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I admit that I wondered what “own” was for far too long. I’m also surprised IRC came later than I thought. It should be better than it is at that late in the game. Not initially, but it should have been improved more, in my estimation.
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The reason IRC never got better is this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/IRCd_software_implementations3.svg
The reason the Timeline lists different IRC networks is because most are not actually compatible with each other: different IRC flavors. This is why Telegram won’t open source the server—once you lose the network, you lose the future (like IRC did).
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Yeah, I wrote a raw IRC interpreter for a bot or a proxy once (I intended to have it used for both). It was an exercise in frustration, and knowing the edge cases and ridiculousness of the “IRC Protocol” have made me long for replacing it with something federated and open. Ah, our eternal lists of projects.
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migurski
2 years ago
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My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site
Best part of the article:
Facebook likes to think of names as a one-to-one mapping. You have one name, and that name is how people refer to you at all times. It’s a very WASP notion of how names work, and the reality is far more complex. Names are a tool for description, a shorthand for quickly communicating the idea of a person or thing. They change based on context. Each person has many names, because each person has many contexts and social groups.
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I actually disagree with the description of a name. She is referring to a title, which is the thing that changes context. I am called different titles, of which my name is one. When we talk about names as identity ties (which they are officially and in the capacity of Facebook) the context is meaningless. We are saying “Identity X is blah.” If your official identity changes, it makes sense that a social network and the social structures around you would have struggles with how to fit you into those social contexts we think nobody should burden us with when we change them. This is not so. If I change my identity, I’m making it hard on others. Others having some resistance to taking all the pain is good. Building software to mitigate pain would be nice, but this isn’t Facebook’s purpose at all, and we shouldn’t use it as such.
I should note this is semantics, because the meaning of “name” changes where we use it (english is “fun”) but if we’re discussing it in the context of what it means at Facebook, its meaning just has to be consistent, not match what we want it to when we use it elsewhere.
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Among other things, I imagine neither your manager nor your parents call you TodPunk. They very likely also have different preferred forms of your legal name. Everyone has many names, though, yes, only about 50% of the population is raised to expect their legal one to change at some point.
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That was, in fact, my point (though both my manager AND my parents do call me TodPunk in some contexts, as did both my managers before them). My failing in previous was not syncing up hard enough that this is a semantic difference in the use of “name.” As used in the Facebook context, “name” is supposed to be your legal name, which is an identity name (the identity being some summation of your existence as said entity) and your legal name being the title that identity is given.
I wasn’t trying to make light of the author’s particular issue, just the point migurski was highlighting, which is incorrect because it assumes “name” means something from a different context than the one in which the term is used by Facebook. If Facebook were calling it your pet name, or title, or friendly moniker, or any number of other things when it called it “name,” then the authors point would be correct. The problem is, as presented by the author, Facebook is correct in that you DO have one name, and that is how people refer to your identity at all times in the case Facebook is referring to (as your legal identity). Facebook does have the added problem of different legal cases having different legal identities for the same person (like native american names were a good example from some comments in another thread). Their policies don’t always account for this 100%. It might be better to call it “most presumed legal representation” and that would cover things like stage names of celebrities (some of which used to have problems with Facebook as well).
I don’t care to weigh in on the social side of it, as it’s not interesting and would just be my opinion, doubly uninteresting. What I was discussing from was, we as designers of systems need to be keenly aware of intent beyond our original, but every interpretation is ludicrous and ultimately users do need to meet us some of the way.
I will say when this issue was discussed years ago as the need for pseudonymity, it was an even more interesting discussion to me. Facebook didn’t have an answer to that problem. The answer to “your name has been reported as ridiculous by X people, auto-action taken, paltry human effort shown” is there for anyone, celebrity or not, popular or not, and while tedious and imperfect, that process can’t go away without losing another group of people to the wayside. The pseudonymity problem was much more of a curveball for Facebook’s policies and engineering assumptions. I don’t remember how that got resolved off the top of my head. Still, this is all an excellent discussion on assumptions we make that have social consequences.
