klingon78

My biggest problem is thinking instead of building.

I’ve had and still have some great ideas, and that’s all they amounted to thus far.

When I’ve started to build, I get stuck spending a lot of time to produce very little, because I try to implement a novel way to do something simple that no one would want while deploying it easily and handling requests quickly.

My greatest dream is that I write something eventually that actually works and that people would want to use.

My greatest fear is that either that no one would use it, because I don’t need it or understand the need for it, or that it would work, not scale, and I’d have leveraged everything and let everyone and myself down.

Also, execution bores me. It’s more fun ideating, thinking and analyzing, but I’d like to be responsible for creating things that are interesting and solve problems or make life better.

I’m unsure where the risk-averse creative fits into a startup CEO role.

Removing or anonymizing PII in a large system not already designed for PII removal or one you don’t have resources to manage can be painful.

Companies of all sizes can have a lot of PII and code that’s not GDPR compliant, and it’s non-trivial to fix that. When asked by a user to remove PII, the removal is sometimes incomplete at these companies. Even the process of incompletely the removing PII wastes time; the users requesting PII removal often didn’t even do business with the company, in my experience.

Companies of all sizes but often small companies hire out development of web apps that keep PII and may not have someone permanently on staff to maintain it to make the changes needed to allow users to remove their PII.

I’d go so far as to say that I’d intentionally not work with users if I knew they would be painful to work with, leaving me with nothing but a legal requirement to wipe their asses because they used my old site. I hope that EU didn’t intentionally do this to hurt small businesses and foster new startups within the EU to brunt the cost of this stupid, stupid law.

I’m a privacy advocate.

If it’s about releasing information on schedule that’s verifiably created with a datetime stamp and maybe also by user, then it’s not really about predictions, it’s more than that. It could be used for any info, and then verification is available for the who and when.

The thing though that would make this worthwhile would be if it were decentralized, because you want universal verification and independence of some third-party breaking if its like a contract. While they could act as a law office or official records office that keeps the contract, deed, or certificate on-file, I’d not keep the only copy of something important with a startup that could go out of business and has no requirement to keep my data or secure its future, so I’d hope there’s something for that.

The US has a similar privacy law in California they must support, and many companies have presence globally, so they are having to deal with this in the following ways, like many others.

GDPR has given a 50M EUR handslap to Google and similar to some other large companies[1] while seriously hurting smaller companies with existing custom web applications for whom they may not even have someone on staff to modify those to be GDPR-compliant.

Small businesses like others must determine what PII is, how to anonymize it, and how to remove it when users request their PII to be removed. PII could be in their server logs or other locations that are inaccessible to most employees of the business. Backups might be excluded from PII scrubbing, but so much is unclear.

Let’s also talk about what it doesn’t protect. PCI, not GDPR, attempts to provide protection for cardholder data. GDPR doesn’t protect against PII that was previously shared. Nor does it protect from data being stolen, unless the user had their data removed prior.

[1] https://dataprivacymanager.net/5-biggest-gdpr-fines-so-far-2...

What did you use for programming games?

I wrote games for the Apple ][ in basic and created some with The Arcade Machine, but my Apple Machine Language book was largely unread, due to my impatience.

Someone at the time that did have the patience was Jordan M., who wrote Karateka[1], which I thought was pronounced “kah-RAH-tic-a” but is “CARE-ah-TAKE-ah”[2], and please don’t ask me to change. The making of that game was one of the greatest things in the recent history of humanity, at least in my limited experience.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Karateka-Jordan-Mechner-ebook/...

[2] https://youtu.be/QDaFte42odA

I used to have the original version on a 3.5” floppy that I kept even when I could no longer play it.

I also got to play Beyond Dark Castle[1] at one point- also a great game.

(Tangential: I was in a user group that may have tended to share pirated software for pretty much every version of computer that Apple made. If I could go back today and give each of those developers and businesses what they were owed, even with inflation, I would want to. I don’t remember anyone being aware this was illegal, and it might not have been back then. It felt sneaky though, like taking a cookie when you weren’t supposed to. I didn’t understand copyright, not that ignorance is an excuse. These kids were not intending to be criminals by any means. I know one became a cop. Duplication helped spread those games that parents probably would not have bought and they helped the kids learn and care about slightly more technical aspects of the technology they were using, such as what a sector was on a floppy, and the physical noise and behavior of the drive when things were written or read from the disk in a certain way, and how that would sometimes relate to whether the duplicated game could be played.)

There was a later color remake version of the original[2] for the Mac. It’s strange that old B/W Mac OS is being used in the video; my Color Classic’s desktop was in color. I’m also unfamiliar with the ports of Dark Castle, but it looks like a color version of Beyond Dark Castle was made for the Amiga[3].

I eventually got Return to Dark Castle[4] for macOS many years later, which was a good bit of fun also.

[1] https://youtu.be/ISP9su7okHo

[2] https://youtu.be/ZVSm6pexOWA

[3] https://youtu.be/1ZfEbqhb_Mc

[4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/return-to-dark-castle/id410703...

The goal in football/soccer is a bit larger than in hockey.

If you’re going to bring that up, we could talk about the hows and whys of the NBA not allowing goaltending.

Have you ever noticed that one player just can’t jump up and sit in the goal for the whole of the game?

It’s rather small, so the game then would be about who could remove the man from the area above the basket.

