Though I agree with the author & use the web version of various applications, there is another side to this. The author says s/he uses plugins to disable ads and so on. If its an ad supported site for which one does not pay, this is tantamount to expecting the provider to run the service for no compensation/revenue at all.
Furthermore, to say platform owners don't care about offending such users would be an understatement: platform owners likely want to actively repel such users. Why serve someone who neither pays a fee nor agrees to be shown ads?
"Bombadil is property-based testing for web UIs, autonomously exploring and validating correctness properties, finding harder bugs earlier."
I can't make heads or tails of this. What does it do? "Bombadil checks each property as it explores your system in its chaotic ways, reporting back any violations." what properties? checks how? does it read application state? "recording violations" what violations? "select an action and performs it" what actions?
This needs some code example, or a video, or something to explain what this tool is
The page "Language features > Properties" starts to explain what this is.
Go for it! I've been meaning to do an "architecture of Bombadil" blog post that'd likely answer this question. It's not super advanced by any means, but it's a mindset shift to how you might think about browser testing coming from the mainstream frameworks like Playwright.
This is broadcast publishing in a nutshell. Look at the early radio shows, they had names like "Alka-Seltzer Time," "The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour," "The General Motors Hour" and so on. It was explicitly "we are playing music to get you to tune into our advertisement."
Free newspapers and alt-weeklies are the same. How are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
> I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change, not stopping it.
Yes, you feel. And the author feels differently. We don't have evidence of what the impact of LLMs will be on a project over the long term. Many people are speculating it will be pure upside, this author is observing some issues with this model and speculating that there will be a detriment long-term.
The operative word here is "speculating." Until we have better evidence, we'll need to go with our hunches & best bets. It is a good thing that different people take different approaches rather than "everyone in on AI 100%." If the author is wrong time will tell.
Yes. Exactly. We’re both “feeling” without much proof. But between the two speculations, one is more open and welcoming, while the other is more restrictive.
I find it sad that there's a story of people (mostly women) doing this disgusting job for little pay (yes, chatting up horny men online because you need the money is disgusting, there's no glamour and little dignity to it), and the top comment is how this is unfair to the john (purchaser of sex work) because it's misleading.
Sex work is work. They’re not being coerced. There’s no more or less dignity to it than being a waitress or checkout clerk. It’s no more or less disgusting than being a hospice nurse or a garbage collector.
It’s just a job.
Jobs are not inherently fraudulent, however. A deal is a deal, and this is plainly fraud.
It is unfair to the purchaser, and it is not unfair to the people who voluntarily accept these jobs (when other jobs are obviously available).
I hope not. Most people I know seems to get at least some enjoyment and satisfaction from their job. But I live in a first world country and have a white collar job, so my experience may not be globally relevant.
> it is not unfair to the people who voluntarily accept these jobs (when other jobs are obviously available).
Are you saying that jobs are obviously available in this case, or are you saying that it is not unfair under the condition that other jobs are obviously available? That's very different.
> There’s no more or less dignity to it than being a waitress or checkout clerk.
Do you imagine this is how the workers feel about it? Do you think they tell their friends "I seduce western men online for pennies an hour" the same way they'd say "I am a waitress?" You can ignore this fact if you wish, but these jobs carry a social stigma and most people would prefer not to role play intimacy with men online if there were another option.
"Sex work is work" is like saying slavery could theoretically be OK under some circumstances (We're all born under legal obligations, how is slavery different etc etc.). A tortured theoretical argument could be made to support either of these, but in reality we know that slavery is unconscionable because of the indignity and brutality of it, regardless of theory. "Sex work" is the same: in reality it is a dangerous and unpleasant job (that overlaps with slavery a lot, incidentally) done mostly be vulnerable women, and that they're often abused and left injured by it. See this article before you go saying prostitution is benign and harmless, this stance is divorced from reality: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-trafficki...