I will also say I feel for the author. I can’t help, and any rage I could take up would be counter-productive to a net positive for the world in my belief, so I’d rather make progress where I can help.
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It’s completely untrue that everyone has more than zero legal names and fewer than two. Think about citizenship corner-cases. I apologize for not responding at greater length, but it’s a topic I’m kind of frustrated by too much time talking about it without progress, in general, not with you specifically.
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I get that it isn’t 100%. It’s 99.99999% or something close to it, though, which is why the assumption is made (on all levels from social to technical and administrative). I assume you know that.
I appreciate that you recognize your frustration and don’t take it out on me as a focus point of it. I hope you recognize that I know and understand the generality of why you have that frustration, and am not trying to diminish the actual problem as much as frame one paragraph of a tangent from it. The overall is indeed a hard problem, and not one I even wish to wade into, let alone try to frame.
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Reponding to TodPunk’s comments:
The problem is, as presented by the author, Facebook is correct in that you DO have one name, and that is how people refer to your identity at all times in the case Facebook is referring to (as your legal identity)
and
I get that [having a single legal and social name] isn’t 100%. It’s 99.99999% or something close to it […] [I] am not trying to diminish the actual problem as much as frame one paragraph of a tangent from it
It really is not 99.999999%. Among my family and friends with european ancestry, most have multiple valid state names. Common variations include the addition or abbreviation of a middle name, use of a middle name as a first name, or changing family name during marriage and divorce. Among my family and friends whose background is not european, there’s those cases and more, roughly tripled by different writing systems and variations in lossy transliteration. My off-the-cuff guess is that low double digits of American Facebook users have multiple state names. This is a minor-to-major hassle for places where the state provides and reconciles identity papers, and a minor hassle in finance (you’ll see a lot of medallion stamps), where the state cares that it gets its cut or that money is not used in particular ways.
And all this is a tiny sliver of the actual problem discussed: it is overwhelmingly the case that people use multiple names in different social settings and relationships. Facebook wants to mediate those social interactions with a grossly, dangerously reductionist model.
Hell, I took a moment to count up how many names I’ve been addressed as in the last week and got 9. Most are “simple” variants on the state name on my identity papers, but two are transliterations and one is not in Unicode. I’m not even trying to be exhaustive and I don’t have any kind of predeliction for different names, it’s just a part of human cultures that we give setting-specific names.
Facebook wants each user to use a single name that will be recognizable and familiar to all of that person’s social groups, but wants to probhit joke names and multiple identities. It attempted to find a focal point): users must give a state name and, if challenged, provide state identity papers. They assumed that people would only need to use one name and would be comfortable with a documented state name. The state name variations they were familiar with (“Jim” vs “James”, “Smith” to “Smith-Jones”, “Alice Smith” vs “Alice Q Smith”) felt minor and ignorable.
The point of the article is that there are sizeable numbers of people with multiple names for whom this results in insultingly broken variations (eg. Spanish and hispanic compound names can’t be shortened to a single “last name”), significant confusion (eg. people with friends in two cultures have to pick which group will be unable to recognize the basic characters of their name), support intrusive state policies (eg. “Jim” may not become “Jane”; “Alice Smith” must become “Alice Jones” upon marrying “Bill Jones”), endanger people (eg. “Jane used to be Jim”), etc. etc.
Name variations are much broader and more impactful than Facebook (…and the typical American programmer) envisioned. The focal point they chose has poor tradeoffs, and there are many ways Facebook could fix the problems its unforced design choice caused. But dismissing the very idea that this these problems are common or meaningful is ignorant or hurtful.
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A great resource I’ve seen is Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.
I’ve taped this to a few doors before…
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This is definitely true in my experience. I’ve been surprised on at least 3-4 occasions when for some reason I’ve seen the “official name” of someone I’ve known for a while (usually when we’re traveling together and compare passport stamps). It’s probably the case that a nontrivial percentage of my friends whose passports I haven’t seen would be similar. The three most common cases in my circles are: 1) people who don’t use their legal first name, usually instead using their middle name as a first name; 2) people who legally changed their surname upon marriage but still use their previous surname professionally; and 3) people who have a “foreign” name and have unofficially (but not legally) anglicized it, either in the sense of a rough translation (legal name Yannis, goes by John), or just making up a new “anglo” name entirely (especially common among Chinese).
