I am going to do the unthinkable for a programmer and read the docs first

03:47Frici 👋
justkarolis hello!!!!
You beat me here. my morning has been jam-packed, so... Little change from the usual starting at the top of the hour there, huh? Hello, Fruity. Hello, Just Careless. Nice to see you both again. Fruity, did I remember to thank you for something? Oh, yeah, the chat history on the archive pages. Yep, I got it. Frici You remembered to thank me yes.
Okay. .. You know, sometimes I see a name and I'm like, justkarolis Hey, last time on stream you mentioned the UChicago study, I reached out to one of my friends to whos a PhD student at UIUC abou tthe ethics. I found out that his lab mate actually worked with the lead PI for that study... small world
Wasn't there something I was going to talk about? Frici I know cause it was fixed and I also looked back LUL
And then that feeling hangs around even after I've managed to do the thing. So better to say it twice than say it zero times, right?

04:33Oh, hi. Oh, just careless. justkarolis yep
You were the University of Illinois student, right? Not to, you know. Frici ohh just me, or are we missing frames?
docs you but you said it on the chat log so labmate worked with the lead pi for the study well yeah so one of my jokes about chicago is that we're actually just the largest small village because as soon as you start talking to people you find immediately that like they're actually your cousin's upstairs neighbor and all those kind of things. I hope you're not missing frames. Is the audio okay or is it the video? Either way, my little graphs are green. I mean, honestly, it's not like this is a high frame rate kind of stream. It's me scrolling the browser is maybe the most graphically intensive thing that happens on this stream.

05:43Keep an eye on it. If it looks like the stream quality has gone to shit, I can try restarting. But so far, my graphs are green. Oh, no. Actually, one of my graphs is going to shit. justkarolis yep, stream keeps lagging for me
Frici I got a couple bufferings
So OBS has its stats. But it's not really clear that I can do anything about any of them. pushcx In case you can't hear me well, it's definitely my upstream
yeah i think it's my end and it did rain in chicago this morning so we may have that post rain shitty connection yeah yeah

06:50Right i'm going to bounce the stream in the hopes that that does it because you know, sometimes just a tcp connection gets sad and doesn't want to recover.

07pushcx should be back now...
Frici we could hear you in chunks between the buffering
I'm going to watch the little chart in the corner here, but it's possible that just my upstream is... Hear me in chunks between the buffering. Okay.

...41pushcx It's possible my upstream is just not going to work today and I'll have to scratch the stream, let's see in a minute.
Frici it does seem better. for now i'll keep you posted
Frici it does jump between working and catchup for me but its only on the 3-6s range
okay so things look green no no that's not green actually yeah this okay well we'll see how it goes but the one little chart i can see is kind of swinging around and i don't need a wonderful stream upstream to run you know a terminal at 30 frames a second at 1080p given that it's mostly static but all right if that continues i don't want people to just suffer through it and i would rather just call it because i didn't have anything super pressing to talk about today anyways the the thing i was rambling about is that chicago is actually a village and everybody kind of is one or two degrees away of separation away from people lab mate worked for the lead pi yeah the the really irritating thing about that one was they experimented on me and the erb team was like no it's okay because they didn't care about you they only wanted to see if their thing was effective and i was like yeah that's that's exactly the logic of why it's horribly wrong and if this was a drug where it was like they don't care about you they just secretly gave you the drug to see what would happen to you like somehow that sounds bad in a way we opened a bunch of dishonest pull requests people are like oh that's a computer thing it's okay to experiment on people if it's a computer thing you chicago

02:43Frici strongly agree there how its both bad form and bad practice
justkarolis So my friend also does reliability research and apperantly what they did is super common. He said "Part of how we measure success is we identify the bugs with our tools and raise issues anonymously and see if the bug is correctly identified or not" idk if it right or wrong just wanted to tell you, thought it was interesting
so my two topics i showed it a minute ago but my two topics were this again and brigading oh yeah i'll do the standard intro that this is the lobsters office hour stream so if you have any kind of questions on how the site works how site practices work there's some of that i want to talk about or anything on the code base because we are open source We can talk about anything.

03:22Yeah, just careless. That's that is exactly what I was. I was concerned by like. If you change the topic of research from software to a drug, would you give drugs to strangers to see if they have an effect or not. Because that's what they're doing, is experimenting on people to observe them. And when you do that without even disclosing to people that they are being experimented on, it's grossly unethical. Please, if your friend thinks that that is acceptable, maybe don't be friends with someone who thinks that because that's a really shitty thing to do to people.

04:26Honestly, if their pull requests had had one sentence that said, this is who we are and this is what came out of the tool, instead of trying to manipulate me by being anonymous and secret and refusing to answer questions because they felt that that would mean they got less feedback on whether the tool's bullshit responses were good or not, that would have told me everything I needed to have consented. But just doing it without disclosure is the unethical part.

05:15Or to put it another way, the lobster's pull requests are not an invitation to do a prank show.

...44justkarolis Yeah I agree with you, I feel like also the way they talked to u on the PR was super weird
And in case the like highfalutin moral reasons are not super clear if I have to spend time weeding out experiments I can't spend time rewarding these incredibly useful things. The reason they talked to me that way is. They didn't want to this is hilarious but they didn't want to compromise the integrity of their experiment. Because. If they had had to explain their changes, maybe the thing that I accepted was the promise of a new contributor or the prose they wrote as opposed to the tool, right? So if you're an amoral monster like those researchers, you don't want want to do an experiment with as little interference as possible and talking like a human as an unethical monster or a university of chicago researcher but i repeat myself you want to have your pure experiment i don't know if your friend is unsure about doing this stuff you could show them the last 10 minutes of the last stream archive and this first couple of minutes of talking about this it's been what six or seven years and i am still like instantly mad as hell about being experimented on that way it's fucked up and i don't know how many more ways there are to say that it's unethical to experiment on people without their knowledge. It is one thing to study people and see in the wild how many comments get posted on this poll request. Yeah, scrape stuff, do research. But when you start messing with people to see what they do, especially when you are like, let me burn incredibly limited open source developer time, just Fix whatever is wrong when you're sold, buddy.

08:03So I'd really like to merge this pull request, and I don't know what's going on with this contributor. justkarolis lol its another UChicago researcher!!!
Because this contributor, speaking of anonymous folks, made a pseudonymous, a new account to contribute without any kind of background justkarolis theyre back
I would hope they are not a researcher who is messing with me. That would be very unpleasant. They actually talk, so that seems unlikely. And the fact that this is some kind of one-off throwaway user account makes me wonder if they're even seeing that I asked for one more change and asked one more question. I don't know. They've been very responsive previously. Now a couple of days of quiet has gone by. These are quiet as bad for getting stuff merged. Because the longer something sits idle, the less likely somebody comes back to it.

09:11The thing is, everything in this user's two pull requests has been smarter than what UChicago dumped on me. UChicago came up with a, their tool was a very dumb idea. And if they had thought about it for 10 minutes or had ever maintained a code base, they would not have suggested that kind of optimization. It was one of those like, we can identify this, let's go find out if it's useful. And if they had just made a cup of tea and reflected on it or had some real world experience, they would never have suggested that because it was such a dumb approach. And I'm saying it a lot less politely than I would for someone who had a soul but I'm not really worried about hurting their feelings because they don't deserve nice things you know what I'm doing I'm doing exactly exactly what I was just talking about is a bad idea in public let's let's transition back to our topic I was saying just a couple of days ago that one of the issues with brigading is that when people are outraged, as I am outraged at UF Chicago, very often there are really contentious issues And when things get really contentious with a strong moral dimension to it, it feels like they justify an exception to our rules or to common courtesy. And that is exactly what I was doing. And even when I'm mad, it is a mistake. There are bad people who did bad. but I should probably not joke about them being soulless. That's cruel and it just makes me into an asshole. And I don't want to sink to their level, right?

