HN user

stuffbyspencer

47 karma

Hey, I'm Spencer, I make stuff :^)

Posts0
Comments29
View on HN
No posts found.

This isn't an issue. You either have the ability to pay the monthly fee (which would probably enable cheaper subscriptions, saving people money), or you can't afford it & you'll experience the same web experience you have now.

For people in lower economic areas, their monthly fee would be relative to the median income (hence the "integrated into your internet bill").

What I'm saying is we have a solution that is being suppressed. It would fix the internet for 80% of people, and the other 20% would experience no downside.

I hate that we still are talking about this. Ads suck, and there's already a better way to do things.

Micropayments are the answer. Everyone on the internet pays a small monthly fee, say $5/month (ideally this would just be integrated into your internet bill), and every piece of content you view streams tiny amounts of that fee to whatever content you are viewing. The actual amount sent is based on your monthly usage, and never goes over that $5/month cap. People who browse less send more.

A webextension tested this years ago & it was sweet. Businesses could be sustainable on there own, no ads, no data selling. If you have viewers, you have currency. But, it wasn't a seamless experience so it didn't take off.

Make no mistake: This is the best possible way to fund the open web, which is exactly why Google pretends it doesn't exist. If chrome had this feature built in & people never had to think about it, ads would drop to near 0 incredibly fast. Google says no.

We are doomed to have an enshittified web because the powers that be won't integrate sustainable funding mechanisms.

That's pretty funny, and is literally what I did with a CLI tool I made once. It was supposed to loop through something that was over 10,000 entries long. It finished in under a second.

I decided to add a small fraction of a second every X iterations and output some garbled data to the terminal. I got paid a nice little sum because of that. Sometimes, knowing how to make something look complicated is as important as doing something complicated.

I think the tool they used came from their capital reserves. IIRC they had about a billion dollars worth of BTC, and they have money from other sources as well. So they got liquidity to buy up all the sellers of UST on exchanges and stopped it from going to zero. If you have enough capital to soak up the supply, then you're good.

I'm not familiar with how Google does it with Android & Chromebooks, do you have a similar level of understanding there? Your explanation was very good, thank you for that information. I'm now wondering if Google is just small enough (with their OS operations) that they don't face these issues, or if they do something different.

Hot Take that no doubt will meet a lot of doubt: I would make a prediction that Window's next OS, is going to be semi-Linux based.

Imagine Windows doing to their OS the way they did with their browser, forking opensource code and rebranding it as their own. I could see them deciding to take some flavor of Linux (or maybe even something esoteric like Google's Fuchsia), and just slapping on their bloat & spyware.

I don't think this would damage Microsoft's marketshare as much as some people think. Sure, they no longer have "their own codebase", but I don't see the benefit in that. Hell, they could go lower & build off the actual Linux kernel and then build there own distro off of that. That way they can still enforce certain structures at a low level.

I would deeply enjoy this, although I would not use it (sticking with Linux). But imagine Microsoft embracing & advocating for AppImages/Flatpaks/Snap packages, Vulken, WINE/Steam Proton, etc. Imagine building for only 2 platforms to get your app running on (nearly) all devices. Imagine having Linux on the desktop get the same treatment it got with Linux on mobile.

Again, I understand this sounds like I'm predicting pigs will fly, or it'll rain cats & dogs, or the government will be efficient, but I'm serious, I can see this happening. Maybe not soon, but the next decade could be very interesting to see how this fabled "new" Microsoft moves & behaves.

I highly doubt Google would embrace something that kills there business without having a plan.

Off the top of my head I can think of 3 scenarios:

1. Google is investing in tech that allows them to index canvas-rendered items (putting them far ahead of all other search engines if they are the only ones with this tech)

2. Google will put out an "index.txt" guideline ushering in a new way to create SEO content for the internet (there are problems here but, like with anything, they can be addressed in time)

3. Google might ditch indexing altogether and look into alternative ranking methods (curation groups? popular in your social sphere? heavier reliance on ads?)

And then Charlie walks out and goes "Ooooh, uh oh, uh yeah, guys you know what... I think I know what they mean. Last week when everyone was talking about the virus, I had just watch this really cool cyber hacking movie on TV last night, so I kinda zoned out and didn't know what our next scheme was, so when I went home I paid someone on the darkweb for a virus just like in that movie-"

Dennis: "How the hell do you have money to pay people on the darkweb Charlie?"