Not Facebook-related, but tangentially on topic: I personally have a slightly humorous bureaucratic situation at the moment because I have two legal names, in two different countries, and they are sort-of but not actually the same. In American government documents my first/middle names are Mark Jason, but in Greek government documents I’m Μάρκος Ιάσονας = Markos Iasonas. These are of course in some sense the same name, just translations, in fact that’s exactly why my parents picked them, since they work well in both languages. But in some other sense they aren’t the same name, like Lukasz and Lucas aren’t quite the same name. So, the Greek government is perturbed and thinks I really ought to have either been called Markos Iasonas on my U.S. birth certificate, or else have been inscribed in the Greek family registry as Μαρκ Τζέισον = Mark Tzeison. But I don’t like Markos Iasonas in English, and I don’t like Mark Tzeison in Greek! I’d prefer each name to stay in the language it’s suited to and not try to promiscuously transliterate itself everywhere. :)
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Even “official documents” are not always right. I am Norwegian and my wife is British/Chinese dual citizen. We named our son Sølve, an old norse name. We lived in Hong Kong at the time, and they were not able to represent the LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH STROKE in his name, so his birth certificate has “Solve”. (It also has a field for his Chinese name, which we filled in.) When we moved back to the UK and got a British passport for him they too were unable to input the “ø” in his name, so the misspelling of his name stuck. Does it make it his official, or actual name? No, in my opinion it does not. It’s a bastardisation brought on by insufficient technology. I am hopeful that the British passport system will eventually allow Norwegian characters so we can represent his name properly where we live. (Frustratingly, we were told that the older British passport system accepted “ø”.) We may have been able to get him a Norwegian passport, but Norway doesn’t allow dual citizenship, so he would have to give up his British one—a bit silly when he’s never lived in Norway. (Luckily he’s not old enough to have a Facebook account, so he’s not had the opportunity to be thus insulted yet.)
(Edited to fix use of “password” where I meant “passport”.)
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Facebook seems to want name in the sense of “official documents” rather than “what everyone calls you and you use personally and professionally”, though. Even in the case of very stable identities, those may not be the same, especially for immigrants. I know a reasonable number of Chinese-Americans who have an “American” name that they use personally and professionally. When they moved to the U.S. they picked a name like Albert or Conrad, and that’s what they use everywhere. It’s pretty stable and consistently used: on their office door, their journal articles, their business cards, etc. It just happens to not be the name on their driver’s license and passport. It’s not a change for anybody, because nobody in their Facebook network ever knew them by their original Chinese name.
This particular group is fortunate to rarely have problems on Facebook anyway, because names like Albert don’t trigger Facebook’s name-flagger, so they can get away with violating the real-name policy. (This also, incidentally, makes it trivial to use Facebook with a pseudonym, as many of my friends do: just pick a generic American-sounding name as your pseudonym, and you’re unlikely to ever get asked for documentation.)
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dkreuter
2 years ago
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My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site
The alternative to hoping that facebook will develop the right policies based on feedback, is to make sure you’re in control of the infrastructure you depend on. Until now I don’t know how to achieve that without having to force all the people I want to stay in touch with to switch to the same medium. There is some interesting research in cryptography related to finding common friends without disclosing the friends list which is one major blocker for decentralized social networks.
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I took a mental crack at that just now. I want to see if X person and I have common friends. I take all my friends identities and hash them with their public key and my public key. I give this list to X person. X person takes their friend list and does the same. They hand me back the union. Done. At worst you can do this hash on every known identity you have come across to cross check, but you must do so every time you want to check against me, so put it in a 12000 round thing or whatever you want to specify as the one initiating checking against my friends list (and I only allow you to do this once a week, so cache the results).
