bjornstar

List 5 famous goblins with proper names, for each provide a quote either from them or about them.

Half the time they say Jareth from Labyrinth, The Great Goblin from The Hobbit, or the Green Goblin from Spiderman. Sometimes they answer Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter.

They also confabulate goblins out of thin air and create made up quotes. When pressed for links to support their answers they admit they made them up.

I'm happy when they include goblins from Magic the Gathering, World of Warcraft, or Warhammer. Occasionally you'll get a good answer like Blix from Legend, but more often than not if it's a goblin you don't recognize, they made it up.

Recently I had an experience where the chatbot gave completely wrong subway instructions over and over again. It confidently told me that it was accurate and it was my "trusty companion". It had no idea what was wrong with the answers and kept prompting me to give it the correct answers.

This was in contrast to when I asked it who had access to my chat logs and would only tell me to read the privacy policy. When I asked it to for specifics in the privacy policy it refuses to give wrong answers:

"When it comes to company policies, especially related to privacy and data handling, it's crucial to provide accurate information because these topics are very sensitive and important. I want to ensure you have the most reliable information, and the best way to do that is to refer you directly to the official privacy statement."

It's clear what the priority is for these chatbots: get the public to train them and protect the corporations that run them.

Text of the tweet

We're hiring @ChromiumDev! The Chrome Extensions Developer Relations Engineer will work directly with developers, helping them adopt Manifest V3 and build extensions using web/browser API’s.

It looks like having an MIT license gives you a score of 70. It seems wrong that the most commonly used license on the platform is poor and it makes it hard to trust your scoring on anything else.

This used to be true, but in 2008 direct flights between China & Taiwan were established and today it's easy to holiday in Taiwan from China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Links

@dang can you fix the typo in the title? Assymetric => Asymmetric

create-react-app made their own security problems by bringing in the entire world, npm audit just makes that clear.

npm itself having vulnerabilities is a more serious problem and it's not clear that they're taking it seriously.

My assumption is legibility, should be a nice cost savings when you don't have to read handwriting.

I was going to comment about this as well. We've been unable to ship packages from Japan to the US for the past 20 months. I heard that as of yesterday we are now able to ship again, but all custom forms & address labels must be printed rather than hand-written.

There's already the Redirect AMP to HTML extension, I use it for both Firefox & Chrome

- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-amp-to-ht...

While it doesn't modify the behavior of any sites, Intercept Redirect automatically skips most redirect services. It's a dead simple implementation that attempts to require the bare minimum permissions to do the job.

https://intercept-redirect.bjornstar.com

From the MIT license:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

It clearly requires attribution.

I've already switched to Firefox on Android and expect to stop using Chrome the moment they stop accepting updates to manifest v2 extensions.

It's like claiming that the weeds are not dangerous in your garden not that the guidebook got them wrong.

It's really disappointing to hear an important member of the javascript community not maintaining their library and then blaming npm when people rightfully complain about it.

This is like getting mad at the guidebook for showing which plants are weeds when your neighbors complain that your unmaintained garden is full of weeds.

If Dan says "npm audit is a stain on the entire npm ecosystem", maybe it's safe to say that Create React App is a stain on the entire react ecosystem. The best time to maintain it was every single month of its existence because that's how you maintain software.

Facebook has abandoned Create React App. Dan stated that he intentionally does not maintain the project. Rather than complain about npm audit, they should give Create React App over to the community who actually use it instead of keeping it shambling along as a zombie with their name on it.

And if Facebook doesn't want to give it up, the best thing we can do as a community is to move on to any of the other great tools available that are actually maintained.

It was added to the standard library: padStart

He just posted another demo where you kick your feet to accelerate a la The Flintstones -- https://twitter.com/GoingHandsfree/status/140136648492059033...

Pretty fun to watch!

There's a nice demo of using handsfree.js to drive a car in a racing game -- https://twitter.com/GoingHandsfree/status/140032233301379891...

Thanks for trying it out and leaving a review. It's available for most browsers at https://intercept-redirect.bjornstar.com

I wrote Intercept Redirect to skip these redirect services. It doesn't change the URLs that appear on sites but intercepts the requests and instantly redirects them to the intended URL. It also requests the are minimum of permissions and collects no data.

As counter anecdata, I've reported a concrete coatings company claiming to be inside of a post office. I've reported it several times over the course of several months and nothing has happened. See for yourself: https://goo.gl/maps/LvAZXpSJgURoUqYk8

And with the blackhole that is Google support, what's the point in feeding the beast? We're all better off using Open Street Map and not rewarding Google for their poor behavior.

Some choice quotes:

"Google does not sell user data and extension developers may not do this either."

"Prohibiting the use or transfer of user data for creditworthiness or any form of lending qualification and to data brokers or other information resellers."

"The item listing page will also display whether the developer has certified that their extension complies with this new policy."

