it would be much more fun to tool around in a golden sub in the 70s than deal with the online safety act

06:25Hello, hello. Moment late because the cat needed so much attention. He usually gets fed here at nine and he got an early dinner last night, which automatically means breakfast is late. So big, exciting morning. All right. So got the stream all set up. This is Lobster's office hours where just pull it up here. I run the site lobsters, social news about programming, computing in general. And if you have any questions about the site, or its code base, or which is open source, or anything else, we can jump into it, you can feel free to throw your question in anytime. And if it wants a longer answer than I can jump into I'll just stick it here in the scratch file until we can get to it. That's about the whole thing. When there aren't folks asking questions, I like to work on the code base. And lately, there has been a lot of that. So yeah, where to start. So the two big things going on are

07:53On the stream, there's a whole idea in Lean Manufacturing, which, thanks to Mary Poppendick's excellent books, that actually, yeah, I like to recommend books on stream here. So where is she? I think it's spelled like that. Yeah. So Mary Poppendick wrote a real influential book. pushcx https://bookshop.org/p/books/im…
couple of minutes ago what was this 2005 ish 2006 not so far off come here copy oh linux clipboard is being real temperamental today there's one of those stream hassles every time hi big boss i don't know if you can hear the cat grumbling or if he's noise gated out but okay sir yes we had breakfast big feelings you're okay big feelings when breakfast seems like it's late so you know i keep saying mary poppendick i forgot that tom also was an author mary's done a lot of the public talks of it so she's kind of the public face of this but This was a real solid influential book that took the Toyota lean manufacturing principles and applied them to software development, which is not a perfect fit because writing novel code is a little bit different than implementing a standardized manufacturing line, but it was real influential and worth reading just for like putting tools in your toolbox, vocabulary in your toolbox. And the one that popped out to me was the concept of inventory. So if you have a factory line with, what would you call it? you're making cars like Toyota, you might have a stamping machine that stamps two metal parts out, and then a bolting machine where you bolt the two of them together. And if the stamping machine runs faster, you're going to tend to build up inventory of stamped parts between the two machines. And a big chunk of lean manufacturing was realizing that a lot of this inventory buildup was a sign of a serious problem in the process and redesigning things to minimize the amount of work in progress or inventory was enormously valuable. And I've been thinking about that because Ooh, keys are off stream. So the stream work in progress has gotten pretty big. I've accidentally drifted into this. And I've been kind of thinking about all the stuff I've worked on on stream. And a bunch of it hasn't been deployed. So the two obvious things are what I've been working on the last couple of streams. So the two things there was story merging. and revamping that context page, which has been coming up a bunch because self-promo has been coming up a bunch. So working on that. And then let's see what else. There was, oh, well, real important that's been hanging around. was the action mailbox stuff to replace scripts. This one, I tinkered with it a little bit yesterday off stream. This one has been needing a bunch of just really tedious, or not tedious, real fiddly postfix plumbing. So postfix is the mail server we use in production. Where is it? Guides. This is a little bit funny, so I want to actually show it. Just go to the guides, mailbox. So Action Mailbox, Lobsters has the mailing list mode so people can, if you get an email notification of like, there's a reply to your comment, just in your email client, you can click reply. And you can set that even to say, well, I just want all of the comments by email. And we've been leaning into a call it yesifying the APP more where we try and lean into these rails features that have been created, since our features were and we have currently we have like a big Shell script that takes these in. And I would like to use this action mailbox system, because it has stuff like. Proper queue and the ability to send bounce emails and the idea of. Daniel Katz- treating each email like a job, so it can be paused or the job can fail and later get retried after a bug fix that kind of thing it just makes the whole system more resilient when we when we ask if I when we lean into these rails features, it also means we get rid of a lot of custom code. Daniel Katz- and So setting up Action Mailbox was a wonderful pull request by GMEM that we reviewed on stream and merged down. Everything was happy there. I have to do this post-fix setup, and the actual document just links to Stack Overflow. It's just like, yeah, you... There we go. Do that. There's just someone asking how to pipe into a Rails app, and then... pipe into their program i don't think it's even a rails app and then you just have to read it and they've written a multi-step answer and then somebody else has disagreed and sent another answer so like i don't know i it is a little funny that the official document is just like i don't know man check stack overflow this one's pretty good so this setup has gotten a little fiddly and it means that the action mailbox stuff is done and i've tested it with manually creating emails, and that works. So, Gmail's pull request just knocked off, you know, knocked it out of the park, totally works. But the wiring up is real fiddly. And then, let's see, what else is kicking around? The avatars for direct image uploading, because Man, there's a whole can of worms behind that one. It's been a feature we've wanted for ages because, you know, a bunch of people don't love the third-party service. And it's owned by... How do we want to say this? I'll just throw it up on stream. So I'm trying to avoid putting it directly into the show transcript because... This service is all run under one guy's fiefdom and he's gotten real unreliable this year and is in the middle of kicking his own ass in a court case. So just I want to get out ahead of whatever chaos is going to happen with that service. And this code is basically done. I think it needs a little more like a mod overview on it. And then there's a little bit of plumbing to pull in existing avatars to it. Yeah. The other thing that's been hanging around for a while, and this one's not like done, done. I don't know. Maybe it doesn't count as inventory. techknowlogick Howdy, how goes it o/
is pagination which was started on stream and i've been tapping away at but it's just big and fiddly and honestly every time i i think of this stream as as lobsters office hours as just trying to create another path where if folks want to chat about the site i mean you can email me you can message me on the site you can Message me on IRC. And some people don't like all of that really direct stuff. Hey, Technologic. That's a cute nick. I assume you like the Daft Punk song? So, yeah, there's a ton of stuff that's kind of going on. And then the UK came in with a wrecking ball where they're like, yeah, forums should be illegal. being a little snarky about it and i will try and tone that down even if i'm real frustrated by it because there is already more light than heat so so story let me actually break this stuff out so like pagination is half implemented and part of it is I've been using office hours as dev time, but it's much better when there is anything interactive happening. And when I work on pagination, chat kind of dies off. Nobody really has anything to say about it. Yeah. So if that is not the interesting content, I am happy to do more meta kind of stuff, more feature work, more talking about site norm stuff and Things like story merging are pretty significant for that. So is the stats on context.

18:32F is really generous there. And then many places to place pagination. redirects. So let's see, what was, so avatars, script avatars into action, what is it, active storage? Active storage. I always have to stop and think about if they are active or action. That is my least favorite Rails convention is active equals backend action. equals user pacing. I always have to stop. That's why it is active record and active model, but like action mailbox. I don't think that's such a useful distinction.

19:45Let's context that.

...57Intention. let's see with avatars yeah there's scraping it would be really nice to have a button to pull avatar from github because almost all users have a github account and almost all of those have an avatar even if I don't know. It feels like half of active commenters have a linked GitHub account. It just might be a convenient way to pull things. That one's optional, but it would be nice. And then remove the old third-party service. And then what's the... There was one more thing. Oh, yeah. Because avatars are user submitted content, the mod dashboard needs a review queue of, you know, here's the last hundred avatars uploaded. Make it real easy to click on any in case they are just gross or weird. There are some legal liabilities there, of course, because if you take image uploads, people could upload some really nasty stuff. yeah laws are complicated we'll talk about the uk one in a minute i don't want to let it totally dominate the stream but it's a it's kind of like that one naughty browser that we talked about a month ago where it's not something i want to deal with and it's a ton of work just to stay in one place oh yeah maybe that's worth talking about

22:00so and i say fiddly not because postfix is bad postfix is just one of those long-running wildly powerful softwares and so its config is real particular and there's there's like a hundred ways to do anything and i think the steps in the stack overflow post are pretty clear but there's a you know kind of an almost certainty that i break the mailing list for a day or two while deploying it, which is, you know, it's not the end of the world. It's not a killer feature, not a ton of people. I want to say at any given time, like a dozen people have mailing list mode active. What is that number? It's been a year or two since I've checked. So this is something, if this is your first Office Hours stream, we can run queries against the production database.

23:04Let's just actually.

...18So mailing list mode has, it's an enum. I think zero is off. One is stories only. And two is stories and comments. Yeah, I might be swapping one or two, but that's actually informative. That is a lot more people using mailing list mode than I thought. Cool. Well, then I care more about not breaking it. I was a little cavalier for a long time. God, it has been years since I've run a query like this, actually. The mailing list mode had like, 10 or 11 people using it and i think i must have run this query in 2018 2019 says the site has grown over the years this number has gone up okay well then i guess it's especially important that i test this whole process the comment reply thing happens fairly regular i think there's even So this is, if you have an idea for a query against the database, a big chunk of office hours is helping the site understand itself. So if you wonder how many people use mailing list mode to understand if it's a good use of our limited dev time or what percent of comments get flags, all those kinds of stuff, we can write queries for it here on stream. Especially during office hours i'm pretty happy to write queries if you just email me queries I would really appreciate if you at least take a first pass yourself at them, but. Just because I can't promise that I could keep up with the flow of arbitrary complex queries that people request so see I was going to check. My second comments has yeah.

25:21How do I want to do this? Let's say the week it was created at and is an account from comments where is from email equals one group by one and created at is greater than or equal to 2024. I think I could just slop it. MariaDB would let me get away with just saying the year, but I don't remember. Group by one. That's okay. So only in the middle of the year, there were two that were posted from mailing list mode. So this is part of why I don't think of mailing list mode as super active.

26:27know what i think i was wrong about functionality i'm kind of rabbit hole in here but i said that you can reply to those comment email notifications but i don't think you can because of the way it looks up the way the pipeline works because i was just reviewing this pr so mailbox So this is the action mailbox. This is all code GMEM wrote. And it tries to find the sending user. Oh, that's a funny limitation. Yeah, so it's checking that you have the right mailing list token, because we don't want anyone to be able to send email on your behalf. Email for historical reasons that I promise I won't get into is very easy to spoof. Well, spoof badly. But you can't actually reply to comment notifications unless you have turned on mailing list mode. Even though that's the same. So if we said reply, yeah. email reply mailer so this is the one that sends out emails this does not set the reply to header with the mailing list token yeah it has the message id which is correct has the references has the in why not Let's just fix that. So I'm going to actually throw in a quick feature request.

29:08let's what am i saying here let's grab come here let's grab the name of this when users get an email notification that they someone has replied to them it's sent by it would be nice and hopefully not way more promoting because there is a thing where if you make it super easy easy to respond to comments sometimes people get really locked into boy I'm gonna get this guy you know the classic xkcd duty calls comic where someone is wrong on the internet you have to explain to them when they're wrong you have to win it has to be a fight so I try and be careful of things that improve how easy it is to reply? I think we'll be okay for a minute.

31:17let me check in the mailbox what is it called inbox mailbox let's just grab this file name so it's clear what i'm talking about come here what are we doing vim

33:04Alright, so leaving just a full brain dump here.

...40All right, that's pretty good. Kind of rabbit-holed a little, but that would actually be a really nice small feature. And it's funny, it's one of those places where deleting code adds a feature. I mean, yeah, there's the one line to add with the reply to header, but then there's deleting a predicate to add a feature. I get a kick out of that. All right, so anyways, I was getting back to Action Mailbox's work in progress. These two. So, like, Action Mailbox and Avatars are pretty close to going. Like, three of these require writing code, but they're pretty well bounded. Probably take half an hour to an hour each. Longer if I do them on stream, of course, but Not bad. This feels like it's two or three hours just because I want to be real thorough. I might get lucky and knock it out in 15 minutes. But realistically, if I'm tweaking server config, it's going to be a couple hours. And I definitely can't do this one on stream because there's a whole thing with wiring up things to have the same key so that Action Mailbox will trust the emails sent by or forwarded by Postfix. Yeah. Email is such a miracle that the protocol was loose enough to survive the things that have had to be added to it over the last 50 years.

35:40So let's see, we were most recently working on revamping context. And where I got on that last stream was there's more copy to write. This is the product term.

36:00ymeynot45 accidental or planned... email "looseness"
Gotta collapse the warning about flags, which rarely applies. And then there's a very open-ended, like, find more stats. Like, what did we talk about? We talked about how many comments posted, how well received those were, which I guess means above average. But there's a lot here. Like, there could be... or upload histogram would actually be pretty handy.

