Here is a video of how it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjYr25N6n38&ab_channel=WentingZhang
I am using it as part of the development for this extension in the demo video. So you can see that moments after I saved my Webflow CSS to my local CSS file, the under-development extension reflect the latest styles.
The title was changed from “Don’t Sell Your Indie Business to Digital Ocean!” to “Digital Ocean has shut down two technical sites” by mod, but I want to clarify that the CSS Tricks is not officially shut down yet and I am still hoping Digital Ocean will do the right thing with it — keep it live and free
Isn’t the point of buying a blog to continue to host it and add more things?
People prefer to link to technical documentation (including me!) but when the editors of MDN are laid off, it’s helpful to at least reference blog posts when doing something.
Isn’t the point of buying a blog to continue to host it and add more things?
Exactly!
The value of blog is its content, not the click(not directly). People click on the links because they want to see the content. They can’t remove the content and just hijack the click with redirect, people won’t stay after being misguided into their website. How expensive is it to just host scotch.io, really, considering the buyer is a web host provider? Add a banner to each page and they can get more juice out of it.
They can’t remove the content and just hijack the click with redirect, people won’t stay after being misguided into their website.
Yes, yes they can. They bought the damn thing, so they may do as they please. That’s sad from my point of view, and probably people will not stay in the long run :(
Let’s be grateful of archive.org that will allow us to still read those very, very good articles from css-tricks
I think the meaning was “They can’t remove the content and hijack the click and thus extract value.” Unless they’re doing click fraud with ad impressions, I guess.
I got furious following this series of blog buyout by Digital Ocean and seeing them destroy it afterwards. I want to write down a record what they have done over the years and make them accountable for their unethical business practice even after they correct some of the things I pointed out directly. I am curious what others here think of what they did.
I want to write down a record what they have done over the years and make them accountable for their unethical business practice
I’m confused about what’s unethical? They don’t seem to be buying these sites/businesses specifically in order to shut them down (as you point out in the blog, that would only harm their reputation).
We’re not entitled to DO continuing to host content for free forever, or for them to pay people to edit it. It would be nice if they did, but not doing so is not unethical, even if we don’t like it.
A real suit would sue a person or company for using code generated by CoPilot that copied their own code. MicroSoft would need to decide to jump into the fray (taking risk) or not (abandoning users of their tools).
I think the lawsuit is meant well to regulate AI - it is uncharted law teritory.
I don’t think Microsoft would just stop the product even if they lose. There are middle ground to reach an agreement on. Maybe add something to the terms and conditions that user consent on the usage when they submit code to Github public repo.
I’m going to ask that you please read the prior thread, or any of the other multi-hundred-comment threads on other popular programming forums, when this lawsuit was previously announced. There’s not really anything new or useful to be said that hasn’t been said already. For example, GitHub’s terms of service have already been discussed extensively, along with what rights they require you to grant and how they require indemnification.
Maybe add something to the terms and conditions that user consent on the usage when they submit code to Github public repo.
That’s very tricky. If Copilot’s use is fair use then it’s fine to do it for anything but if not then it requires an explicit license. If a particular F/OSS license permits it, then it’s fine, but if not then you need additional rights. All copyright holders need to agree to this, so if you have accepted a PR from someone else then you can’t tick the box legally. If you tick it but don’t have the rights to do so and someone sues Microsoft, there may be something in the GitHub T&Cs that lets Microsoft sue you (you probably agree to indemnify Microsoft if you don’t have the rights that you claim you have) but actually doing this would kill GitHub as a viable product.
wow, you found it while I was developing the feature – i am being crappy not having a dev site and everything is done to the live site! I finished developing it, now it is moved from the bottom to a more prominent place on the page!
One thing I noticed was that there was only one pair of parentheses. A few of the fonts had braces that looked really like parentheses but it wasn’t obvious from just looking at the text. Something with nested brackets would make this much easier to spot. Similarly, most of these fonts made it easy to tell 0 and O apart, but I don’t know how many of them made it easy to distinguish 1 and I or I and l because the sample text didn’t have these characters nearby.
It would be a bit more robust if it showed things more than once. There were a couple of fonts in the list that were almost identical (different shape of 5, most other glyphs basically the same). A few of them happened to look really good or bad at 16pt with my monitor size and antialiasing mode (Ubuntu Mono, in particular, looked terrible) but might be very different at different sizes. Once you’ve made a selection against something though, it’s gone forever, so you don’t get to find a ranking of preferred fonts.
It would also be good if it didn’t tell me the name of the font until after I made my choice. My favourite according to this is Adobe’s Source Code Pro. Purely by coincidence, that’s the font that I have installed for all of my terminals to use. Or possibly seeing the name gave me a positive bias towards it that I wouldn’t have seen if I’d been comparing it without knowing the name.
Here is a video of how it works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjYr25N6n38&ab_channel=WentingZhang I am using it as part of the development for this extension in the demo video. So you can see that moments after I saved my Webflow CSS to my local CSS file, the under-development extension reflect the latest styles.
The title was changed from “Don’t Sell Your Indie Business to Digital Ocean!” to “Digital Ocean has shut down two technical sites” by mod, but I want to clarify that the CSS Tricks is not officially shut down yet and I am still hoping Digital Ocean will do the right thing with it — keep it live and free
Isn’t the point of buying a blog to continue to host it and add more things?