11:42I sure don't want to take my idea of what it means to be a good net neighbor from someone like that. Anyways, just a reminder that it is very easy to get pissed about things and feel like you're justified in acting badly.

12:11pushcx https://lobste.rs/c/v2dfj4
So that was the... Actually, let me grab that link. This one... Let's get the short link.

...27Hey, good boy. The... Brigading rule was something that's been getting a lot of attention in the last year-ish. And I have been trying to improve what that practice is, what that guideline says, how it gets enforced. pushcx https://github.com/lobsters/lob…
taimouraaa Hi can i ask how many daily active users you get on lobsters and is it same as the hacker news website
So for recent activity on it, there was this commit, and I'll throw the link in here, where I said, hey, let's not link into other people's issue trackers and things. Talmora... pushcx https://lobste.rs/stats
So our daily active users, which I would define as... People who... Oops. Let me go back. People who have... submitted a story, posted a comment, or cast a vote. So this stats page shows you by month. By day, it is something like 2,000, 2,500. I would have to manually run the query. Wait, does that make sense that the month could be lower than the day? taimouraaa hmm all data is public
Yes, because I'm thinking of weekdays. especially Monday, Tuesday, which are the busiest days, and then things fall off significantly on the weekends, like half. So yes, this monthly number still makes sense. But if you wanted a conservative number, you could say, you know, 2,200. Not all the data is public. Like you can't tell the cardinality of voting. You can't tell if there are two comments that both have five upvotes. A looking at the site from the outside, you can't tell if those votes came from 10 different accounts or the exact same five accounts. So if there's a query you want me to run, we can run it. But that's kind of a rule of thumb is I think of it as something like 2,500 daily active users. Cause I'm thinking of the, the typical weekday when things are busy, but if you wanted like monthly active users, eh, the average is a little lower. And then to the second part of your question. Is it the same as the Hacker News site? No, absolutely not. I would say that Hacker News is something like 100 to 1,000 times higher on any metric that you could name of logged in users, number of comments, number of votes, number of readers, effect on the industry. In every way, Hacker News is enormously larger than Lobster's. it's huge so my rule of thumb is that they are like a thousand times bigger than us there are a couple of dimensions where they're only a hundred times bigger there is kind of a thing so hacker news a lot of it is about entrepreneurship and especially in vc funded entrepreneurship You need to show enormous growth and scale. And that leads to valuing size. I mean, it's great, right? It's easy. You can put a number on it. But the value of the community is not just how many daily active users do we have. And that is not a number I am trying to optimize for and trying to increase. It is nice when we grow. And I am happy to see the site grow. But honestly, I would be just as concerned if one of these graphs doubled or halved. Because either way, something very bad is happening. It's very hard to taimouraaa the community on lobster is very niche i guess. I lot of very focused topics whereas on hackernews, it also caters general public.
grow a community and maintain community norms if you are growing too fast you get swamped by the norms of whatever the place that is linking to you is so if we had open signups every any time that hacker news linked to us which happened over the weekend actually on sunday i think saturday i don't remember which day it was a busy weekend for me But if we had open signups, the day Hacker News linked to us, the day is the day that our culture would end. And we would not be distinct because if there are a thousand of them for one of us and like 5% of the people who click through decide to sign up and join, like that's it. They've swamped us. They've totally overwhelmed whatever we had going. pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E…
It's the eternal September problem. Oh, how is that? How is that not in my browser history?

18:24I mean, from the perspective of lobsters, which is really focused on making stuff with computers, Hacker News looks general public. justkarolis Can I use lobste.rs without an account? Is it just commenting that I need an account for?
But from the perspective of, I don't know, Reddit, Hacker News is also fairly niche because Hacker News will remove stuff on pop culture, on some politics, on things that are not about being clever. Like you will never read about a, Who won on the latest reality TV show on Hack News? Definitely not on Lobsters. Just Careless? Yeah. pushcx https://lobste.rs/filters
To submit a story or post a comment or upvote, you have to have an account. But lots of other stuff like filtering. You don't need an account to filter out stories. So if you are like, and this one is real common, if you are like, I never want to read stories about gleam or go, right? Like, I don't know those languages. They're not interesting to me. I can't read the examples. I don't want to learn to read the examples. Well, great. You can click on this and it gets stored in a cookie and those stories just go away to you. And that's as much filtering as the site supports. Tags are mostly for filtering out stuff. AnakimLuke cookie yummy
You can do also RSS feeds. So if we picked one of these tags, like networking, you can get, and I'm not going to load it because, well, yeah, Firefox just downloads it now instead of showing it, which is unfortunate. But you can also say, like, networking, comma, justkarolis cool, thank you
hardware and if you are interested especially in two tags you can also do dot rss on that so anyways lots of nice little features there honestly the multi-tag thing especially with rss is i think i added that i don't remember i don't remember if it was something i had to overhaul completely or if i wrote it from scratch but i saw in the server logs that There are some people who will pick like the four programming languages they're interested in, the four operating systems, you know, like they'll go through this and they'll find the 10 or 20 tags that interest them. And then they'll put all of those in their feed reader and then their feed reader shows up and it hammers 20 tags at once. And also they get a bunch of duplicate stories that way. taimouraaa I was trying to guess how active the site is and i got to page no 4257. https://lobste.rs/page/4257/
So the value of the multi-tag thing is that it allows them to just list all the tags they want and get one feed for it. pushcx https://lobste.rs/about#queries
also means they don't hammer the shit out of the server with repetitive requests like that's a fairly cheap one but they're still enjoying there yeah tell mora so aside from that slash stats page if there's a question you want to answer it's on the about page there's this queries that it's just a paragraph in the middle of this but We can run queries against the prod database, like right now, live on stream, especially if you want to write them.

22:09taimouraaa whats the business with on brave. it does not run. i did not read. anything tldr
But we can kind of graph activity over time or sum things up. As long as we're not creating like a worst of, like who's the most flagged commenter on the site? Like I don't want to make loser boards. I said worst of leaderboards, right? I don't know what to say if you didn't want to read. The explanation on the error message is one or two sentences. And then it links to more. You don't read the one or two sentences? The gist of it is they do a bunch of bad behavior things as a consistent pattern over years where they keep coming up with things that abuse sites and claiming falsely that they're following standards. And some of it has felt very scammy. Like they said, oh, we're fundraising for these websites. You can donate to these websites. But then they kept the money for themselves. And the thing that really tipped me over into calling it a scam was they claimed in public that the money was being held in escrow, but then they later had to admit that there was no third party. And that's what escrow means is you have a third party involved who doesn't have a financial incentive to just keep the money. taimouraaa oh ok i read i just wanted to get a little more from your side
in the way that brave gave themselves that financial incentive to just keep the money and then it sure looked like they were set up to just keep the money which looks you know i can almost believe that a company would design a terrible system but when you claim that it has the fix for the problem and you falsely claim that it has escrow when it doesn't that's okay you know what you're doing and you're lying about it and in the middle of the last time we rehashed that actually it was like the day that that ceo got shot in manhattan or the day after and i was on a backpack subreddit because i i like reading nerd communities and justkarolis lol geoguessers of backpacks
AnakimLuke backpack nerds LUL
In the surveillance video, the guy who shot that CEO was wearing a weird backpack, and the backpack nerds were like, is this the Model 1 from 2014 or the Model 2 from 2016? And they were going on about the buckles of that. I don't know. There's something about the way nerds really get into the details on these things that I enjoy reading, even when I don't care about backpacks at that level. I certainly don't recall things at that level about backpacks. And in there... Someone was like, oh yeah, Brave sells user data. And I was like, what is this? I've never seen that claim. And I looked that up and it was like, oh, actually, I don't see anything that supports the idea that they sell user data explicitly the way the person was saying, but they are, they have a whole nother scheme going where they scrape sites and they sell them for LLM training and they ignore robots.txt and they use, What is it? They use browser users as mules to get around blocks. pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/iopw1d/what…
Where was this? Do we have it in the history? Yeah, this is probably it. Yeah, this is it. So this is the comment where I explained what was going on. Yeah. The

