I would say that a sprint is fundamentally about delivering a valuable Increment. Something useful, some kind of meaningful progress. You can start to use past performance as a way to estimate what you'll be able to do in the future, but only with a stable team that has been estimating its own work for a while.
None of the things the author complains about are specified in Scrum. The Scrum guide states that the developers choose the work: "Through discussion with the Product Owner, the Developers select items from the Product Backlog to include in the current Sprint." I've also heard people complain about the meetings, but honestly people hate meetings generally--my current team doesn't do Scrum or any other agile system, and we still have several time-wasting meetings every week. In my experience, scrum reduces the meetings you need to have to a minimum, and each one is there for a reason. If you use each meeting for its reason, they are valuable, if not, then sure, they probably are a waste of time.
I know that scrum has often been weaponized by managers and tools, but scrum doesn't prescribe this. Scrum doesn't prescribe story points or velocity or burndown charts. Those things may suck at your company, but they're not Scrum's fault.
Personally I like Scrum. I like the focus of the sprint goal and I like being able to show what I did at the end of the sprint. My team, as I say, has no process, and I started implementing scrum just for myself and my projects, that I work on solo. It's not perfect or ideal but it's better than any other system I've seen.
This whole episode gives the lie to this concept of building the company for the good of humanity. The real players here care about humanity about as much as Elon Musk does. Altman has the power because he can make (or lead others to make) a thing that’s worth billions of dollars. All this nonprofit org chart craziness and good of humanity is horseshit and always was. Safety, justice, corporate governance, the law generally, effect on the environment, will always be second to AI’s capacity to generate money for those who make it.
Let me clarify, he won't pardon SBF before the 2024 elections, but afterwards he will, either in 2025 or 2029 on the last day of his term. And if Biden dies, then his VP will pardon SBF.
I would definitely take the $1000 bet, but I don't make bets with strangers who probably won't pay up.
Anytime tonsky's site gets posted here, I'm reminded by how awful it is, which is ironic given his UI/UX background. The site's lightmode is a blinding saturated yellow, and if you switch into darkmode, it's an even less readable "cute" flashlight js trick. I don't know why he thought this was a good idea. Thank god for Firefox reader mode.
I'm having a hard time reconciling "he knows what he is doing" with him making his site practically unusable without a reader mode, which by the way, not every browser supports (especially on mobile).
Don't even think of switching on the dark (night) mode with that attitude! :D
I really enjoyed the tongue in cheek design. I think every modern browser either allows you to turn on reader mode (especially on mobile) or just turn off CSS. This particular article works excellently even in w3m.
Fine, sure. Cute - turn on reader mode. Now the images that are supposed to be sitting over yellow background are dark gray images over a slightly less dark gray background.
The decision to design a serious (read: not-tongue-in-cheek) topic with these "quirky" tricks sucks, JMHO.
> Don't even think of switching on the dark (night) mode with that attitude! :D
:D
> I really enjoyed the tongue in cheek design. I think every modern browser either allows you to turn on reader mode (especially on mobile) or just turn off CSS. This particular article works excellently even in w3m.
Firefox Focus on mobile does not have Reader Mode.
It's deeply ironic that an article about dealing with text properly has images which are part of the article text and yet have no alt-text, rendering parts of the article unreadable in reader mode if the server is slow.
It is obviously a joke (and a good one, I dare say). The fact that people seem to take it seriously says something about the contemporary state of webdesign :)
2. I don't think it's a very good joke to post long-form content on your blog with the expectation that it's basically unreadable without a reader mode.
> The fact that people seem to take it seriously says something about the contemporary state of webdesign :)
Mind expanding and what it says exactly about contemporary web design?
Whether I take it seriously or not doesn't change the fact that it's still damn hard to read anything.
I can agree that most modern web design is bad. I can also agree that the web design on tonsky's site is bad, but OK, I acknowledge that it is intentionally bad; so bad that it's unreadable. I had myself a chuckle now, and next time I see a link to tonsky's site, I'll click on it, chuckle, and immediately leave.
Works like a normal website with JavaScript disabled. I didn't even know it did fancy junk until reading the comments here. NoScript saves the day again! I don't know how people can browse the web without it.
I never understood how people can browser the we WITH IT. Even 10 years ago. today more then ever basically every website needs JS to work properly. I basically never come across a page where I have the urge to disable JS. I have a large list of adblock lists active that also help getting rid of cookie banners and other shit.
I can not imagine manually approving JS for every site. And again doing the inverse and have noscript installed to deny one website a year does not seem to be worth it for me. In this case I can also just use a adblock rule to block that specific script or all .js files from the domain I guess. So I really no not need NoScript.