...52And then I guess also same for stories. This one is really open-ended. So actually these are the like must do and then, you know,

37:18Yeah. And I want to be accidental or planned email looseness. Yeah. So it was really accidental in the case of email because the folks implementing it in the early seventies really, I mean, there were some sci-fi novels about what a network of computers could become. But realistically, I don't think the ARPANET folks who were inventing email really had any idea. And they lucked into a really flexible design with a plain text protocol where email headers are like a hash, you know, key value of two colon, why me, why not, at Twitch. And doing that in plain text, I mean, it made it possible to make a million janky tools and there's been so much compatibility fights, but it also meant making it really flexible and extensible for adding more headers. And it had a, I don't remember if it was a designated escape mechanism where I think it was added to the, we'd have to find the, yeah, we're going to, I'm going to list that one as an open question rather than trying rabbit hole.

39:05So the RFC, what was it? 800 something that standardized email. I believe that was where they came up with this convention of, Hey, look, if you are a random email client or server, and you're going to add your own headers with your own ideas, start them with X dash. And then we will tell email clients and servers, look, you just have to accept that there's going to be weird stuff in the X dash headers and just ignore it. Unless you're pretty sure, you know what that means. And that worked really well as an escape hatch. And I'm pretty sure that wasn't planned in email or invented by someone who knew they were doing something on with email headers. I think that was email was getting standardized and first written up in the RFC which despite the name request for comments came after it was in use for a few years I think that's when they added the X I don't know I'm gonna ignore that one because I could spend an hour just trying to find it and then still be wrong but if Shamless is watching the stream. I probably just nerd sniped the hell out of them because they like looking stuff up. So... Yeah, I think that's the must do for context. And this kind of stuff of fixing the copy and tidying up is fine for doing on stream. And then story merging. So I wanted to talk about it last stream, and we got a ton of questions on Monday, which was great, but it meant we never touched story merging. I created a spreadsheet two or three streams ago that was about every merge story on Lobsters and categorized roughly half of them. To get at what are the patterns here of both. What are the rules I think i'm implementing and what am I actually doing in practice, because maybe i'm making mistakes or being inconsistent and I had thought when I finished up that one stream and the whole that whole spreadsheet if you go look at. Where is it let's just pull up the archive. So here. pushcx https://push.cx/stream/2024-12-…
you can grab the spreadsheet as it was at the end of the stream so that is christ twitch okay so it's twitch's bug it's not the clipboard when i try to control v and paste a link in the chat twitch is focusing some new dashboard search widget in the corner that's I've learned better than to report bugs to Twitch. So anyways, you can check out that spreadsheet. And I had said at the end of the stream that I thought I could probably stop there because I did half of the spreadsheet rows. There were like 700 and we did something like 350. And I felt like... that was enough to see really clear patterns. And then I realized after the stream, after sleeping on it a day or two, I think we actually just did the easy half of the merges, the ones where it was really obvious what category they went in. So I think, so I say rest of merges. I think probably another quarter of merges. or maybe all would be useful because they're probably fuzzier and more complicated and less obvious, which means they're more valuable in terms of writing documentation around story merging. So there's, that was the other big thing was like write up a merging doc or like about, I don't know, call it story merging or like merges? I don't know what to say. I guess merges. We equivocate, not equivocate, in story, in meta discussions, we kind of alternate between calling them merges, plural, or merging the gerund. I don't have a strong feeling. I guess merges is a little nicer.

44:27And then there was the GitHub issue. So story merging has kind of been a bug factory for years because of how the DB model works. So then there's redo the DB model. Redo, redesign, refactor, refactor. And we kicked around ideas for what to call these things, because it really does need to be a separate model that what we call a story now, which is each of these, but then also if any of these had stories merged into it, is also the stories merged into it, these need to be split out into two things. And one of them needs to be renamed, honestly, if not both. And I'm leaning towards My idea of calling the new thing headline so that this would be a page full of headlines which feels like it makes sense and then each individual thing in might be a story, just to minimize the code churn. So.

45:48not i'm not sold on that name if anybody has a better one or thinks that story should stay the top level thing and the individual things that get merged in needs a new name i could be very easily convinced so there's a whole whole bunch of code there and then that means also fixing ui stuff this was discussed Two streams ago? Three? My memory gets a little hazy when I miss streams. So let's see. This one is... Have to... On the single story view... Fix... I guess just like... Revamp. big block of story titles at the top of page because we have a slightly confusing view there where yeah and then also list detail internally each one of these here this is called list detail and it's reused Over and over and over real consistently select if you search for stories it uses this same partial template to render them so that should be that needs to indicate number of murder stories. And then we discussed in the. threads. sort. comments by. merge story and they should be included in line i'm not sure that's a clear description to anyone but me story threads

48:19I don't know. That's fine. If no one's complaining, it's fine. And then, oh, the motivating, one of the motivating things was that users should be able to suggest merges, which wants the story controller refactor, but maybe it could just drive that of, well, we'll pull out merging from the story controller The story controller edit form. I'm not going to dig out the issue number right now, but it's in the GitHub tracker. If you want to see it, the edit form for story controller has grown into doing like four or five different things and it needs to get broken up just for sanity sake.

49:22So I've tried to... I really enjoy working on lobsters, but it means that as a code project, lobsters kind of wants to take over my life. It is always easy. There is always another bug I want to pick up and work on or another feature I want to do or... And so I have to try and time box it and say, okay, I'm going to spend two hours on Saturday morning coding on lobsters. And I'm not going to spend all of Saturday coding on lobsters. Just, you know, to make sure going out and doing other things and since i started streaming a couple of months ago very naturally i have tried to time box it to like okay well i'm going to do these two streams they're going to be about three hours each that's been a pretty comfortable time i had originally thought two but i i had originally thought two and i've let it drift to three because honestly i just code slower on stream, and I'm doing more of that than answering questions, which are, if you're joining us recently, you can always ask questions about lobsters, the site, lobsters, the code base, lobsters, the lunchbox, the flamethrower.

50:54And I've let that drift to three hours. That's okay, though. I still feel pretty good about it. It's enough time to do a solid chunk of work at the reduced pace of keeping up this line of patter.

51:14But when there's stuff that's like fiddly server setup, which includes some security concerns or not particularly engaging for folks like pagination, or it feels like it's done but there isn't really a clear to-do list to know that actually there's a fair amount to do left some of this was server setup actually you know what i'm actually not totally sure

52:06not totally sure the main functionality on avatars was finished but like pagination especially because it there's not really anything to talk about there in terms of site meta and site norms i guess that's part of figuring out what works on stream and what's worth the time streaming but since i've been trying to time box that means this kind of stuff that I don't want to do on stream is getting totally shoved out of getting worked on because spending, you know, I want to say spending six hours streaming is six hours, but then there's set up and tear down time to say nothing of, you know, it takes something out of me. It's actually like sitting in meetings for a while And so it's hard to say like, oh, well, given that I'm given a full workday to Lobster's office hours every week, let me spend even more time doing stuff that I can't put up on stream. And then stuff like just finishing, getting the action mailbox stuff deployed is not getting done. That one's been hanging around for what, a month? And that feels kind of rude to the contributor who did all the work to submit that, actually. I don't love that.

53:53So this one, the fiddly server config, legit, I can't. do it on stream because it's got a bunch of security sensitive stuff. There's no way I could do that without putting up API keys and whatnot. And this stuff is just kind of boring on stream. And that's fine. Maybe I'll just do boring streams. It's less fun for me, too, if folks aren't talking. And I think there's a lot less. I guess it's a missed opportunity because like Mondays, many conversations about stuff were pretty darn valuable in terms of helping folks understand what's happening on the site but then also it is forcing me to explain myself not to put too fine a point on it but If I have to talk this stuff through, I realize, oh, there's stuff that's happening that's in my head and not written anywhere. And even if you read the about page, and even if you read the code base, you can't know that the practice is X. And that's a big part of story merging. And that's been a big part of self promo. So I think it is much more useful if I try and do the stuff that folks are interested in talking about on stream. okay but having all of this inventory hanging out is yeah in the lean sense i keep coming back to this term inventory and i'm not gonna read you the pop and dick book but it's draining in a bunch of ways to have inventory pile up it's distracting and even if The inside of my head is not a factory floor. It's a lot. So I want to reduce how much stuff is hanging around. And the easiest thing to do, I guess if I'm prioritizing, is I should do the action mailbox stuff off stream. Not going to happen today, but maybe tomorrow. because that one really is very close to the finish line. Oh, I do have to... That's pretty easy. Just delete the code. I don't think it has any tests because it's a big shell pipeline that's all side effects.

56:58epic_ninja_elephant Happy Thursday!
So these Thursday streams tend to be a lot quieter than the Monday streams, both in terms of fewer people show up and fewer people talk. And I think some of that is I can do fewer posts on, ah, hey, Epic Ninja Elephant. I believe you came by for the first time, what, last week? Maybe Monday. epic_ninja_elephant I just made it.
Anyways, Thursday streams tend to be quieter. I was trying to design them to be more useful to folks in the EU. Hmm. I guess the thing I'm saying is maybe I should roll back Thursday streams and just do Monday streams. And then I can use that time for doing the things that are not interesting to do on stream. I don't know. And so while I am juggling all of this stuff, the UK has thrown a big hand grenade. They came in like a wrecking ball. epic_ninja_elephant Sing it.
So that's been not great.

58:31Let's do PR review instead. I actually only know the chorus to that song. I think I've heard the full song once. But it occurred to me that it's been a second since I did pull request review. I peeked at it before stream. And those ones from the junior developers are kind of hanging out. And then I think I accidentally killed this one by not realizing it was waiting on my response and the contributor lost steam. One of the big values of doing streams is if I'm doing pull request review at the top of each one, I'm forced to like twice a week look at these things. And if you leave a pull request long enough, especially from a first time contributor, people tend to wander off. And that's been my bad here because i accidentally cleared the unread notification peeking at the stream and then i didn't realize it was still waiting for a response so probably i'm gonna end up finishing this one and probably these three are just gonna die because i don't know if ashwin was i don't i didn't get the impression that ashwin was related to ryzen and this youtube id and the there was a third person started with a b not pirate Blaster. These seemed like high school or college kids who were told, open a pull request against an open source repo, and they checked that box and then have kind of bailed. So probably these are just going to get expired by the stale bot. However, wonderfully, there is a bug fix worth reviewing. And when did this show up? Because I definitely didn't do PR review on Monday. Yeah, so this one is hung out too long because I forgot to do pull request review on Monday. All right, so let's review the bug because I don't remember which bug this is. Ah, this is one of those from the exception tracker. I got an exception, and I try and keep that to zero. 500s in production.

01:01:13Ah, yeah. So there's a method added by request for... I don't add a lot of JSON API to the site. unless the front end needs it, because I don't want to maintain an arbitrary open-ended API that I don't use, and then all I do is get more work from having to manage deprecations and bug reports. I mean, you can look at our issue tracker. There's already plenty to do. I don't need to take on more. But this one was so generally valuable to just tools and hacks and tinkering that I added a endpoint so you can, you know, coders can say, hey, I have this URL, have you seen it before? And lobsters will return back a JSON structure of, sure, I've seen it, or no, I've never seen it. And it is small and self-contained and super useful. So it made it over my fairly high bar of API endpoints that the front end doesn't use. However, it is throwing an exception where, because people are coding random bots against it, if they hit the endpoint but don't provide the needed URL, it was throwing a 500. This is kind of an odd fix. And it's odd in that I assumed it would be a tweak. So this is called strong parameters, which is because Rails checks and enforces validity of user input at the wrong layer, Kind of a fiddly URL. Or URL. Kind of a fiddly API.

01:03:40And I don't generally love the... Like I would want to see... I had just assumed that this was going to be some tweak to... this part how the URL is found rather than, well, let the exception get raised and rescue it. I would rather recognize the bad situation before it happens than clean up after.