26:09pushcx https://old.reddit.com/r/peakde…
AnakimLuke am browsing r/backpacks now
didn't mention it in here yeah so this is the the reddit thread right like so it's a bit tasteless because it's about a murder but then like the very top comment is someone who points out that the side grab handle color doesn't match, you know, it must be the V1 Ash, not the V2, not the V1, I don't know, Gazelle, but the V1 Ash. I'm making up names because I don't know backpacks. It's so... I don't know, there's just, what a magnificent nerd to set aside all of the context and all of the horror of a murder on a public street and be like, let's look at the handles on that guy's backpack.

27:20And so if you scroll down in there, you will see where I saw the user claim. And then this one here was very much like the fundraising scam so brave has written some very carefully lawyered claims that they respect robots.txt they don't actually claim they follow the spec they just claim they respect the spec which is like what a clever little dodge right like I'm not going to, you know, there's a law against taking groceries out of the store without paying it. taimouraaa all these companies use very technical language that can't be used in court against them
I respect the law. I'm not claiming I follow the law. I just respect the law, right?

28:23justkarolis its only a crime if u get caught ...
And yeah, and brave.

...35It's not with brave that I am, if it was one of these things, I would say, well, that's a weird messed up thing. And they made a mistake. Let's fix it and move on with our lives. But there's one of these things with brave, like every eight to 18 months, it just keeps happening. And the people in the thread, justkarolis did u see the thing w the honey extension stealing money from content creators?
who were advocating in favor of lifting the block to be able to use brave again were like, yeah, I mean, they keep doing this, but if you ignore what they did this year and what they, and you ignore what they did last year and you ignore what they did three years ago. So if you ignore the consistent pattern of abuse, they're totally fine. And I don't, I don't know how to say that. Yeah. The honey extension. I did see that one. It is that same kind of maybe you are technically legal, but what you are doing is very awful kind of thing. So for anybody who doesn't know, Honey was an extension that you could put in your browser that said that when you went to checkout on stores, it would apply coupon codes for you. And they were being dishonest about it because then they kind of turned around to stores and they said hey if you want to pay us protection money we won't apply the best coupons to your store so that your shoppers don't get all of the discounts you offer and then secondarily they said there is a whole thing where you know like when I link to books on this stream I keep pulling up bookshop.org because I have I don't think they even sell, I don't think they offer affiliate links. I want it to be really obvious that number one, I love independent booksellers because I'm a huge book nerd, but also I don't want people to assume that I'm giving Amazon affiliate links that I would get any kind of kickback from. And Honey would replace affiliate links with its own, which is not kosher. That one, it probably, it almost certainly violates the affiliate plan terms and conditions, and it may even be illegal depending on some FTC guidance. I don't know. the really shocking thing to me about honey is they got acquired by PayPal a couple of years ago. So. You know, usually you hear these kind of scammy extensions and scammy business practices, and there's some little company from, I don't know, the Maldives with three people. And when they get publicly outed for this stuff, they just kind of quietly close up shop and disappear. This one, there is an enormous company with really deep pockets to be worth suing. because it's owned by PayPal, and PayPal's not going anywhere. So I think we have definitely not heard the end of the Honey extension. I should probably disclose, since I'm mentioning PayPal, that I used to work for Stripe, which is a very direct competitor to Stripe, and I still have a pile of Stripe stock because they won't hurry up and go public already. So it's fair. I have a... I guess, yeah, I guess if PayPal blew up for something, it would be good for Stripe. So it's fair to say that I have a financial interest in Stripe still. So yeah, like think about that. Take that with a grain of salt. I am obviously like not trying to manipulate stocks. I'm just telling the story of weird shit that happens on the internet. But you could judge for yourself if, you know, am I being honest and upfront and disclosing things or am I a UChicago grad student? See how I tied that back?

33:03Oh boy.

...11Yeah, the other part of Brave was... This last paragraph was... I have actively not tried to pay attention to Brave. I don't want to know what it's doing. I don't want to spend my time thinking about the browser and responding to its latest just so misunderstood action where they accidentally did something that benefited them to the detriment of the web. The stuff I listed is just what went by in the chat room and then I was reading the most ridiculous nerdy thread possible about backpacks. And I ran into another thing that they pulled. AnakimLuke 😅
So I wonder what the comprehensive list of, you know, does brave browser, like, do they have a controversy section on their Wikipedia page that lists everything? Actually, I don't want to know. Like, I really, I want to stop spending time on them. Because I'm assuming there's like five incredible stories I've never even heard of before. And I don't want to learn about them. And it's just that they keep doing stuff to take advantage of sites like Lobsters. Is that a good answer to why I blocked the Brave browser? I hope that makes sense, that It's just the most bizarre thing. So speaking of being a good citizen on the internet and not a UChicago grad student or a brave browser developer, I care a lot that lobsters isn't used for brigading other sites and other projects. Because if we get 100,000 readers a day, it's more like 110, but I figured I would round down in the public number. And it's obviously much less on the weekends.

35:44If we dump 100,000 or 110,000... people into like a github bug issue where there is the text area saying hey are you outraged about something would you like to yell at somebody here is an opportunity yell at something about some you know outrageous that you feel justified being mean about and exactly the way i was mean earlier and i harp on that because I am maybe a little, I try as the moderator, be calm and even keeled about these things. And I think I do pretty well on it, but even I go on tilt sometimes. I'm only human.

36:40And I wrote up a big comment, what, two days ago, I guess. I bet if I reload this, it'll switch to, yep. Ticked past the time. writing up the idea of getting really good third party sources, because someone who's trying to write about the whole situation and all of its context, this rust in the kernel thing has been going on for like two years, it's been especially active the last couple of weeks. But if you dump into one angry lkml email from someone you have no idea what's going on because you do have to understand a bunch of not just the core technology that is really topical for lobsters but a ton of blow by blow that's happened in the mailing list and who are the people involved and what have they been writing and what kind of tone have they been writing with that one's real interesting on lkml

37:58I don't know. So I've been trying to figure out how we stay as a good knit neighbor while still discussing a lot of these really hard topics, some of which are very exciting. And I say exciting not to be dismissive, just a lot of this stuff is very, very important. And it matters that we get it right. And it's less This kind of thing of what programming language do we use in the kernel and what is our team's practice around interfaces between the two and whether maintainers have to know both. chamlis_ I remember liking the np.reddit.com convention to raise the barrier to brigading, one can perhaps dream of something similar adopted by more places
justkarolis have u had to deal with any lobsters users brigading?
That one is not like it's an interesting topic, but it doesn't come with as much moral baggage, not baggage, moral concerns as stuff like

39:04I'm trying to not be flippant about any of this. So let's just use the specific example. Last spring, summer. Yeah, actually just careless. So this example here that I wanted to give that I wrote up in the comment was a place where people have tried to use lobsters for brigading. And There was a user I banned during this Nix stuff who was both acting inside of Nix by, like, they had a whole RFC process for deciding how the project was going to run, and that user was participating in that process, but then also at the same time that user was creating other entities named Nix and NixOS and representing themselves as if they were official Nix projects and they were doing a whole bunch of other their general rhetoric was very trolly and abusive and like internet cranky and it pushed me into thinking they weren't acting in good faith especially the thing where they were the biggest part of it was that they were imitating the Nix project and acting like they were an official Nix project and they weren't And I banned them over that because they were trying to use lobsters for brigading the Nix project and getting their RFCs accepted and the other ones rejected. And I noted it in the guidelines that There isn't a clear-cut line between advocating for improvements in a field and talking about how should a project be run. I guess one place I'm trying to draw a line is are we directly linking into their spaces especially the ones that are most open to the public like a github issue and i keep coming back to that one because i would assume for lobsters readers who click through to github something like 90 of them are already logged into github right so they're going to see that tempting text area they're going to see the emoji reaction button everything is going to be inviting them to jump into a thing that they just got thrown into project, probably with no context, right? So if we link into, Nix uses GitHub issues for tracking their RFCs and things. If we linked into one, 90% of our users would be logged into GitHub and what, like 0.9% of them will know the history of the Nix governance stuff that's been happening that last six months. And so the gap between that is a lot of ignorant responses getting dumped into really contentious stuff. And that would be us being a shitty neighbor.