Many sites don't need JS at all, like the OP of this thread for example. For a lot of sites, disabling JS actually gives a better experience than leaving it enabled, again like the OP of this thread. It's a trade-off, but I find most uses of JS are so bad it's worth putting up with whitelisting. For example, I don't see cookie pop-ups, I don't see videos, disabling JS kills most of those stupid sticky headers that web designers love so much, and whatever too-clever crap the OP of this thread was doing is completely bypassed. The web is so, so much better with JS off by default.
For those sites that do need JS, NoScript's whitelist feature makes it quick & easy to fix. The first time I visit a new site, if it is obviously broken, then I whitelist the main domain. If that doesn't fix it, then I whitelist a couple likely-looking domains (often sites import JS from similar domains, or from common library domains). That's enough to get probably 90+% of websites working, while still leaving most garbage JS disabled. The remaining ~10% of websites that need a dozen domains whitelisted are probably not worth visiting anyway, so I just move on at that point. Or NoScript even lets you temp-whitelist everything for a given tab and just put up with the misery to get whatever I need from that one site. Since the whitelist persists forever, and I don't visit hundreds of different websites every day, after some time it becomes pretty rare that I need to whitelist more than one or two things per day.
You maintain an adblock blacklist, I maintain a NoScript whitelist. Not so different :)
By default the script for the page itself is whitelisted, it is just the third party scripts that are blocked. This works fairly often, but there are a few sites that you can also globally unblock because they provide value. One example is mathjax, used to format equations on many pages.
It is some time ago since I last used it, but I found that too many websites that I want to read require Javascript to even show you the main body of text, or a reasonable layout. Is that different now?
No. Just whitelist the main domain for sites that are obviously broken. Then try one or two likely subdomains if that's not enough. In the rare cases where it still wants more crap enabled, then it's usually not worth the effort, close tab and move on to something else. As you build up a whitelist over time, it becomes pretty rare that you need to interact with it more than a couple times per day. Yeah, it takes some effort, but it's worth it to nuke cookie banners and sticky headers and videos and all the other crap people do with JS.
I already have that routine with uBlock Origin. I don't think NoScript offers all of uBO's functionality, and I certainly won't do the same dance for two extensions, but I'll look into uBO's abilities to specifically block JS.
Makes sense! I use both, uBO just does its thing and I never interact with it. NoScript handles blocking & whitelisting javascript. It's totally possible uBO has a similar feature and I just don't know about it.
I've been drawing circles for over a minute now and no one has joined me yet, so I conclude those movements are random rather than made by intelligent beings. :)
I did the same for a while while I was reading. From another comment, the position only seems to update once a second, so it'll be hard for someone to notice your movements.
It's quite possibly the worst web page presentation I've come across in a long time - aside from the fact it looks like some bug has caused my OS to leave a random trail of mouse pointers all over the screen, some of them even move around, making me doubt my sanity when I'm quite sure I'm holding the mouse still.
And the less said about the colours the better. There's no way I was going to put up with that long enough to read all the text on it.
Good times. If you click on the sun switch the entire UI gets zeroed out and you get to use on:hover mouse shtick to read the UI through a fuzzy radius. Is Yoko Ono designing websites now?
> If you can't handle refreshing or merely clicking it again, that's you having a problem, not the site having a problem.
No, it's the site's problem. The contrast between the blinding radioactive yellow background and the font is eye straining and doesn't meet the WCAG standards for accessible text. And the dark mode is unusable. The joke would be funnier if there was a real dark mode or if the light mode was readable.
You said the joke made you leave. The normal color scheme is not part of the joke, and I'm sorry it hurts your eyes. I won't try to defend the eye hurting.
> doesn't meet the WCAG standards for accessible text.
Oh, which part of the standards? When I punch #000000 on #FDDB29 into contrast checkers I get good results.
The single quote isn't as good but all the rest has those colors.
I'm using the Firefox Accessibility Tools. But you're right, I mistook the accessibility warning for the quote/header text for the body text. #000 > #FDDB29 does pass unfortunately.
It's cute, and provides a hint of human connection that is otherwise absent on the web "hey, another human is reading this too!" which you probably know but something about seeing the pointer move makes it feel real.
Probably not the greatest during a hacker news hug of death, but if I read that article some other time and saw one of the moving pointers, I would think it was really cool.
Have you ever read with other people, like in school or a book club, or been somewhere that there were other people around? It's an interesting move by the author; the loneliness epidemic hasn't gone unnoticed.
Too bad the Linux and the Mac pointer look so similar. But when you give them different background colors, it becomes more obvious which platform dominates, like:
Nothing? They provide and run the marketplace that distributes your app anywhere in the world, and handles nearly frictionless payment. And they have created a marketplace where users feel safe downloading your app. As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.