Calling it certified is a bit misleading since Google is the one auditing, and they are not certifying anything.

Not looking forward to having my extensions updates being arbitrarily prevented from updating and not getting any clear answers from Google about what the actual problems are.

Don't call me Shirley

Are they still going to call it a "Store" when you can't buy anything on it?

I always thought it was weird that my free extensions were distributed by a store. Expect Google to launch a new service with the same functionality and then deprecate the Chrome Web Store.

I put in my favorite poorly conceived product name: chocolate stool

It warned me that it contained the words 'ho' and 'chola'. Not really the result I expected.

The server is in the process of being overwhelmed.

Here's the best tweet it generated for me: “Sex with very handsome and beautiful people is the best.”

Instead of coming on here and addressing the issue, he tweeted this instead:

Thanks for the tag. Looks like the author's core issue is (understandably) with the construction of the system itself. I'm not sure what I can do here other than listen and reiterate that we are trying to work to address these issues.

- https://twitter.com/DotProto/status/1264331488029376513

A month ago he said:

For context, we're currently planning to create a team that will respond to escalations with more meaningful information about a rejection.

- https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-exte...

But the situation only appears to be getting worse and no one at Google appears to care enough to do anything about it.

I have an extension that is once again in rejection form mail purgatory and it makes me want to take my extensions off of the Google Chrome Web Store as well.

Here's the text from the post:

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Since the introduction of the Chrome Web Store in 2011, it has become the largest catalog of browser extensions with over 200,000 available to all of our users. This has helped millions of users to customize their browsing experience on Chrome in ways we could have never imagined, from niche utilities to companies building businesses around the platform’s capabilities.

In response, our abuse systems and review teams have been hard at work ensuring that the Chrome Web Store is free from abuse, as many of our developers have noticed an increase in review times lately. However, the increase in adoption of the extension platform has also attracted spammers and fraudsters introducing low-quality and misleading extensions in an attempt to deceive and trick our users into installing them to make a quick profit. We want to ensure that the path of a user discovering an extension from the Chrome Web Store is clear and informative and not muddled with copycats, misleading functionalities or fake reviews and ratings. Therefore, in order to keep the quality of our inventory high and help users find what they want, we’re introducing some updates to our spam policy:

- Developers or their affiliates should not publish multiple extensions that provide duplicate experiences or functionality on the Chrome Web Store. Extensions should not have misleading, improperly formatted, non-descriptive, irrelevant, excessive, or inappropriate metadata, including but not limited to the extension’s description, developer name, title, icon, screenshots, and promotional images. Developers must provide a clear and well-written description. Unattributed or anonymous user testimonials in the app's description are also not allowed.

- Developers must not attempt to manipulate the placement of any extensions in the Chrome Web Store. This includes, but is not limited to, inflating product ratings, reviews, or install counts by illegitimate means, such as fraudulent or incentivized downloads, reviews and ratings.

- Extensions with a single purpose of installing or launching another app, theme, webpage, or extension are not allowed.

- Extensions that abuse, or are associated with the abuse of, notifications by sending spam, ads, promotions, phishing attempts, or unwanted messages that harm the user’s browsing experience are not allowed. Extensions that send messages on behalf of the user without giving the user the ability to confirm the content and intended recipients are also not allowed.

The new policy can be found in our updated Developer Program Policies. Developers must comply with this policy by August 27th 2020. After that date, extensions that violate the updated policy may be taken down and disabled. You can learn more about these changes and how they may apply to you in our Spam policy FAQ.

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As an extension author, I have been struggling a lot with the Chrome Web Store lately. The review times are measured in days and the rejection notices are designed to frustrate you. I have one extension that I have been unable to update for the past 2 months, they keep rejecting it for violating their "Spam and Placement in the Store" policies. The same extension is published on the Mozilla Add-On and Opera Add-On sites without a hitch.

With the Chrome Web Store in this dismal state and Manifest v3 on the horizon, I'm afraid I will have to stop distributing my extensions on the Chrome Web Store.

With the way the Chrome Web Store has been behaving recently, I'm also planning on moving away from publicly distributing my extensions on the Chrome Web Store.

I've been impressed with how quickly the Mozilla Add-On site approves extensions. I also like how it sends me an e-mail when my extension is approved and published. But the best part of the Mozilla Add-On site is that users can install old versions of your extension.

I've already dropped Safari support for my extensions. The fact that you have to pay the Apple developer tax to package your free web extension is bad enough, but now you need to use xcode which means you need to buy a Mac.

With the upcoming Manifest v3 changes, it's time to switch to using Firefox and stop enabling Google.

In Japan the Coronavirus takes the weekend off so we see new cases reduced by 75% on Mondays. It's too obvious that Japan is under-testing.

With Abe's masks getting recalled and hospitals refusing to take suspected Coronavirus patients there is a lot that is going wrong here.

Closing the schools very early on has had a huge positive impact, but there are still way too many people going to the office.