Perhaps we could just make the goalie have to stay away from the crease in the NHL and wear something similar to that which everyone else wears? (Unfortunately, there are a number of good reasons things are the way they are[1].)

[1] https://hockeyanswered.com/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-goalie...

When and how do you transition from thinking/marketing/etc. to building?

And how do you handle situations where:

(1) you know you must ship, but it’s not good enough?

(2) you know you must think/market/etc., but you’re building?

Is this how Mickey Mouse is so freaking big IRL and has been around since the early 20th century?

Nevermind; that’s probably not the type of mouse model you were talking about.

I took a poll with a kid who said they thought an emoji email domain wasn’t smart. Up until that point, I’d been sold on it also.

No, like an XXL bedsheet, perhaps made of dark matter, maybe 1800 thread count.

It might not be as empty as it looks. Maybe it’s just got a really big dark sheet over it. Astronomers don’t consider the possibility of ginormous dark sheets in space.

Reading the title makes me think of “Who does number two work for?”[1] which in turn sums up my work in development; I yell at the data and push it into the toilet, while the guy in the other stall encourages me to do whatever it is he thinks that I’m trying to do.

[1] https://youtu.be/nmJKY59NX8o

And I know Wifi is electromagnetic radiation, so there must be some phonon interaction somehow.

CDs do emit music over higher frequencies stronger than vinyl. That is not a lie.

The lies about lies are lies.

Some people can’t hear it. I can. I can hear a TV when it’s on, and I can hear harmonics of Wifi, so when I say I know it’s true- I know it’s true.

See: Analog vs Digital[1].

I said there were differences. A lot of people putting words into my mouth.

I was actually alive and aware listening to pre-1980s vinyls, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, etc. unlike some of you. CDs added additional frequencies into the high range, which people thought sounded crisp and new, but it never had the warmth of cassettes and vinyl.

The waveform thing is true but I never said that it was the reason for the difference in warmth.

[1] https://innersense-inc.com/analog-versus-digital/

What I said was true. Whether it was digital or not can be a subtle difference.

I never said that vinyl is only analog or that that is the reason for the difference in sound between vinyl and other formats, because it’s not.

The “warmth” is cassettes and more so with better balance in vinyl is known. Digital didn’t kill music quality; it did affect waveforms, but that’s not the reason for vinyl sounding better to most.

Of course, there are many more reasons that music sounds better or worse.

Cassettes have good bass and midrange. Vinyl is great and more defined. CDs have too much treble and anything digital can’t really produce the same waveforms exactly.

Backups are a reliability tool, yes.

A backup on its own is of little worth if unused.

When a backup is used to re-enable something, then the amount of time disabled may be decreased. When it is, this is reliability- we keep things usable and in function, more than not.

Does “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device”[1] use the same concept as described?:

I don’t know if there’s a difference between this and the Alcubierre drive.

Perhaps the tic-tacs were prototypes, given the patent and claims made by others. They may not be FTL capable, though, at least not within Earth’s atmosphere[2].

If the technology were to exist, it would be seen as a serious weapon and threat to security as much as a tool for colonization and exploration, so why a patent would be filed and left as much is beyond me.

I don’t want to legitimize make-believe things, though, if that is what they are, which is tough to say with much certainty.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

[2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-...

MOVA stands for “multiple object versionless architecture”, which is something I’d imagine any experienced full-stack developer should be able to handle- if it were real.

I wonder about Cloudflare. It seems like the Windows Vista of its genre. It’s big, pretty, and possibly doomed to be replaced.

Tesla is fine. It may as well have been a publicity stunt for them. “For a limited time, you can tour the Tesla facility, but please don’t. (wink wink!)”

You don’t have to quit to travel the world.

I was sure this post would be about SPARQL; the web as a distributed DB is genius, but a new query language with tuples and specialized servers weren’t the answer I’d imagined.

I have a reliability and risk avoidance mindset, but I’ve had to stand back because my mental gas tank for trying to keep things going is near empty.

I’ve really struggled working with others that either are both ignorant and apathetic about the business’s ability to deal with risk or believe that it’s their job to keep putting duct tape over the duct tape that breaks multiple times a day while users struggle.

I like seeing these comments reminding others to a wear seat belt or have backups for their backups, but I don’t know whether I should care more about reliability. I work in an environment that’s a constant figurative fire.

I also like to spend time with my family. I know it’s just a job, and it would be even if I were the only one responsible for it; that doesn’t negate the importance of reliability, but there is a balance.

If you are dedicated to reliability, don’t let this deter you. Some have a full gas tank, which is great.

Not so fast. I’ve not yet seen a broken bridge with two cars suspended by chains.

Not on purpose at least.

In early evolution of Drive when I was using Google for backups with their client, which was called something else that I’ve forgotten, one day when I tried to delete or overwrite something, it corrupted all of the data and it was lost. I was glad I had a different backup, and I’ve been spoiled since then by Drive because it’s not failed in past years.

Keeping another backup offline is critical.

99.99% of the people buying cryptocurrencies today are driven by greed instead of innovation.

Greed or fear. More fear than greed at this point.

In Microsoft’s defense, most organizations have security vulnerabilities in their code that all may or may not be aware of.

Just because Microsoft has software powering very important things globally doesn’t exclude them.

This is great. Another thing is that sometimes leaving things as-is can be better than making changes.

The problem you might be avoiding is change.

Things that are bad should probably be fixed, though.