If you start with identity as a shared thing, cryptography in all communications, it seems really not complicated cryptographically that I can see. What am I missing? (Yes, missing something is usually the case when I think it’s simple.)
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~~If you and X both hash your common friend P with your own keys you get two different hashes with no way to figure out that they belong to the same person.~~ (edit: misunderstood TodPunk here)
At worst you can do this hash on every known identity you have come across to cross check.
That’s exactly one of the challenges. These systems try to prevent one party from pretending to have a huge circle of friends to maximize the intersection. You can find more on that topic at https://eprint.iacr.org/2011/026.pdf.
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I think what @TodPunk was getting at was that if Alice wanted to see if Bob had mutual friends, Alice sends Bob
A(pub)+B(pub)+Fx(Pub)for all friends 1 to x, then Bob would do the same calculation and return the intersection.The problem is there’s no actual information hiding; it’s just “tune the KDF slow and pray”.
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That is what I was getting at, yes.
I thought information hiding wasn’t possible in this. I want to know if you have any of X set of friends. Either you need to know what X set is, or I need to know what set of friends you have. There’s no way around it. The best I could think (in this thought exercise that was the moments it took me to come up with that idea) was to make it so the irrelevant information is not easily seen, not that it was unseeable. dkreuter brought up a different axis entirely to light I thought was interesting. I forget sometimes that some people give a damn about how many friends someone else thinks they have.
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The problem is called private set intersection; follow the citations about it from the paper dkreuter linked. https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/469.pdf in particular has a good summary. It is solvable without revealing extra information, although algorithms for it are fairly inefficient still.
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At worst you can do this hash on every known identity you have come across to cross check, but you must do so every time you want to check against me, so put it in a 12000 round thing or whatever you want to specify as the one initiating checking against my friends list
Yeah, that means the system ain’t gonna work - the KDF you use is either going to be
- so slow that no work will get done either because no one wants to wait 4 weeks to see if mutual friends exist so no one uses your site, or because attackers who ~~control a large clique of the network~~ send a large bunch of fake hashes can tie everyone up in pretzels having them do busy work
- or fast enough that some time on EC2 and a large enough body of pubkeys lets me know who your buddies are.
As soon as you’ve published an attested list of friends and your scheme depends strictly on public knowledge to answer the question, the crypto just becomes window dressing.
The only real path forward is some sort of zero knowledge proof between both parties.
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I thought the crypto was more verification than hiding. An obfuscation at best. If you want it unknown, I definitely don’t think there’s a solution (a la the DRM problem of secret telling, where you want to share something with Alice and not Bob, but you don’t know that Alice and Bob are the same person, so your entire approach is moot).
I definitely see the problem of this sort of a thing at scale like you’re mentioning. Even if it wasn’t abused (HA!) you’d have to have some beefy infrastructure just to handle popular people like a celebrity.
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This is utterly fantastic. I remember seeing an article about a man who lived in China and made his tiny apartment into this sliding puzzle place that changed contexts of the place as you moved panels out or over. So one room became 6 different uses of room. This makes me think of such a context with a family where shared space means changing contexts at will probably isn’t as useful a moniker, but this separation and sharing of contexts is inspiring.
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I think the “need” for something like Redis is greatly overstated these days, and one really should not prematurely “optimize” there until the severe costs of adding it can be afforded. After all, there aren’t that many applications having a simple beefy, well designed postgres server with a good schema and performant queries isn’t going to meet the needs of all devs willing to test its limits. Scaling well beyond what normal postgres clustering (yes, that’s a thing there are options for) can give you is a very rare actual need.
If you’re throwing everything you have in a couple tables and wondering why postgres is slow… well, Redis or things like it might be fooling you into believing the problem is anything but you and your sheer laziness. Sorry the Emperor is naked.
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I love Unsplash and hope it gets more love. The fact that they’re iterating on their API rather than just their photos gives me hope in them beyond their excellent images. Hey Universe, more projects like this, please.
