as if I don't have enough software bugs, I have actual bugs

02:46jangomandalorian Hey @pushcx , long time no see
Pardon starting a minute late. Ooh. That was me almost spilling my nice big glass of water across my entire desk. Wouldn't that have been a great distracting way to start the stream when I'm already running late? Oh, boy. Give me one second. frici Oh no, starting stream with a keyboard bath is never a good idea HahaSweat
It's only a splash, but if I get it off of shit. There we go. All right. hello hello yeah it was very i don't know if that came through on the mic but you might have heard the whole like pint glass of water wobbling on the surface of the wooden desk i was moving something out of the way and caught it and it it thought about tipping over and just barely didn't it probably would have gone straight into the keyboard too oh boy Luckily, you know, even that wouldn't be the end of the world because there are several spare keyboards around. I got into mechanical keyboards, gosh, I don't know, seven years ago, so I've soldered a few. I'm not sure there's one within arm's reach that uses QWERTY, though. It's been a couple of years, but I was using the Norman layout, and it's lovely, but I never did get the... Yep. The speed back. So... Let's not allow that. Guess I missed closing something there. I don't know if the five seconds of rock came through there. All that aside... Nice to see you for Chi Django, Mandalorian. And then for everybody else, this is the lobsters office hours stream where twice a week, I take any kind of questions that folks have about the site, the community, the code base. And when folks don't have stuff, I work on the site. Usually that's code, but my plan for the day absent questions is more writing. which is why this stream started 20 minutes late. There was the big meta topic last week around the Brave browser. I just left a comment that is about that, and I'm just not a particularly fast writer, especially when I'm trying to be clear about contentious stuff. So I was working on that comment and then working and working and working, and I realized it was just going to be Better to pause the stream than wait another couple of hours, because it's already been a couple of days of reflecting on it. So that's about that.

05:50How are folks doing? I see a lot of familiar names in the user list. Thanks for coming back. Although I understand it's rude in Twitch to call individuals out, so I won't. My general plan was to talk about story merging, which has come up on the stream a couple of times. I guess that's part of why it's in my head, is maybe three streams ago, we talked a little about the UI of story merging, which is this item here. frici Now you got me curious, time to find out what the large stream blocker comment was 👀
But I've got a couple of... couple of reasons i think it's worth spending some more time on story merging yeah we can just here i can find the link real fast it's whatever my last comment was which the threads page should have somewhere down here pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/iopw1d/what…
Many big threats. It's this one I'm talking about. So let me grab this link. Oh, yeah. What is this, like 600 words?

07:14Yeah, I learned in college writing papers that I could write good paper at a rate almost exactly one page per hour so if I had a five-page paper to write I could just block off five hours and I would write it and it was always always that amount of time and I would get really good grades on papers that was pretty consistent but then just I am such a slow writer when I'm going for quality jmiven hello!
obviously silly comments I can bang out pretty fast, but having worked with professional journalists, I mean, I was a professional journalist at the Washington post, but like I did, I built sites that went along with news stories rather than directly writing articles myself. And yeah, I guess the other thing I did that was journalism was I built the, the tech crunch job board and did some other stuff in the early days of tech crunch. I had a contract with the New York Times that didn't work out. Anyways, I got to get in gear. I'm distracting. espartapalma Hi Hello, folks
bsandro VoHiYo
But I was always impressed by the prose journalists, we'll call them, who could just bang out stories so fast. Because I would look at the stuff they would write and I'd be like, oh, that would take me two hours to write. And they'd write it in literally 15 minutes. Professional writers. Pretty cool. Ah, hey, Jay Miven, Espar, Bisandra, welcome back, folks. Nice to see so many familiar faces. I didn't actually expect that for Lobster's Hours, that there would be, you know, a nice little core group that returns, but that's been super pleasant, actually. So, absent meta stuff, the other meta stuff is story merging. I had talked a little, oh, because it's such a usual stream fixture, I should maybe mention there's been no movement on any pull requests since the last stream. So I'm just not even going to go there. pushcx https://github.com/lobsters/lob…
This bug that we talked about on stream a little while ago, and I'll throw the link in chat.

09:46was kind of funny, because let's actually have that open in the tab for an example of story merging, because not that guy, which This not this thread. Didn't I put it in my notes? Yes.

10:23pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/skds9f/redu…
So this comment is where I did a big write up of story merging a while ago. And let's get rid of that highlighting for contrast.

...41The funny bit that popped out at me was saying, oh, if the saving feature doesn't work properly on merge stories, that's a bug, and please file it. And if saving is broken, hiding probably is as well. So I wrote that September of 2019, and then August. So almost exactly five years later, we had this bug reported that, oh, yeah, if you hide a story, it doesn't actually hide all the comments on the story. So the the gist of the way story merging works is it's kind of a bug factory. So here's a really small example of merging stories where there was an official blog post, and then also someone submitted, I think Keygen created this fair source thing. These were the two things. So they announced that they were becoming fair source, and then they created this fair source group. So since they were the same topic from the same company, I merged the two stories together. And so you can kind of see an example of, well, there's two headlines. And then this text is a little funny. And then if we dig down somewhere in the, oh yeah. So like here's some comments from the merged story. They get this icon on the front and they have the title of the story on the right. And if you're just skimming along, especially for the top level comments, so like this one A consistent thing that comes up is basically people miss this UI. They don't notice this title. And so, actually, this is a great example because this person says, oh, two years. So they are responding to something that is in the article. But if you're just browsing this story, it's not super clear which of the two links they're responding to. People just, they miss this part of it. And this UI is not super useful inside of a story because, so we reuse this template for comments and every place that we print comments, we use this template. So this links to the story, but on a merge story, this just kind of like links to the page and it tells you it's merged, but it's not clear. Oh, if you want to understand why this person is saying two years, you have to click the second link, not the first.

13:34jmiven just as a note before I forget: if I'm not mistaken, yawaramin is waiting for a comment in PR #1383 :)
so the way merging is implemented a note before you forget oh they're waiting for a comment in the pull request that's that's worth interrupting for because otherwise i was just going to go into store emerging for pretty much our whole time so all right so there was this i reviewed it Oh, that's great.

14:28How long was that sitting that I missed it? Two weeks. Oh, man. I must have clicked in and accidentally cleared that little blue line that notes that it's new, and then I just never looked back.

...49Is indenting a good idea? Honestly, people miss the indented message for editing titles. Let's find that code to refer to it. We use that for that. So that's over in application.js has the, what is it called? Delimiter? No, separator. Yeah, here we go. The check story title has a really simple bit of code that just says, If you see one of these punctuations, the dash, the colon, and then like the N dash, the M dash, a pipe, a dot, a different dot, or the word by, we're probably seeing a title or someone that was automatically fetched from the page. And it's something like, Cool things in Python pipe blog by Alice Smith. And we don't include the blog by Alice Smith on the end of titles. It's just a style issue. And so there's this really simple title reminder that says, hey, look, if we have one of those, just that is the best time to tell people this, which is, what is that, over in the story form? yeah that says please remove extraneous comment components from titles such as the name of the site blog section and author this is pretty much lifted from the story guidelines but those appear below the story and they don't show up all of the time usually the guidelines are collapsed so it's deliberately echoing that text

17:46Does that answer? See, Yawar Min is kind of implicitly asking what the message should be here. So speaking of slow writing.

18:10Yeah, so the thing that I want to see out of this message is that it is clear to the submitter that we just replaced the thing they pasted. So their example here even is kind of similar, like it's a short URL, but it's very often the last part of the URL that has changed. So here it's just a trailing slash, but sometimes it's a dot HTML or a dot PHP or something else way out at the end of the URL. And when I say way out at the end, I mean, some URLs are so long, it's off to the side in the box. And when people are tabbing along in this form, the next field title is right below. And as soon as they out focus this title, typically within, I mean, it depends on how fast the, We can round trip to the target server, but typically in like 50 or a hundred milliseconds, we've pre-filled the title. So people's eyes tend to like just snap down to that next line of the form. And so they're going to be looking away specifically from the URL. And when the human eye moves from one place to another, unless it's tracking a moving object, it moves in what's called a saccade. That's actually a pretty cool topic if you don't know it.

19:57pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…
So the eye... basically snaps around. Yeah, so it's saying what I was saying of if it's following something that's moving smoothly, the eyes move smoothly, but otherwise the eyes do a quick simultaneous movement of both eyes. So when people are looking from the URL they just pasted and then they snap down to the movement, I'm not going to read the whole Wikipedia page to you, but the useful thing to know there is bsandro is it when brain puts a picture into your memory and you think you saw it?
people are functionally blind when they are circadian and you can see this yourself so is there a way of i'm never going to have a diagram let's make a terrible diagram this is one of those this is a little bit like that what was it called the card test that I did as an example on stream a month or two ago of can you recognize which of these cards to flip over in a logic test? bsandro nono
Bisandro, I think you're thinking of like Pariah Dolia, which is when people see faces in things, or then there's another one I'm not remembering. Less tracking.