01:04:21You can see the docs on strong parameters. Maybe my intuition is totally wrong here. Somewhere in here. Do you have a full text search? No, I don't think you do, but I do. So I have, before I pull this on stream, can I flip? So I have Zeal, the doc browser. And I don't remember if it has a dark mode. Otherwise, oh yeah, it does. Cool. Turn that on. half of it went into dark mode okay i'll take it like this is dark mode the text is dark but the ui all right i try and put the stream on all the stuff on stream in dark mode because folks seem to prefer it but on my usual desktop only the terminal is what you would call dark mode so

01:05:24epic_ninja_elephant I think you have to configure your UI to dark mode separately.
epic_ninja_elephant For Zeal, I mean.
I thought I could full text search the guides. Configure my UI to dark mode separately. Yeah, the zeal config was like it has this content tab. And so I guess that's why it's just the content rather than, I don't know.

...56A lot of these things will have an option here of, you know, use the system versus, I mean, you know, this option, but for their UI. And I would rather not switch all of my nomaps over to dark mode.

01:06:25Well, predefined raise rescue flow to end up as 400 with no effort. So I guess that is the preferred flow control, which I guess is because it's a security control. And that is how our login controller works, just epic_ninja_elephant I think I have this in my .xsession:
It uses exceptions for control flow because they're so much because they take priority over ifs and especially with security controls, it is nice to have fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

01:07:25epic_ninja_elephant gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme prefer-dark export GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark
epic_ninja_elephant To give me a darkmode Zeal.
Oh, thanks for sharing that config.

...34epic_ninja_elephant Line break before 'export'
But that's going to affect all GTK apps, right? Because I don't see anything specific there about zeal. Line break before export. Oh, sure.

...56epic_ninja_elephant Yes, you'd need to write a wrapper script if you just want Zeal in dark mode.
Yeah, I think that's just going to be all GTK apps, and I really don't want my desktop to be in dark mode. Just when I use it, and if it's in... Oh, that would make sense. I could write a wrapper script at some point.

01:08:22Does it... is that one of those settings you have to have set before gnome gets initialized or if you call g settings in a terminal in the middle of your x session will new gtk apps pick it up immediately because if i have to restart x windows for it it's definitely never happening

...59epic_ninja_elephant I'm not sure how gsettings work, sorry.
Okay, no worries I just figured if you knew something I would ask, but thanks for sharing your config I appreciate that kind of thing.

01:09:13dr3ig I am really not sure, but it seems that rails should rescue ActionController:: ParameterMissing in middleware and returning status 400
Alright, so reviewing this if it explicitly says yeah, you should use the raise rescue flow. yeah I.

...34Especially if... Is there something we... We have a couple of rescues.

...45Oh, we have... So we have the unpermitted params. Maybe I should just extend this and take... you know ask the author to do it because this is kind of a universal problem i was kind of thinking so i think kernel is saying that the story urls controller is doing it in latest as well yeah it's cut off here the first line but it's happening here too. So I was going to suggest they follow the documents pattern of having a URL parameters private method in the store URLs controller, but maybe it'd be better to just do it up at application controller, especially with it over respond to block for JSON and HTML. Do we have

01:10:59Okay. volvix whats lobster is about
So these, these are all authorizations.

01:11:12It's a little odd that this is 400 instead of 403, but that's fine. And then do we say bad request? One time also here in application controller. Oh yeah, this was, this was some, excuse me a sec, probably my throat.

...42This was some, mildly badly behaved bot or browser.

...54Where's my commit message. pushcx https://lobste.rs/
yeah yeah i didn't describe the whole thing but it was there are some some tools i want to say it was like a python library did it by default or was really easy to misconfigure where they would send kind of nonsense in the mime accept header and then the server throw 500s so yeah drake i think you're you're right about this one So how to evolve the X welcome lobsters here is a social news site and discussion forum about programming. And this is the office hours stream. Where folks are welcome to ask questions about the site in the Community. volvix thats cool
So.

01:12:56drake drake can i name check you here in github i don't remember if you have a github account and you want to link it i can just say like a viewer if you don't let me know that you're okay because some people don't like getting named out but i do like giving credit where folks contribute and i've really appreciated your contributions I'm just going to kind of guess until you respond.

01:13:57dr3ig I'm dreig in GitHub, but I don't care for attribution here
dr eig but you don't want attributions okay i checked the parameters well that's just me correcting my misapprehension about how strong parameters work so let's just say strong and nurse to recommend using the raise rescue pattern and i realized we already do this for the other exception it raises

01:14:56What line was that? 34 rescues.

01:16:02dr3ig i tried accessing the url (without a param) and the browser returns status 400
So Drake, I think you got a 400 at a different level because you got a 400 for not coming in with a MIME type saying you want JSON. If you add .json to the end of the URL, do you get a 500? Because that would be the bug. dr3ig still 400
I think you're just getting the 400 for Rails not realizing that, yes, you are trying to get JSON. Because this method is set to only respond to still 400. Weird. Because I definitely saw the exception in production. So I'm not sure why you can't immediately replicate it. Hmm.

01:17:06What am I saying? I'm getting hung up on what I'm saying because, because ideally, your mon2 block could also return a plain version if that's the, and the existing, Rescue for unpermitted partners could do that.

...58I'm always a little shy to ask people to do more because I think it's pretty darn generous when they do anything at all. bsandro hello cyberpals :3
So, all right, that would be great. Oh, and did they... Huh, why did I put a... Oh, hey, Bessandra. So Drake, here's an example of if you pull stories URL all

01:18:40Even without JSON? I don't know why I wrote this test. I assume I was used to writing controller tests and I just sort of assumed that there would be a middleware that would turn this 400 into... Hmm. Why did it throw off 500? And why did this test not catch it? There is some behavior here happening

01:19:14Oh, I think I have an idea. I want to understand it because I feel like I'm missing something. This is enough slightly undefined behavior. So if I curl lobsters slash stories URL all URL equals, I don't know, example.com. Okay, so I got back nothing in JSON, which is fine. And if I leave off URL, what status was that? I get a 400. So that's good. What if I say URL, but there's nothing there? I still get a 400. I was thinking that was going to be the What if I say all JSON?

01:20:09All right. What's different about the request that caused me to get a 500? So off stream, I am pulling up the exception. And I'm doing it off stream because it's going to have the IP of the person who did it. Okay, so their URL is this story's URL all. That part is correct. They didn't put JSON on the end. And if I look at the environment stuff, did they have an accept header? Their mime type was star slash star. Hmm. taimouraaa hey whats going on
that might be the difference and i don't have anything else that pops out to me about the exception do we remember how to set the accept header in curl no dash h And then this one didn't have the JSON on the end. And what was in the parameters was URL blank or was it totally missing?

01:22:10chargedneon Hi, as a Rails hobbyist - I was wondering - is it normal in Rails routes definitions to rely so much on "manual" route construction, like not using helper methods like "scope" or "resources" in `routes.rb`?
It was blank. Or no, I'm sorry, it was missing entirely. dr3ig is it possible that your exception reporting is misbehaving? this rescue of ActionController::ParameterMissing -> 400 should happen in a middleware
Well, that's just obnoxious. Why can't I repro this bug? Oh, hey, ChargedNeon, welcome.

...38Drake, I don't think so. The exception notification has been pretty bulletproof. So I think this is, we got some request that was really structured oddly in some way that I'm not recognizing out of the exception report. And charge me, I'll come back to your question in a second, because we're mostly into chargedneon No worries! Thank you!
feel like we're close on reproducing this bug is it because it's yeah i'm so i'm skimming up and down the exception off stream and there really isn't

01:23:37really isn't anything different that's a real frustrating okay i guess it's possible that the exception reporting is misbehaving but it is explicit that we threw a 500 about this rather than And I have never seen a case where an exception has been reported and we didn't respond with a 500. That has been bulletproof for years. So I'm going to trust it. And I feel like doing it ourselves up here the same way this one happens is fine. is a little odd to me drake to your point that we have to explicitly do this i agree that it feels like something rails middleware should already be doing but i had to add that because i was seeing how long ago was this just last year yeah and i was complaining that i was getting 500s

01:25:00And it's something and just like this current 500 it's it's some kind of bot that is. Well, I remember this one now from that commit message people run vulnerability scanners against the site just fucking constantly, you know, and some of that is. just the background radiation of the internet where people run vulnerability scanners against every site and some of that feels targeted because it is not let me come by and check the one new exploit I have against WordPress it is let me run the whole fucking suite and some of that is because we're a site that targets programmers We get a lot of baby's first bot kind of stuff where someone's like, oh, I want to write a web scraper or I want to write something that uses a REST API. What website do I know that has a bunch of URLs? And then they write their first bot, which is really badly behaved and has no rate limiting and, you know, those bad things with exceptions where it gets into a retry loop. I feel like Lobster sees a lot of that. So there is some weird flow where this is not happening from Rails middleware. And yeah, Drake, the more I talk about it, the more I agree that it should happen automatically, but I definitely added it because it's not correctly happening due to some odd thing that bad crawlers, bad bots are doing. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and finish that pull request review. I think this is fine.

01:27:08And I hope you don't mind Drake but i'm going to use your observation here that actually I said in the comment that this really does feel like middleware should happen, but.

...56Really? Something really unusual. But with a really common header URL to combo. All right. That says it pretty well, I think. So hopefully, Colonel, who has contributed a couple of really nice things, bug fixes mostly in the last few months.

01:28:42Yeah, Drake, to your point, there is a whole bunch of stuff that, I mean, this is me being angry, you know, when I'm calling it a Rails misdesign. It feels like There's a bunch of stuff here. All of this is stuff that Rails, in my opinion, should be doing out of the box and is not, which is why I'm kind of tetchy about it. jangomandalorian Hey chat! hey @pushcx 👋🏼
The missing template one is especially frustrating because it's really strange.

01:29:25oh hey Django Mandalorian welcome back all right so charge neon you had a question about manual route construction so I'm assuming that you have looked at our routes files for this question and our routes files has a whole ton of stuff that is like manually defining these gets. And

01:30:10I feel like there's kind of three things happening. Number one, and not to bag on him, but this was the first app, first Rails app written by the original author. And I don't think he was totally sold on the value of the resource routings. So you'll see I've tried to use resources in the routes for all kinds of new features and slowly subsume routes into it. And I've joked about that as like yassification where I am trying to lean more into the Rails conventions because we just get nicer stuff and we get less code from it. And it tends to be more reliable code because it's the original Rails, you know, it's the general Rails feature rather than something we've had to code ourselves, which There's the same thing to Drake's point about why isn't the middleware handling these things? And then I guess the second part of it is he had some pretty opinionated ideas on how the URL should be structured that didn't line up to Rails defaults. chargedneon OK! That makes more sense. I just have a lack of "prod" applications experience, and reading the routes file was an interesting read.
And I think it's the kind of aesthetic opinion that doesn't really keep me up at night, but it does mean having a bunch of custom code for things. And then second, or i guess third is the pagination thing is rather than using a pagination library it got custom coded and it requires these extra routes for everything not everything i mean just you know the stuff you paginate which is a lot of urls and so it If I said, come here. All right, so the routes file is 273 lines, which is long for the amount of functionality in this app. So if I look for just pagination routes, that's 24 routes. And it's especially a lot of noise right up at the top because it's all of those early routes. And that's part of why I wanted to do the big pagination rebuild and redesign is I would like to get rid of all of those pagination routes.

01:32:52And then I guess kind of back to point two about aesthetic stuff, or maybe it's point one of not being on board fully with resources. A lot of this stuff would be done by. I think the the APP is kind of showing its age, where rails introduced resourceful routing and what rails or. Maybe for one, but I think 4.0 and it took a couple of years, both for folks to to migrate over to it, but also to come around to the idea that. rather than having extra actions like hide and unhide we should have a controller called story hidings or hidden stories and it should have a create and a destroy action and you get to have you know then this would just be a resources line And the code base predates that style decision becoming pretty ubiquitous in Rails. And I've talked about it a little on stream before. Where was that? So I'm jumping over to my blog because I've got the stream archives. And if I, what was it? Maybe I'll get lucky here.

01:34:34Here we go. So these two dates, if you look in the stream archive for what is that? 0822.