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I’m old-school, so I don’t believe in feeding the trolls, even if they’re unintentional trolls. Ignoring them is much better. Lavishing attention should be done in positive swaths to those deserving. If a downvote is actually necessary, I’d rather it be for some calculable objective error, rather than my view that their tone doesn’t jive with my personality (or worse, my perception that it might not jive with somebody else’s).
Be the change you want to see in the world. That doesn’t mean stamp out the changes you don’t want to see. All that does is highlight the things you should be drawing eyes away from.
Basically, if you don’t like what someone is saying, give people something better to see. There’s no more sure victory over a troll or a bully than to see their efforts ignored. Negativity just begets more negativity.
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I normally do decide not to respond at all to comments I just don’t like because they’re attention-seeking. Personal attacks are different, and need to be handled differently - it’s important for the targets to know they’re not alone and undefended, and it’s important for bystanders to see that those things aren’t allowed to pass.
Even knowing that it’s important to speak up, there’s still a decision that has to be weighed, because the benefit is still balanced by the negative effect of giving the attacker attention. I see downvotes for those situations as falling in-between saying nothing and saying something about how the attack is inappropriate and unwelcome.
I realize that there are people (not on Lobsters, as far as I’ve seen, but in general) who view a negative score as something to aspire to, but the score isn’t for or about them to begin with, it’s to get their remarks moved to the bottom of the page so they don’t waste as much of everyone else’s emotional energy. And it rewards them less than a response in words does, while still reinforcing the community’s standards with reasonable efficacy.
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I think the handling of abberations like direct attacks is for moderators to weigh in on. Community moderation through the use of flags (to call mod attention to a thing) is the closest to effective I’ve ever seen, and still results in mods having to sometimes say “no, lynch mob, they’re not actually doing anything wrong.” Downvotes invite more of that abuse in my experience.
If we want to foster a community where such solidarity is a thing, I’m all for it, but the downvote mechanism is a bad choice for it. A mod should negate the posts scorability altogether (pulling it to the bottom instantly), and replace the text with “moderated for X content” in the worst case (depending on well defined rules about censoring). With a note of why (maybe to just the poster, depending on context?). This would also mean no more replying to that subtree.
Culture is hard. Especially as you get larger.
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Logs: the place you go after something goes wrong. If they exist.
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Over the course of the year, I authored 25,809 messages and was mentioned in 7320. Looking at the 25,809 that I authored, if each took on average 1 minute to compose, that’s just over 430 hours writing messages or about 11 work weeks. (Hey Stripe guys, where can I send an invoice?)
I hope he enjoyed answering questions, but… wow.
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They need VoIP to get rid of CenturyLink altogether. That should be a thing that happens.
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I think the languages is the least of the necessary requirements to fill that position. You could learn Fortran in a weekend, and assembly you just have to get a head for but it isn’t hard. (How to accurately apply those tools is just experience over time, as many of us know.) What NASA likely needs is efficiency in a lot of different uses of that term, reliability in ways most of us don’t have to worry about, and the ability to work with some serious stress that isn’t so much as your boss yelling at you because he’s a jerk, but your boss yelling at you because your code is failing and it might kill someone and cost millions of dollars and a PR nightmare.
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I’d almost like to see someone else take a stab at this.
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Hey, if we’re shilling for our own projects… - I haven’t used this in a while, but it scratched the itch I had - I didn’t want the effort of static sites, but I didn’t want the bloat of a CMS either - this is stick Markdown files in a directory and forget.
It also uses Web Forms, causing any MVC users in the vicinity to faint. Yay for ugly hacks!
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Hahaha, ugly indeed, but good on you for doing it anyway. Maybe you should update it as an exercise. Or perhaps you might be interested in that “grav” project linked not long ago. I’m assuming you didn’t learn the MVC ways, since this was updated a couple years ago, long after WebForms were declared a Bad Idea ™
Do you host a site with it somewhere currently?
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If I remember, when I did it, MVC was very immature on Mono. You can tell though, I came from a mix of WinForms and the classical CGI style dump scripts in a directory over the recommended practice of web apps as servers themselves.
