doctorOb

I had a friend call me–practically in tears–because YouTube removed his highest viewed video game montage for violating their hate speech policy. Context: WWII tank game playing as the Germans, usually with some old german language folk song in the background. It's algorithmically removed and most likely algorithmically reviewed upon appeal, and there's basically no recourse for him. Meanwhile, similar videos by other creators have their content left up.

I have to remind him that, unfortunately, YouTube has no shortage of content and absolutely nothing to lose from false flagging a subset of it, compared to the pushback they get for letting something truly horrible slip through the cracks.

Hey, those are my weekend plans you're talking about!

I've had a few Big Macs lately, and from my perspective the meat is perhaps the least consequential part of that sandwich, both flavor and texture-wise. At one point I asked for 4x extra cheese (gross, I know) and after the first few bites, that too seemed to be pushed aside in the palate by the sauce. I can almost guarantee you I would not notice a difference if they swapped the beef for beyond meat.

A PagerDuty family account?

K-12 is a terrible system in the US which seems entirely reliant on the desperation of people who devoted 4-8 years of education to retain their jobs in a very limited market.

A teacher friend's district claimed to be investing in training their teachers, but all it boiled down to was a high level overview of google docs, with no guidance on adapting a curriculum.

> a "panel" of "experts" discuss how "issue x will destroy america."

My friend who worked in news regarded this as the first incarnation of "fake news".

Or, more charitably, the 90s?

From what I can tell, New England IPAs–especially the coveted ones such as Heady Topper–really only work when you can control for freshness.

As soon as the beer gets canned its got 2-4 weeks where you can drink it and say "wow, that's amazing". After that you'll have it and think "ok, a bit overhyped".

Distributing beer throws freshness out the window. A liquor store may put it in the back for a month before they throw it on the shelf and then your prospective customers won't get the best impression your beer can offer, as it's tarnished while waiting in that can. So now there's this surge of brewery controlled distribution where you make these pilgrimages to buy a bunch of beer that they'd canned only a few days prior, attracting people to enjoy it when it tastes its best and spread the word.

This is a bit like saying "why would someone take a ferrari to the corner store, a honda sedan works just fine". The implementation of the task at hand is without consequence, their boss just wants X to happen even if it gets done by hand. I love these opportunities because I can use a language that I'm not getting paid to write for the 99% of of my day job. Coincidentally this happens to be python for me but i'll defend parent's right to do it in brainfuck if it makes them smile :)

A number of years ago, I was conducting an interview for a front end developer position. I started with a mostly algorithmic question hoping to gauge the candidate's comfortability with javascript. It was something like “use a for loop and manipulate an array”. They froze up and asked: “can I use jQuery?”. At that point jQuery was at peak ubiquity. Here we had someone reaching for it when the DOM wasn’t even on the table.

I think we’re at that point with React today. It’s become the de-facto way to make a web page, oftentimes for the better. People use it on their complex sites so even for a simple landing page, it’s often the most comfortable tool to work with, despite the fact that it’s adding unnecessary complexity. Fortunately for the user, most of that complexity can be absorbed at build time using server side rendering (the client doesn’t even need to have react if the site is truly static).

It doesn’t matter that you have now moved your HTML into a transpiled javascript syntax that spits out a chain of javascript function calls which generates a javascript object that is then fed into a javascript library that builds an internalized DOM representation and, finally, translates _that_ into an HTML string (which, btw, is happening on a javascript powered server). The browser sees the same HTML + CSS that it might have seen if you had just served them a hand written HTML file over Apache.

For some devs, KISS might actually yield an incredibly complex blob of javascript ecosystem goodies, that is at the same time simpler to setup and get started with than remembering how to structure an HTML file ;)