01:35:01pushcx https://push.cx/stream/2024-08-…
Yeah, this was the one Twitch. Thank you. This was the one where I talked a bunch about that convention in Rails where we lean into making resources and restful kind of things. And then... What's the more recent one? 10.17. Oh, this was me... pushcx https://push.cx/stream/2024-10-…
If you want a specific example of it, I talked a bunch about a refactoring that should happen to the stories controller and how leaning into Rails' style of doing resourceful routes and mapping things to rest verbs would be a real improvement for that particular action that has grown to be very complicated because it does at least four user-facing features in one controller action. There are so many conditionals in those templates and controllers. So I hope that's a useful answer to your question. chargedneon Thank you! Awesome resources to learn more. Yes, extremely helpful!
I think this is, if I want to zoom out, because you said you have a lack of prod applications experience, I think Maybe if I can speak more philosophically, every production app has some kind of weird corner or odd behavior where somebody laid down a pattern and then you kind of just have to keep extending the pattern. And that's what's going on with our routes. I have been very gently trying to clean them up and use resources now. chargedneon Specifically with Rails, that is, but yeah - I'm all too familiar with prod apps and "legacy" patterns!
but because it doesn't really provide a user-visible feature, it hasn't been a high priority, and it has a lot of fiddly potential to break bookmarks and break links. So, yeah. Well, if you are very familiar with having legacy patterns in Rails apps, wouldn't you like to contribute to lobsters? Look at all of these bugs and feature requests that you could help with. And I will stop doing my used car salesman voice. But in seriousness, if you like this stuff, I'm very happy to get pull requests and then also talk about on stream or in pull request comments about style issues, long-term maintenance of Rails apps, the weird things in our Rails apps, because I've been doing Rails for almost 20 years now. So I am happy to volvix wow, 20 years is a lot
to pontificate about this stuff all right yeah you know it sneaks up on you one day at a time and then you add up all the days and it's been like 20 years i mean maybe it's only night There was like a 0.08 release of Rails that I tinkered with a little and then I really started using it in 01, so maybe it's only been 18 years. I'm rounding that one off a little. All right. So there is lots of in progress work and just for my own peace of mind i need to start you know these projects have to be done done there's that joke that when you're working on a project the first 90 of it takes 90 of the effort and then the last 10 takes another 90 of the effort and i think that's a little bit of what's happening here plus just trying to time box this hobby and avoid letting lobsters take over my life, though it's very tempting in a pleasant way. And then just to make things more complicated, the UK has created the Online Safety Act. What a silly name. So without getting into political rants, please, let's not pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/ffd4xt/lfgs…
This is not the thing that proves write about everything that's happening in politics and why everyone should agree with you and vote the way you do please don't let's just talk about what's happening a bit so there's this story that a large long-running forum mostly about bikes lfgss is shutting down the day before the online safety act not enforced is what is the word for when a law takes effect i guess just takes effect enforcement is the follow-up from the various regulators and even law enforcement because The UK Online Safety Act even includes criminal penalties for being non-responsive. It looks like they're all related to being non-responsive to the regulator. So when the regulator says, hey, can you show us that you spent several hundred hours documenting your process on all of this stuff, and then that you use those documents in an incredibly bureaucratic way when you are cleaning out your spam queue. If you are not responsive to that, there are criminal penalties attached. So I've left a couple of big comments on this thread, and I want to start with Well, let's just go top down. The gist of it is And I talked about the Australian Safety Act on stream a couple of weeks ago. That one is very much up in the air. There isn't any guidance from regulators because there's a pattern in these laws, like there is in US laws, where the law says that the regulatory agency will develop specific guidelines about A, B, and C. And so We are waiting for that specific guidelines from Australia, so I don't have much to say about that one and it's not expected to come down for months, although. In ways, it is significantly worse than the UK osa because. we'll see what the regulator say, but it comes with a. The law has restrictions that say. You have to check the ages of people who are visiting your website. And the only way to do that would be to sign up with some third party verification service and basically be a nightclub bouncer and force people to show me their IDs when they visit the site, which is even getting aside from the political implications. I am not a nightclub bouncer. I don't want to see anyone's ID. Seeing their ID generates enormous amounts of PII, personally identifiable information, which is best understood as toxic waste. Because the only thing I'm going to do with somebody's personal information is fuck up and leak it. I don't want that responsibility. And I am sure there will be services that just, you know, you hit their API and you never see their driver's license and then they give you back a thumbs up of we think this person is old or not. I don't even want that level of data about visitors. And it is I think the UK or Australia law is written as visitors rather than users. And the distinction there is, you know, is it everyone who shows up? And the only way I can enforce that for Australia would be like check everyone globally. I don't know. That is a big hassle with these laws.

01:44:22So I'm not going to talk too much about the Australian OSA except to say volvix they just want to legimitize surveillance, excuse my english
volvix (in a global scope)
It is also coming down the pipe and has its own complexities and we'll see how bad it is, but the law as written is pretty concerning i'm not too freaked out about it until we see what the regulator says but. So volvi that is the kind of political griping I would prefer not to get into. it's. I have lots of my own opinions on that, but I don't think that trying to say how this proves all of my political opinions is useful. It's not practical in the sense of helping us deal with this stuff much. And then also sometimes it just touches over. touches off flame wars on electoral politics or the history of the 20th century and it's just not super useful to relitigate every political event in the last 50 years so the reason i an american with a non-commercial hobbyist site on an American server care about the UK Online Safety Act is the law is very clear that it says, if you have users in the UK, we are going to apply this law to you. And yeah. yeah there's nothing i can say about that that doesn't immediately get into the kind of broader political fight that i just said i don't want to it is an interesting time for international order when the internet has made publishing so cheap so i will just kind of vaguely gesture at there's a lot going on in the world and who gets to say stuff and what they get to say and who gets to be in charge. And I did say a little bit of that there. So Ofcom is run by a political appointee. And one of the reasons that was concerning is i don't know to what extent the political appointees really run things in a partisan way in the uk because i'm really ignorant of uk politics i try not to have opinions about politics that i'm not well informed about and that is definitely true for the uk but it is totally reasonable to expect that a wealthy anglosphere country has political opinions about American sites and whether they get to dominate their local culture and whether they are run to the political desires of their electorate, to put the nicest version on it. And so there is the very real possibility that a political appointee who runs Ofcom may say, hey, wouldn't it be great to make an example out of American big tech? And Lobster's is not big tech. Like we are not, oh my God, we're not even in the same universe as Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, epic_ninja_elephant Just admit lobste.rs secretly runs the world.
the giants, like this law is very clearly written for the giants because for them it'll be an incremental cost to stuff they are doing anyways to make sure that their internal documentation and contractor guidelines can be mapped to these things. But the law is written very universally and applies to all sites pretty much. And one of the reasons I threw big tech in there is I have worked for stripe which. Some people call big tech that is not a debate worth getting into but stripe powers an enormous amount of online payments just. Staggering and so hey some guy who runs a technical site that used to work at big tech. I think it is pretty implausible that. Ofcom decides to target. Me personally. So I don't want to belabor that point. I'm just saying the connection is there. Should the political temperature increase.

01:49:42But the. Even not paying a lot of attention to UK politics. Oh just admit that I secretly run the world. Oh god there was. So you joke. But please be gentle with these jokes. Because I have. It is a regular thing that people conspiracy theories unfortunately there was somebody I tossed a couple of months ago where he submitted a story about how he was I think he was mad at customer service he got and people occasionally do this where they're like you know I'm really mad at what feels like a big tech company tech is related to programming this is topical for lobsters let me try to brigade this company and through a combination of publicly shaming them and getting the Lobster's user base riled up to yell at them, then we will force this company to do the thing I want. And that is brigading. And that is, even when I agree with the cause being brigaded, it is really a shitty, shitty road to go down. Because number one, it makes you into a just a really toxic, awful place to be that becomes obsessed with judging the moral worthiness of everything. But then also it just weaponizes the site and it makes it into a let's go destroy things and inevitably gets co-opted. So I'm real, real careful about that. gtfrvz @Epic_Ninja_Elephant lobsters runs on a giant super computer in a golden sub
So I pulled this guy's customer service rant and I said, no, we're not going to do that here. And he immediately updated his blog post with a conspiracy theory. There is an excellent conspiracy theory. Yes. Luigi Blumencraft. Yes. I read the Illuminatus trilogy. I absolutely agree on that one. So. When I tossed his post, he immediately updated his blog post to say that the company he was mad at had reached out to me and at their behest, I had pulled this post and I was conspiring with them. epic_ninja_elephant By "sub", you mean the sandwich, right?
And then like an hour or two later, he sent me a message demanding that I answer his accusation that I was secretly his accusation that he had already published, that I was conspiring with them. Which, my guy, you did it in the wrong order. Because the first part where you make up a conspiracy theory makes me really unhappy. I don't want to be the target of conspiracy theories. So I tossed him. He was pretty unhappy about that, but if you are inventing conspiracy theories about the mods, yes, you are going to get shown the door. That is an inappropriate social behavior. You can email me and ask me if I am conspiring with someone, and I will tell you, because the answer is no. I mentioned I work at Big Tech. I had a conversation when I joined Stripe with... the CEO, Patrick Collison. It was a very short conversation of just like, you understand that Stripe isn't getting authority over lobsters by hiring me and you're definitely not owning the site. And I got back an email that was like, yep, all clear. Anyways. ymeynot45 @Epic_Ninja_Elephant Yes, as in the Company... it is hidden behind the counter at a Golden Subway.
So I am a little touchy about conspiracies in part because the guy who was mad about customer service was not a big deal. Like he was just really riled up about how he had been treated poorly by this company and he leapt to conclusions and he's probably harmless.

01:53:57gtfrvz on a golden hoagie
There are other people who I have had to toss from the site who are less harmless, unfortunately, and

01:54:09I don't want to tell the stories because I don't need to get into publicly jamming those folks, and it probably won't help anything if they ran into it, but suffice to say there have been a handful of people who have written publicly about being diagnosed with very serious mental health issues and who I've looked up and found also have criminal records related to those issues because They have imagined conspiracies against them and acted what they believe is in response to those. And that kind of thing is a real lousy situation all around and I can't actually help any of those folks. The only thing I can do is keep them from making things bad on the site. So that is why I am super touchy about jokes that I run the world because more times than i can count people have assumed there is some kind of big tech controlling or it is really funny but some of them have put us in a conspiracy with hacker news which you kind of have to be ignorant of the entire history of lobsters forking off from hacker news and leaving you know with middle finger raised and chip on shoulder anyway big rant

01:55:44So the Online Safety Act. It would be much more fun to tool around in a big golden sub in the 70s than deal with the Online Safety Act. Oh, and there's the stream title.

01:56:15long for it though so the online safety act has i thought i linked it in here no it's linked in the the main post has kind of a just a ton of regulation. And this former administrator who also left a bunch of really thoughtful comments on Hacker News about all this. So this was the press release. It's so hard to take you seriously when you have a cookie banner.

01:57:15yeah so they published these there is the actual text of the law itself, and then they have a series of documents that they describe as their overview and their summaries. And then they have.

...35So if you look at these like the overview is four pages, the two summaries or another 40 pages.

...47The other summaries are, wrong tab, right? Where do they open? They never open in the right order in Firefox by default.

...59So the other summaries are another 40 pages. And then the how to comply is an unfinished thing that doesn't actually say anything. So, Then the summaries go on and on. And then there are volumes. And then there are documents. And then there are annexes.

01:58:40So the summary of the summaries and the overviews is that it is hundreds of thousands of words of legalese to even understand how much applies and what it wants. And that is the summary, let alone you do have to actually look at the law, which is its own thing written in its own legalese.

01:59:09It is just

...16so, so much stuff. And there is a big hassle where it is tempting to read this stuff and think you understand it, but it's all legalese. So we're going to pick just one of these documents, the one that's on screen here right now. And we are going to jump to the middle of it. All right.