Full bloated CMSes don’t interest me… with the exception of SharePoint, which has its own charm. I don’t host anything using it right now.
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Maybe today is the day I finally try my code on PyPy. Maybe.
Likely not though. The fear of having to figure out what would go wrong while customers are down just sounds like something I’d rather not risk. I think I’ll have to try PyPy on a new project where I can start building with it hand in hand.
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If you’re building a service, I would guess you have multiple machines offering your service, in which case you could slowly roll it out across the fleet. It’s time consuming and requires paying attention, but with nginx or haproxy infront you can take a machine that is misbehaving out of rotation easily.
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Wikipedia did that with PHP/HHVM. There’s a writeup here; see the section “How we made the switch” about halfway down. In their case it was a fairly extended rollout, though, in part because the worry wasn’t just about stability, but compatibility with a codebase that had only been tested on the original PHP implementation. So they first asked some volunteers to opt-in to using the HHVM servers for their edits, reporting bugs and inconsistencies as they found them. Then a few months later they started slowly rolling it out machine-by-machine to the general public, and monitoring for any remaining anomalies.
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From my perspective, this is is conceptually no different than any code change. You have some canaries you smoke test against, then role it out across your fleet verifying that it work at each step. It’s a bit scarier because you don’t know all the changes, but the actual steps are all the same.
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That’s quite long and process-oriented. Meetings are really simple to determine efficacy of, for any department:
- Are most of you figuring something out together? If not, the one learning should be getting emails or something from others or reading docs or any number of other things.
- Are you staying on task? Nothing is a more clear waste of time than multiple people getting off on tangents about someone’s dog or something. Save it for the water cooler.
Get in, figure out what you needed to, maybe (maybe) determine what actions need to be taken by who, and get out. This article just sounds like a diagnostic tool to fill out forms in triplicate to figure out if the meeting is good or not. It’s not enterprise enough yet, but it’s going that way.
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Don’t continue reading if you’re a pussy, 9-year old boy or afraid of little bit “strong” writing.
This is like standing at a podium as a huge banner unfurls behind you saying “I AM A JOKE” and a pantless marching band comes out on stage playing a off-key version of Yackety Sax.
I definitely do not give a single solitary shit what the author thinks after that.
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It looks like he’s removed that line now. But the tone remains that way throughout… Public discourse has standards that are required if you expect to be engaged.
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Trolling and terrible writing aside, I’d be far more interested in the opinions of people who have been using the language for more than a whole 4 months, and who have actually used it in production.
None of those seem particularly bad to me. In fact, the variable shadowing seems like people getting what they deserve for shadowing a variable in an inner scope like that ;-)
On the other hand, maybe years of C++ has numbed me to it.
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I’ve been using Go for years, since before 1.0 was released. In side projects (that I count on and use every day, at home and at work). In academic research. And now in production. Several of the things the author mentions are benefits of the language. For example, I love
go generate. Others might be reasonably considered warts or footguns, but they are warts that simply haven’t caused many (if any at all) problems for me personally.
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So, you have no opinion on the technical complaints presented in the article?
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If somebody announces “Hi, I’m trolling!” I think it’s a reasonable tradeoff to decide you’re not interested in reading the rest of the post to determine if that’s true or not.
I probably could have put up with around half the intro, but at some point I grow tired of reading why I’m not going to like what comes next.
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That’s typically where the scroll keys come in handy. :)
I’ve noticed (over the last year or two) that people seem to be increasingly reluctant to try and find the good with the bad when it comes to technology posts, often to the point of (as with your GP) proudly proclaiming their impatience. At least the author here had the decency to be up-front, even though the edginess was sorta tiring.
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Personally, I’m fine with anything in an article besides unwarranted swearing. I don’t enjoy reading it and have a hard time blocking it out.
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I’ve noticed (over the last year or two) that people seem to be increasingly reluctant to try and find the good with the bad when it comes to technology posts
My time is too precious to waste it reading poorly written content. If the ideas have merit they’ll be written up again by better authors.
