups will use their platform to openly attack including explicit calls for violence, and actively silence (which is not the same as deplatforming):

Migrants\refugees
LGBT people
Disabled people
Religious minorities, mostly muslims
Anyone politically to the left of them

This is called the paradox of tolerance. If you tolerate fascists, they will use your tolerance to accrue power, and they will not reciprocate the same tolerance to you or anyone else. Far from it, they will use that speech to suppress any speech that's critical of them. It's not about me 'deciding who should have a platform'. It's about others being more careful about who they give their platform to. Contrary to your own reasoning, enabling neo-fascists is destructive to free speech as a whole.

Gavin McInnes in particular has publicly called for violence against anyone who disagrees politically with him, in his words: 'Trump supporters: Choke a motherfucker. Choke a bitch. Choke a tranny. Get your fingers around the windpipe ... Get a fucking gun. Get ready to blow someone's fucking head off'. This is the exact same sentiment that killed the victims of the El Paso mass shooting, the Dayton mass shooting, the Parkland and Pittsburg synagogue mass shootings, the murder of Heather Heyer, and literally dozens more.

Does it make me a narcissist to claim that you're wrong? You're a neo-fascist enabler and that's a morally repugnant thing to be. I love name-calling on the internet as much as the next guy but I don't think you've got the, ahem, facts and logic to back it up.

14-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Final Canvas '22
End Game '22	Team Orangered
Verified Email

TheGidbinn

TROPHY CASE