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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 1st, 2024

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  • Why not simply say donation

    It’s about setting expectations. The wording is chosen because they believe that paying open source developers for their work should be the norm, not the exception. Calling it a donation would not do that justice. Their wording is saying “Here’s the software, we’ll trust you to pay us for it if it brings you value and you can afford it”. It’s an explicit expectation to pay, unless you have good reasons not to, which is also fine but should be the exception. Whereas a donation is very much optional and not the default expectation by nature.

    In the end it’s just a semantic difference, it’s just all about making expectations clear even if there is no enforcement around them.








  • The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they’ll get to play you more ads and cash out more.

    You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it’s just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn’t equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you’ll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you’re just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn’t really have an incentive to make it work like that, it’s just accidental.

    Here’s the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: https://youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI

    Edit: to be clear, I fully agree that YouTube will do anything to shove ads down our throats no matter how effective they actually are. I’m just saying that this example you’ve brought is not really that.








  • Not really. Timezones, at their core (so without DST or any other special rules), are just a constant offset that you can very easily translate back and forth between, that’s trivial as long as you remember to do it. Having lots of them doesn’t really make anything harder, as long as you can look them up somewhere. DST, leap seconds, etc., make shit complicated, because they bend, break, or overlap a single timeline to the point where suddenly you have points in time that happen twice, or that never happen, or where time runs faster or slower for a bit. That is incredibly hard to deal with consistently, much more so that just switching a simple offset you’re operating within.