People prefer to link to technical documentation (including me!) but when the editors of MDN are laid off, it’s helpful to at least reference blog posts when doing something.
Exactly! The value of blog is its content, not the click(not directly). People click on the links because they want to see the content. They can’t remove the content and just hijack the click with redirect, people won’t stay after being misguided into their website. How expensive is it to just host scotch.io, really, considering the buyer is a web host provider? Add a banner to each page and they can get more juice out of it.
I am being a little cynical here, but:
Yes, yes they can. They bought the damn thing, so they may do as they please. That’s sad from my point of view, and probably people will not stay in the long run :( Let’s be grateful of archive.org that will allow us to still read those very, very good articles from css-tricks
I think the meaning was “They can’t remove the content and hijack the click and thus extract value.” Unless they’re doing click fraud with ad impressions, I guess.
There are two questions:
Are they entitled to do it?
Should they do it?
I think the answer to 1 is yes, and to 2 is no. We can acknowledge the former, while still decrying the latter.
I got furious following this series of blog buyout by Digital Ocean and seeing them destroy it afterwards. I want to write down a record what they have done over the years and make them accountable for their unethical business practice even after they correct some of the things I pointed out directly. I am curious what others here think of what they did.
Have you tried contacting them? Maybe they just didn’t think about it at all (which clearly is still very bad)
I’m confused about what’s unethical? They don’t seem to be buying these sites/businesses specifically in order to shut them down (as you point out in the blog, that would only harm their reputation).
We’re not entitled to DO continuing to host content for free forever, or for them to pay people to edit it. It would be nice if they did, but not doing so is not unethical, even if we don’t like it.
Yes. This feels like a stunt.
A real suit would sue a person or company for using code generated by CoPilot that copied their own code. MicroSoft would need to decide to jump into the fray (taking risk) or not (abandoning users of their tools).
I think the lawsuit is meant well to regulate AI - it is uncharted law teritory. I don’t think Microsoft would just stop the product even if they lose. There are middle ground to reach an agreement on. Maybe add something to the terms and conditions that user consent on the usage when they submit code to Github public repo.
I’m going to ask that you please read the prior thread, or any of the other multi-hundred-comment threads on other popular programming forums, when this lawsuit was previously announced. There’s not really anything new or useful to be said that hasn’t been said already. For example, GitHub’s terms of service have already been discussed extensively, along with what rights they require you to grant and how they require indemnification.
That’s very tricky. If Copilot’s use is fair use then it’s fine to do it for anything but if not then it requires an explicit license. If a particular F/OSS license permits it, then it’s fine, but if not then you need additional rights. All copyright holders need to agree to this, so if you have accepted a PR from someone else then you can’t tick the box legally. If you tick it but don’t have the rights to do so and someone sues Microsoft, there may be something in the GitHub T&Cs that lets Microsoft sue you (you probably agree to indemnify Microsoft if you don’t have the rights that you claim you have) but actually doing this would kill GitHub as a viable product.
I see there was discussion on this topic 2 weeks ago: https://lobste.rs/s/ukgknn/github_copilot_litigation
Nice idea – would be great if there were multiple example languages to choose from (python, c++, something functional).
And perhaps a “blind test” mode where you choose A or B so you are not biased by the fonts you know.
Hear, hear.
I tried to get the window set up just right to avoid seeing the names, but it was tough.
Your voice are heard! I added a new toggle button to hide the font names! Try refresh / hard refresh the page to find a toggle for “Blind Mode”
I’d love to be able to see the full tournament bracket after doing a whole run in blind mode, so I can see what my second, third etc. choices were.
Ah yeah that’s what I was saying as well. At least the 2nd-place runner-up, but yeah showing the full ladder would be great too!
There is a “blind match” button at the bottom of the page.
wow, you found it while I was developing the feature – i am being crappy not having a dev site and everything is done to the live site! I finished developing it, now it is moved from the bottom to a more prominent place on the page!
That probably explains why it seemed that button wasn’t there the first time I loaded the page. ;-)
And well, you probably don’t need a QA server right now considering that you apparently didn’t (visibly) break the website while doing your changes!
One thing I noticed was that there was only one pair of parentheses. A few of the fonts had braces that looked really like parentheses but it wasn’t obvious from just looking at the text. Something with nested brackets would make this much easier to spot. Similarly, most of these fonts made it easy to tell 0 and O apart, but I don’t know how many of them made it easy to distinguish 1 and I or I and l because the sample text didn’t have these characters nearby.
It would be a bit more robust if it showed things more than once. There were a couple of fonts in the list that were almost identical (different shape of 5, most other glyphs basically the same). A few of them happened to look really good or bad at 16pt with my monitor size and antialiasing mode (Ubuntu Mono, in particular, looked terrible) but might be very different at different sizes. Once you’ve made a selection against something though, it’s gone forever, so you don’t get to find a ranking of preferred fonts.
It would also be good if it didn’t tell me the name of the font until after I made my choice. My favourite according to this is Adobe’s Source Code Pro. Purely by coincidence, that’s the font that I have installed for all of my terminals to use. Or possibly seeing the name gave me a positive bias towards it that I wouldn’t have seen if I’d been comparing it without knowing the name.