Monthly Archives: January 2019

Article note: Years ago I started calling this "Dung beetle programming": rolling up bits of other people's crap into a monolithic ball until you have sort-of the program you want. Someone in the comments referred to it as the "Invented here problem"; developers now tend to reflexively avoid writing any code they'll be responsible for, and push off the dev time and maintenance cost onto anyone else.

Article note: The regularly scheduled gaben quote "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." Fragment up the market into expensive silos and people go right back to piracy. Make a convenient legitimate single-source, and people stay put.

Article note: Breaking aggressive content-editing extensions for ad-blocking and such would turn Chrome(ium) into another Google product I like killed or rendered unusable by Google's business interests. I always think about Alan Kay's Dynabook paper "One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising!" when I read these "general purpose platforms are too powerful, we need to restrict them so only the really powerful bad actors can scam the serfs" arguments. It's a vast failure of computer literacy.

Article note: I don't' expect there will be anything here I don't know, but I'd like to see their proposal for a way out.

Article note: Astounding! Ads designed to slip through as content have a 9/10 success rate at slipping through as content. Perhaps we should fucking regulate advertorials as advertising...