42:52So I am trying to figure out how to make sure that we stay a good neighbor but then also just as a practical matter we have to have some kind of rule that we can understand that's not just peter made a judgment call did he get good vibes off of this link or not Because I can do that, and I have been doing that, but all of those judgment calls are automatically contentious, especially when they're about moralizing issues. But then also, Peter makes mistakes. At least if we have a clear rule, we can say, well, we're going to bite the bullet, but we get the benefit of clarity. Submitters can predict whether their link is about to be removed. It can be, I closed the commit, but like it can be implemented by a regex instead of by me skimming things. Because I definitely do not have all of the background on Rust in Linux. I haven't been following that story. I don't have a dog in that fight. I definitely don't know anything about, well, I kind of, infamously and publicly bounced off of nix i wrote a whole blog post about how i couldn't learn my way around it i found the docs to be pretty bad and so when nix last summer was having a whole big fight around who should be allowed to contribute and who are the users and all this kind of stuff i don't know what's going on but i can see the behavior of what people are writing on lobsters, and some of that stuff, like pretending to be the NixOS project was pretty obviously bad faith maneuvering.

45:24That kind of rolls into the next thing I had to talk about, and folks can pop up with questions anytime. justkarolis gotta go finish my OS HW, but it was nice chatting! have a good day
And you know, Shamless, that no participating, someone responded with a, what if we linked to the archived snapshot of those things so that people were not logged in when they viewed them?

...56It sort of works. I don't have a great answer for that because, like, it's a very slight barrier. And I guess that can work on Reddit where everything is very, very surface level and there is an infinite flow of content where, you know, the Reddit user can just hit the back button and move on to the next thousand TikTok videos. lobsters doesn't move at that pace doesn't operate at that scale so it doesn't have all of the other stuff going on to distract someone away from you know if you take three characters off of this url you can start interfering in the thing that you all of a sudden are outraged about right it doesn't help that our technical users understand you know why that text area isn't enabled and can't read the URL and get what's going on there. The other side of this is, and I'm giving you such a long answer because I'm kind of like mentally writing my response to this comment that's hanging out in a tab on my personal browser. The other part of it is, is if we normalize linking archive.org and archive.is snapshots of things, the band code stops working. And I don't want to, like, then the band code would have to extend to include these sites. And then what are we doing here? I don't know. It just feels like opening a loophole and falling through it right it's not opening a loophole it's opening a hula hoop and maybe there's a title

48:12I'll take care of just careless good luck with your homework. wonder if that's reading system or open source. So this kind of. Are we brigading. firefox wrote some legal terms and understand they've updated we have seen a little confusion they've seen. big threads on Lobster's HN and Reddit if people pissed at them. pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/de2ab1/fire…
Which, does that feel like brigading? It's in the neighborhood. On that one, so, this user left a comment about how They have seen a lot of stories that feel very similar to this, where... And this user is a bit of a dick, and so he keeps writing really dismissive stuff where he's exaggerating what people write when he doesn't care about that. And if I had seen this before it got a bunch of good replies, I probably would have removed it for being unkind.

49:50And it may still.

50:09The answer on this one.

...15is not to be dismissive and scream. It is to say why don't you go right up if it happens every six months, why don't you write up the last five and explain what this pattern is and then it will be the top comment every time someone starts one of these. As opposed to. delete the things that I already feel like I know about well.

51:04Let's go back to pull requests and reviews there.

...16I really want to merge this little fix. I mean, I say little fix, but it's actually an incredibly finicky fix. chamlis_ musing on the archive stuff, it then feels somewhat like talking about someone behind their back
There was one... I just don't know what's going on with Tomcat. If they were... Hmm. Talking about them behind their back, I think. Yeah, I don't know. I think part of being on the web is you understand that the web is infinitely larger than you can look at. And so you have to accept that there will be communities, not just publicly readable communities like lobsters, but like private discords that will link to your stuff and discuss it. that you're working in public or performing in public or collaborating in public. I don't know.

52:30There is that risk of context collapse when something small and narrow intended for a narrow audience, especially that's like when a project writes mailing list message or a github issue about improving its process it is expected that the readers have years of experience with that project and know everything that's going on and its releases and all of that stuff so when we dump in with no context we definitely don't know how to read that stuff and it is not written for us or other ignorant users because you know not every link can be a 101 I don't know. So Shamless, you've been pretty insightful. chamlis_ but then is being public on the web not accepting that people can brigade you
Generally, if you could find a way to have all of the good stuff and none of the bad stuff, and just write that up in a sentence or two, that would be great. Thanks. You want to just knock that out on the stream here?

54:14pushcx https://bookshop.org/p/books/fa…
yeah i don't think so some of this gets into community norms where communities have very different norms and like famous people have very different norms you know if you are an a-list hollywood star oh there was a really good book recently what was her name was her name justine remember which is ironic given the title yeah so justine bateman was a a-list actor in the 80s i want to say she was on an enormously famous culturally relevant tv show such that she could not go to a restaurant without getting recognized and she wrote very candidly about what that actual experience was because of course it was incredibly disruptive to her life but also as an actor she wanted that in part like people don't go into acting especially at that level because they don't want attention But it changes basic social relationships in a incredible unbelievable alienating way and.

55:56One of the issues we have with the Internet like one of the good things is that everything is a click away isn't that convenient, one of the bad things is. A community that has 100,000 people reading might be one click away from your tweet that explains something a little poorly, or is written to be understood by a small audience of friends with lots of context, as opposed to 100,000 people who saw a spicy clickbaity headline around a moralizing issue. And After 100 years of Hollywood, we haven't figured out what those norms should be. We certainly haven't figured it out after just a couple of decades of the internet. So I don't think we should accept that people can brigade you. Like in the realistic, like, there's the two senses of Is it possible? Yes. Should it be acceptable? No. chamlis_ yeah, to be clear I'm not saying brigading is a good thing
You know, it's the difference between are we describing or are we moralizing? And I will moralize a little and say that brigading and outrage mobs are bad. And I think people should know the risk but not be subject to the abuse. Yeah, I didn't think you were. I'm just kind of... I'm beating the topic to death because... Frici yeah accepting that it might happen and accepting that it will happen and (thus letting it so) are vastly different things.
And I'm talking through the like is-ought distinction because I'm trying to figure out how we get all the good parts and none of the bad parts. Frici essentially.
And it's funny because sometimes, like if we get a link to a GitHub project, let me say the readme of a project. dumping 100,000 people in can be incredibly wonderful because all of a sudden they have 100,000 fans and 100,000 new users and they get people saying, oh, have you seen this thing and volunteering to write PRs and getting involved and it can be wonderful, right? It is part of the magic of the internet is you can find the people who are interested in your specific thing and get your art to a place where it can affect that many more people and be celebrated. And so I want the good without the bad, right? Freachy, that's a good way to put it, thank you.

