> Oh good, another pop-up dialog no one will read that will be added to every site.
> no one
i go through every cookie pop up and manually reject all permissions. especially objecting to legitimate interest.
i actually enjoy it. i find it satisfying saying no to a massive list of companies. the number of people who read these things is definitely not 0.
my question to you is, why does compliance with regulation make you so … irritated? you don’t think it serves a purpose. but it does. there’s an incongruity there.
Why does it irritate me? Because I genuinely care about things like user privacy and I wish we had regulations which were actually well designed to achieve their goals. It seems to me that legislators think “what would I like to happen” and then stop there. They don’t seem to consider enforcement or other practical effects at all.
I’m honestly baffled that anyone could think that the cookie popups are a success. Like if we are going to mandate that everyone implement some new scheme, can we at least make it a good one? The lowest possible bar might be something like a standardized setting in browsers. Something actually good for user privacy might mean imposing some cost on companies that want to sell user information, so there are actually incentive's for companies to respect user privacy.
Maybe I am way off, but I think the group of people that "enjoy" going through cookie popups, like yourself, are a distinct minority. For most people, it's an annoyance.
I always have the feeling companies keep nagging me until I check the right boxes. Or that even if I explicitly say "no", then at some point they quietly change my settings to "yes" and I have no way of proving that wasn't what I said.
At least my irritation comes from the increasing amount of "consents" and "agreements" that are obviously not designed to be read, let alone understood. Not only cookie nags, but things like EULAs and ToS and privacy policies. And they are often not even legally valid.
It's all a performative sharade of "voluntary contracts", which are in practice just forced down people's throats due to power inbalances.
Yes, but how much can you blame this on regulation, where the regulatory intent is clear, and it's the industry that collectively chose to engage in malicious compliance?
If the regulation has unworkable enforcement system, the regulation is to blame. E.g. that while around 2% want to be tracked while the majority is tracked is clearly a catastrophic failure in the design of the regulation.
For the case of nags, something like a legally mandated respect of DNT would have solved the problem, at least on the UI level. Instead now it's a cat and mouse game with dark patterns obviously against the spirit of the law, where some Irish judge bends over backwards to find loopholes.
often seems to be liability protection for the service provider for the service provider/company.
“when we were made aware of these account we immediately removed them from the service for a breach of the ToS”. ring any bells from any news articles?
basically, “please don’t take us to court and sue us for everything users might do with our software. thanks.”
> privacy policies
consumer protection. don’t sell my phone number to direct marketing companies without me explicitly saying you can do so, or without you explicitly saying you will do so.
like, yeah, these are not perfect. and they are sometimes frustrating to deal with, for everyone on either side of the agreement. and figuring out someone has done something against one of these agreements is sometimes impossible.
but it is better than having nothing. don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
There are also things like mandatory arbitration, bans of reverse engineering, handover of copyrights and personal information etc etc hidden in the ToSs and EULAs and privacy policies (or in byzantine nagboxes). Often not even legally enforceable, but how many want to go to court with some megacorporation with the risk of having to pay huge legal fees?
The terms should be in law, not by whatever some lawyer army cooked up, whenever applicable and the enforcement should be done by public authorities.
And proposing legally unenforceable clauses in ToS and EULAs should be criminalized. They are essentially fraud.
> Hacker News, as usual, loves to pretend it has all the answers to life’s problems, and the issue is that nobody has listened to them.
eh, it’s not just HN.
like, there’s no single technical/material solution to something as complex and widespread as humanity’s apparent base need to “get more stuff”. which is the root cause for acting maliciously — it’s just “getting more stuff” in a way that’s harmful to others.
but that won’t stop people from claiming that they can come up with a technical solution. whether that’s politicians, tech bros, HN commentators or that guy down the pub on a thursday evening.
—
that being said, signing software is better than doing nothing… so, a better way of phrasing it from the GP would probably have been it is a partial mitigation for the problem in some cases.
There's nothing wrong with that. But once the interviewer tells you that the next number is the sum of the previous two, starting with 0 and 1, any programmer with a pulse should be good to go.
> We are no longer bound to stake/poorly written docs.
from what i gather, the training data often contains those same poorly written docs and often a lot of poorly written public code examples, so… YMMV with this statement as it is often fruit from the same tree.
(to me LLMs are just a different interface to the same data, with some additional issues thrown in, which is why i don’t care for them).
> I think we have a lot of old timers ramping up on their version of "I walked 10 miles to school uphill both ways". Not a good look. We old timers need to do better.
it’s a question of trust for me. with great power (new tools) comes great responsibility — and juniors ain’t always learned enough about being responsible yet.
i had a guy i was doing arma game dev with recently. he would use chatgpt and i would always warn him about not blindly trusting the output. he knew it, but i would remind him anyway. several of his early PRs had obvious issues that were just chatgpt not understanding the code at all. i’d point them out at review, he’d fix them and beat himself up for it (and i’d explain to him it’s fine don’t beat yourself up, remember next time blah blah).
he was honest about it. he and i were both aware he was very new to coding. he wanted to learn. he wanted to be a “coder”. he learned to mostly use chatgpt as an expensive interface for the arma3 docs site. that kind of person using the tools i have no problem with. he was honest and upfront about it, but also wanted to learn the craft.
conversely, i had a guy in a coffee shop recently claim to want to learn how to be a dev. but after an hour of talking with him it became increasingly clear he wanted me to write everything for him.
that kind of short sighted/short term gain dishonesty seems to be the new-age copy/pasting answers from SO. i do not trust coffee shop guy. i would not trust any PR from him until he demonstrates that he can be trusted (if we were working together, which we won’t be).
so, i get your point about doom and gloom naysaying. but there’s a reason for the naysaying from my perspective. and it comes down whether i can trust individuals to be honest about their work and how they got there and being willing to learn, or whether they just want to skip to end.
essentially, it’s the same copy/pasting directly from SO problem that came before (and we’re all guilty of).
> actually mastering those skills may be wasted time?
this question is, i’m pretty sure it is safe to assume, the absolute bane of every maths teacher’s existence.
if i don’t learn and master the fundamentals, i cannot learn and master more advanced concepts.
which means no fluid dynamics for me when i get to university because “what’s the point of learning algebra, i’m never gonna use it in real life” (i mean, i flunked fluid dynamics but it was because i was out drinking all the time).
i still remember how to calculate compound interest. do i need to know how to calculate compound interest today? no. did i need to learn and master it as an application of accumulation functions? absolutely.
just because i don’t need to apply something i learned to master before doesn’t mean i didn’t need to learn and master it in order to learn and master something else later.
mastery is a cumulative process in my experience. skipping out on it with early stuff makes it much harder to master later stuff.
> Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication?
> [than] having a function which calls out to lots of other functions and I'm jumping around the code base, back and forward.
i agree with longer functions and less jumping around, but there's also some nuance i find. I sometimes find converting a complicated multi-line condition into something like the below is much easier for me to read, so long as the function is named in a clear way and the function definition is just above the big function it gets called by (never in a different file!)
def is_something_valid(something, foo, bar):
return something > 0 and something != foo and something > bar
if is_something_valid(something, foo, bar):
it's like a convenience reading shortcut so i don't have to parse the logic in my head if i don't want to. also makes the condition nice and easy to test.
then again, can also do it the grug-brained way
gt_zero = something > 0
ne_foo something != foo
gt_bar something > bar
if gt_zero and ne_foo and gt_bar:
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