“pennies an hour” sidesteps the fact that $2-3/hr is a fairly decent wage in the Philippines.
The average hourly wage is $2.11 and the minimum wage is $1.36 per hour. It is likely easier work and better pay than being a waitress.
Voluntary, harmless sex work such as that described in TFA has no relation whatsoever to slavery. Your crusade is out of place in this thread, I believe. Most working class jobs are unpleasant, and being a sex chat operator is probably one of the safest jobs one could have in the world. You seem to be intentionally conflating the topic at hand with unregulated street prostitution.
> most people would prefer not to role play intimacy with men online if there were another option.
What does that have to do with the people who DO do these jobs? They plainly have other options and they work as sex chat operators by choice.
TFA intentionally frames their wages as exploitative when they are median for the locale and substantially above minimum wage there.
Someone paid to have a fantasy of sex, and they got that fantasy. If they don't like it, they don't do it again, and this is true whether it's "the model" or someone else. If they do like it, what's the issue?
This is like saying you paid for a celebrity plumber & a regular plumber did the work, but you're upset because you wanted the celebrity. "The job" got done one way or another. They're selling digital handjobs here, there's no need to be precious about it.
Because what Person Y is doing is no more the whole of the job than what Person X is doing, and OF can more easily detect (though its still far from perfect, I've heard) and aggressively cracks down on when the person doing Person X's job is not the person who legally owns the account.
Are you serious? However goofy that sounds, they paid for a specific fantasy. They would not have paid if you advertised the service as "talk dirty with a random dude in India". If the reason they paid for this service is that they were promised a specific person, that's fraud. As simple as that.
Your judgment about whether the services are equivalent doesn't matter. If I pay you for Gucci socks, and you intentionally send me cheaper HZBZZYXY socks from Amazon instead, that's fraud even if they're still socks.
> If I pay you for Gucci socks, and you intentionally send me cheaper HZBZZYXY socks
The difference is t he product is 'blessed' by the official seller:
Would you feel defrauded if Gucci sends you the Gucci-branded socks you ordered, but you discover later they were made by the HZBZZYXY factory in Guangdong rather than by an Italian master sock-craftsman?
What do you think of fast-food chains using of idealized-product-shots for ads and menu pictures that look nothing like their actual product? The.markerting uses pictures of products that take hours to prepare by 'food stylists' in a specialist kitchen/studio[1], and are often not even edible, but look great on camera.
Apocryphally, motor oil is sometimes used as a maple-syrup stunt-double. Is that false advertising to you? If so, why would an OnlyFans model be more culpable than McDonalds or Wendy's?
I have a lot of issues with dictation as well which I feel has gotten much worse as it gets "smarter." It used to take literal dictation & I could say "comma" "period" etc. to insert punctuation. Now it tries to guess when commas or full stops should be added and it's horrible. If I pause to take a breath it puts a comma or period, sometimes entirely changing the meaning of the sentence.
Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.
What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?
Siri: Shows the literal text “Hey Siri, turn on the [such and such] light” on the screen and does absolutely nothing. It’s an edit box. Pressing enter has no effect.
Did you upgrade your iOS? I’m stubbornly sticking to v18 as long as I can and have noticed no such change. Cooking timers, alarms, and light settings are basically all I use Siri for.
Same thing has happened to me with Siri. It's absolutely garbage.
For years, I've said "Hey Siri, turn on Bright" because I have a "Bright" Home scene configured. About 2 months ago, the HomePod updated and now responds consistently with "Pause in the bedroom?"
Nothing is playing in the Bedroom.
Nothing CAN play in the bedroom, there's just lights in the Bedroom. No speakers.
What the heck is it even _trying_ to pause.
It made me remember how Siri used to turn on the lights when you say “Let there be lights”. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work anymore either. It was a cool gimmick that made us chuckle.
Same frustration here. It’s somewhat painful for me to type but using dictation on the iphone is so terrible I prefer the physical pain.