58:47I'm pretty sure Wikipedia has, I love Wikipedia. Yeah, the is-ought problem. This is one of those places where philosophers kind of... To me. They kind of make a mountain out of a molehill. There is just a practical problem of describing things where... I am trying to describe what's happening separately from what should be happening. I guess that's what's happening there, Shamless. I don't think you are saying brigading should be happening. And that question of... accept is, are we accepting that there is a risk? Or are we accepting that the risk is acceptable? chamlis_ I think I'm seeing it as analogous to getting DDoSed, obviously you don't want it but that's just a risk you have to accept with the internet such as it is
See, I said it badly. Are we accepting that the risk exists? Or we are accepting the morality of the practice? That's the distinction I'm trying to make. Yeah. espartapalma g-morning...
It's hard to nitpick these things.

59:58Yeah, that's true. Oh, hey, Aspire Plumber, been a second. So when we say it's a risk that we have to accept, I'm looking at it from the position of moderating lobsters where in your analogy, lobsters is the DDoS tool or is the botnet. And I don't want to see it abused that way. And I have a moral responsibility to these random projects that we will be a good network neighbor and not dump 100,000 outraged people into their projects.

01:00:53So those couple of comments I left were about chamlis_ right, I think I'm considering the internet as a whole where will always be people who want to brigade, rather than how someone who wants to discourage brigading should approach it
How do we get a practical rule for the site that we can explain and enforce that is reasonably well aligned with our responsibility that doesn't totally throw the baby out with the bathwater? Because if I blocked all links to github.com, that would be a disastrous waste.

01:01:32Yeah. And I think your perspective is a very important one because if I were to get lost into, well, obviously you should just never brigade, then I could forget the reality that, yeah, but it's still going to be a risk. Yeah, but there are still other places that do it. And we have to understand the world we're operating in.

01:02:11And I guess part of it is we have seen sites like 4chan for 10 or 15 years where they actually celebrate brigading and they make a game out of abusing people And that kind of horror show is the worst of the internet. And I would never want to run something like that. Like, what is it? Is it 8chan or is it Wizardchan that has been, that has had three or four shooters who have like gone and shot up a public place or gone and shot up their high school who were radicalized on the site and like, hosted manifestos and tried to live stream to the site just before they got, like as they were beginning their violent rampage, like that's a whole nother level of abuse above brigading if you are inspiring terrorist attacks. But if you take all the brakes off, that's what it can look like.

01:03:45Frici I generally take it as a "pick your battles", will sites that bridage always be there? naturally. does our site need to concede to it and just go "oh brigading happens let it happen?" or "work on the netiquette to help the drive against brigading?"
I got to put this, hold on, let me stick this in topics.

...54I'm putting this thing. I don't think I've remembered to update schedule in the GitHub issue templates.

01:04:10Frici "our" being any site/place you have "driving force" power on.
chamlis_ so, and this is probably obvious, given most lobsters users aren't registered, any moderation to address brigading must take place at story, rather than comment or account, level
Yeah, Fricci, I think you and I are on the same page there that

...20Yeah. Well, and there's also, even if you aren't the driving force, can you improve the public understanding that it's not acceptable? And you can do that by any site you remember on, whether or not you have official power.

...52That's an interesting distinction, Shamless. You know, I've thought it, but I don't know that I've put it as concisely. But yes, I do... I am a lot more concerned by story links than links in comments. And we have not tried to extend, like, the domain ban code or the deleted link. So you can't resubmit links that a mod has deleted. That might be time-based, but let's just say generally that you can't do that. But you can link to them in comments. And I don't think there's even a warning about it. But that's so much less of an issue than story links. Especially because there are a whole bunch of sites that scrape lobsters, and there are the feeds, and there's the Mastodon bot, there used to be the Twitter bot. There should be a blue sky bot if anybody wants to work on that. And those are the ones that really concern me because especially you go in with the least amount of context, right? There is the title and that's it. And sometimes those titles are pretty clickbaity or they are just wrong. Like we have had misleading titles before.

01:06:35Thank you.

01:07:20my life i'm unemployed everything's free time right

01:08:31Where are we? It's Thursday. So maybe just on the next Monday stream.

01:09:00Because there's still that open question.

...19chamlis_ random idea: "fade up" the visibility of a story over a period of time so the brigading traffic isn't all at once and there's time to moderate it away
Really hard to set expectations with pseudonymous volunteers. So let's go look at those issue templates. Fade up the visibility of a story over time so creating traffic isn't all at once and there's time to moderate. That's, hmm. chamlis_ yeah, based on some hash of ip and account
Like show it to 5%, 10%. There is sort of the inverse problem though where, yeah, I follow. where we have to have critical mass of people look at a story to start getting comments so on the home page like there is right now a story that's two hours old and has zero comments and there are a couple more that are you know two hours no comments two hours no comments three hours no comments and that's it's not so unusual but then there are also other stories that are and you know the same ish amount of time Where a conversation has started six hours old 23 hours a reasonable conversation has started 14 hours a big conversation has started. and If we. Another way to look at it is there are still stories that make the the front page. and don't prompt a conversation so I think it is sort of nice that we can share good links with people but it is a little bit of a failure when we don't have any discussion because the thing that is special about a community is it creates these discussions and things come out of that then that can't be produced by an individual right it is If I can be pardoned for using 90s business jargon, there is a synergy to an online community and an online discussion where you get things that are more than the sum of its parts. And that is wonderful and it is why I find running a community to be so incredibly rewarding. So like, it's not a big deal if one link is like this, but if we start fading up the visibility of a story, We're going to have more stories that kind of fizzle and don't start discussions.

01:12:10If we were just a link blog and just about let's find the best app, you know, the absolute best 15, 20 links of the day, lobsters would look very different. But it's the hosting novel conversations that's the real value.

...49I have no idea what this is about. Some kind of CSS feature I haven't heard of.

01:13:04chamlis_ would you consider reprimanding a user for following lobsters links and brigading? then maybe you could "fade up" only for unregistered users?
so i have tried i have said things like i am not the police officer for the entire web but at the same time yeah i would feel responsible if i thought someone one of our users who i like identified and knew had the same identity on both sites which is hard sometimes If they went there and were a dick in the comments, I would feel responsible for that and I would consider reprimanding them. There is a bunch of steps in the middle where even if they have the exact same username, maybe they're not the same person, right? chamlis_ right
Or even if we have a story and I know they're the same person, did they get there from lobsters versus mastodon versus email versus some private discord and then sometimes it's like they're they post an angry comment on lobsters and then you know one thing that happens with story merges is sometimes i merge links that don't look like a direct response, but I can see that the submitter of the link was active in the prior discussion and sometimes even linked the other one. And then they were like, oh, no, this deserves a top level story. Either it is more information or it is let's have a thread where I'm right about this argument.

01:14:46So I do judge those intents and contexts, but Yeah, I don't know. Maybe only fade up for unregistered users. That's really interesting. Hmm. So what would fade up look like? Is the value of the fade up

01:15:32chamlis_ I was thinking about a list of referers for aggregation sites that places can use to block/prevent commenting, but then flipping that around so it's not the responsibility of sites to defend themselves
If the value of the fade up is giving a moderator time to make sure it's not brigading, well, maybe what we want to do is say that, I mean, we could just make it a gateway, right? Like thinking about a list of refers for aggregation sites that people can use to block commenting. Hmm. chamlis_ yeahhh
Yeah, there's also the JWZ approach. Do you know that one?