Charlie: "KittenCoin"

Dennis: "Oh god dammit, KittenCoin? You did that huh? Alright, checks out. Anyways, so then what happened?"

Charlie: "Well then I didn't really know what we were doing still, so I just emailed the file the russian kid sent me to your email, but I totally messed up the address cause my fingers were all sticky with peanut butter at this point and-"

Dennis: "WHY WERE YOUR- You know what, not only do I not wanna know, but I'm also gonna take a stab at how this story ends. Charlie, are you telling me you made a scam cryptocurrency and then used the profits to pay some sketchy russian hacker for a ransomware virus which you then emailed to a random address with a subject line something along the lines of "FOR FRIEND, IMPORTANT FILE, FOR PLAN, GIVES MONEY", which obviously enticed the random receiver to open said email promptly starting a massive email worm that managed to spread its way into the government's oil pipelines?"

Charlie: "That's... Uh, yeah, yup, yup, that's pretty much spot on dude, I'm pretty sure."

I always felt like the hardest position to uphold is "Anti-Kink-Shaming", A) it's embarrassing, B) there's some... questionable kinks out there, C) the amount of adhoms you'll get in response is absurd

NSFW is the catch all phrase paving the way for censorship

Say what you will about the crypto & blockchain scene, but I can't fucking wait for us to move over to it more & start adopting more tamper-resistant decentralization standards... One can hope

I'm stupidly illiterate to online sarcasm without a /s involved, so if you're joking then my bad.

But, if you're not... You really don't know how to draw a rectangle? It's like the 4th icon in the top toolbar when you open a project. It's literally a square. With a tooltip that says "Shape Tools"... ._.

This comment needs to be higher. A strange amount of misinformation in the top comments, and phrasing that makes it sound like solo designers can now only make 3 projects (or the commenter who wrongly edited their comment suggesting that a "file" == a "frame").

This really just effects collaboration.

I love open & new hardware stuff like this. Currently using an Ergo Dox keyboard & I firmly believe it has saved me lots of wrist pain to date (plus I look hella cool typing without looking now, and my WPM has gone up rather nicely).

Excited to see who this fairs!

But there's nothing stopping me from stopping the DVD halfway through.

And who's to say I'm being drip-feed these movies on autoplay? What if Ghibli had their own service (please no, not another one lol). I would have to make the deliberate action of going to their platform, searching for the movie I want, and clicking play.

I don't see the lack of streaming as preserving value, the value should (and definetly does imo) come from the movie itself. The animation, the story, the colors, the music.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. I think that all streaming has done is allow for easier access to music, not "less meaningful" access.

Many family members of mine LOVE music and cherish it no matter if it's an old mixtape, a vinyl, or a Spotify playlist. My friends go to concerts of bands they discovered through youtube, I found a new love of many genres thanks to these services.

The people who don't value music (value as whatever it means for your definition), are just the people who never really got into music. If streaming was non-existent, these people wouldn't suddenly magically get a love of music, they just wouldn't listen to it as much.

1- EU can tell Facebook to remove posts WORLDWIDE due to a politician's hurt feelings. 2- Blizzard bans you for speaking your mind. 3- Apple removes apps that support your right to freedom.

...I'm waiting for when we cross the line into "fuck this, something needs to change" because, for me, that was 3 actions ago.

Haven't embrace, extend, extinguish always been used in a malicious way? I can't for the life of me figure out why any front-end framework would want to maliciously kill of javascript / web-design...

Also, I don't know if I'm just not understanding your full complaint properly, but personally I have not found your claims to be accurate, at least in my situation.

I use Vue and I feel like I've only gotten better with JS & general web-dev since. I occasionally startup smaller projects where I don't use any frameworks & I have not experienced any negative repercussions from my framework usage.