21:59bsandro when you move your eyes quickly to the object
bsandro your eyes can't see anything on the move but your brain can't interrupt the "video stream"
i'm not sure i understand what you're asking well enough to say if it's the same thing because you know i read about this stuff because i think it's neat i'm not any kind of expert on the brain or the visual thing so as an example let's see let's make some our ascii art about it

22:28bsandro so once you focus on the image it puts the same image into your memory, and it is uninterrupted - feels like
all right so yeah okay so this is a ascii art version your eyes can't see anything on the move but your brain can't interrupt the video stream once you focus on the image that could totally be how it works but i don't know my understanding has been that bsandro that's why if you look at the analog clock second hand it often feels that it stays there longer than a second
bsandro yeah it is a terrible brain hack :D
when you are circadian you generally can't see things and your brain is just used to it and covers the gap like you don't notice that you have a blind spot in the middle of your vision oh yeah that one about the when you first look at a clock it feels long yeah i know that one but so here's ASCII art This is you, top down. So assuming you are not where someone is gonna give you weird looks, if you put your arms out to the left and right, so let's actually, here we go. Let's get a pipe. and a carrot. So I want you to always face straight ahead. Your chin should be pointed directly ahead, say towards your monitor. And then if you lift up your left and right arms and you hold them out and keeping your chin pointed perfectly straight forward, move your eyes all the way to the left and put your left hand with one finger up. You can choose your finger. Put your hand with one finger up so you just see it with your eyes all the way to the left. And then put your right hand, keeping your chin forward, do the same thing. So if you look all the way to your right, you can just see one finger up on your right hand. Without moving your head, look at your right finger and then snap your eyes to your left finger. It is the longest possible saccade you can do all the way from left to right. and it is long enough and slow enough that you may see sort of a bit of blackness in the middle and it's not really blackness because your inner eye is not a movie camera but you may realize that in the middle when you're doing this exceptionally long saccade there's kind of a feeling of blankness you just don't see what's in front of you which is what you would naively expect if your eyes were tracking from left to right and so if something changes in front of you in that i don't know what that it's going to take i think the longest saccades are around 100 milliseconds so a tenth of a second if something changes right in front of you you're not going to see it and there is a smaller version of this bringing it back to the form where Something appears down here and your vision snaps from the URL down, and if the URL changes at the same time, you literally cannot see the change. So that's why I'm especially careful around forms that change things for people, because naively it feels like they're looking straight at it. But if they are in the process of moving to the next field, or there is an animation happening somewhere else that their attention snaps to, they are blind to the change. So that is the very long way of saying I would like this message to be clear about what happened. And so let's say

26:54I would like to say canonical, but it's jargon that people won't know. So I'm trying to start with the noun of the thing you are caring about and we're just thinking about.

27:58Is there a good... See, I'm just hoping MDN has a page for it.

28:13Is there a... It's kind of a shame this talks about search engines. That's a little distracting and is not why we use it. We use it because... We use it for a similar reason, which is there are often many URLs and we want to avoid getting duplicate URLs submitted. That is probably enough. All right. Let's see if that's reasonable.

...58canonical URL given by the server.

29:05I'd like the message to start with the URL as the subject because it's what the user was just thinking about. And explain in active voice that it was changed when i say active voice the url above no but then the server is the subject the url is the object yeah so i'm not even being grammatical And I do try pretty hard to write messages in active voice, but in this case, I think it's clearest for the user if they see the object that they were just paying attention to. Anyways, thank you, Jay Miven. I appreciate you bringing up the PR that was hanging around. I didn't realize it was waiting for attention.

30:35So coming back to story merging, but with the reminder that if you have stuff you would like to talk about on stream, you can just bring up questions most anytime. I will either stick them in the dock and come back to them in a few minutes or just jump into them.

...57So we're talking about how story merging, there is this feature that's been hanging out where Users can submit suggested title changes, which is very often removing things like the name of the blog or the author of the blog, because people don't always catch that inline help. Or tag editing, where they're like, yeah, you know, this is about a programming language, and you just tagged programming generally rather than Python. Or what's the other one that's real common? Yeah, I'm not sure there is one that's quite as ubiquitous as folks leaving in stuff that we take out of titles.

31:52So users can do that, but they cannot suggest story merges. And that one is also it's been There was a discussion on the site. I don't think this one, the other merging story guy that I clicked by, I closed it. But there's like in a narrow technical sense, allowing users to set the merge story ID column is the exact same functionality as allowing them to suggest title. And it's just as easy to reverse. But then like the resulting UI of merge stories is a little bit clunky and it's not clear to submitters what that means. We'll talk about that in a minute. And so I've been reluctant to pick this up, even though it's been an obvious feature for six and a half years. And I noted down here today when I was reviewing before the show that We talked about the story controller justification to lean more into rails by splitting up the story controllers actions like allowing users to suggest or allowing mods to edit into their own controllers. And it would also benefit from the reactor refactor in 1298 which is already open it's the bug from the bug factory where. A feature does not interact well with story merging because story merging is implemented as each story has a column in the database called merged story ID. And so the stories table in Rails is very table oriented. it makes the story table kind of equivocate between whether a story is a single link or a single text. And then the alternate thing it could be is a merged story, which might mean the group of all stories that were submitted to make this one entry, which is kind of how the URL thinks of it, or The target for all of those merged story ID columns, which is again an individual link, but that one that becomes kind of special. And I call it the bug factory because, as I put it on. The post leading up to the stream if anybody follows me on blue sky or mastodon. Story is a God object and then everything that interacts with it has to have the complexity of checking the merge story ID column in both directions, both is this story merged into others and our other stories merged into this. And then it's not clear, so the way the hidden stories table works. is it is a very small join table from user id in this case gustav who is here sometimes i think to story id and so in the extra step of looking up comments it doesn't respect the story merging and it yeah it really should

35:53so maybe last stream or the one before where'd it go i'd have to look back at the scratches we talked about some options for how to refactor this and how i was kind of blocked on what to call the two entities resulting. And after sleeping on it for a few days, I really come along to doing the opposite of what I wrote in this issue and having a headline, which is the item that can appear on the front page. That seems nice. And then a story is the individual link or text and or text if we want to be pedantic. And then features like hidden stories becomes hidden headlines and they are forced to say, oh yeah, someone has hidden this headline. So we are merging, you know, all stories listed on it. And the common case is going to be that there is exactly one, but every time there's a merge, we're going to merge the others. or include the others. I hope that's clear how refactoring this would solve the bug factory, because then every story, regardless of whether or not it's merged, has the same database structure.

37:37And it's not strictly needed for fixing some of the UI stuff, but Boy, it always seems nicer to fix database issues before UI issues.

...58So we've talked about the bug factor. We've talked about features we don't really have. The other feature we don't have that people kind of want is Down here for but my exposure so, especially when people are. Self promoting or trying to rebut something that they are really disagree with. They get pretty unhappy about seeing their link submitted, even when they are very explicitly submitting it to respond to an existing story. And we merge to keep our discussions together to avoid having to rehash things. But people feel like they are missing out on exposure. And this is kind of an uncharitable way of putting it, but my exposure. I don't have a better way to put it because people don't usually explicitly say that they feel entitled to one of the 25 slots on the homepage. But that's what they want. And it's not obvious because the story disappears from slash newest when it's merged into something else. And that's one of the ways that people read the site. But those discussions do show up on slash active. So if any story in a merged story, and I don't, are there any on the page here? Firefox is the, why is there a, this is one of those stories that sounds like it's going to be about using software instead of actually making software, which is not a super strict distinction on the site for topicality, but I think about it a little bit.

40:02Firefox is also a developer tool, so yeah. Oh, here we go, here's a merged story. So it's not obvious from this list, but this one has had another link merged into it, and it's ordering on slash active is the latest comment in any of its merged stories. So the exposure is there, and this is why I put slash active like literally next to the logo, the top thing in the upper left. This was only about two and a half years ago. pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/ltwlfp/comp…
And so on a regular basis, longtime users still notice slash active for the first time. I'll throw this one in as long as I'm sharing an example, merge story. And then in the, where are we in the notes here? I will throw in that we have a couple of examples.

41:11And no discussion of merged stories would be complete, speaking of examples, without the most merged story in Lobster's history. Does anybody know what it is offhand? This has come up on the site. I know it's come up in the chat room maybe two or three times over the years.

...37bsandro hehe
The story in Lobster's history that includes the most links merged into it is Microsoft acquires GitHub. I think that's the title that ended up getting used.

42:04Yeah, here we go. Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion. frici holy...
pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/zknzmj/micr…
So this one has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 linked into it. Yep, that is the most. And I include it because I think it's always useful to have these kind of outliers to understand, well, what's the most extreme version of this? bsandro hah even ddevault is there
And I think it is to the site's benefit that all of these got merged together. Oh, there's actually like a 14th link that the original submitter put into the story text. Yeah. So one of the places that merge stories are especially useful is hot take responses. Like a bunch of these are like this one, floss ramblings on Microsoft bio. GitHub has sold us out. Like these are people who have moralizing quick responses rather than very deep what does this mean kind of reflection because if we went and looked at these dates so 6 4 9 15 and then the first one that kind of sounds like A response is 6, 4, 12, 55. So like in three and a half hours, did this user think extremely deeply on it and come up with, not user, author, think deeply on it and come up with something? Not, not really. frici I remember avoiding those stories cause I figured they would be rambling and fighting more than things I could learn or reasonably discuss about
You're not going to come up with something deep in three hours, but a lot of this stuff just kind of poured in in the first couple of hours.

44:00frici but i never looked if or how they got merged LUL
This one is also a pretty good example because some of these I didn't see instantly for the merging. Yeah. And so they had pretty good threads on them. Oh, and it's funny. I just randomly scrolled in here and landed on people talking about story merging. And so then it became... Some amount of confusing rehashes people are like wait which story, are you responding to because again people just don't see the part on the right.

...48yeah one of the benefits of merge stories is, and this one. Microsoft to acquire GitHub, that is straight up business news, right? Everybody knows it. And I would remove, I have removed many acquisition stories. I left this one up because just GitHub is ubiquitous. We obviously need to talk about it. By the fact that it was submitted 14 different links, I think it was worth bending the rules on topicality a little there. And Fritchie, what you're saying really gets to one of the benefits of story merging is if you don't want to get into it, you can ignore that story. You can click hide on that story. Well, not that it works perfectly, but it mostly works. And you can move on with your life. A lot of the times there's lots of stuff where you're like, you know what? I'm not required to have an opinion on this. How's that Seneca quote go?