01:16:17chamlis_ is lobsters on that illustrious list for jwz?
I wonder if... Maybe the more general version of what you're suggesting is, what if the front page was a little more produced? What if the front page had a gatekeeping step where... I don't... I think we are beneath his notice.

...51You know, that... What was his name? Or their name? Talmora asked how popular, how busy are we, especially compared to HN. And if we are 1% or 0.1%, safe to say he probably doesn't know we exist. I would assume, eh, I don't need to actually guess at what his reaction would be.

01:17:23There is actually, it kind of wouldn't work on us.

...37so when stories are added to lobsters we do send a refer because we have authors who watch their analytics and watch their server logs and they see oh i got a couple of links from lobsters what's that and they click on it and when some random blog That developer is like, oh, my blog post is getting linked from this interesting community. Maybe I should join it. That's wonderful, right? That's been a source of a lot of wonderful users and it gives them the opportunity to participate in the conversation. But we don't leave it on indefinitely because we don't want marketers to get good analytics because marketers want to be able to say, oh, I started spamming this lobsters site and I got us a hundred thousand visitors to our latest company blog post. So I get a raise, right? I made my OKRs. And so with this, after a story is an hour old, we strip out the refer and we stop sending one entirely. So we show up in the logs so people know we exist. but they can't get enough signal to know that we're worth spamming. And similarly, there's another, where is it? UTM. Similarly, we strip out a bunch of URL parameters that are used for tracking sources. And especially if, We see that they are specifically trying to track lobsters. We tattle on this. I send these people love notes like, hey, I saw what you tried to do. Don't use us that way. And just as a rule of like ballpark, a quarter of the time, it is just an enthusiastic blog author who's curious. But then three quarters of the time, the person has like DevRel or marketing in their job title and they are on their way towards a ban. Which is a very rambly way of answering your question that JWZ could put us on that one. list, but the code wouldn't actually work because it wouldn't get the referrer saying it's coming from lobsters after the first hour. And given that he's famous, it's unlikely to get so many flags in the first hour that it can't make it to the homepage. And then after it's an hour old, you know, off to the races.

01:20:33chamlis_ I need to go soon, but another thought: is brigading always immoral? there are campaigns to sign a petition/poison survey responses that I would consider moral. if so, does that preclude any purely technical solution, at least in general
On the other hand, on the flip side of that, if somebody really doesn't want to be linked to them, we don't link to them. There have been a couple of domains where blog authors have said, hey, I don't want that kind of attention. And that's either to individual posts or to the entire blog. espartapalma deVault hare
and one example of it that was fairly complex was there's a programming language named hair like the rabbit hair and its author didn't want the site posted to social news aggregators like lobsters until i think he reached 1.0 or some kind of milestone i don't remember what the milestone is And so I banned that domain for the language because people were regularly trying to submit it. I think I removed one or two stories and then I was like, what am I doing? I'll just ban the domain. But then the ban message was really long and like, yeah, that was who the author was and that made it more complicated. And so like in the ban message, I had to explain this project is not banned. We are trying to be a good neighbor and respect the author's pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/hdj2q4/greg…
wishes by not linking to them before they want it so if jwz said i don't ever want lobsters to link to me i would just go ahead and block his domain like that is part of being a good neighbor in the same same way that just generally don't brigade people is yeah shameless you're hitting a bunch of topics that I got into in this comment here. Like, so for the Knicks, to put it charitably, some of the people who were involved were advocating and organizing for better governance. To put it uncharitably, they were trying to brigade our readers into the project to overwhelm it. Like, that's a big judgment call. And there is also even if people weren't trying to change the project's behavior either nobly or as evil brigading it is generally good for these kinds of things to get posted to lobster so that we can talk about issues of governance and how do we run a project and come to consensus you know all of the stuff that happens in addition to like what license should we have should our project collect telemetry by default is it opt-in or is it opt-out like those kinds of things are worth discussing and they're going to be discussed generally as here is an example of this pattern let's talk about it rather than someone has written a book about The practice of telemetry and software and they have collected 1000 examples right like just the structure of lobsters is we're going to see the individual examples more than we're going to see the big sweeping write ups. So. When I say I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Mostly that is, I want us to be able to talk around the practices and the issues raised. A small amount of that is, is attention from lobsters contributing positively? And I've tried to make sure that lobsters is unwelcome to trolls who want to i even linked it here yeah i linked to the dark triad page on wikipedia but there are people who enjoy leading outrage mobs and enjoy hurting others and feeling like i mean feeling like 4chan 8chan And so I don't really worry that we're going to have that. But when we say, ah, Lobsters has the most moral positions on everything, therefore our brigading is positive attention. Even if we were right about that, we are building the gun and like loading the gun and aiming it at targets. and just waiting for a troll to come in and say, ah, now you have built a tool that I can point at whoever I enjoy hurting.

01:25:51chamlis_ hmm, yeah
And I'm really leery of getting high on our own supply and feeling like we are more moral than other communities and that our behavior won't be taken as abuse because it absolutely can and the change can happen surprisingly quickly where like blue sky accounts and twitter accounts that get tens of thousands millions of followers have to learn that they interact differently, right? So if you have one of these microblogging accounts and you have a million followers, if you link positively to someone, they will still end up overwhelmed. And so large accounts have to be, they have to learn a new set of politeness norms because they can't control their readership in the way lobsters can. But that kind of thing just stays a risk. An enormous responsibility goes along with size. So these comments and all of this talking, I really appreciate your questions because I am thinking really hard about how we make sure that we are staying good and that structurally we are likely to stay a good neighbor and learn very quickly and respond appropriately if we start doing bad things. And ideally, you know, the amount of harm we cause will be zero and the amount of good we cause will be 100%. chamlis_ I need to head out now, thanks for indulging my thoughts. I'm confident I'll have a Grand Unified Theory of Moderation on your desk by Monday
But we gotta make a system that understands that we're gonna make mistakes in both directions.

01:27:51Thank you for talking through this with me. I really appreciate it. Great. Yeah. And if that grand unified theory could fit into a tweet, because that's where it's going to show up, right? So just knock that one out. You know, if you could solve the problem of evil, you know, you might as well sweep in all of human morality and social interaction, right? Just chamlis_ haha
I'm sure you'll, you'll have that. Thanks very much.

01:28:35Anyway, one of my biggest things is, mjiig But you think working gravity in will take you a bit longer? </terrible physics joke>
Because it is so hard to make absolutes to even understand these problems, what I look for instead is. Can we do something that is good. and has a feedback loop. Because if we have a feedback loop and we are learning from our experiences. it is okay to start out at pretty good and get better, then strive for perfection and never ship. You know, in most of these cases, because the harms that we cause tend to be pretty low. I'm not worried that Lobsters is going to push people into suicide, destroy projects. That second one is actually, like, that's a real risk we have. The really super bad stuff is unlikely. And so... Maybe instead of saying, it is okay to start from imperfect as long as the risks of harm are very low. I am not a move quick and break things guy. I think that's an incredibly irresponsible kind of thing to say. And it is okay to start out least bad, and then work on the good. Just find that feedback loop. How do we learn from our experiences? How do we reflect on them? How do we make sure our errors are getting smaller and less harmful?

01:30:20Actually, I think that's a great joke. I think I mentioned it on stream, didn't I? Oh, no, I didn't. pushcx https://bookshop.org/p/books/th…
So as long as we occasionally are talking about Peter's favorite books.