As for names, I an also baffled. Most people in my family have either a Brazilian Portuguese or German name, but my work life is in English, so guess what, no getting anyone’s name right!
It's extremely painful that there's are free, OSS dictation tools that can run on-device, that are so much better than Apple's dictation, and yet it's quite difficult to use them on the iPhone. I'm referring to Whispr. Microphone access is a pain for custom keyboards -- for good reason, but still.
I still use spoken punctuation and it works ok so long as you don’t pause. E.g. “ hey siri text my wife I’m not sure when I’ll be home comma but I’ll text you when I’m leaving” if I say that without pausing, it puts the comma in the right place
I struggled with family member names too until I realized I can create shortcuts for them (usually just their initials). Now I just type the shortcut and it always works. Joy!
I'm not an MS dev type, but I've often seen these forms questions. What made their forms so easy, or more in general what is so complicated about forms that this was even a tool so many liked?
MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...:
* You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was)
* You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records
* You add a "form" for users to do just that. You can also add a "login" form to give some users more permissions.
It's basically if you could turn a SQlite file into a low-coded desktop app.
With Access, a business doing data entry could -- with a business user not a software engineer -- craft a Form and voila, easy onboarding to train new employees instead of filling out sheets of paper and filing them.
Access biggest advantage by far was that you could share the file on a network drive and having multiple people accessing it: You didnt need any type of complex backup procedure.
In case of failure, just copy-over the old file from yesterday - such simple solutions are pure gold for SME without any big IT department
Right but it is cheaper than open source products if you self-host. Most open source products in this space, including grist, are only partially open source.
It is weird that your enterprise features are not self-hostable even if a customer pays. I understand if some features are not open source, but why make it not self-hostable? Self-hosting is a requirement for confidential data.
The enterprise features are self-hostable. Look at "your servers" on the pricing page for Grist. Individuals (and orgs with < $1 million in annual income) quality for free activation keys btw.
For what it's worth, which isn't much because this is probably outdated: I remember trying grist a few years ago and leaving mildly unimpressed with form support (I think because I was hoping to have image upload in the forms and that wasn't supported yet).
Since it is relevant here: support for uploads was code written by a French contributor, and reviewed by a developer working for the French gov (ANCT/DINUM) and a developer working for Grist Labs. Grist Labs has since maintained and improved on it. The forms feature itself was inspired by an integration built by Camille Legeron at ANCT.
This whole affair should get much more attention. If one topic on Wikipedia can be so manipulated, any topic on Wikipedia can, and it's no longer a reliable source of knowledge.
I hope The Wikimedia Foundation can get its act together, and I admire the courage of Jimmy Wales for speaking up about this, but I've also stopped donating. I want no part of this.
I also have stopped donating. I replied to a WM Foundation email explaining why and they said they don't have editorial control over wikipedia, i.e. their hands are tied. Well OK, but I'm not giving money to fund the promulgation of Jew hatred and blood libel. Sad state of affairs! I've given for years.
I would say it absolutely violates the NPOV policy, and it's worth noting that both Wikipedia founders share this view [1] [2]. It's the only thing they've agreed on in many years.
Ultimately it's just a numbers game - Wikipedia almost always follows consensus, even when the consensus is to (effectively, without admission) throw neutrality or other rules out the window.
Some of this has to do with concerted and long-running campaigns of coordinated editing (against wikipedia rules) to push a one-sided political narrative. Most notably this happened and continues to be done by Israel-eliminationists[0]. Wikipedia eventually acknowledged the problem and banned a couple of the worst offenders[1] but that's a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned. I read it less and less these days and don't consult it at all for anything controversial ("controversial" meaning "topics that leftists have strong opinions about").
Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.
Furthermore, to say platform owners don't care about offending such users would be an understatement: platform owners likely want to actively repel such users. Why serve someone who neither pays a fee nor agrees to be shown ads?
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