46:07oh yeah there it is oh not seneca aurelius i guess i got close enough we have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and to not let it upset our state of mind for things have no natural power to shape our judgment so meditations is a series of notes that aurelius wrote to himself so You can read this as someone saying, like, dude, you don't have to carry about every bit of news that passes by. You don't have to have a hot take. You know, that would be the modern translation. You can just let events go by. And if you don't have an opinion on this kind of thing, you can click hide on the story and move on. As opposed to... we didn't have story merging it would have been basically the whole front page for two or three days yeah call it half of the home page but story merging one of the things it does just by existing is it encourages people to post in comments oh there's a topic yeah put that in the notes

47:22So I just shoved that in the scratch file, but it encourages people to leave comments with links instead of starting more stories. So I'm not going to go through this one, but if we didn't have story merging, and this was the first time we've had story merging, we probably would have seen at least five or 10 more links as people were responding to stuff and then linking in comments instead of submitting top level stories. As I recall, the next two or three days, the Hacker News homepage was just all Microsoft buying GitHub. And I think our programming was similar. pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/skds9f/redu…
So that's one of the benefits of story merging. Speaking of the benefits of story merging.

48:20so five years ago this person said they quoted the about page and said a lot of what we've talked about where there are downsides to story merging where it feels like they vanish from the home page oftentimes in the middle of active discussion this might even be where i picked up the word active because at the time of this post we did not have active up in the top level Merging disrupts the comment threading where it's really unclear by the UI. And then this one, relevant and interesting news effectively get hidden from a large part of the readership. That is kind of the first post again. I think maybe the difference is, or first point again, I think maybe the difference is, no, I don't know another way to put that besides it's about exposure.

49:27And their example here is Breaking News that had developments. And Breaking News is especially prone to having pretty rough discussions as people both rehash what came before the news and then react to the title. And when we have stories where people react to the title, which mostly is paywalls, but then also happens a lot with news, we have more likely incendiary discussions and don't really get anywhere interesting. Which is why paywalled stuff gets removed.

50:22Yeah, save stories is the bug.

...29So there was a solid discussion about this one. arh68 so may I ask: how many merges have there been, like total ?
And I improved the description of merging on the About page based on it. arh68 is it like 1/week or smth
But in the years since, because it has been five years, I've come to think that how many mergers have there been total? Let's check. Oh, ARH, I was wondering if I'd see you. We had a weird event. maybe two days ago. Yeah, it must've been Sunday. Cause I was, yeah, it was Sunday. Someone submitted a story about Mozilla rebranding and they had a username similar to yours. And oddly enough, they submitted a story and then like an hour later came back and deleted their account. And it was all done by the time I saw it, but they had just gotten a couple of, anodyne comments about branding, and then I was really puzzled by it. arh68 huh kinda weird. not me tho
I was hoping it wasn't you, but they did have a username similar.

51:48arh68 1 username's enough for me
Okay. Well, glad you're still with us.

52:03So when you say how many merges have there been, I want to make sure I'm making this join in the right direction. Where's that other example? That one was also two. So ARH for your query, would you count this as one or would you count this as 13? arh68 oh like 13
Well, I mean, just the one target rather than the 12 that were merged in. arh68 the # of merge icons basically
Okay, 13. arh68 1 + is fine\
So do you wanna include the top level one or just the ones that are merged? Number of merge icons, sure.

53:06What is it? And come here. Whoa, read line.

...19Let's see. Not deleted at. I guess it's is deleted, and it just didn't want to autocomplete for me. That's, or not is null.

...42Okay, so we've had 754 in the life of the site.

...57And then just for ballpark, this is just top level, there's 106,237. Or maybe a better overall denominator would be Eh, rounded to 107,000. So that's what?

54:36arh68 1% kinda higher than i'd thought
Yeah, 0.7%. I mean, it's almost your username, right? 0.69 instead of 68.

...57And we get roughly lately.

55:08It feels like we get about. 20 or so 20 to 30 links a day, I would have to check. And so that's a story gets merged every couple of days, you know, call it two times a week. I can query out the exact numbers, but that's just kind of my ballpark.

...45arh68 how is un-merging .. possible ? like is that a mess
So unmerging is...

...53It is and isn't a mess. arh68 do votes get moved from mergee to .. &c
It isn't a mess in the sense of on any given story, you could update that merge story ID column. Right. out to another you could just update that to null and those comments like you see this very first top comment it has the story id for the bloomberg one which was reporting and so if on this bloomberg story i clicked on merge this comment tree would move over But at the same time, and I'm not logged in so you don't see the comment box, but if I were logged in and I was mostly wanting to respond to the Bloomberg story or one of the comments and I left a new top level comment, it would always go to this with this story ID rather than say Bloomberg or as somebody else pointed out, Drew DeVault's response. arh68 how did the story only get 26 upvotes lol
and so in that sense it would kind of be a mess there is no site feature for moving threads from one story to another and i could do it in the database but it would boy that would be just dangerous because there's no no guard rails if i go to the database and then i have to manually write moderation messages arh68 i'm losin frames 1 sec
So that 26 upvotes is... bsandro yeah me too :C
So let's see. Yeah, it got 31. So it's ARH, it's net 26. So it got 31 upvotes and then four flags. But you're losing one frame, one second. arh68 F ?
I am not getting any kind of error out of my streaming setup. OBS thinks it hasn't dropped any frames. And the stream health graph is still green.

58:33No, now that I reload the dashboard, Twitch says the stream is unstable. Thanks, Twitch.

...53pushcx Twitch says 'unstable', let's give it a sec to clear up...
I shouldn't put this in chat. I should just put it on the screen, right?

59:18ARH, what are you asking about F? pushcx arh68: What are you asking about F?
I don't know if I'm audible.

...47arh68 F means stream died
arh68 i'm just askin if it died for y'all too
Oh, F in the chat. F to pay respects. All right. Just took me a second to get there.

...57gtfrvz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P…
Yeah, it's just gone to hell. for no discernible reason it didn't even rain today ah hey again gtfrvz yeah that's that's the meme i didn't how funny to see a meme page on wikipedia instead of on know your meme

01:00:37Yeah, the situation is really frustrating, and I don't know if it is on Twitch's end or my end. Probably mine, right? But OBS doesn't show any issue. Hmm.

01:01:10Are the, am I audible cleanly or is my voice also dropping out? Is it just that the video is behind? arh68 i think i can hear ya. could you pull up a clock like time dot gov
Because if it's just that the video is behind, I can be a little slower jumping around between things and we can keep rolling. But if I'm not audible, I should just stop, whether that's a pause or a give up for the day. Pull up a clock, yeah.

...44So let's bring that in. dr3ig it seems to be fine now;it was pretty much unlistenable for a minute
arh68 all good here SeemsGood
chamlis_ after a refresh I think you're good for me
bsandro voice is ok
Seems to be fine now. OK, good. So Twitch has a little stream health graph that jmiven only 30s late here and voice is ok
is not always responsive after refresh you think you're good okay so please refresh if things are awful and let's keep rolling shameless nice to see you again alrighty only 30 seconds late and voice is okay chamlis_ hi! doing some admin so not paying 100% attention
30 seconds is a lot more delay. Usually the delay tends to be in the five to eight second range. I did notice that folks were responding a little slower in the chat, but yeah. So anyways, having broken out of that, I will do a, you know, a station bumper that this is the Lobster's office hours. And if you want to talk about the site or the community, frici its 2.30s for me but it can get far more delayed if your side is playing up and we lose frames.
You can pop up anytime with questions and we will talk about it. We are working on, otherwise, a project to help the site understand itself better, which is to say, to talk about what story merging is, to how it works, how it's implemented, how it can be buggy.

01:03:33Fritchie, are you saying jmiven I *think* 30s is usual for me and my european DSL link
frici 2.3 seconds lol
two and a half minutes or are you saying like 2.3 seconds because two and a half minutes is a hell of a lot nobody's ever said that much delay before 2.3 seconds okay just You know, the number was either big enough that it was surprising or small enough that it was surprising.

01:04:10So, in this meta thread, I had just kind of drifted into, hey, here's the virtues of story merging. And this was longer than the value of

...32longer than the text I added to the About page, which we should click over and look at that.

...51So I believe... Oh, man. So the last couple of streams I have talked about... writing stuff and then run a git blame and then no i didn't write it or at most i tweaked it a little so i'm gonna avoid putting my foot in my mouth again about the history of this bullet point i actually when i just roll right into it i want to say we had like this short sentence and i wrote the later stuff Oh, and I linked a couple of example stories. Like, I'm pretty sure this was me. Yeah, well, there's the large example. That must have been me because it came well after JCS left. Not left, stepped down. So...

