floatingatoll

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
10,766
Submissions
3,978
Member since
Mar 1
I do not recommend using Keybase; this proof exists solely to maintain claim on my username to prevent impersonation attacks.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/floatingatoll; my proof: https://keybase.io/floatingatoll/sigs/GUvyKD9s8uaWo_slfFKKYdqV-G4X-WUy9hPtZwyDUXU ]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
Years and years ago, I took a photo set of the Santa Cruz boardwalk and all of its beautifully painted buildings and rides, in the middle of January when it was completely and utterly devoid of people. I think I encountered one person the entire visit. I was thrilled because it let me add a second album to my collection of “places that are gorgeous and deserve photographs taken of them without all those annoying people in the way”, and I celebrated the reactions from people. Which were, more or less, that is was incredibly weird to see it portrayed in perfectly normal lighting and color and tone, but missing the one thing that everyone takes for granted: passersby.

Anyways, I reawoke this old dead account (I have since changed names everywhere, here too) so I can link the album and talk about it. Not because I care about appreciation of my photos, but because as an early adopter of the trend, I found it was possible to create the eeriness of today’s ’liminal spaces’ without the ‘lifeless’ characteristics of the Backrooms, House of Leaves, an so on. It’s a lot easier to create that feeling with decay, with monotonality, with cookie-cutter cubicle mazes; and, the theory tends to connect with people more readily as plausible if you include ‘rotted by time and age’ to justify the emptiness as Horizon Zero Dawn and Last of Is both lovingly demonstrated.

But at the core of all of this modern liminal, is portraying human-dense spaces as human-zero, and then confronting the eternal question that haunts humanity: “What happens in the dark forest when no humans are observing?” Whether it’s a cubicle maze or a carnival ride, as the world grows more and more crowded and lonely, it’s no wonder that we want to spy on our busiest spaces after we’ve all gone home for the day. What do they get up to? Where did all the people go? Is this merely a painting of a screaming person on a wall, or is this space empty because they were consumed?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/floatingatoll/albums/721576328...

Comment · 3 years ago
Thank you for doing so; it led me to see this post, and I appreciate that. I’ll vouch next time if I see it go back to [dead].
Comment · 4 years ago
Well, I’m glad my question helped you uncover the root cause, in any case.
Comment · 4 years ago
If Tesla said “working as designed”, then that would definitively confirm that it’s not a bug. Apple has said “working as designed, not a bug” about the most common feature requests (such as “uBlock support” and all the underlying capabilities to deliver that), leaving no uncertainty about them. So I do appreciate your point in the generic “any” case, certainly, but that uncertainty can easily be voided in specific cases — yet we’re ignoring that when it occurs. (I assume this is because framing feature requests as bugs is a common persuasion tactic, as any software maintainer would confirm, but I don’t have any certainty on that view yet.)
Comment · 4 years ago
It could be considered such, if you file a lawsuit. No one else seems to be, so until it reaches a judge, I don’t know if you’ll see any response.
Comment · 4 years ago
Bungie, another tech company, has been making this exact request of its community for years now, and their community has for years now found every excuse under the sun to ignore it. Bungie asks “tell us what’s broken, tell us what feels wrong”, and their community responds instead “recurring feature request X, cynical dismissal of intentions”, and then complains that bugs aren’t getting fixed in Bungie’s products. This self-fulfilling prophecy of refusal, complaint, and outrage repeats on an annual cycle, and yet these users continue to ignore pleas for useful feedback.

As of when I posted this comment, most of HN’s discussion of this post is a stellar example of this Internet forum social behavior. Safari asks “tell us what’s buggy and broken, not about recurring feature requests”, and this community is responding with “recurring feature request X, cynical dismissal of intentions”. There are three or four actual real bug reports in this discussion, but they’re drowned out by the non-curious ‘feature’ and ‘cynical’ repetition.

I’m kind of disappointed that they got a hundred plus viable bug reports on Twitter, but only a couple from HN. Given how much so many of us sneer at Twitter, it’s upsetting to see Twitter dramatically outshine us technically. We’re Hacker News, this ought to be a piece of cake.

For example: I wish that Elon Musk wasn’t prideful and troll-y online (these are feature requests that his personality team has refused us), but if he asked me to name a bug in Tesla’s cars that he isn’t aware of, I’d point out that Tesla cars allow you to drive at unsafe speeds when the fog lights are turned on, which is wasting untold megawatts of Supercharger time per year because drivers either don’t know that fog lights aren’t effective above a certain speed and because there’s no chime or automatic-off setting to prevent energy waste. Yes, Elon’s a jerk, and yes, I have feature requests and cynicism about that — but I’d leap for the opportunity to even have a chance at posting one paragraph that cuts all Teslas’ watts per mile by any amount at all. I wish others here found that as rewarding as I do.

Comment · 4 years ago
Have you filed this bug or reported it to the requested Twitter thread? If anything else, a link to your HN comment posted to them would be enough — and then they’d realize there’s bugs here to find.
Comment · 4 years ago
In the Safari menu, there may be a Feedback option that lets you report the broken site issue to them directly, without having to use Twitter. I’m not sure if it’s a developer thing or not, but if it’s not there, I imagine it’s present in the latest tech preview build.
Comment · 4 years ago
That’s a bug worth reporting to them on Twitter! Which dates, incidentally?
Comment · 4 years ago
Those are design decisions that result in missing functionality, not unintentional defects (“bugs”) in shipping functionality.
Comment · 4 years ago
I'm not restricting my considerations to "the technology that is implemented and available to Tor users today", given that what's available neither meets the needs of sites, nor the needs of users. If you think that the idea is inappropriate, please state so and make your case for why you believe in your viewpoint. If you think that the idea is impossible, please note why you believe that — and then consider the idea as if it were possible.
Comment · 4 years ago
That would also remove essentially all potential for attacking workers. I like it far better than my idea. Good call.

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