...39I just repurchased this book that's been out of print for like 20 years. I think I read it from my college library and. I really like it because it's a series of puzzles. for building up your intuition about physics. It's less about, can you do the calculus and understand the limit and integrate correctly and all this kind of, you know, can you plug and chug the formula and more? Can you look at a problem and kind of eyeball and be like, ah, that's about two tons. And, you know, if the answer comes back and is like one and a half tons or four tons, you're like, ah, it was in the neighborhood. But if the answer comes back 200 tons or 200 volts, you know immediately that you were very wrong. I've been flipping through it the last couple of days and starting to work my way through it again for the first time in 20 years. And I was very surprised to see that ended with like a rant about politics and then a couple of angry letters that the author has written to their congressman about copyright infringement. I think it was from a. I think it was self published like i've looked at the one or two other books from this press. And they all look self-published or very lightly edited. I don't know. I wonder what it would take to bring this back into print, maybe without the political rants. It was a very fun book. Let's throw this... Did I put the... I didn't put the...

01:32:41Where's the... Great, grab that link, throw it in here. Try and make the scratch useful.

...57You know, MJig, if you work in a steep gravity well, it'll take you a lot longer. Huh? The other actually has a book on relativity as well, I think the title might even be thinking relativity I haven't even seen that one I wonder what the political rant in the back of that one is.

01:33:32issues let's look at the issues.

...52Yeah, this is really out of date. You know what? It's been long enough and GitHub has started to allow you to like make issue types and other templates that I'm going to do the unthinkable for a programmer and read the docs first.

01:34:19Let's see if we can figure out where the dock even is.

...46Just putting that silly statement in the title options. So let's read this introduction.

01:35:02Oh, the stream is about to get an upgrade. One moment, one moment. Frici sailsShiny cat
The boss is present. It is now a cat stream. Actually, I already got the overhead letter.

...47Yeah, this is the new thing that I'm unfamiliar with. So this is Raz, and he is in charge.

01:36:11This is actually a really nice feature, especially for... projects that have really complicated workflows or need to collect detailed info from people. That's nice.

...37Okay. I think this might be more complicated than I want because I don't want to force people to like, what version of lobsters did you see? But. What is a community health file? OK, we have those. I thought there was. creating a single. So I think this is, yeah, this is the old one that we use. This is the legacy.

01:37:24Yeah, this is not even the thing that you see now on ours. So ours, like if I click new issue, I see that text, right? Yeah, this is the new thing. Does this get us something?

...51No, so then that thing doesn't even appear. All right, so we have to use the new template.

01:38:07In which case, let's throw away the old one because it's wrong and it's not used. If I click open a pull request, do I see the other template? I've got to have, let's say, I think there's a branch. I don't actually want to click create pull request because it'll actually be a pull request. I just want to see All right, I will reread this doc. Yeah, I think that other one... Nope. Goodbye, sir. Hey, good boy. He wants to sleep on my hand on the desk.

01:39:13Now see, this is what we have, and it's getting ignored. Yeah.

...47i think this will get used so i'm gonna all right so i have to figure out this new issue template Frici And thus the stream is once again forlorn of the kitten overlord. PoroSad
thing and then write up a message and then use it in both places I really don't want to make a schema what is this can I just have a text area settings issues yeah so for a long time that spot was his favorite place to hang out in my office and then something in that routine changed and he decided he preferred to hang out on the side of the desk where i could bump him in the butt with the mouse and then he gets offended that he's getting bumped in the butt and i appreciate that he likes being close but he sets himself up to get annoyed

01:41:05I can actually hear him crunching kibble in the other room. I'm assuming it's quiet enough. The mic doesn't pick it up, but he's having himself a little snack, so maybe he'll come back after. Frici One of mine tends to get between keyboard and monitors... which isn't too bad until she decides that I don't need monitor space i'm getting a whole ass of cat instead.
All right, so I got to go to Settings. Really don't want to form. Yeah, he does. So right now between the keyboard and the monitor is my microphone and my little timer. So he can't sit there, but that is also one of his favorite places to be. And then try to, there's something about cats where they can lay down and double in size and weight. So he really likes doing that. And then he kind of like, stretches until his feet are on the keyboard and getting touched, and then he gets mad that his feet are getting touched.

01:42:15That's why I call him the supervisor and the boss, is because I put up with all this ridiculous nonsense.

...26So he's not just a baby, he's King Baby. Because he is in charge. Alright, so... Where's the, I'm going to pull this up. I'm going to yoink this off stream. Cause I don't remember if GitHub, like, I don't think they show you API keys and things, but just going to make sure there isn't anything super sensitive. So it's in the features under issues. You click set up templates, set up templates. Okay. Yeah. All right. So I clicked set up templates.

01:43:17How do I, okay.

...36Thank you.

01:44:06Frici oh it's fine, if I wanted an API key i'd look under my bed /s 🤦‍♂️
see where's the where's the text of what we just had all right

...44this.

01:45:31Save you. What am I trying to say? I don't want you to waste your time. Because we're really particular. About.

01:46:11Frici could always re-frame it to exposure?
Thank you.

...35Frici discussing them in a META thread will expose the discussion to the larger community than people currently online in the chat room etc
So can I fit in? I think I may have screwed this up. Reframe it to exposure. I'm sorry, I stopped reading chat for a second when I was writing.

...48Discussing them in a meta thread would expose it. Yeah, there's that too.

01:47:10I'm trying to wonder, like, I'm thinking about longevity. So what are my points here? Let's break it down. We are opinionated. I mean, you know, I would like to say this as thoughtful, considered, but like, let's say opinionated. We've been at this since 2012. Wait. All of a sudden i'm drawing a blank yes 2012 we started July 3 2012 that's our birthday. So like. Not to be mean that's the thing i'm trying to say like not dismissively but then also.

01:48:10Okay.

01:49:03this feels like a, you know, I'm writing this and it feels indefensible as like, there's that irritating things that happens at jobs sometimes where there's always that one guy in a meeting who's like, we already tried that. And then you say, right, but this is different. And he says, no, we already tried that. And the most irritating thing about that guy is He's right and you're wasting your time. It is so frustrating when he's right. So how do I want to say this? AnakimLuke !lurk buskyoDuck
That doesn't sound like that guy being a blanket dismissal, like the wet blanket dismissal.

01:50:00AnakimLuke DUCK
Ah, see you later, Anakin. AnakimLuke LUL
What's that emoji? AnakimLuke it's a strimer I watch
Buskyo duck. Frici That is quite an emote LUL
Okay. This is me being ignorant of Twitch culture. I have no idea what that means.

...18Right?

...25AnakimLuke also, lurk means the person is still around, just doing something in the background
I have no idea what it's supposed to be, even. It's like a guy... Is it a face?

...35It's sort of a face with a duck bill slapped on. Okay. I have like, I need you to picture me as a middle-aged guy tilting my head back so I can see it through my trifocals.

...53AnakimLuke she's doing a duck cosplay with pringles :D
Lurk was jargon at Stripe that meant sort of the opposite. It was a really confusing bit of jargon, but it meant that someone was joining a project or like contributing an opinion unsolicited on a project they didn't actually work on. AnakimLuke no that's not at all what it means here 😅
And so lurk meant they were joining as opposed to, I think of lurking as not joining. It was very confused. She's doing a duck cosplay with Pringles. We'll have to see if we can talk Raz into doing that. Maybe next time he decides to join as supervisor.

01:51:35All right. Yeah. No, I didn't take it as what it means. It means something that is reasonable. The strike one was... It was one of those bits of jargon that it is useful to have a word for the behavior, but I don't like the word they picked. All right.

...59Let's capitalize, make these easier to skim. I can't actually make this a markdown.

01:52:56Now I feel like I'm saying idea too many times.

01:53:31And then the other thing is.