01:05:52I'm basically saying... What is this linked to? So this links to JCS's original description of story merging. And I would like to replace this link with a full page description. So it would live at something like lobsters slash story merging or lobsters about slash merging. rather than there's a little blurb here that links off to this kind of out of date thing i say kind of because like the core of this is the same but this also points to some of the issues or it doesn't cover some of the issues is maybe a better way to say it so

01:07:17So given that nobody has piped up with more site questions, what I was basically going to do is take this, figure out where to stick a page, and look at categorizing the existing story merges, which I did years ago for so many tabs. I can't keep track of where stuff was. which I did roughly for this, where I made a tab separated value of all the merge stories so we could see the scope of the topic. And I kind of skimmed it. This is certainly still true. I really appreciate efforts to try and build a shared foundation for discussion. Remind of that slash about note that I'll run queries. This is the same kind of impulse that led me this year to start doing these office hours because a big chunk of what I feel is my responsibility as a moderator is to help the site understand itself. And sometimes that means you have to run queries against the production database to understand that story merging happens 0.7% of stories. And if we look at the moderation messages for all of the merges, we can get themes of So the other thing I wanted to include in a document is the practices around story merging. So I believe with that giant GitHub thread that the Bloomberg story was released first. They beat the press releases into publishing by a couple of hours, maybe less. but we merged into Microsoft's announcement because it's kind of the official primary source. And so most of the time we prefer to link to the primary source if it's going to make enough sense to have context. And honestly, the only place I should stop, should stop rambling and start making notes, right? So, All right, so the topics here, let's, there we go. So here's kind of those topics emerging.

01:10:05Let's put a pin in the week timeline. Well, practices, prefer primary source, prefer technical write-ups to, what's the term here? So if we have If we have two stories submitted about the same time that are on the same topic and one of them is like the CNN.com version and one of them is Bob's deeply technical blog, I would prefer to make Bob's deeply technical blog the primary write-up because the CNN one is going to spend a lot of time. It's not going to go into his depth and it's going to spend a lot of its time on other stuff rather than the real valuable part for us. So I guess just two general news sites. I try and discourage general news, but that's neither here nor there. The other thing I was gonna say is for primary sources, and this comes up very rarely, maybe every two years, except in the case of legal proceedings. And this one, has not been a universal practice, but stuff that's come up in the last year or two has driven home the value of it because legal documents have a heck of a lot of jargon and they have a heck of a lot of assumptions and a naive non-lawyer reading of them kind of rounds to worthless. And I say that as someone who has worked closely with lawyers on different products and on contracts for my consulting. I learned many times that my non-lawyerly understandings of documents were often just hilariously wrong because I was missing stuff. missing assumptions that they teach in the second year of law school, or missing that something was a particular jargon. And so I would interpret a term like reasonable person to just be like, yeah, okay, I know what it means to be reasonable. It's somebody who's not flying off the handle. No, actually that's a term that's a legal standard with like 19 big pieces of case law and is a major open doctrine in US legal proceedings. So one example of that, I don't think we need to dive into examples and I really don't want to like, if you'll pardon the pun, litigate those examples.

01:13:21And so for legal matters, We tend to have really pretty good discussions actually when we have a lawyer writing for non-lawyers and that's happened with I think the Dino suing Oracle over the JavaScript trademark that's just happened in the last week or two. And then the other one is there's somebody who writes about software licensing and I'm blanking on his name. Is there a blue in his name?

01:14:04jmiven kemitchell
jmiven ?
If I... K.E. Mitchell. Yes, Jay Miven. That is exactly who I'm thinking of. And is that a... I want to say he might even be a user on the site. Yes. ..

...30What's his site name? writing.kenmitchell.com. Not Ken, K-E. I swear there is someone that had the word blue in the title of their name. Blue Oak. That's who I'm thinking of.

01:15:02jmiven yeah they are involved in the blue oak thing
That's a lot of... This might be just going back to KE Mitchell again. So this one... There's a... Oh, yep, here he is. Here's K.E. Mitchell again. That's exactly why I was coming back to it. So yes, all right. This one is writing.kemitchell.com. pushcx https://lobste.rs/domains/writi…
So if we swap that out to say, these have been pretty consistently some of the best writing on software licensing that has appeared on the site. And software licensing is Pretty hot topic. Like, as you can see by 80, 47, 37, 32, you know, when our median number of comments on stories is like six or seven, we tend to have fairly large discussions. And even though these are licensing, they don't tend to turn into flame wars. I'm not gonna say they haven't. not going to say they haven't gotten contentious because people have a lot of strong feelings about licensing and I don't want to dismiss those but Kyle Mitchell there is part of what informs this opinion of mine that when we get a lawyer who is explicitly writing for non-lawyers we have our best chances of having a really fruitful discussion and that is always my north star for the site is Are we having healthy discussions where people are sharing interesting things and forming opinions and feel safe asking questions and building on one another's knowledge and connecting with people who have shared interests? When we do that, it is the best of an online forum. It is why running Lobster's is so satisfying for me. I love being able to I don't know be the the party host who helps those discussions happen so that's why I say the primary source, except for law, because. As a bunch of you know programming teaches you to be nitpicky and teaches you to rely on the written word and you kind of. We drive into the ditch, and I say this knowing I drove into the ditch many times trying to discuss legal stuff when I just don't have the training and experience to be able to talk about it with the confidence that is very tempting just from a career spent in programming. Because they're so similar. It's, you know... It's writing made real, writing that changes the world. Oh, that's the whole thing I do as a programmer, right? So then this other kind of guideline of referring technical write-ups to general news sites, that one's pretty obvious.

01:18:44jmiven if people haven't seen this article, it's a must-read: https://writing.kemitchell.com/…
MIT license line by line. Which one is this?

...58Oh, yeah. This is a great post.

01:19:08I have been occasionally tempted to actually go to law school for dealing with software licensing and other IP issues. Not quite so much I've actually done it, but if there were a remote law school, especially one that allowed me to move at my own pace, I probably would go do that. I've looked a couple of times and they all are very oriented around the idea that it is a three-year program There are really only a few law schools that are not full-time in person or like night school in person. And that's really hard to fit into being well into another career and not actually wanting to change careers, just wanting to have a deep understanding of the topic and the other option would be to find the curricula for a law school and hire some tutors and just do the studying and not the structure but I don't know so there was let's grab this link too because this is useful

01:20:35What is happening here? Clipboard hassles.

...52So let's go look at these merge stories, right?

01:21:03So grab that and then we will say. What I really would like is, yeah, I better do it at the console interactively and then I'll dump it to a TSP to look at, like the other time that we've reviewed all the moderation decisions. All right, so we want to. Starting from stories. Let's select the short ID, the title from stories where merged stories ID is not known.

...48I'm going to say limit 10 just to make it reasonable. What did I get wrong here? Open the, wrong console let's try that again let's merge story singular so here are offhand these are probably the first 10. and

01:22:40Okay, so there's the merges and that's going to also include unmerges, right?

01:23:02That's, I didn't mean to.

...09Oh, I see. I wanted to say there was a, no, the action column is just the whole thing. I keep expecting there to be a verb column on the moderation, but we don't actually have that. All right, so we want the ones whose action starts with merged into, and that has been consistent. We've never changed that. description.

...47So let's join against.

...57It's not story ID. It's stories.id. And I'm just building up a table of all the examples where merge story is not an ID. And action is like merged into. I actually want to see that. It's the reason I want. There we go. First couple, not too informative.

01:24:48say order by stories ID desk limit 10 just to look at the most recent 10. Yeah, this is stuff I've written as reasons.

01:25:22So let's take off the limit and then just to count. Yeah, I'm not allowed to sub query like that. I just wanted to grab the number of lines real fast. That's fine. So this is my query. I already can tell I'm going to have read line hassles in two seconds, but that's okay. Good. And we'll dump that into slash TMP slash merges dot TSV. Let's look at that. Looks good.

01:26:31Almost want to. So.

...43So duplicate links, you know, we've already seen it just scroll by a bunch in the last ten. That's most of them.

...55I know that's a reason. So if I said, here, 712, okay. Huh, that's actually a pretty big drop from the 777. It shouldn't be possible for a story to get merged without a moderation. So this shouldn't be a left out or joined kind of thing, should it? That's easy enough to check.

01:27:34And I'm into fighting read line, which I really don't enjoy doing.

...52Yeah, that's ridiculous, but it worked.

...59That's still only 712. Hmm. It's like a 10% difference between 712 and 777. Do we think that's worth investigating?

01:28:28arh68 deleted ?
gtfrvz VoteYea
Yeah. Deleted? I didn't... In neither query did I... Well, maybe it is deleted. You know, stories just don't... arh68 idk seems like the number would go up HahaThink
If a story is merged, it's almost never deleted.

01:29:13Yeah, there have only been seven of those. So this isn't deletion.

...27dr3ig does "action like 'merge into'" filter down?
So this gets us 745. Does action like merged into filter down? Yes. Yeah, I was doing the left outer join. So if I said count star, this should be the number we already saw. Yes. And then if I get rid of the merged into, oh, I think I know what this might be. now we get 779 okay so it's for a while for the longest time story merging was sort of a special operation and the controller for stories was written so that if the moderator merged a story, the other edits on the form were ignored. And this was the source of many hassles. So if I said, select from iterations where action like merged into and action not like merged into and so the net effect of this is the action will contain the phrase merged into but it might not be the first thing because the action is generated from all of the edits that the moderator makes. And so if the moderator edits a title and merges, it might say that they updated the title, merged into blah. So let's say limit 10. Yeah, so here's, or no, that's the, I wanted the action field. but you can see actually me doing it of remove story text or story text is not for summarizing or so this is me changing the title or changing the story text as well. Yeah, so these are changed description from, and then where is it out at the end? Yeah, two, no description, changed markdown description because it's so redundant, and then comma merged into. All right, so it's just the potential for it to be. So if we said count star, and we'll get rid of the limit, it's only 34 out of the, what was that, about 60? So there's half of our story.

01:32:49So if we change this to say, action like merge into the start or, Action like percent comma merged into percent. That gets us up to 744.

01:33:40See, even there, there's like a. Off by one, because it was 711 plus 34, and we ended up with 744. I'm not going to track down the last 1%, but I feel like 5% is maybe worth it.

01:34:04Let's take a look at these.