...46We have, oh, this big categorization thing. All right. So here on this arbitrary page in the middle, it has measures for search services. And I know from having read some of this stuff that it's talking about, okay, so if you're running what we consider a search service, this is stuff you have to do. So an open question for me, especially not being familiar with UK law, is what's a measure? Because I don't know if a measure is a legal term of art in the UK or in the context of this law. measure might mean here's something that you must do here's something that you should do here's something that you could do it might just mean you know we have this list and measure is just the equivalent to row and it could be that a regulatory measure is oh no, that's what they call regulatory rules over there, and that means this is a regulation with the force of law. Maybe measure means this has civil penalties attached, or maybe it means it also has criminal penalties attached, because it's a measure rather than a regulation. And that's the kind of thing that you cannot know unless you are a lawyer in this jurisdiction. And it is so tempting as a programmer to look at this because it is using English words that I know the meaning of, but I am ignorant of the meaning of them in UK legal jargon. And right there I can throw out a half a dozen things I could, it could be, but there are also unknown unknowns of, oh yeah, actually a whole thing happens with regulatory rules where if they publish standards, because I think ICS stands for something standard, then it kicks in this other category of law that I've never even heard of. So years ago, I mentioned I work in Big Tut and Stripe. So let's talk a little about that for a second, because this informed a lot of my approach to legal stuff and a lot of my caution and my frustration here. So Stripe Atlas is a tool for incorporating startups. If you want to say, get into Y Combinator and you wanna have a legal entity that they can invest in, Stripe Atlas is an excellent choice. He said, totally unbiased. Because Atlas is a tool for doing a legal thing, filing your incorporation paperwork with the state of Delaware. It has a whole bunch of legal considerations of does every page of the app, does any page of the app accidentally give legal advice? It actually is giving someone legal advice as a lawyer comes with an enormous professional responsibility. backed by the force of law in most jurisdictions, but certainly by the force of your local bar association, to make sure that that advice is accurate, complete, and won't lead them to ruin. If I was acting in the capacity of a lawyer and I gave someone advice and I was like, you know, the form says you have to fill in this, but you could just totally lie about that. That would put me in the shit. That would be a really bad idea. And as a programmer who is used to, I'm diving into a pile of jargon that I don't understand and I am going to learn it as I go and I am going to make small tweaks. It is super, super tempting to look at stuff like this and read it and think I understand it because I have correlated table one and table two. I have researched, I have found ICU J3 and I have read about it. And it applies to some, which means, oh, medium or high risk of fraud. And I've looked up the definition of that. And I've, you know, I've run down all of the imports and I understand what this code is doing. And then you get shot in the foot by something like, I actually don't know what the word measure means in the UK. And it didn't occur to me that I don't know the word measure. Maybe that is a legal term of art. And working on atlas stripe atlas with counsel where i would write something or i would read a legal requirement and think that i could translate it into code i just constantly i'm trying to find a non-obscene metaphor i just constantly walked into the door like i made the mistake over and over and over again and to the credit of the A couple of product councils I worked with, they were all really cool with it because they clearly had worked with programmers who think that they can do this over and over. And I didn't have any big howlers, but there were stuff where like, just, I was ignorant of very basic facts that you would learn as a first year, as a first month law student, like what's required for a contract to be considered binding in the US specifically. There are a couple of things and I can't even accurately recall it off the top of my head. And I would say something like, oh, well, we can give them this form or this checkbox. And the lawyer would say, no, that actually that doesn't count because of. There is a principle of. I don't know, negotiability. I'm making something up because I can't remember the specific example and I wouldn't be able to tell you the specific example anyways because you don't repeat conversations you have with lawyers, especially from former employers. And they would say, oh, well, you know, in a contract, a contract has to be negotiable or has to be X, Y, or Z. And I would never have heard of that requirement. And I'm a quick learner. So after the first 30 or 40 times this happened, I realized I don't actually know the law. And that when I try and read this stuff and think I'm a lawyer, I just constantly walked into open trap doors of stuff I didn't know I didn't know. And that is a long way of saying I am a little frustrated when I get programmers who respond to me and say, well, I read two of these fucking bookshelf length documents. There is a bookshelf full of documents here and somebody read page three of one of the PDFs and they think they understand everything about how it applies.

02:07:20And to bring it back to the beginning of the stream, I guess I am saying someone is wrong on the internet. But hopefully in a constructive way that leads to less of it. And hopefully in a humble way of admitting, I am also wrong on the internet. And I am reading this stuff to get an idea of what it requires. dr3ig Maybe lawyers meet every other week and redefine some common word, so that we don't understand what they mean
But even understanding it is a very daunting prospect.

02:08:04Drake, I think there might be some truth to that, you know, as a hobby.

...12Yeah, I actually, I know there's that like default attitude of, you know, well, to quote Shakespeare, first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. I think law and programming are similar in a lot of ways because we take words and we reify them into real world effects. That's kind of cool. ymeynot45 I wish that when they use a legal term in a document or site they would have to mark the word like when they put (TM) after a trademarked word.
And I've worked with, actually, I think all of the lawyers I've worked with have been really impressive where they were very smart and thoughtful and great at explaining this stuff and totally cool with my million questions because I want to know how this stuff works. I want to know how everything works. and being willing to give me the the 101 basics or at least give me the keywords so i can go read the wikipedia pages with the 101 basics they don't want to be explaining contracts 101 to every programmer in the world forever but like giving me the pointer of hey you're missing this thing that's been actually really cool and i like all of the lawyers I've worked with, and I have even considered getting a law degree because I don't know, it's just a really interesting field. And I have stuff I care a lot about, like contract design in business incorporation, especially related to starting a worker co-op. And then also in, of course, software licensing, where all of us programmers, God, we love playing lawyer about software licensing. The law schools I've found are all really committed to the three-year structure and i understand it and i've just never wanted to take three years out to do it there are like now in the us there are two or three schools with a online only or a hybrid component but neither of them one of them is okay in the rankings for intellectual property law if one of the ones that was high for intellectual property law had a online or a hybrid one like the hybrid one i've seen is you like go for a week at the start of each semester that's not too bad that's survivable that would be really compelling actually

02:10:58So why me, why not? If you wish they had to mark the word when they put TM after a trademarked word, there's a chicken and egg problem there where a lot of legal jargon isn't something like a law said we are going to define the reasonable person. So I gave a longer example here. pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/ffd4xt/lfgs…
Okay, okay, Kat, you're not actually helping now.

02:11:32So you might see in a document something like, oh, will a reasonable person park their car on the sidewalk? And as a non-lawyer, it's easy to read right over and be like, oh yeah, sure, no reasonable person would drive on the sidewalk. This is an alternate version of that what's a measure example I just gave. But there's a Wikipedia page for reasonable person because there is 500 years of case law about this term. And it's literally just, Somebody wrote...

02:12:10I think this is just a book. And he's writing about the law. And he's writing legal theory. And he used the phrase reasonable man. And then everybody was like, oh yeah, that's a useful term. We can kind of reuse that. And it just drifted into being a term. This is not... This is not France, where there is a legal body that is in charge of acceptable vocabulary. In the law, they just kind of grab useful terms from books and judgments or contracts. So if a contract says something like, you know, I can't actually even make up plausible jargon off the fly. but some term in a contract that people fight over might get decided, and then it gets elevated to being legal jargon just by the fact that somebody fought over it. I don't know. I have practical concerns about marking legal jargon.

02:13:29This, .. idea of reasonableness in law and legal theory is pretty useful for this because it is not just that reasonable person standard there are dozens of examples of what it means to be reasonable in the law there is not one adjective reasonable these are all compounds and even if they don't all rate their own wikipedia page If you are talking about having a reasonable rate for your telephony service, you're going to care about whatever the hell is behind this footnote. And yeah, so this one's a law article that probably cites 500 other cases. It is a legit professional skill to do all of this research and have all of this opinion.

02:14:31So I've had a couple of days to sleep on it. The Online Safety Act has just so many regulations and so much complexity and so much unknown complexity, because I can't know when it's using legal jargon that I'm not familiar with. Sir? I don't know how that came through, but the cat just decided he needed to rub his chin on the microphone. volvix did not
if you just heard a weird ass noise excuse us he's having big feelings so even the task of understanding did not oh good then the noise gate worked there's a a filter on the audio where volvix yeah, probably
I can say that quiet noises, it should just drop them out, and that's incredibly useful so that you don't hear it every time a truck goes up and down the alley and hits the speed bump. Big city life. I do not have a fancy podcast studio with those foam audio tiles up on the wall. I do have a $50 USB microphone instead of volvix curtains are enough i think
You know, my webcam mic, because I didn't want to sound like I was yelling down a PVC tube. But this is not a... This is not a high-gloss production. Nothing on lobsters is. Oh my god. Obviously.

02:16:14So...

...21manateemon Surprisingly good sound quality for a $50 mic
Yeah, so I was just talking about the hassles of programmers writing explanations of this thing. And I merged in a story. Oh, thanks, ManateeMox. It is a, what is it, ATR 2100? Yes. volvix oh thats a good one though
I read a bunch of blog posts about if you want to make a podcast. Oh. 80 bucks. I want to say I paid 50 maybe I got it on a sale. espartapalma Hi hello
But I just I read about them speech synthesis wasn't the F I read about just a couple of like how to start a podcast or how to start streaming pages. And folks said if you get a cardioid microphone instead of one of those. Oh, welcome back, eSport Plumber. Instead of one of those like blue Yeti microphones. I actually had one of those. Somebody gave it to me years ago. volvix that is correct
But apparently those are for if you want to record the contents of a whole room. Like if you have a studio and you have a band around it. And this is you want to sit a foot or two away from the microphone and talk directly at it. Anyways, whatever the current model of this, if you want to start your own stream, let me know. volvix i have a shotgun mic, a friend of mine has one of those blue yetis. yeti picks up a ton of noises
espartapalma I would
And I will, heck, if you want to start your own stream that starts after my streams, I will raid you, which I have learned is the Twitch thing where I can boot all of the viewers over to somebody else's stream because I think it's neat. A shotgun Mike is is a shotgun Mike like the thing that you see on the long broomstick on a movie set where somebody holds it over the conversation. volvix usually, yes
I don't actually know any of the terms.

02:18:27Usually yes okay okay I knew one term cool. volvix because it picks up sounds only from that direction
Esper Palmer. So, I mean, you know my schedule because you show up pretty regular, but if you want to start a stream, drop me a line. I will brain dump my notes to you about the stuff you have to do to set up OBS and such. I would be happy to throw to you as I wind down my stream.

02:19:14espartapalma thanks!
espartapalma I already did that once, I used to twitch about 3 years ago
So I was saying I merged this in. This guy is a generalist software developer and very explicitly not a lawyer. And while I appreciate the significant amount of work he must have done to generate this, It is not helpful to me because I can't guess what kind of landmines are in there. And it sounds like from his description of being familiar with UK law, it probably means that he has an experience similar to mine where he's had to work closely with product counsel or I mean, I also have friends and family who are lawyers and I've it about legal stuff and i understand a little bit about how lawyers think and a lot of them have been very very patient with my many questions about the law i assume he's got all that background and more but at the same time i cannot rely on this documentation because the penalties that come with the OSA are ruinous. espartapalma did you ask, or was mentioned the jurisdiction stuffs ?
And I don't, there is also the like, well, how likely is Ofcom or whoever they delegate to for legal enforcement to pick a hobbyist non-commercial forum over in the States and say, was mentioned, I'm not sure what you're asking, Aspart Palma. Oh, great, if you're all set up, cool. I mean, usually I go for three hours. So if you wanna fire up your stream in about 40 minutes, you'll be rolling when I start running down this stream, because usually I go about three hours.

02:21:22espartapalma how does applies outside UK
So yeah, it is unlikely that somebody In the UK says let's go target that little American hobbyist forum and hit them with the 10 million pound fine. But that is also a political question of what do I think is going to be the political relationship between these two countries over the next couple years and without giving my political opinion or saying let's have a big political fight is just to say there is another source of uncertainty. So to answer your question, these tabs are not appearing in the order I expect from my browser. espartapalma not sure if that's the same person that was affected because is a UK citizen
I must've tweaked some setting. you can read the section of the law. I linked it in my first comment, but it says someone is a UK user. If they are an individual, which is to say, I think not a business. who is physically in the UK. And then it does not matter whether they are registered to use the service. So it is explicit that this is talking about all visitors and it calls them users. This much I feel like I understand pretty well. And then also it says a little bit about what they do. But it it is not shy about saying they believe the law applies to any service, regardless of where it is hosted, if it has UK users. And that part is crystal clear in both the text of the law and the summaries, and there is very little verbiage that gives me any reason to think there might be some wiggle room in there. And I can see why the LFGSS espartapalma yeahh velocio...
person who let's be polite uses they them pronouns what is their handle actually they used a different one so on their own site they are velocio but they were also over on the hacker news thread and there was some excellent stuff they wrote there but they had a different handle ymeynot45 Can you put any sort of pop up (like the old age gate) stating that UK users are not welcome and if they are on the site they are against the TOS?
pushcx https://news.ycombinator.com/it…
borough nine. So I'll share this link too.