> They provide and run the marketplace that distributes your app anywhere in the world
It's nice that they provide that service for those developers that want it. It's not nice that I don't have a choice to distribute my own app however I see fit.
See, I want to build an app, and people want to install it, but Apple is standing between us, dictating how we must and must not interact.
> As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.
Then you're free to not enable sideloading when it eventually inevitably materializes, and miss out on apps that aren't available on the app store. This decision is still yours to make. We've had this on Android and macOS since forever.
So you’re advocating freedom for you and coercion for others. You’re free to buy an Android, no one’s forcing you to do anything. Free not to buy Apple. But you won’t extend that to others, forcing them to bow to your demands or lose their freedom to conduct trade.
Where did you see coercion? MacOS offers both options. You and I both know how popular the Mac app store is among both users and developers. I'm sure there are people who use a Mac and would not install anything from outside of the app store out of principle. It's their right to do so.
They also write and maintain the primary frameworks by which one creates software on their devices, a set of tools that help developers create apps far better than any competing mobile operating system. These frameworks are available for all developers to use for free!
I propose Apple start charging some pennies for every million UIView calls.
What is the price of devices for then? It's a sane expectation that when you buy a device with a preinstalled OS, you pay for both the hardware and the R&D costs for the OS.
Apple sets prices and there’s no reason they need to charge customers for the R&D costs of supporting public APIs. In fact, if they charged developers per call, maybe customers could pay less. It used to be pretty standard to charge for better application development frameworks. Heck, people used to pay for compilers!
I remember how Microsoft wanted non-insignificant amounts of money for its official SDKs and Visual Studio (and I always pirated them).
But Apple always offered Xcode for free and, iirc, some Macs even came with an Xcode installation CD in the box. But major macOS updates were also paid back then. But the version that came with your computer out of the box was still free. So no, I feel like "we need the $99/year and the 30% to support the R&D cost of our APIs" is a mostly made-up excuse. It's not like Apple would operate at loss if they remove the $99 and 30% fees tomorrow.
What I'm saying is that Apple can fuck around and find out. 2 years ago there weren't protections for arbitrary digital market gatekeeping, now there is. If Apple wants European market access, being the vanguard for the World's Dumbest pricing model is a bad start.
Remember: Apple is considered a gatekeeper for app installation regardless of the cost they pay to maintain the platform. Charging per-call on a literally free API would be so profoundly stupid that it would force a second Digital Market Act.
Being the vanguard? Usage based pricing is not new, and framework makers have charged developers for access for a long time.
Making an API public, even if the necessary code runs entirely on-device, is not free. It incurs immense upfront and perpetual R&D costs. Apple has spent the last three releases trying to slowly fix privacy issues with API as basic as copy and paste.
The digital markets act is about facilitating competing entrants to “essential platform services.” Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims. A developer could use their own UI framework that draws straight to the window server itself! And maybe use some of that famous Android audio processing software!
> Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims.
Sorry, that's like saying the Apple Developer program fulfills the DMA qualifications because it's not "inconsistent with it's aims".
Apple is of course welcome to try any of these things; nothing stops them as a private business. They failed to defend the mandatory value of the App Store in Europe though, so I fail to see how they could defend an arbitrary charge on other API calls. Apple quite literally cannot call Europe's bluff - that's what my original upstream comment was about in the first place. You can talk confident smack about Apple's talent in the pissing contest, but none of that means anything when the capitalist leash gets tugged and the alternative is losing money.
There is not a single value Apple holds that they would not forgo for money.
I have had good experience with Scrum when all the participants had a common grounding in it, and worked together toward its goal of frequent delivery of valuable software. But I’ve also had bad experiences, in which the company claimed or pretended to do scrum but left out one or more key parts. The main thing you need, and that we don’t have at my current company, is someone to act as the product owner, the person who says what they want built. The key relationship is between Product (who wants a thing built) and Engineering (who build the thing). Without that, we have a lot of performative number-watching and busy-keeping.
Agree with all the advice to grow your savings. I would also add: be intentional about what kind of work you want to do. Seek out this work at your current employer. It's easy to go with the flow and end up doing vague or undifferentiated work, just because no one is looking out for your personal development. Then if you get laid off, or quit, your skills aren't as fresh. Think about your own skills and professional goals, and seek opportunities, at your current or prospective employer, that will help you achieve those goals.
_Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control_, I believe by Errol Morris. Four totally unrelated subjects, but Morris finds connections and echoes between them. Delightful, fascinating.
_When We Were Kings_, about the Rumble in the Jungle between Ali and Foreman in the 1970s, really awesome. Young Ali is so quick witted, warm, and charismatic.
And the recent doc about Apollo 11, for its 50th anniversary, was breathtaking.