...14only way i can think of to diagnose this is to do just a big giant join of find me everything in the first query that's not in the second one stories where merge story id is not null not null and Short ID is not in. Select short ID dot dot dot. And then thanks read line. All right, so here's a handful. I'm going to grab this short ID and open it off screen so I can just do it as a logged in moderator. because maybe there's something weird here. So yeah, this one was indeed merged. And it was just some kind of alternate link, or somebody wrote it up.

01:35:44So how is there?

01:36:20So there is a moderation. And it's a dupe.

...37Like I noticed this, this title here matches this. So Did we just get this one URL submitted multiple times? Because that actually does happen fairly often with merged stories where either the dupe detector doesn't fire because there's some slight difference that it didn't normalize away or something else happened. And so then there's duplicates. But then the action here is that I undeleted the story.

01:37:25This must be the...

...33This must be that hassle with if you change the merge ID, stuff doesn't change. There was another one where if I click delete on a story, it wouldn't just set deleted at, it would throw away the other edits in the tab. So that might be these other, what, 30?

01:38:03It's weird that there's a moderation for undeleting this story, but not for deleting this story.

...38Okay, so it was only submitted once.

...45If I look by ID, yeah, there's an undelete, but nothing else. How is that possible? It's possible the original submitter removed it, right? Yes, actually. And this story was posted seven years ago. I am sure not going to remember that. Let's look at a newer one.

01:39:42So here we've got HTSSPG.

...57So this is a story about Ah, some kind of AI thing. And if I said, let's find all the moderations related to it, that's

01:40:35so this was a year ago this is weird it shouldn't be possible for this story to have the merge story id set without there being without there being a moderation to match you know i look at it i've got it come here there's something else that pops out I'm going to bring it up here. So this story, nothing too exciting, something about compression and text classification. Something that catches my eye is that Hunter merged this, or Hunter submitted the second link. And Hunter is a site moderator, and the story form is weird about moderators. so let's grab these submitter names stories because if these are all moderators that would explain it the story form it's all it's all callbacks it's active record callbacks and i've hated this bug and it bit me even two weeks ago join users on stories.userId equals users.id. And let's get rid of this desk, or limit 10, because we've only got 30.

01:42:27OK, so all but three of these are site moderators. So what's happened here is, I hate this bug. I don't think it's even in the issue tracker, although I know which bug it goes on. So where am I here?

...56We've talked about how the Stories controller is overloaded and does a lot of stuff. Well, there is one edit form, ifEdit. And when you host to it, you get the form and then when you submit the form it calls the update method when you call the update method it checks if you're allowed to edit it which is to say are you the person who submitted it and it's only a few hours old or are you a moderator and then it sets this virtual attribute story editor And the thing that's missing here is, boy, where does the moderation get created? Well, it's not in the controller. Model story. Instead, before save, the log moderation hook calls. And the moderation hook says, If this is a new record, well, if this is a brand new record, we don't have to log a moderation because it hasn't been persisted. And if you are not editing from suggestions or you are the submitter, oh, you are editing your own story. And so the concept of is a moderator editing this is implicit in the false path through this giant Boolean. And so what the short version is, when a moderator edits their own story, it doesn't create entries in the mod log. And so the other unmarked stories there are the ones where a moderator submitted a story and realized it should be merged into a story that was already submitted and did so themselves.

01:45:16So that's the bug factory. But this one has the different fix. The different fix for this one is splitting up the stories controller functionality because the stories controllers form handles both users editing their own stories and moderators who have different permissions and different things they're allowed to do and different timing. And then the moderation logging happens after in a callback. So let's just note that.

01:46:15Moderator edits, plural. It's harder for me to type because they can't just curl up in my lap.

01:47:22All right, so with that bug run down, I think we are good to go ahead with the TSV.

...40We want to say, oh, read line, why are you doing this to me? We want to say like this.

...58catch the ones where it's not the first thing. And then I need a right parenthesis, some unknown number of characters.

01:48:21Ooh, looks like I got it in the right place, right? All I did was... Hit right arrow as I spelled this out. So I was like six, one, four, one, one, you know. Okay, and then how many lines are in this? Still only 712. That should have gone up to like 740. Oh, because I missed the closing. Now we got 745. And the reason it's 745 instead of 744 is it has a header line. So there's that off by one error. And then the rest of these are going to be moderators doing things. So I feel pretty good that we've got something accurate.

01:49:35Let's grab that.

...43I'm going to fire up LibreOffice. So we're about to switch from dark mode to light mode.

01:50:00I'm going to open this off stream because I'm going to have to browse files and stuff. So that's code lobsters merges.tsv. Good. So here's the dialog. So we have the short ID, the title, and the merging response. So this all looks pretty reasonable. I hit OK and bring this back on screen. arh68 ahhh GUI PopGhost
All right, so this, clearly there was some long-ass reason on something. I'm going to shrink that down so we can fit on screen. If folks want to tell me how the font size is. Ah, GY, yeah, I know. I could probably use... What's the name? Like Visidata or Dataset. arh68 font is a lil small but it's fine
But as neat as I think those things are, I don't actually have them installed and know how to use them. Font is a little small, but it's fine. I'll nudge up a little bit. And we'll just kind of chop more off of this. And this.

01:51:24All right. So here. There's a quick way to say I don't want the text to overhang. I don't want to wrap.

...47I see that this one is overhanging into here, and I want to hide that because I know when I skim, it's going to be hard to see

01:52:03It's the view.

...14There's something. All right. dr3ig It's weird that moderation is created as a callback in the story model. Intuitively it should depend on who performs the editing action, and so occur in the controller.
Well, if I format these cells and I say, oh, not that one. arh68 uh maybe fill R10C4 with content ? or wrap with fixed 1.0L height
say wrap it's weird the moderation is critical back in the store model yeah dreg it is it is just one of those slightly hairy places where it is some of the first functionality written in the code base by someone who wasn't very familiar with rails and it wasn't as clear as

01:53:07yeah that's fine we got a couple extra lines but all right so now what I would love is if it was possible to do a multi-cursor thing and select every line that included like merging response. As far as I know, I can't actually do that. And I try and be really consistent in these messages. arh68 mmmm ya Excel kinda wins there. i stil like libreoffice
I wasn't super consistent at first, but then sort of built out a set of standard messages, and I have Firefox set to remember form input on the story form. So those are pretty repetitive, which I think helps. So if I said merging right up.

01:54:25Yeah. Honestly, I could do this in Vim easier, couldn't I? For some of these. All right, hold on. Don't open a new one. Let's just add a tab. arh68 M-x butterfly SeriousSloth
And so for everything that says...

...51So what are useful categories? MX Butterfly? Yeah, I don't know that one. Not an Emacs guy. Never have been.

01:55:04So there are 99 of those.

...24Don't need two there.

...36And if there are 99, it's just easier to do it by hand than write the macro. It also gives me a chance to kind of skim some of these others.

01:56:04OK. So the other one is very clearly merging reply because I've done that a bunch.

...25It helps if I spell things right, though. Response. Only five of those. Anybody else? So this idea of dupes. How many of these? We have 62 dupes? All right. And I'm going to do another search in a second for the word duplicate because there surely will be some.

01:57:09just hitting these these most popular ones real fast in vim it's easier than churning through them in the libre office because we have you know 740 some rather than like the last time i categorized stuff where it was 100 or something and we didn't actually need to use all of them oh no it's saying more than 99 oh no so i actually Maybe should have. What line are we on? 621. All right, we're getting the home stretch. But there may be responses that I missed. All right, so where was that last search? So if I went down and searched up, yeah, here's a couple.

01:58:22come on you just rapping on me thank you

01:59:12Go ahead, cat. Make yourself at home. Knock my stuff down.

...32How are there so many? Oh, I'm only at line 400. That's how. So lots of responses.

02:00:04oh there we go there's my limit so the other one i know i've used a few times especially if i'm grumpy and i'm expecting that i'm going to be cleaning up after nonsense is i have sometimes said merging hot take and i am going to go ahead and categorize them as responses because They are... I was just grumpy about them and feeling a little spicy myself. The hot takes rarely add much to stories. This is sort of a personal opinion more than a professional opinion. Oh, that's interesting. This one is both a dupe and a roundup. I am just... It's a hot take and a dupe. I'm just going to leave that one as dupe. Yeah. Oh, this one. This one is me correcting an error.

02:01:25Which. is going to be a response to this one let's check one of these is just going to be moderator error i'm pulling up that id yeah so this is this story being angry at chromium so this one Wait, no more Google. That one is a response. That one is a Google. All right. So somewhere there is a error. It's not so many that I want to break them out into their own section. So let's find the rest.

02:02:59738. okay so another thing that's pretty common here is if something is a write-up so we've got 30 of those and sometimes i call that an alternate link i guess so that's Those are especially common on security stories like this OpenWrt. So the write-up is some sort of technical news site wrote about it, but we also had submitted the original link of the security researcher. An alternate link. alternate well actually yeah there is a distinction so a write-up is third party and an alternate link is first party and the thing that pops out at me is tickle tk9 i don't even have to pull up the story i remember someone submitted like the the github releases page and then also their blog post or it was like the blog post and the download page something like that so that's when i use the phrase alternate link And I guess if we're being fair to the criticism that story merging is confusing, I should split out those primaries versus third party. So what do we want to call those? The write-up would be, it's not a third party response. We'll just call it write-up, right?

02:05:12dr3ig I think you've put 'response' or 'dupe' on newlines a few times (or it may be just wrapping)
I think you've put response or dupes on new lines a few times, or maybe wrapping. It's mostly wrapping, but those will stand out pretty clear once I pull it back into LibreOffice, so I'm not too worried about it.