02:24:10why me? I am going to get to your question in a minute. Yep. So anyways, I think, I think, Velasio, I'll call them by the handle on their site, is more concerned by this and is choosing to shut down because they are a UK citizen and thus more likely to be targeted by the regulatory authorities. As an American, oh, it's really tempting to say, you know, without even getting into the history of where America came from, speaking of forks, I can see why Velocio had more concern that they would be targeted. So I talked through the really shitty options I saw. And this is, I left this comment with only a couple hours of reading the blog post, starting to read the law and the summaries. God, I don't want to spend a week reading this fucking off-com docs. And I'm not exaggerating with that one. It would be like dozens of hours to read all of that and try to make sense of it. So the shitty options are that I'm including for completeness are like number one, shut down. Sure as shit don't want to do that. Really, really don't want to do that. I love lobsters. It is a highlight of my life. You know, first line of the obituary, I enjoy hosting this community and helping people learn things and meet each other. It is so satisfying and rewarding. Not much better than shutting down is the option to migrate to a commercial host. Make a Facebook group, make a subreddit, make a discourse hosted thing. I think that would be a disaster. We would at least cut the community, lose two thirds of it, just right off the top. manateemon Lobsters is a highlight of my day too. It's a great community and it would be sorely missed if it has to shutdown
you know, every URL breaks, none of the history goes over, none of the functionality goes over. That's awful. Oh, thank you, Manatimon. And I am writing all of this because I want to avoid shutting down. And I also want to avoid being shut down. because I get fined 10 million pounds by some regulator that I had to read the Wikipedia page of yesterday because I had never heard of them. Tuesday? I think it was Tuesday.

02:27:21So it is very tempting to ignore the law and just keep doing our thing. That is a bad risk. because as Velocio pointed out, we occasionally get trolls, and any troll online, and this might be surprising, but there are people online who are jerks. Yeah, I'm so frustrated by the whole thing, I keep slipping into sarcasm, excuse me. I try not to do that. arh68 so I'm just catching up on this stuff ... what are like All The Other Sites doin ?
So, whether that is A troll who... What are all the other sites doing? Great question. arh68 like has anyone solved the pset lol
I wish I knew. Once again, you are skipping ahead to the end of my point, ARH, because I said it in my next-to-last sentence. I would love if folks could share links to write-ups or to groups of online communities that are faced with these laws. That is one of the things. No, I don't think anyone has solved it yet. And if they have, I would love a link to it because I don't think so. And I do think that that link I criticized earlier of a software developer attempting to summarize it, I would like to see that kind of thing from the regulator or from a lawyer in the jurisdiction or from a lawyer paid by hundred forums in the uk chipping in a dollar chipping in a pound of course something like that would be tremendously reassuring so the reason i mentioned trolls is aside from the fact that you know we have seen trolls like all sites somebody could do something like

02:29:54I don't know, bye. arh68 HahaGingercat ur cat typed that i'm sure
We just generated a screenshot of something that you could give a regulator and say, hey, why don't you go inspect this site that is wildly out of compliance? And look, here is a screenshot of a comment where someone breaks the OSA. Like, it is very, very cheap and easy to create violations of this act. And I say that because it has terms that are like making sure that children don't get harassed, that they aren't the target of cyberbullying. Or some of these are like very UK specific, and I don't... I don't know shit about the UK freedom of speech laws. I know the US ones about as well as a non-lawyer can, because it's been a particular interest and I've worked as a professional journalist. But some of this stuff, boy, I definitely don't have the background to read it, and they have lots of feelings. ymeynot45 The UK slander laws are VERY harsh. You can not state opinion about people.
If a recognized news publisher has been banned from using a service and the ban is still enforced, the provider may take action in relation to news. In US, yeah, the UK slander laws are very harsh. You can't state an opinion about people. I've heard some of that stuff. I would prefer not to rabbit hole into examples. I will just certainly agree with you. But this is, you know, we've all seen stories where politicians say, and please let's not rabbit hole. where politicians say, oh, TikTok is biased against me or Facebook is biased against my political party. And they are vindictively removing and selectively removing the things posted by my political allies to advance the opposing political cause. And a lot of this law seems to be written to assume that that is true and a thing that the law should get involved with preventing. Which to my American eyes is very invasive.

02:32:40and also makes it very, very easy to generate violations of the law because the laws, like the Online Safety Act, the big thing it describes targeting is any user to user service, which is basically, is there anything on a site where a user can post something and someone else can see it? And like the obvious example here is comments. It can be like dating profiles. I think one that is underappreciated is if you have a public bug tracker and that bug tracker allows people to put in comments or patches, I believe unambiguously that this would apply to you. So that is every software forge, every mailing list. I mean, it is broad.

02:33:43So then another shitty option is to burn a few thousand hours of time attempting to understand these laws and get into compliance with them. And I say thousands because reading the laws is dozens, hundreds of hours. And I believe for all of the things I was saying about terms like reasonable person and measure and what is a contract i firmly believe that there is no chance of meeting these laws requirements without legal advice because i don't know what i don't know and the risks of yoloing it are significant because it just takes one asshole to put you in violation of this law. And boy, do I believe that there is at least one asshole online.

02:35:00So,

...07These are, I said that I would just guess that it costs something like a hundred K to get the legal advice to comply with it. That's a fairly conservative estimate based on having worked with product council and gotten advice on legally sensitive projects or on incorporation or, or, or. then i said 10k a year thereafter i didn't want to get into the complexity of it would probably decline over time but then it would also increase over time like excuse me there was a nap it would probably decrease over time because once you get up the enormous amount of bureaucratic stuff and you keep it working You're not going to have to pay a lawyer on an ongoing basis to look over that stuff. But as the law takes effect and case law starts appearing or examples start appearing where the regulator has enforced against people, you're going to have to update or at least review those procedures. arh68 when's this go into effect ? like next week or something?
And a huge amount of this law is just making sure that you have written procedures for various things and follow them. It is a little bit like HIPAA, the American healthcare privacy law, which is May, March 17 is when it goes into effect. So yeah, we got three months on this one. arh68 oh march. you're way early on this haha
So as things happen, you know, I think it kind of nets out of the lawyer has to look at stuff occasionally and that need declines, but then the practical implementation stuff changes and requires review. So like finger in the wind is probably a few grand a year there. And then if you want to take on the big version of it, it's, can you produce a useful version a general guide to hobbyist forums and boy oh way early no in legal terms three months is not early also three months is not early when i try and time box the amount of time i spend on lobsters every week to like one day know six hours of streaming and some amount of time moderating every day and then you know another block of coding that's an hour or two long if it costs several hundred hours of volunteer time to understand the law that that blows my budget for doing anything on lobsters for like a year So I am not early. We are, in fact, very, very late and Ofcom only released their rules like you can see the dates, but like last week. I have worked with lawyers on producing general guides. they are especially antsy about writing things for public consumption because for lawyers when they give legal advice of do this don't do this file that paperwork don't worry about that when they give advice to people it comes with professional and moral obligations and it is very hard to give general advice to say when you file your taxes, you have to include schedule 43B. dpk0 evening
Oh, but maybe one in a million people has to file 43C because I don't know, you know, they have some nonsense fluky combination of all of the founders are non-US citizens, but the investors are US citizens who are using the government grant to do things, and so they have to file on this special tax form. arh68 afternoon PrideLGBTea
And then you end up with general guides where you have to write these really indirect things that are like most people file 43b and then you read them as a user and you're like how do i know if that applies. So getting lawyers to write general guides is brutal. And I say it in a slightly teasing way, but it is, I am not joking that it would be 10 times larger and more expensive to get large lawyers to produce a usable guide. dpk0 ymeynot45: an opinion is not defamation
And that is especially because this is a brand new law with zero case law and zero enforcement action so far. It is unclear.

02:40:43Yeah. DPK, I happen to know that WhyMeWhyNot isn't an American, so they may be comparing what American case law considers an opinion against what UK case law considers an opinion. I'm pretty sure that those two things are different.

02:41:07And even if they are not different, boy would I not want to be involved in litigation over it.

...19So, another bad option because ignoring the laws is really not a viable option. A bad option would be to buy an IP geolocation database and ban the UK. And, you know, I wrote AU in this because that one's up in the air, but yeah, what was it? dpk0 the main UK/US difference in defamation law is that US requires malicious intent for a defamation case, aiui. (but i am familiar with the UK side). the burden of proof situation may also be reversed?
Is it IP? So I asked a friend for a good one. I'm not remembering the URL.

02:42:05arh68 ya I like the geo-IP-ban actually .. as long as it checks the box so to speak
Boy, it's not good enough to keep their site online. It was dbip.com. Can't type.

...18Well, I know there's another one whose website actually works. arh68 as it allows for a more better solution to develop w/o some doomsday
I was looking at this DBIP because it was like half the cost. The... Really, you just do inline styling. The standard license for this, which might fit our needs, is 100 bucks a year. You have to subscribe and you have to get the updates because IP allocations change on a regular basis. That other one that I can't load the URL for was, I want to say, 50 euro a year. So, you know, call it 50 bucks a year. And the friend who pointed me at it has done a ton of stuff with these kinds of databases, so I trust his opinion on the quality of it. So ARH to your question of whether it checks the box, an IP database is not perfectly accurate. And also the people in those jurisdictions can use a VPN, whether that's a known commercial service or Tor or Homebrew like WireGuard to a US friend's home connection. And I included that one because it is indetectable. someone could set up a wire guard to my cable IP address and they would look exactly like me, the American sitting on a home internet connection, like the bulk of our traffic. And there would be no like port scanning I could do to detect it. I mean, people can VPN out of the great firewall. dpk0 in the UK the burden of proof is on the defendant to show that the allegedly defamatory claim they made is factually true (or covered by one of the other defences), which creates a kind of guilty-until-proven-innocent situation
And if I don't think I could, you know, detect VPNs better than China. ymeynot45 @dpk0 I tried to whisper to you if you wanted to have the conversation (you have it blocked). But I'm not going to spam Pushcx's chat with a side conversation.
However, I do think... dpk0 hehe
Yes, thank you for not rabbit-holing on the UK definition of defamation. I appreciate not having this argument in this comment stream. Thank you. I will leave it up to you two, should you choose to have this one, but I don't think it's a good use of either of your time. So trying to block the UK, knowing that it is imperfect, might be enough of a good faith effort that it really knocks down the risks. dpk0 depends if you think i’m trying to be right on the internet or trying to learn something :-) if i learn something it’d be a good use of my time!
I wrote there's still significant risk here on a couple of days reflection. Honestly, the risk might not be so bad because all of those things, stacking up all of those things of... Cool. Well, all you, DPK.

02:45:26epic_ninja_elephant Lots of US-based sites have blocked EU IP ranges rather than comply with GDPR.
I will just remind that both of you should ask each other whether you are lawyers in the relevant jurisdictions. Yeah, I am aware. So Epic Ninja Elephant, that does kind of inform this like, well, maybe the easiest way to deal with it is ban the UK because I don't see a ton of American sites. The GDPR regulators have not been going after American sites, especially small ones that just try to ban the EU rather than comply with the law. It sucks, though, because I don't want to ban a huge amount of active users. We have a bunch of users in the UK, and I have never tried to geolocate our users, but people have said things about being in the UK. Or if I who is their IP, I get a UK ISP. If I arh68 ya it sucks to cut off like 2 of the 3 biggest english-speaking foreign countries .. not ideal i know
look at their blogs they mentioned being in the uk heck that that russ guy who wrote that merged story i don't think he's an active user of the site but he said he was in the uk so like we know there are some there it would be lousy to have to show them the door i don't want to do that that's you know it's It's amputating your foot to save your life. arh68 it's not like i'm going to learn another language LUL
And there are situations where you have to do it. I would like this to not be one.

02:47:19Learn another language. I actually think it's super useful to speak multiple languages. Even just the... Yeah, changes the way you think in the same way that learning more programming languages changes the way you write code.