...55You know, I don't think I need to say that you can bug me by DM and email if shit's on fire because people already do that and it happens. I feel like we actually have a pretty darn good hit rate on I see these things quickly if they're real crises.

01:54:52trying to shift from second person into first here and say, maybe I can write it in second. Well, I can't.

01:55:32Thank you.

01:56:09You know, I write stuff like this to keep it from taking over my life. It is not really hyperbole because if I had a magic wand, I would love to spend a full-time amount of time working on lobsters, which maybe says that instead of doing the database thing I'm doing, I should just start lobsters as a service and grind it out. I got such, I got such limited positive feedback. You know, there's a Jason Cohen, the guy who started WP engine and he went and interviewed, I think 40 or 50 WordPress users. So like the developers who hosted WordPress sites or maintain them or built them for people before he started his hosting company. And. I think universally, he was like, what if there was word of press hosting that was good? And they all said, shut up and take my money. And I interviewed maybe 20 people who wanted to start communities. And the closest thing I got to a universal sentiment was, wow, $5 a month is really expensive.

01:57:44I feel like Timebox says it enough.

01:58:00See, the thing is, this probably isn't going to be styling with Markdown as supported. Right. But not for the reader, because the reader is going to see this in a text area, I think. And then this link is going to be a pain in the ass to click.

01:59:35Frici communities are much more different than a blog or company website though and a substantial effort too.
Frici and I guess there is always the "do i wanna invest money from the start? what if i fail, for a community only me and my mom reads i think 5 bucks is quite crazy right now and mom doesn't even post! just upvotes me"
Yeah, to reiterate, that's going to be... I feel like people know that streams are public. All right. Yeah. Yeah, Freachy, that is an issue. I mean, it makes things worse for me. But, yeah.

02:00:08Do I just want to... Oh, that's multiple. Okay, wait. Oh, that was an unexpected UI. Man, GitHub. I thought it was throwing away my work there because I clicked on a different issue and it closed the issue I was working on. was going to be so mad if it threw that away it looks like it saved no because i said okay all right it did say save it god it scared me for a second there you saw me struggle to write that stuff so all right let's make sure that's going to show up now is that why do i have to propose changes i am the admin What? What a weird, I get it. So if it's going to live in a file in the .github directory. All right. Slightly strange workflow, but I get it. All right.

02:01:41So if I commit this, OK, so it's just a commit on the repo. But then what file got edited? Oh, now it's in an issue template bug or feature request. OK. So it's similar. All right, so if I go issues, what the heck was that? What am I previewing?

02:02:18What about this is a preview? Oh, I'm seeing, it's not saying that my change is a preview, it's showing me some kind of different UI. Okay, fine. And I guess this one's also new, but it doesn't tell me what's new about it beyond that it's not sorted the way that's useful. So if I create a template, what is the point of making a template if there is still Now it's a decision. God damn it.

02:03:16GitHub, I didn't want to have a decision. I don't want multiple types.

...28God, I swear.

...40All right, well, at least the text appears.

...58And let's go back here. So pull that, hit this, and then

02:04:12I'll put this same kind of text here.

...31It can just stay the same and be generic.

...49Just trying to set expectations for contributors. I wish things were such that I could just block off, I don't know, a half hour or an hour every morning to review stuff so that people got Swift reviews. I mean, I'm being serious. I would like everybody to get a response to their issue or PR in 10 minutes, but... I can't totally let lobsters take over my life. Moderation already tries to do that, and I'm slowly working on feature design for doing that better. All right. All right. Where am I? Two hours.

02:05:43That took me a minute.

...52right so if there's no there's nothing to do on pull requests speaking of reviewing issues this is the bug for that pull request and then everything else i think i've looked at but let's give the useful sort yeah

02:06:27all right so if there isn't anything waiting for a response in the issues in the code it is maybe a good time to do a bumper that this is oh i didn't turn on the i didn't turn on the footer haven't yet i wonder if in the OBS settings. I could actually wire that up so that when I start a stream, it runs a script, and then the script could do that thing.

02:07:13That would be nice.

...19That's a post stream kind of thing.

...42Frici likely can. either with a python/lua script that flies on start streaming and dies on stop streaming.
So anyways, the rest of that bumper was if anybody has any questions about the site or wants to run queries to investigate something in the prod database or is curious about the code base, we can talk about that. And then otherwise, I work on the code base. Yeah, I am sure that you can with OBS. I just have no idea where. And that's probably not super interesting to do on stream.

02:08:21So of course I'm doing it. So I found the tool scripts menu. Can I make a... So if I make a script, it's just a Lua script. Ooh, there's a countdown. I could have a countdown instead of doing my starts at the top of the hour. Hmm. All right.

...51so if i put in this nothing happened off screen when i hit edit all right someone's explained how to do it i mean you know worst case scenario could make a cron job that runs every minute on my stream and if it sees obs is live because there's a something that you can see in the process tree or you know i could else off it and see does it have an open file that it's writing to an mkv because if it is there we go this one This Doom story is incredible. It's a great hack. All right. So what am I doing? Where was I? already merging.

02:10:09All those reorganizations.

...24It's going to be every branch.

...34What the heck was the name of that branch?

...52I guess I didn't have a branch open. I put it in stash, didn't I? I don't know where i'm at i'm discombobulated this morning.

02:11:16So i'll stream i'm looking at the stash to make sure that it's actually what I think it's going to be.

...35And yes, the thing I want is actually in the stash. But I don't think I have the brainpower to do it right now.

...52No, I think rather than struggle through badly writing some complicated code, I'm just going to call this stream early. Frici I feel the discombolulated part today too, it's a weird thursday.
I figure if I usually aim for three hours and then run late half the time, that means every once in a while I'm entitled to a shorter stream as self-care. AnakimLuke thanks for the stirm!
So I'm going to call this one early unless folks have questions or stuff they want to talk about. AnakimLuke are you taknig raid suggestins?
And yeah, I didn't sleep super well. And then it's just been a busy week. AnakimLuke https://www.twitch.tv/finitesin… has a cute dooooggggg OhMyDog
it's i am trying to think about the code and the stuff i want to do for merge stories but i can't kick out all of the stuff i have to do and i am waiting to hear back on oh yeah i am absolutely taking great suggestions is there a especially a development streamer that you like or are you gonna start streaming there was somebody in here who said they would consider it if i tossed to them Let's see, is it... I think there's a slash raid command. AnakimLuke !raid
Finite singularity. A cute dog is pretty good. Is it anything software related? Okay, I am peeking at a stream off screen. Is this person making music? What do we know about them? AnakimLuke yep he does OBS plugin development
A marketplace connect. It says software and game development. All right. So Anna Kim, you promised that they're like good people. AnakimLuke they are
AnakimLuke :D :D
I'm not linking into somebody pretty spicy. All right. espartapalma it was me who was considering streaming again, and then disappear for 3 weeks because work
So all right. Well, that's a fun way to end the stream then. I think this will be my first raid. Good. If he's good people. That's exactly helpful. Thank you. Yeah. So my usual end of the stream is that I say, thanks for hanging out and talking through things with me. Obviously there was a lot of that this stream as we're talking about brigading and rules. Ah, S part. Yeah. Work is tough that way. They keep expecting you to do things. I mean, my boss would be great if he didn't keep telling me what to do all the time. But anyways, yeah, thank you for hanging out, everybody, and take care. And let's go raid that guy. I will hang out in the chat room there for five minutes, and we'll see how it goes. But if he's doing OBS plugin development, it could be pretty good. So let's go say hello to Finite Singularity. Ah, there we go. I get a little time down. Neat.

02:15:01Now I can click raid.

...09Now I don't see that it happened.

...20Okay.

...41Oh, and I actually can't say hello because I'm not verified. Too bad.