...33There's also the possibility of accidentally Put two categories on something, because I've moved real fast on some of these text edits. And again, that's going to stand out in LibreOffice, so I'm not too concerned about it.

...54So for alternate links, I'm just going to say alternate. And we're going to remember that that means it's from the same source. And I'm going to pull all of these unique reasons into the scratch file or into the draft to explain.

02:06:30It looks like a reply. Just one of those. All right. So I think that might be enough. Oh, here we go. Into primary. How many mobile links do we have? None. So this one's just a dupe link. I remember this one where the site has a like m.whatever.com or, you know, question mobile equals one. And then it just provides a different view. And then. Some of these are, these are gonna be responses or write-ups.

02:07:27This one is an alternate link. Emerging writer. This one is an alternate, remember that.

...43Oh yeah, there was a lot going on in that one. I'm gonna call that one a response.

02:08:13It takes our responses. Oh, this one. Yeah. Merging plagiarism into primary source. I remember that one. I want to say it was even submitted before the primary source, which was kind of gross. But somebody just copied a post. I think I might've ended up banning the plagiarism site for this one. I don't recall instantly, but they just knocked off the blog post, but we had already had some comments on by the time it got... So, what do I want to call that? Do I want to just say plagiarism, make it its own category? It's real rare. It's like a maybe once a year thing.

02:09:11I'm going to classify it as a write-up because there's so few I don't know that it's worth breaking out. And I'm not going to be, so I'm not trying to be ontologically complete here. The goal is what's useful for writing this document for users. And I don't think it needs to call out, hey, don't submit plagiarism. This one's a write-up. That one's already done. Done. Done.

02:10:10That's a write-up that I was grumpy about if I called it content marketing. Oh, Freenode. Man, you know exactly which week that was. What, like three years and change ago? frici Oh what a time...
There's another one that had a bunch of merges was when Freenode was taken over.

...49frici i missed the /s there
yeah come here that's a response that's also a response because those are a couple of hot takes and then these are write-ups

02:11:18Merging into same story as one I should do right run through here in a minute. Oh yeah this one X NSA hacker drops new zero days doom for zoom not only was it a do it was a look at general news site and we had already had the. primary source submitted that's real common for security news because somebody sees something interesting and security is just sort of always a little emotionally salient like it kind of grabs you i found a bunch of the times where i'm like wow like not only is it already posted it's not actually a ton of interesting stuff like the only Interesting thing might be who is the victim rather than how.

02:12:21Yeah, write ups, dupe.

...32Hand old, response, response.

...40jmiven there's also some "Same story"
wrapped around okay so this into same story these are like half responses and half write-ups or more complicated they also can be There's also some same story. Yeah, good eye. I see it up here at the top, a different kind of CT log. So some of these, there are a couple of things. So they are third-party write-ups. This post-mortem one, I think I would call it an alternate because it was from the same source. And then... Some of these are responses. So we're gonna have to look at those individually.

02:13:53arh68 could you explain the "This one is a little backwards ..." action
Yeah, I think all of those I'll have to look at individually.

02:14:01Let's make all those links. Could you explain that this one is a little backwards?

...14Oh. So, Nintendo is suing the creator of Switch emulator Yuzu. This is a little backwards, but to keep together the links on the same story in one week, I'm merging the third-party write-up into the more recent and decisive primary source. So this is... I bet there was a time gap between the first one, which was a third-party write-up, and then the first-party source. So usually... That's not in the notes. That's a good one. So this one is 3-4 at 2 p.m. And this one is 2-28, so six days earlier. arh68 ah I see. thx
And that's why I kind of called it out as a little backwards because merge into the earliest submitted rather than the latest submitted. But here it was intention or with this idea of prefer primary sources. So maybe we're seeing some kind of priority order. So good eye. Yeah, actually on these like technical write ups. I think. Yeah, so. really what's going on here is like there's this practice and then just the question of deciding which will be the primary story and this is kind of the decision tree of first is it the primary source second is it the earlier one and this one this honestly is a little fuzzy And we could go through them, but I think... You know, if it's an hour or two, especially if there's just one or two comments, I'll go ahead and merge an earlier news story into the technical write-up. But if it's days, well... No, actually, I think that's pretty consistent as kind of the tiebreaker. The earliest submitted? All right. All right. So great question, ARH. Thank you.

02:17:30This is sort of an alternate take on this and then merge in responses, merge in updates. Like I haven't categorized many as updates, but that's part of what these same story ones are. All right. So. Oh, this one. I remember this one. It was a... I don't remember if it was first or third party, so I'll have to pull it up later. All right. So another thing that pops out at me... Oh, wait. Did I finish the primary sources? No. Because here's one I missed. Maybe I just missed it.

02:18:33I think that was a write up. Let me double check that one.

...44And I'm fighting the cursor. Come here.

...54Grab the tab at the end of it. Oh, yeah, this one. is third party yeah i like that guy's blog though so that one was a write-up and then this i sure don't remember looks like i just missed one or two in the middle because all the rest of these are done Bottom, look back. Looks like we've got some of these same stories. Looks like there's plenty actually. All right, so I lost my place investigating that one. We'll just start from here.

02:20:28Can I search for primary source and then any character that's not a tab?

...52So let's say not tab star. to the end. There we go. That cuts out all the ones that have already been looked at. So this was a write up. That one I don't know. This one is an alternate.

02:21:21It's this. This one was a write up. This one was a response. Only 14 of these left. And then we can get back to LibreOffice and sear your retinas.

...50This one's right up.

...58This one's right up. This one's, I guess I'd call it an alternate. So it was the same story. So same story also just means an independent thing. So like in this one, there was an exploit called Checkmate where at the same day there was the original announcement and then there was another interview with the author. And I wonder, I think I could just call that an alternate because it's an interview with the primary source. Yeah, I think that's fair.

02:22:43This one's a response.

...58This one, was this official? Because it's an alternate or a write-up. I don't recall. Looking at it off stream. Oh, man. Many duplicates. So this one was titled Getting Started. So it was from Medium, so it's just some quick follow of here's how you do the thing i'm going to call that a response this one's the alternate so like arh i called it out here of merge mailing list archive into story from primary source posted later so this was we had somebody's mailing list post and then probably a few hours or a few days later someone submitted the actual announcement

02:23:59This one was a write-up.

02:24:14arh68 ah like they leaked it lol
This was a write-up.

...20Less that they leaked it and more that's just where somebody happened to hear of it. So on the mailing list, You know, if someone was subscribed to the mailing list and they saw the announcement, they might immediately submit that where we probably would do better with a like actual product announcement product, not necessarily product, but a version announcement blog post. Cause you know, sometimes the mailing list post is just a change log or is otherwise written more for internal consumption. And then like a blog post is better to start a discussion from. I don't remember what that one is. We'll have to look at it. This one's a write up.

02:25:15That was a write. No, this was a response.

...24This one was a write up. That's a write up. And that's all the way around. OK.

...39So anything. Oh, press release. So those are going to be alternates. At least seven. Not too bad.

02:26:00And then anybody else popping out?

...18arh68 you got some `same story` left
This one's a write-up. And it's about lobsters. jmiven official announcement?
every once in a while so like part of being a moderator is being the no fun police but i figure like once a year this kind of like it's the lobster emoji which is not super topical especially because it was just some guy fighting over being the gold sponsor lobsters our site was the silver sponsor for that emoji. In any case... Oh, I see. JMiven, you're suggesting that that's a pattern we're zipping through? Come here. Let's do that. jmiven yes, sorry
I'm gonna reuse that.

02:27:21Okay, looks like we got eight of those. Nope, that's enough for me to go on. So these are going to be write-ups because otherwise I would not have referred to those as the announcement. All right, so there's those.

...49That one's a write-up. Hey, look, here's the... The day of the Microsoft acquisition, you can just kind of see a bunch of them. All right. There is a bunch down here where JCS did not write reasons for his merges. Oh, and he liked calling them dup instead of dupe. All right. Okay. I think that's probably enough to get back into LibreOffice, which is there a reload? Cancel all changes. All right. So I'm going to have to shrink this back over. Can I just... format all of these as links right now no not you format anchor no data and i guess i'll just copy and paste instead of click on them they'd head over to my personal browser anyway so i was gonna have to OK, so you could shrink that in. And this column is category. And if we take all this and can I just Make a, yeah, here we go. So here, if we sort ascending, here's everybody that's marked. so that was roughly half of them categorized that's not bad for the amount of time it took ah mosquito excuse me the noise compressor should have kept that from being too bad but oh yeah there's a place where i slipped onto two lines this one was a dupe And then I have to delete the rows.

02:30:40This one also. You can probably just get these pretty easy by using the Control Down. jmiven 369 also
Yep.

02:31:05369 also. Did I get it in the time? Oh, yep, you got it. I did not get it. Oh, not insert rows, delete. I can see this one. I wonder if these came in before I shift delete to, can I control delete? I could use a shortcut for deleting the row.

...46there isn't one so i will just have to use the mouse back in the 80s oh man i thought i only goofed these on two or three this is like a bunch here's the four I guess I was moving pretty fast on those responses.

02:32:36All right, that's all of them. This one is a dupe. This one is a write-up. This is an alternate. This is a write-up. More definitive link. This is probably a write-up. As are these. Do re-merge. Yeah, the UI on merging is not quite as helpful as you might want. And so it is, You basically, as a moderator, just have to open the tabs and copy out of the URL and paste the story ID, as opposed to the form having any kind of feature in there to help. Old news. And I think that's the one that's down a little ways. So I'm curious if that's a merge that happened way more than a week later. So the first one was 2.16. Second one was 2.24. So only six days. All right. The way it said that, I thought it was going to be a link down to one of these down here. But I guess get host by name and get adder info are not it. All right. Got some blanks.