...39So lobbying the US government to pass some kind of law that says that we, you know, Americans can ignore laws that are written like these. It is not that I would expect that. to solve the problem. But for us, it solves the problem because then it is a big fight between nation states and their lawyers. And there is a lot of good faith of like, well, obviously, I couldn't have complied while my government was in the middle of having a slap fight with your government over it. Because who knows what applies? I feel like that just kind of punts the whole thing down a road, the road for a while. dpk0 would the EFF/ACLU really take on a case like this which would intrinsically be in another jurisdiction? (apologies if you haven’t got to that idea yet)
However, without talking about contemporary politics... Oh shit, I wrote five months instead of three? Yeah, it is... I think it's unlikely to happen in five months. I think it's really unlikely to happen in three months. Yeah, DPK, you are skipping ahead two bullet points. So the flip side of... maybe the U.S. government could help is maybe the U.K. government could help fix the law. arh68 i now realize i have no idea if any of those groups have foreign presence HahaHide
dpk0 the Open Rights Group would be the people to ask in the UK, probably – rough UK equivalent of EFF
I don't know much about U.K. politics, but I'm going to guess it's less likely than the three months. Yeah, so the open rights group, I don't know them. Thank you. That is super useful. That is exactly the kind of thing that I was going to round up my comment with by say is useful. Everyone's right to privacy and free speech online. Wonderful. This sounds like they are right in the neighborhood. Is it even one of their campaigns? End pre-crime. How you doing over there, UK?

02:49:56That sounds like defending online speech.

02:50:05Oh yes, it is exactly about the online safety act wonderful yay dpk if you were not already a channel VIP you sure would be for that, because that is. I mean I realized, this is an external advocacy group, but they are doing the thing of trying to improve the law. That is the exact thing that I was just saying feels unlikely in the next three months. And I may not love their chances, but they are going to have lawyers involved and be writing to a standard that is much more useful for figuring out what I care about. Thank you.

...53So I I wrote that I can reach out to one of these groups like the EFF and ACLU to ask if they would defend, you know, commit to defending lobsters as a test case. And, you know, that is not to say I want to wave the red flag in front of the regulator and say like, come at me, bro. I would love you to try to enforce the law against me because being in one of those cases is such an enormous time sink. That's like a, sit down and have a talk with my spouse about how do we want to spend the next i don't know call it three to five years because that's how long a case like this takes to run right that's even before that's my intuition for if it was a u.s case if it was a international case where you have to go back and forth and like argue over which court gets jurisdiction arh68 are the prisons in UK nice ? lol
You know, tack on another two years. arh68 askin for a friend
That is a big commitment. dpk0 litigation sometimes goes faster in the UK but i think 3 to 5 years as a reasonable maximum is a reasonable expectation
Are the prisons in UK nice? Honestly, they are probably nicer than the US. Most are, right? I'm getting spicy about politics there. Sorry about that one. I shouldn't have. Okay. DPK, are you based in the UK? dpk0 i am from the UK originally
You've said things that make me think you're in an EU time zone. Actually, you've said you're in an EU time zone, but I don't remember what part. You don't have to share if you don't want, but I'm curious because... Okay, from the UK. dpk0 (but i’ve lived in Germany for 10 years now)
So you have opinions about it that are reasonably well informed on these basic issues. Thank you.

02:52:49I don't know. I'm enough of an idealist that... I do think it might be worth it because, you know, realistically the open rights group or another group advocating for improvements to the laws and regulations are unlikely to have much effect before the law takes effect. A lot of this, you know, I'm talking out of my ass. I actually don't know. I'm speaking from a U.S. perspective there. In the US, realistically, a lot of it would get handled in case law where parts of the law might get thrown out as violated by broader legal principles, violated, wrong legal term, overridden by broader legal principles or higher level law like constitutional law in the United States. I have no idea what the common process is in the UK. dpk0 yeah, so in the UK you can’t get an Act of Parliament thrown out by the courts *in general* because Parliament is sovereign
And I am just sort of guessing that it is roughly similar where the likeliest thing that's going to improve the law would be big, long court fights. I don't know. And so I kind of summed up as UK can't get an act of Parliament to our side in general, because Parliament is sovereign. dpk0 the exception would be to get a ruling under the European Convention on Human Rights
Yeah, I don't know what sovereign means in this context. And the exception would be to get a ruling under the European Convention on Human Rights. Okay. dpk0 at most outside of that, you could challenge Ofcom’s interpretation and regulations made under the Act
Yeah, I was just trying to speak really broadly about whether it is really common in the United States that the states or the federal Congress write a law and enact a law, and it is overbroad or improper in some way, and then You know the law giveth and the courts take it away, and that is a big part of the way the US constitutional system is balanced. i'm speaking ideally. At most, outside of that you could challenge outcomes interpretation. dpk0 (those are executive actions and thus judicial review is fair game)
yeah and so that is also why it's such a big research project is keeping a mental tally of what does the law say and then what does the regulator think the law says and do i believe or realistically does a uk lawyer believe that those two things are out of sync

02:56:06dpk0 Parliament is sovereign = Parliament gets to do whatever it wants; there is no supreme law above any other law. every Act of Parliament has essentially the same status in UK law as a constitutional amendment in US law
I don't think there have been any comments posted since I was here. No. Parliament gets to do whatever it wants. There's no supreme law above any other law. Every acting parliament has essentially the same status as constitutional men. Whoa, that's a really interesting and different process. Thank you for breaking that out. Yeah, you're clearly familiar with how there are tiers of laws and courts in the US, so I won't belabor it, but, huh. dpk0 yes, i have successfully sidetracked you, apologies :D
Yeah, I'm totally getting distracted by thinking of what different effects that is going to have in the actual production of laws and their implementation. Anyway, legal systems are interesting, like I said. seriously considered going to law school there's so much interesting stuff it's no it's fine i'm happy to be sidetracked if this is the like peter talks at you show for three hours like nobody needs that show and you especially have come up with a lot of really interesting and thoughtful stuff to say about the site so i do appreciate it

02:57:33Oh, I DM'd you on IRC a couple of days ago. dpk0 oh yeah, thanks
You should drop me a line. That's what I was thinking of. Loose ends that sidetracked me. dpk0 i’m just losing track of lots of things atm, so busy …
So... Having slept on the many bad options...

02:58:02I mean, you missed it, but like the first hour of this stream was me just talking about being crushed by keeping track of lots of things that are in progress. So I know that feel, bro. So with reflection, I think. I don't want to do any of the shitty options like shut down the site or ignore the law in YOLO. And I don't have any good options that don't cost a bunch of time and effort and feel like they're going to succeed. And so I think the answer is going to basically be do all of the bad options at once, because we're on a tight timeline. So it means contribute in a small way to whatever lobbying the governments looks like. And that probably just means trying to find those groups And be a part of them or like stick a name on the bottom of a petition on behalf of lobsters. And I'm in the same way I talked a bit about brigading earlier. I don't want to use lobsters to advance political causes that I believe in. dpk0 will you also take steps to prevent UK users from circumventing the ban? i mean, i can name a dozen really active lobsters users from the UK whom you should presumably just ban :-/
unless those politics are existential unambiguous existential threats to the site and the uk osa is unfortunately so it is significant in enough to make me overcome that reluctance to use lobsters that way.

03:00:13dpk0 (if you go the GeoIP block route at all, that is)
Yeah, Jesus, I really don't want to ban anybody. So I think that's what doing the... Let me make notes here because I am going to have to write some kind of meta comment and meta thread summarizing this back.

...43dpk0 but those are really good users like fanf, david_chisnall … the site would be worse off without them
yeah dpk i i strongly agree i don't have a mental list of which users are in the uk i just know that some of them are

03:01:29So maybe not maybe. So I'm going to look for. Groups that are. Lobbying. Or improvements. And.

...57dpk0 looks up the actual legal status of commencement of the OSA …
Join in. But probably just, it's in the March 17 is when Ofcom says it kicks in. So we're all, you know, in legal terms, we're on a very tight deadline.

03:02:53So yeah, what I just typed up there is looking for groups that are lobbying improvements and join in at the level of signing a petition or donating rather than trying to lead them or otherwise contribute hours and hours of efforts. I just, I don't have them.

03:03:19And then dpk0 yeah, but what’s the legal basis for that. there are a couple of ways that could be set in law: Parliament could have prescribed that in the Act itself (rare, hard to challege); it could be a commencement order has already been issued for that date (easier to challenge politically); could be that the govt is just promising to issue a commencement order which would bring it into force on that date (= political campaigning could be very effective)
I will contact rights groups like the EFF, ACLU and open rights group. And this is to ask what they're doing. And then also I will have the convo with my spouse of if this is something we'd be willing to be a test case for and i don't want to make light of it because this is i'm not kidding that this is the kind of thing you talk about with your spouse where it's a project that takes over your lives i don't talk much about politics online and some of that is i don't want to be arguing with people some of this is just It was a family practice of, you know, you don't talk politics with strangers. You can guess the... There are a lot of reasons folks have those beliefs. jmiven hello
And then I got into journalism, and my editor took me aside on day one and was like, hey, I know you're new to journalism, so... One of the real important things here is no cheering from the press box. Hey, Jay Miven. And that really reinforced my initial inclination of not talking politics online. dpk0 the original attempt to require age verification on porn websites was effectively defeated because lobbyists and industry (including the parts of industry tasked with enforcement) kept requesting delays to commencement, until it was finally cancelled. (was – i think the OSA tries to bring it back)
But one of the things I do talk about online that's a political topic is Loving Day.

03:05:17pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L…
Loving Day is not like a nationally recognized holiday, but it celebrates when, in 1967, the United States Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage. And as you can tell by looking at my last name, I am in an interracial relationship. And I think it is pretty important as a fundamental human right.

...52And there are actually good books, and I think now a movie, I haven't seen it, about what is involved in being a test case in one of these kinds of overturning an unjust law. It is not a small commitment. So I honor the Lovings who chose to do that. I think that's important work.

03:06:29yeah dpk we have a whole set of laws on age verification for porn sites that are also coming up at the state level in the united states they interact with our free speech laws in complicated ways that i cannot possibly predict what the outcome will be confidently i would lean towards they will likely get tossed And that's mostly based on what I have heard actual lawyers say. dpk0 where did you find the 17th March date? i have found two commencement orders that are effective on future dates, and none of those dates are 17th March
But I'm not a betting man about it.

03:07:19dpk0 some of it comes into force on 17th January 2025
None of those dates are 17 March. ymeynot45 PornHub just pulled out of Florida. Now there are 13 states that all of the smart sites have left.
So I took it from... Why me? You just got auto mod for mentioning Pornhub.

...40Yeah.

...46Some of it comes into force on 17th January. DPK, could you share links for that? dpk0 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/…
Because I was taking March 17 from dpk0 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/…
This blog post literally the headline of it and I hadn't closely read it looking for. Other dates. Let's pull this over here.

03:08:14Following provisions come into force section 81.

...25That's concerning. arh68 cool so like a month
So I had just trusted this blog post and hadn't independently researched it. So this is a, you are also making a nice example of how hard it is to understand these things. dpk0 oh hang, on the dates in the second one are still 2024
I don't understand why you link to this section though.

...55dpk0 i misread
dpk0 is why i linked to it
The dates in the second one are still... I note that this one now says original over here. Is it possible that you slipped into looking at an old version of this? So if I say maybe there isn't a revision because I can't click on this thing.

03:09:30dpk0 statutory instruments (regulations under executive authority) aren’t usually revised
Yeah, unless they have a time machine, I don't know how this works. Perhaps I will be required to invent a time machine. Statutory instruments aren't usually revised. Yeah, see. DPK, I gave a long speech earlier about how I try not to play lawyer because I am ignorant of legal terms, especially in other jurisdictions. And the way you just like every three sentences drop another legal consideration I was oblivious to, like there is something called a statutory instrument and it is different from a regulation. And it has these different practices around it.

03:10:34dpk0 it’s possible, as i said, that there has not actually yet been a commencement order, and the government is only saying they are going to bring it into force in March!
arh68 this link seems to indicate March 16/17 ... https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online…
dpk0 that would actually be the best news
It's possible there's not actually been a commencement order. dpk could you do you know the difference between a commencement order and bring it into force because you're talking about those two things as opposed and I would have guessed that they were synonyms or close to it.

