Every time someone actively approaches you with an offer to spend their real energy and lifetime on your thing, It's almost always about leverage in some way.
At least if there is actual work attached to it.
Money alone might be paid by people that just have too much of it or want to feel better about something.
But if they actively involve themselves to a degree that goes way beyond scratching their own itch, something's up.
You might get lucky and find a just genuinely good person, but you might also not.
That's because we haven't yet started to laugh people out of the room that get uneasy and complain when the rate of updates of something starts slowing down.
Dude that animation sucks so much I could not believe that there was no way of disabling that without disabling _all_ animations.
The fact that it makes content move in a way that is illegal breaks my mind.
You try to check "is this the end" and it all starts moving.
What the hell. Why.
I kinda forgot just how much I hate this animation. Thanks for the reminder.
Why, google.
Hm not necessarily. You "just" need to get code onto the system that is somehow being loaded into the gpg process or has the ability to load code into a gpg process.
Of course, still orders of magnitude harder than just modifying the js bundle, but not a counter-example.
Snake oil is just a fundamentally wrong label for the issues OP is seeing, even though those issues are of course real and relevant.
Isn't non-web-based cryptography affected (as per this take) in the same way but with extra steps?
A sophisticated actor might as well also control the application that ends up on my device.
It does not have to be the same delivery mechanism as long as I did not write it myself.
So all cryptography is snake oil?
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I mean I kinda sorta get the point and there would be some merit to discuss there, but the weird framing makes that very hard to do.
Of course it's easier to break web e2ee if you are for example cloudflare compared with someone also having to compromise the Debian repos.
Do I need to be entertained by my butter knife, mop or screwdriver?
I really don't think that "keeping people entertained" is a sensible goal within the context of building software as tools and not software-adjacent Art.
Which is not to say that I would not want a great and polished experience, but that is not equivalent to "being entertained".
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It would be nice if not everything one interacts with would try to get some sort of emotion out of me. Bring back being bored.
Especially not on the sea-lion infested HR-world Internet, in which trolling has evolved to exploit good faith directly.
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In fact, "being overly hostile" is exactly how you probe to see whether your suspicions are correct.
Sea lioning exploits the gap between what would be a real human thing to do and what still passes as what a real human would do.
So to get useful data, you need to modulate parameters so that people end up outside of that gap window.
Essentially you're probing for genuine Human-ness by creating a context in which the bad faith action space is no longer overlapping with the genuine human action space.
This works, because genuine humans have this amazing ability to reconcile and actually genuinely resolve misunderstandings. Something that is fundamentally impossible for bad faith actors.
(This should not be understood as "just be overly hostile" because simply being a dick doesn't provide any data at all.)
I don't want my image editor to feel like something in a creative manner though.
I want it to rotate an image by 90° when I tap the button that does that.
See, this is exactly my point when I say that animations are no end in themselves.
They serve a supporting role to better get the actual job done.
The actual job is not "feel" it is "do". For vibes, there are movies, Art, and AI hallucinations.
Of course, "feel" can greatly enhance the "do", but only if it takes the back seat, which is exactly what I just said.
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The age-old debate "form follows function" vs "form over function", essentially.
One of them is correct tho, because in the real non-ZIRP world, correctness is defined as "achieves a tangible goal".
Which is not to say that stuff optimizing for other goals would be "incorrect" or "worthless", but it exists in a different category from "software". More like "software-adjacent Art".
The distinction being made based on "what is the primary goal we want to achieve here"
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Related:
Also caused by ZIRP but differently, we have that problem that software trying to invoke feelings usually does so because it wants to sell you something or has any other style of goal that might not be aligned with yours.
So that adds yet another layer.
Pure utility cannot scam people into stuff they actually didn't want to do.
That is a valid opinion to hold, however, the question of "what is wrong with X? Y is outdated and over" is
a) a different statement from "I prefer X"
and
b) pretty low effort, trivially to Google (or ask AI) and generally a bit on the ignorant side
A better reply would not just have said what it said but contained actual wonder about the topic. Like this, it's just indistinguishable from engagement bait.
"We cannot risk looking outdated". So weak management, probably.
But also talent availability I suppose. If there's a new trend, the pool of people you can hire include many that are in on that trend.
UI frameworks too, probably. The modern thing™ does the modern thing™ and you do want to be on the modern thing, because you fear that only that receives security fixes or whatever.
To be fair, that might not just have been the CO2 dropping, but also the pattern interrupt + giving you both an easy and face-saving way out of that situation.
Benn unfortunately is one of those people that actually feel stuff, which is a trait that easily gets exploited by bad actors.
Indeed, he shot himself in the foot there pretty bad, but I would argue that that was just the result of successful Agitation.
I would personally strongly prefer being in the same room with Benn compared with Andy, because one of them is authentic, while the other is calculating. Though, arguably, Benn has been catching up on that lately too.
But yeah, taking stuff with a grain of salt should be the default regardless of the person speaking.
I am wondering though if that was really the world we were living in just before chatGPT launched, given that the whole OSS thing was already harvested super hard.
The "mentoring opportunities" often were just extracting free consulting out of experts + building a portfolio for getting hired by big tech.
Would we really want to go back to that?
So I agree with the idea but only in a vacuum, I think.