I feel like poor language indicates lazy thought, and lazy thinkers often don’t have as deep and interesting insights as they think they do ;)
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If somebody announces “Hi, I’m trolling!” I think it’s a reasonable tradeoff to decide you’re not interested in reading the rest of the post…
Meanwhile, OpenBSD continues to produce “serious” presentations in Comic Sans, which doesn’t at all scream “Hi, I’m trolling!”
Pot, Kettle, it’s all the same in this kitchen. Now excuse me as my karma burns away for daring to point out the above hypocrisy.
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OpenBSD definitely gets justifiable criticism for that, and the pot being black doesn’t make the kettle not black.
(IMO, while the Comic Sans thing is stupid and unprofessional, the bigger issue is that they typically deliver these things in a complicated binary format for which decoders have already had serious vulnerabilities, which sort of flies in the face of their entire raison d'être of worrying about security first and foremost.)
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Their presentations are either presented as PDFs, which already integrate with screen readers & tools like pdf2text, or are presented as webpages with images - and those presentations have plain text or HTML slides as well:
- http://www.openbsd.org/papers/tame-fsec2015/mgp00023.html
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2015-raceless-network/img6.html
- http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2015-raceless-network/text6.html
(and c'mon, if you (not you specifically but y'all) can’t tell the difference between light ribbing directed at people who believe in form over function and starting your paper with GTFO PUSSIES then, uh.)
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Whenever I’ve seen them linked it’s been a page full'o jpegs, and I’ve certainly never bothered investigating further. Good that that’s not the only format they’re available in; bad that it’s the only one I’ve seen, and still stupid and unprofessional that they format it like a middle schooler in the 90s.
And yes, I don’t think the two are comparable. To take the pot-and-kettle metaphor way too far, OpenBSD is at worst lightly scorched here. Not perfect, but at least mostly not actively insulting their audience.
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I’m pretty tone agnostic, actually, so I probably wouldn’t notice or care, except when the author goes out of their way to tell me how bad the tone is. If you know your tone is so bad that you have to warn people about it, but choose not to fix the tone, well… I think you have chosen poorly. It seems to reflect a desire to be more shocking than informative.
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I don’t know if that’s strictly true. The typical example of a tone argument is an angry feminist being told “if you were less angry, people would be more receptive to your argument” (as a euphemism for “please make your point in a format I can more easily ignore”) with no reference to its truth value.
Regardless, this author is (a) not underprivileged relative to the people criticizing his tone, and (b) not justifiably angry anyway, so I don’t see a problem here.
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You’re saying that the tone he is using is sufficient to invalidate what he is saying
Pretty sure what the parent was saying is that the tone the author is using, for him as a reader, is sufficient to ignore what the author is saying, without making any claims as to whether the author’s points about Go are correct or not.
“This paper is so caked in stinky shit I refuse to read it” is different than “this paper is so caked in stinky shit that whatever is written on it must be wrong”.
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I don’t disagree with your point, or desire to point out your wrongness here. I do wish to share that I found it entertaining that you don’t like his tone, but use one like it for most of your own discussion. Again, I’m not criticizing (this is a different medium and you have different goals, for starters of why it doesn’t matter), I just found it causal of some chuckling.
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As an aside: should there be a “testing” tag?
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BTW: A little video we created to help explain how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfbav261Lqg
Did you create the video in-house? What process/tools did you use for this? It’s nice.
Thanks—it’s nice to hear that!
I storyboarded it, and then built the assets in Illustrator. (I tried to keep transitions really simple, as I don’t have any direct experience with animation.)
Once those were ready, I animated them in Flash, which seemed like the best tool for the job. I hadn’t used it in ~15 years, so it took a little while to get used to. That said, it was easier than I remember it being.
I then used a decent microphone to do the voice over and Audition to boost it a bit. (I think the audio could be better.)
The sound effects all came from iStock, which saved some time.
All in all, I’m happy it turned out OK. That said, I’m sure it could be a lot better if a pro would have put it together.