02:34:14frici I'm surprised how all this time libreoffice calc doesn't have a delete row shortcut...
These are write-ups.

...25That's a do. That's a write-up. That's a write-up. Actually, no, that's a response.

...56All right. frici you can do it with "Ctrl -" but you still need to confirm what deletion you want. which doesn't necessarily need the mouse but its also more hindering but helpful
These are write-ups. Very topical, advent of code. Whoops. What did I just do? Come here. You can do it with Control-Minus, but you still need to confirm. Let's see what that looks like. Oh yeah, then I would still need to. So the the pop up appears off stream because new windows on my desktop automatically appear off of the. Area of the desktop for streaming. Just to minimize how much I'm flashing stuff up.

02:35:52These are write ups.

02:36:10frici yeahas you saw it still needs you to ckick the radio for "delete entire row(s)"
frici yeah as*
mm-hmm yeah yeah so the radio appeared off stream and I didn't just drag it in oh here we go so I was looking for one of these please don't submit stories as a super reply to other stories just link them in a comment so Let me pull this one up because it's not going to be too spicy, I don't think, which is convenient because it, you know. pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/jlrwng
So someone submitted this article that was, let's just throw the link in the chat if you're curious. Increase test fidelity by avoiding mocks. And then How much later? A couple hours? 3, 1, 20, 51. 3, 2. Okay, so five hours later? Six hours? What is that? About six hours later. A thing that people sometimes do infrequently, but it happens. is they see an article and either they disagree with it or they feel like it is a narrow window on a topic and in response they say you know what i saw an excellent post about this I will submit the excellent post. And in this case, the excellent post was from 20 years ago? Yeah. God, I remember when this came out. It's gone. I guess I'm dating myself there. very often i don't know if it's the case here but often the person who is submitting a story yeah so you can see it doesn't have the mergedite url here so non-crab this is actually a really really lucky example because it's very clear from the fact that non-crab left a comment on the target story that they are replying to the story and they said This paper makes this point. jmiven ah yes it's the Freman-Pryce-Mackinnon paper
jmiven Freeman
So... I read them not as rebutting something they disagree with, as expanding on something that they feel was limited. Yeah, Mockroll's not object. It's such a classic story. I actually... I now would say... We're getting distracted into what it's actually about. But yes, good paper.

02:39:30So... Not to put... I am speaking more for the general case than the specific. Although it's kind of clear what happened here is... Someone felt that... the rebuttal or the alternate explanation on the same topic was so much better that they wanted to have a thread that was just about their link and it's sort of a way to use a story as a super comment and I think I've called it a super reply or a super comment and this is not a great term because it's clear to me what I mean but it is not automatically clear to people who see it in the mod log because people ask about it in the chat room, or I get a puzzled DM about it of, why did you merge my story? And it's because we are trying to keep the discussion together. And if we split the discussion up into multiple posts, we end up rehashing a lot of the same stuff. And in this case, like these replies to the paper would not be visible on the paper story if it were an independent link so this is strongly one of the values one of the most significant values for story merging and maybe also one of the more contentious because when people do this they are often you know i don't want to cast dispersions because this is such a case-by-case basis and i can't always tell what somebody's goal is but it's often that they feel that the alternate link that they are submitting is so much superior that it should have its own discussion that's just about it. And sometimes, definitely not this case, because this one's not even an argument. Sometimes, that is, with hot takes especially, it's like, well, I want a story thread That's just about how everyone agrees with me and we're going to have a whole threaded discussion that's going to start from my favorite blog posts hot take on these events. And then I will get what I want, which is a thread full of people agreeing with me less than a thread full of people discussing the topic.

02:42:24So this is one of those practices that needs to get explained. Don't use stories as a super reply. Link in comments. And I don't know how to say it better than to call it a super reply or a super comment.

...51but I hope the general outline of the practice is pretty clear there. So let's see how often I said super. Oh, this guy doesn't, LibreOffice isn't gonna give me a quick version of that. Let me save the TSV and then come here, let go.

02:43:22There's one for supercomputer. So super response. Looks like we got four of those. And super comment, one of those. So it's not a thing I say very often. I might also have said super reply, mightn't I? yeah so one of those two super reply super comment oh super response all right so we got a three variants so this one is let's put it in the scratch which I guess this all should just be in the scratch because we're getting towards time. And if I write slow, it's definitely not getting written today. Great. super reply super comment so it's not just that i only do this on average one time a year because if there's like seven of these that's one time a year and it's not super clear to people

02:45:22And I think, actually, if I search for comment, I might have found alternate ways to say it. Yeah, please don't submit stories to be a super response. Super comment. arh68 "ratio"ing that's the phrase i was trying to think of
Unrelated. No, I'm searching for, come here. Ratioing, oh yeah. arh68 when you post reply B to get more votes than A ya
Yeah, that's the Twitter or Blue Sky version of it. Yes. Yeah, oh, I did find an alternate way to say it. I knew there was something. Please don't use stories to reply to stories. Just post a comment. Yeah, and that's why I was trying to be careful about the casting aspersions part was it's... arh68 ya I think a lot of time they think it's more polite to move the disagreers Over There
arh68 so Story A ppl can chat amongst themselves w/o like dual brigading
sometimes it's just i'm really excited and i have a great link on this topic and then sometimes it's i want a thread where everyone agrees with me and i want to kind of show you up and i move the disagreeers over there yeah it could be that is certainly a more charitable explanation i i like that i would hope it is more often that arh68 but it seems the Lobsters "politeness" is to keep it 1 party instead of parties of 1
the other hand our community is small enough it can't really brigade itself in the way that that could be an issue on reddit or could be on hacker news because they are enormously larger than us and when i say reddit i'm really referring to like a specific programming subreddit yeah that's also part of why so on that topic of Disagreers that's also part of why I characterized lobsters in that meta comment, maybe a year and a half ago as it's like a big backyard barbecue. I think lobsters is at its best when it's a bunch of people who are sharing discussion around a topic, rather than people who are trying to win a fight about a topic. there's. arh68 experts are still unclear as to what, exactly, `SKUB` is HahaHide
very rarely a lot of progress in the public understanding of a topic that comes out of fights it and i'm speaking here just of stuff on our site it's when people are having really hard disagreements even if they don't get into flame wars they don't tend to be able to When you focus on winning, you almost can't learn. I think that's just... Yeah. Scub? Oh, there's a good reference. You should please drop a link for that one. Because some of these are kind of deep cut memes. And I guess it's becoming clear on these streams that I'm extremely online, that I'm getting most of these memes. Log4j was another one that got a lot of merges, I think. arh68 https://pbfcomics.com/comics/sk…
And I want to say there was like three weeks of stories about it where there were three threads. Yeah, it was PBF Comics. That's right.

02:49:15So the two guys, people.

...30It's just human nature that if things are different, people kind of want to find which one is better.

...42And obviously the one that I like more is better, right?

02:50:03This one's an alternate.

...24This one's a write-up. Stalin's got cancer. Don't think I knew that. I mean, this is me merging it, but didn't register. All right.

...54So I'm going to save this. And since I just labeled a few more things, let's resort it. Oh, look at that. Typos.

02:51:15386 out of 745. So that's pretty close to half. Yeah.

...30Is there a way to get I guess I could just say, come here. So if I filter this to how many of them are alternates, and then I'm just trying to get some rough ideas of statistics. So so far, that's 28. And then if I replace with dupes. Oh, yeah. Looks like there was one where I had two things. So dupes, there are 64. Let's say. Let's say responses. So responses is 198. If there's 200 out of 350, that's the bulk of it. And then write-ups are the other hundred. Okay. So responses are most popular and then write-ups and then dupes and then alternates. I kind of wanted to eyeball that because I'm wondering, are those numbers going to change much if I actually go through the other half of this list?

02:53:28Looks like there's one more category of updates. Like these, this one, like these two are, but this one is as well where someone submitted a whole bunch of like a, a series of blog posts. Yeah. I searched for series.

02:54:03Yeah.

...08Oh yeah, or here's another one that just happened to show up of merging update into earlier submission. So sometimes that's someone breaks up a blog post into multiple posts. You know, F-Series gear selector part one, the idea, and then part two, the breakthrough, but they only come like two days apart. The other one is someone submits part one, they get a bunch of responses, whether on our site or somewhere else, and then they write a part two like a day later.

...54That's a write-up.

02:55:04Any more serious? All right, so I got the ones.

...32jmiven "this week" seems also common
guess that's a reason i guess this one is so we're coming up on the end here of lobster's office hours because i only want to run for about three weeks and i realize if i start writing this up I'm not going to get anywhere meaningful on stream so i'm going to punt that part to the next stream, but the two things I thought were worth writing a little more about and saying a little more about have come up. The two things are. A couple of things are tied together.