Steam Labs 7 years ago

I like the idea of having metacritic and more review-oriented info upfront near games. There's currently a few browser extensions that solve these issues. Valve would benefit from reaching out to these developers and implementing some of these features directly into the storefront. [ although, I get that it's a balance of keeping it feature-full + lightweight ]

Steam Labs 7 years ago

We're always trying new things with Steam, but often only share them with the world when they're ready to be made a part of the platform. Steam Labs allows us to share these ideas earlier

...Steam has just entered the fabled early access phase :O

lol, for real this seem neat. In regards to the current 3 experiments: MICRO-TRAILERS] this is a cool idea, I like when YouTube implemented a similar concept. My only hesitation with this, though, is it appears to just grab from a random point in the game trailer. The thing I don't like about some of the game's trailers I visit is it takes so long to show any real gameplay or, worse of all, shows no gameplay at all. A novel, yet to be fair tough to manage, alternative would be to allow users to submit recorded gameplay clips, and have the community vote on the best "representative" clips, and show those instead. My personally favorite is the 2x2 grid for curators.

INTERACTIVE RECOMMENDER] this is dope. I love this. It probably won't become my default way to discover, but I can easily see myself using this either once a week, or whenever I feel like spending some money. As a Linux user, I'd like the ability to filter by OS, but otherwise this is, again, dope.

AUTOMATIC SHOW] I like the base concept, but I can't see myself sitting through 30 minutes of its current iteration. The mockup video with the voiceover definitely is more appealing to me, I'm excited to see with how they progress with robotic voice over. Honestly, even if the robo-voice sounds stilted and odd, I think that could add to the charm. Don't try to act like a real human is behind the videos, embrace the concept of a robot tirelessly producing these daily [ or weekly / whatever ] videos. Sorta like a Toonami vibe. Tom was awesome! Also, it'd be nice to split the videos into separate entities. One video for overall games, one video showcasing strategy, etc. Having to skip around in a 30 minute video to find the parts I care about is needless. Either split them up & let me choose, or develop an easy-to-use playback controller that lets me auto-skip to the parts that I'd be interested in. Like scene-selection on DVDs.

lol, I think you need to re-read what I wrote and not have that "hate" implication going through your mind.

I'm not against BTC, I love blockchain & decentralization, I toy around with many cryptocurrencies myself. I'm not ragging on anything with my comment, just making an observation about events and attaching how I would feel if I were the creator / catalyst for said events :^)

I'm referring to the most recent one that I believe most are familiar with: when Bitcoin reached ATH of $20,000 and then plummeted to $4,000 [ I think that was the lowest... ]

I'm not against BTC, and I'm not saying it's dead, I'm just pointing out the obvious crash that recently happened :^)

Not at all. It's the desire to get rich quick without lifting a finger.

I disagree with that. Bitcoin did not start off with get-rich-quick schemes. It started off with a core bunch of people who wanted independent options to wealth. One of the major issues we're going through today [ in terms of tech-misinformation ] is how everyone assumes cryptocurrency & blockchain are just buzzwords that people only got interested in to make money & scam. Not true. Bitcoin started off with a completely different ideology among the early adopters before it got to where it is today. Don't look at the current trend of youtube """educators""" [ read: hype-beast / scammers ] and think that's what drives the development.

"wealth that is not dependent on others" is not a thing

That's actually a very good point! I wouldn't necessarily agree to your ending statement of whether it is / isn't a safer store for one's wealth, but I do agree that wealth needs dependencies. I guess I should have made my statement to be more along the lines of: "Independent wealth OPTIONS where users can control their dependencies."

I agree with this. It's sorta strange to me that the above poster is aware enough to mention that this "might be useful to someone", but then dogs on it.

If you don't have a need for it, perhaps consider it is not for you.

Someone created Bitcoin. It was a neat idea and people played with it. When the first pizza was bought with Bitcoin, I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh cool, real world use!"

Then Bitcoin bubbled. People panicked and jumped on board without researching, Bitcoin went up a bazillion %. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh wow... Lots of people want this!"

Then the bubble burst, price went down, people got mad, but, most importantly, Bitcoin inspired others. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh huh... This is really changing the world..."

Now, the problems are rearing their heads. Energy consumption, 51% attacks, scalability issues, etc. I wonder how the creator feels? "Oh dear..."

[ this is, of course, assuming the creator is still alive ]

It just boggles my mind that this weird internet currency exposed something so powerful in society: The intense desire for personal wealth that one truly owns.