03:11:08Where's my, yeah. dpk0 no, they’re the same. what i’m saying is it’s possible the government is saying, politically, that they will bring it into force in March with a commencement order, but legally, the commencement order has not yet been put forward
So when I saw, so aside from the difference between commencement and bring it into force, the top line press release from Ofcom said that you have three months on this stuff and then more comes in? No, they're the same. Ah, DPK, thank you. So you're saying

03:12:02dpk0 yes, that’s possible
That's when they expect to do it, but they haven't yet ticked the legal checkbox to say that that's for realsies when it's happening. I think is what you're saying. dpk0 so it could be a Simple Matter of Politics to persuade them to delay it, maybe?
Okay. Well, that's actually really encouraging then, because if there isn't a commencement order, yes, perhaps that actually is really encouraging that maybe pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/ffd4xt/lfgs…
one of these lobbying groups will change things up well fingers crossed and i had closed out this comment by saying and just because i know so many folks have joined i'll link it again by saying that i would especially appreciate if folks could share links to write-ups by lawyers in the relevant jurisdictions groups of online communities that are faced with these laws, and the open rights groups is squarely in that, or statements by the regulators that are relevant to our kind of community, which is, you know, non-UK, hobbyist, non-commercial, small, especially by their standards. Yeah, what they call large is 10% of the UK or, what, 7 million people? So, they need a... Not just a small category in one of these PDFs. They need a weensy category or a tiny category. There must be UK slang for really small things.

03:13:47Because we're over in that.

...58So in terms of what to do. I said, I think, try all the bad options. And the last bad option is get an IP database. And we have, my current best understanding is that we have three months, but that clearly is something I have to keep looking at. And rather than start with a ban, because it certainly doesn't need to come out into a force, it's add a site banner warning UK users that we're expecting, we're going, we're, let me be real blunt about this because I try and write in the third person because I try and speak on behalf of the political community or the, I generally try and write in the third person because I'm speaking on behalf of the community and I try and be real careful about not getting out over my skis and reflecting what people have said and the general tenor of things and the conversations I've had in DM and email and IRC and then especially in public comments. But this one is a very much a I am doing this one because the UK law is very explicit that it is putting me personally on the hook about it. And it is me personally that they would toss in jail if I ignore their inquiries, or me personally that they would ask for fines from. So, warning UK users that I will block Will Geo block the UK on March 16? Haha, I'm not using your date format, UK. Because compliance is not reasonable. More than not reasonable. It's just, it's not possible with the resources available.

03:16:36And then the banner will link to a meta thread where I got it. I'm falling back on my personal quirks, because I find this whole thing pretty stressful. And I really hate all of these shitty options. arh68 well it's like, their choice they made idk .. not ur idea after all
really don't want to block the uk and especially now that dpk has pointed out a bunch of very familiar names of folks who are in the uk that i know i would be bad if we lost i would feel very bad if we lost where i attempt to enlist the uk users and delegate the creation of better options to them their choice. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to get into how well individuals' political opinions are reflected by their representative democracy. Like, you can write treatises and have civil wars about that. We're not going to settle that one on a Twitch stream. That's a better title.

03:18:17ymeynot45 Is the sound breaking up for anyone else?
I'm not Canadian.

...30Shouldn't be breaking up. I did the volume control workaround. Yeah, that's open. Well, I'm coming up on the end of the stream because I have another commitment.

...49So hopefully the sound hangs in there enough. Yeah, all of my little indicators of stream quality are green. Oh, wait. Sometimes I have to reload the Twitch dashboard before it shows me things. dpk0 sound is fine for me
No, it still says excellent. ymeynot45 ok just me then
I got nothing. jmiven sound is ok here
I hope it is just you. You know, not to be mean, but... So... I have said the word I a lot, and I don't think this one is going to benefit from me attempting to individually YOLO it. A lot of what I am going to do is find groups to talk to, because this is much, much bigger than I an individual can meaningfully affect, especially given that I try not to spend my whole life on lobsters. Tempting though, tempting. If somebody wants to donate a couple of million bucks so that I not have to worry about work and have all kinds of spare change to put into all of the fun projects that I have ideas for, then I can spend all of my life on lobsters. That would be nice. But I don't think we have too many billionaires on the stream. I don't know. Twitch says I have 15 viewers, so maybe one of you.

03:20:29So... arh68 i have 3 cats each valued at $1B
if this meta thread can avoid the very tempting pitfall of programmers playing lawyers, I would really hope that the UK users can come up with something much better. jmiven I have billions of cells
And I'm actually kind of optimistic about that because we have DPK who she hasn't even lived in the UK for 10 years. And she immediately said like four useful things that I didn't know and couldn't know about this because I'm not in the UK and I'm not familiar with the politics or the rights groups or the legal processes or anything else. And hopefully if I can put it in front of all of our UK users, they will do 10 times more of that And we can do something that is a hell of a lot better than banning them all on 16 March.

03:21:44God, I wonder what the origin of that date difference is. It's so obnoxious that, you know, there's that famous saying that the US and the UK are two countries divided by a common language. The date one gets me specifically, because like all programmers, I have mild PTSD around date and time zone bugs. So I'm winding up the stream. dpk0 also worth noting this law was passed by the previous UK government (Conservative). there is now a different government (Labour), which might also be good news for political campaigning on this
So if anybody has any last questions or comments, now is a great time to throw them in. And then I'm going to stand up from my desk and walk out the door and go do an entirely pleasant social thing. dpk0 easier to persuade them to fix up the other party’s nonsense than asking someone to fix their own nonsese
thank you dpk i was unaware and i appreciate that yeah like in my head i read it and i map it to u.s political parties but i'm aware that uk politics are pretty different well fingers crossed then that something like the what did you call it the commencement order can get pushed back arh68 have fun at your thing, I wouldn't worry too much about this for now but that's just me SeemsGood
Fingers crossed. If this one just kept getting pushed back a couple of months until it was substantially rewritten or we were exempted, that would be a beautiful, overwhelming win. And I would be thrilled at that. ARH three months is not a lot of timeline in... Boy, can we change the law? Can we persuade politicians that this is a bad idea? Especially when it is some people who don't have any money and are not in your constituency are saying that it kicks their ass. It's like, no, I'm getting into political rants. I'm not going to do that.

03:23:59Let's be nice to the UK people here. Let's do their date order. They can have that one. I am trying to enlist them to help fix this thing. Or at least give us reasonable amounts of guidance because compliance is non-trivial. Non-trivial in the NP hard sense. Or in the... dpk0 i will look in more detail into the commencement situation and try and find out where the 17th March date comes from etc
dpk0 will send you info on IRC about it
undecidability on halting problem sense all right so there's so there's everything i'm in progress on and i would like to go do my social thing and come back this evening and i will either knock out the little action mailbox setup or knock out the thing. dpk0 and a reply to your other message
DPK, I would really appreciate that if you... Thank you. That's wonderful. I really appreciate that.

03:25:14Well, then I'm going to wait till I hear from you on that date and do the action mailbox thing. And then tomorrow or this weekend, I will do the IP database and try and write up a meta post that says, Hey, UK users, it's your time to shine. And I will include a more developed version of this response plan, which is, you know, these three basic points, but hopefully written a lot nicer. And I will include epic_ninja_elephant I keep forgetting about the IRC channel.
some polite version i got a little ranty here of i don't need programmer playing lawyer interpretations of the law as i can generate those myself too snarky that was not good rhetoric this comment where i said a short version of boy attempting to interpret the law itself is a very hard problem that calls for professional advice I am going to find some version of this, or I'll just link this comment to put in the post so that hopefully our meta thread does not just descend into programmers playing lawyers. And then hopefully we can enlist more UK users to volunteer and in some way mitigate the risks here. And I have a rough idea of like, I want to want to spend another half hour, but so i'm going to do this real fast, because I do have to commute but success would look like. delay of commencement. or. Some kind of guidance or waiver from the regulator. or.

03:27:32and maybe guidance from a UK legal expert if it seems well tailored to our situation. Like this one is gonna be a judgment call. I don't know how to be more specific about that, but if I saw someone who especially if they had experience writing or defending similar laws in the UK, and they said, hey, here's what you need to know if you are a small thing. And realistically, that is gonna get produced with funding from a local rights group of some kind, because that is, A huge amount of work for a lawyer to do and I wouldn't want to downplay how much effort that they would have to put into that and that's why I say they would have to have some kind of sponsorship.

03:28:50When I say like guidance or waiver from the regulator like. something written in human-oriented writing rather come on rather than legal jargon clearly targeting us as a non-uk tiny and or non-commercial forum just if Ofcom wrote a press release that was like, dude, if you have a Tumblr, no, actually Tumblr is a bad one because it's owned by a big company. dpk0 ‘The regulator’s illegal content codes require parliamentary approval before fully coming into force on 17 March 2025.’ — https://www.verdict.co.uk/osa-m…
If you have your WordPress blog and the comments are turned on and 10 people read your blog, we are never going to look at you. epic_ninja_elephant Do you know Neil Brown in the UK? https://decoded.legal/blog/
If there was something like that, that would give me a lot of peace of mind. dpk0 article from Monday this week
So I am not at all trying to be Oh, DPK, that is wonderful. dpk0 so yeah, this is a political plan
So I'm going to have to run down the citation for that.

03:30:15But if it requires parliamentary approval, then that sounds like there is, I mean, especially if it requires an affirmative step, It is very easy for politicians to just never get together and do that affirmative step. So that's super encouraging. Okay, so let's grab that link and put that in the scratch notes too. ymeynot45 Especially with a new party in charge.
Oh my God, Twitch did something to its chat player and it is biting me today.

03:31:06So I'm writing, how was that been?

...16So I'm writing delay or cancellation of commencement, but you know, whatever that like, legal term is for not ticking the box before it takes effect. They probably have a specific term for that non action. We'll see. I would take just about anything. Because I really, really don't want to ban the UK. That would suck. So thank you all for talking through this stuff with me today on the Lobster's Office Hours. dpk0 also worth a read https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medials…
I have really appreciated the various comments and questions and sorting out how the site works and how we're going to respond to this Very strange situation. Unusually threatening situation.

03:32:19Thank you for the blog post link. I will read that and try to understand what it says. It is definitely not going to be a this second thing. dpk0 yep
I'll read it on the subway. Cool. That's all I got. dpk0 okay, cool
So DPK, I will look for anything else you can find by tomorrow. You know, I don't mean to put a deadline on you as someone volunteering to help. dpk0 yeah i understand
dpk0 you want to get something done on this
But if I don't hear from you, I will time out and I will post the UK call to arms I don't know what's on my calendar for Friday, but Friday or Saturday. Yeah. And I have a lot of political opinions on this law, but I will just say I am taking it entirely seriously. And this is what taking it seriously looks like. It looks like trying to understand it, realizing it's bigger than I can understand, and treating the UK government as if it has the reach and the capacity to enforce what it has written. Because, you know, if you see this law in... I'm not going to say a specific country, but there are smaller countries that have similar laws that they say give themselves rights over social media or the internet generally. And I'm not super worried that a small country with fairly weak rule of law and norms is going to come after me, a guy in Chicago. This one's a whole other kettle of fish. The UK does have state capacity, does have budget, does probably have politics that intersect American big tech or culture. And we'll see how it goes. Thanks very much, folks, for coming on by. The next scheduled Lobster's office hours is four days from now on Monday. It will happen as scheduled, I hope. I don't, you know, unless an emergency comes up. If you think of anything or see anything, please just throw me links. I am very contactable. You can see push.cx slash contact. It has my email. You can get me on the socials. manateemon Thanks for the stream. It has been very interesting!
You can email. Anytime. Somebody mentioned Twitch Whispers. Don't use that. I never checked the inbox. And it mostly doesn't work because Twitch is still pissed at me for not giving them a phone number. I mean, if I can't even comply with that level of regulation, not a lot of help on the giant law. All right, so I'm going to come back to this one. And I've already read all the other stuff that's open here. espartapalma thank you..
Cool. Well, everybody take care. Have a good weekend. If I don't see you, have good holidays. Later.