02:56:25Clarity in which story a comment is replying to. Super replies. And then kind of the inverse of super replies is highlighting best links in a story. And so what that becomes is what if a comment could be promoted to a story so we have a story submitted like i'm reading off of the spreadsheet let's just use that that testing title so actually this is this really is a great example the the one about increase test fidelity by avoiding mocks and then non-crab submitted a comment that was largely saying, hey, this paper was great. Let's talk about that too. This week also seems common. Yeah, that's me. That's the other thing that there is to talk about. I'll come back to that in just a sec. So

02:57:51if non-crab or users could have said you know this comment includes a link to something that we haven't seen before you know that's not not haven't seen before actually never mind that part if it includes a link What if there was a way for the author, comment author, or for readers to say, I think this should be promoted to a story. And part of the reason I think that is this display is real confusing. And it only gets more confusing when there's a whole bunch of stories merged in. And I guess I closed the ones, but... When there's like four or five, it's especially strange that the links for this one are after all the others. So if we go to the most extreme example, this top link is Microsoft's press release. And then this is the metadata for that one. And the metadata for these others is just kind of in line, which is weird. And then stories from the merged links have this tag that people miss. And so I guess what I'm saying is by commenter, reader, Hunter mod or readers. And then also. Rather than. So I'll say two things. Clean up the metadata on links at the top of the page. Confusing display. First items. meta appears last below merged stories right but then also in comments what if we repeated each story's title and thread title as a section header for its comments and i say it's in quotes because the value of story merging is that we keep the discussion together if we have a section header and so we said rather than organizing all of the comments by score so yeah rather than organize top level comments by score they'd be in their story sections. And possibility of continuing to vote on individual stories to sort comments. So this would be a pretty big change to the way merge stories get displayed. But it would make it clear that they're responding to different aspects, to different stories under that headline, if we went with headline as the top level title. It kind of rolls in a whole bunch of things and it makes the line between stories and comments a little permeable.

03:02:10A while ago, so I've been thinking about this for, oh man, a while. So that's the draft. And then this is also there. So if I go to TIG app models link, I thought about this for a while, but I created this link model in July. Oh, it's been kicking around in my head for at least a year. And the idea of the link model is it reads story texts and it reads comment bodies and it finds all internal and external links and the idea for internal links it figures out the the foreign key relationship there's a mosquito i don't know if i got it excuse me as if i don't have enough software bugs i have actual bugs So there it is. This link model, I wanted to use it to interlink comment, to interlink stories and comments a bit. so that you might even see metadata on a comment. So if, what are we up to Carol? If Carol leaves a comment in February about mocks, and then in July, Dave writes a comment and happens to link to Carol's, it would be nice if looking at Carol's comment showed you that there was a later response and another story from dave or not necessarily a response a reference and so that would be nice for internal links and i'm slowly working towards that functionality but the other part of it is it pulls out external links as well so if a comment links off to Actually, let's just go right back to our working example. This comment has an associated link record in the database. We don't do anything with it yet, but it's there that links to this. And I think there might be, since this story was submitted, I might have tweaked the story submission form to look for those and say, hey, actually, yeah, I did. I did, didn't I? Where is it?

03:05:34Yeah. So when checking to see if someone is submitting a duplicate URL, I check to see if they are linking to something that was recently in the comments. and view form errors and then they get this message that says hey this comment just time ago in words which might be 10 minutes or two days also linked to this story Please grow the existing discussion, rather than splitting up the discussion adding a comment will bump it to the top of the active stories, because I wanted people to see you're going to get the exposure you want, if you respond. If you reply to the link that has already been submitted, instead of trying to use a story as a super reply and this one has been a minute right so. TIG plan, log app, views, stories, form errors. So this one has been there two months. And so let's jump over to live. It's a good time to check in to see if there have been fewer merges in the last two months because of it.

03:07:16I need a count.

...28The numbers might be low enough that there's nothing clear here, but let's see.

...52So over the weeks of the year, here's how many we have 1, 2, 4, 14. And then what it was eight weeks ago, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I don't see a strong pattern popping out at me. The numbers on either side of the date look pretty samey.

03:08:23arh68 more missing rows near the endd, but ya
Yeah, the numbers are small enough. It's not worth trying to work towards any kind of epistemic rigor. But it's the kind of small nudge change that I hope has an effect like that.

...44arh68 seems like it nips that in the bud
All right. So Jay Miven. You said over here in the scratch. Seems like it nips that in the bud. It does. Oh, were there missing rows at the end? Wait a minute.

03:09:14Oh, you're right. I missed it. There's no 44. Well, maybe it did work then. 49, there's only one. Like some of this is going to be really influenced by if something spicy happened, but you're right. These are contiguous and there is a gap here. So we had a zero.

...44Huh. Oh, and 48 is missing. Okay. That's enough that I'm going to tip it over to say, yeah, it did improve the situation. I am doing fewer merges since adding that. You know, I'm not going to try and pretend that there's enough data here to have any kind of rigor on it. But as you know, like a stick your finger in the wind kind of thing, yeah, it helped a little. That's great. Thank you for catching that, ARH. So, Jay Miven, you pointed out the this week also seems common. It shows up a bunch in descriptions. because I'm trying to explain what the behavior is. Merged into other intro from this week. Merging this week's Rust Async stories. This week's Terraform story. So, some of what's happening is I am trying to explain to people what the merging rules are. And when I say this week, at least people can figure out, oh, I should expect that stories will get merged in the span of a week. And when I reiterate what that rule is, those individuals who submitted the merge story are a little less likely to do it again. Not 100% likely, but fairly less. And then also people can see it in the mod log and go, oh, it's a this week kind of thing. Some of these are... A big news story happens that carries on for weeks and the... Because I merge stories that are submitted within a week of the original, Well, eight days later, it's time for a new thread. And so that's why you see the this week's story a bunch.

03:12:11And I wrote pin in this.

...20What do we call them here? Like merge candidates submitted are, Within a week of original. Get merged. After a week. Why am I doing the arrow thing here? After a week. First, next story is. The target for future merges. This is. Mostly good so like there is a limit to how often we're going to merge stories and we don't want to merge forever and this kind of a. kind of a balance yeah well not kind of there is a balance happening here between. Keeping discussions together and exposure. A hassle, though, is site traffic is strongly cyclical. We've seen it in a few queries on the stream here, where Monday is the busiest, and then Tuesday is almost as busy, you know, Wednesday falls off, Thursday falls off, Friday falls off. And then Saturday, Sunday are What, 20% of Monday? So, you know, it's like a gentle slope and then clunk down to Saturday, Sunday, and jump back up for Monday. This is every site, by the way. Almost everybody looks like this, unless, you know, you have a Taco Tuesday restaurant. Everybody looks like this. So when a real interesting story is submitted on a Thursday, it gets about a day and a half of strong discussion, and then a little over the weekend. And then Monday... Monday is a new week with a lot more traffic than Thursday had, and so the Monday submitter may not even be aware of the Thursday story, because it's certainly fallen off the homepage by then. It may even have fallen off slash active by then because the weekend is so quiet.

03:15:17Thursday.

...33So this is also a little hard for mods to keep track of. So story merging only happens in 1% of the time, maybe less now that I put in that link model. But I have a mental list of stories I've seen in the last week. And especially when it's something like Thursday to next Wednesday people seem especially surprised by the merge. So maybe story merging. week should be a calendar week.

03:16:28It's something I've been kind of kicking around in my head and especially writing a doc. A big part of rules is they have to be predictable. arh68 merging like ASAP seems best
Someone has to be able to look at an action they're considering and run the rules in their head and say, am I about to break a rule? And hopefully they do that. And hopefully for them, the incentive is follow the rule, not get a thrill out of breaking the rule. But it is really hard for anybody who doesn't really closely read the site like a moderator or a major power user that. They won't know 234 days later. Especially if there's the weekend in the middle, I mean. Part of my goal for the weekend is to not think too hard about the workday, right? And kind of reset, refresh, come back clean. Not a lot easier, but it is easier to explain, more likely to be seen, builds on natural rhythm. So this would be a change, but it's one of those places like that book Badass by Kathy Sierra that I keep referencing where if you can't understand what's happening, people can't understand it and feel competent and follow the best practice and do the good thing and be their best self. So That's about the end of the topics that I had to talk about. This has been Lobster's Office Hours. If you have questions about this, feel free to pipe up. And when I say this, I mean either the story merging stuff we've done or anything else on the site, because I'm coming here to the end of the stream. And I will take this spreadsheet and I will attach it to the stream archive page. arh68 PopGhost VoHiYo cool beans
So this is the 2024-12-9 stream. And I will tie in this TSV file. If you want to download it and play around with it, you're very welcome to, because I want the site to be able to understand itself. And if you want to look at this and figure out Oh, maybe we do want to go through the other 350. You can pipe up and tell me that very explicitly. Otherwise, I think I've categorized enough to feel like we've seen all of stuff. Weird. So this one is obviously a response. What's going on? All right. There must have been a case against OOP and then it got these two responses. It is so hard not to rabbit hole looking at this stuff because it's like, oh, It's a whole list of things I'm interested in. I'm just scrolling past 700 things that are all pretty neat. GitHub has sold us out. Okay. Speaking of hot takes, sometimes you can spot them from the title.

03:20:20All right. Well, thanks very much for hanging out. Folks, I really appreciate that some of you were helping read over my shoulder and helping categorize them. You all asked, either you caught useful errors and distinctions or you asked really good questions that get at what's going on here. And then hopefully we can, on the next stream, take all of this stuff that we figured out from the site's history and me getting forced to brain dump what I am actually doing from the gut and put it into words. And we can write up something that is much more helpful and much clearer and much easier to follow. And once that's written up, maybe that becomes a, all right, well, we could improve the UI. We can improve the practice. And very hopefully, we could do that. Oh, I didn't paste it in here, but the stories controller thing that we keep coming back to. Like, I had been kicking that around in my head, but since I wrote up the GitHub issue for it, I just keep seeing things like the moderator editing their own story that's like, oh, yeah, well, if we cleaned up the controller, that wouldn't happen. All right. Well, given no questions, I'm going to roll out. frici cool, thanks for the stream1
arh68 take it easy y'all DinoDance
Thank you all very much for tuning in. And I will see you Thursday morning for our next regularly scheduled Lobster's Office Hours. But feel free to message me on the site or email me or grab me on IRC or whatever is handy. Talk to you later. Take care.