These examples feel a bit contrived, are there any other cases where random CSS values would be useful? I don't often reach for randomness when doing business apps.
The UI is very nicely built, but I found the actual music making experience very unintuitive. I really didn't know how to build my own thing from scratch. I loaded the Funky Beat preset (indeed very funky once I got it playing!) and noticed a few things
1. I found the play/pause indicator to be confusing. When I loaded it, the play buttons were all highlighted which I interpreted as an "activated" state. Instead they were all paused. I get now that it's a toggle, but my intuition wanted a dedicated "play" button and a dedicated "stop" or "pause" button, with visual indicators to indicate the current "playing" state of the node.
2. One kind of jarring experience I had was it seemed that the loop restarted any time I changed an instrument. In the Funky Beat present, I was changing the "popkick" sample on the Beats node and it made it seem like the beat was continuously breaking and then re-syncing. It would be much nicer if the playback timeline was immutable and the patch changed on the next available iteration.
I think having a few extra items in the default state would be useful to hint to users how to use the software. Even loading Funky Beat by default would be a benefit so it's more clear how multiple nodes can interact. The UI is very clean and well constructed, I feel like there's promise here.
Hey ericyd, thanks for your great feedback and checking out the app. Strudel Flow dev here, I agree with all of these items, especially the second item which is a big priority fix for v2.
This is true, but when good human developers introduce bugs, at least their code adheres to a thoughtful software design that matches expectations. My experience with AI code is its much less likely to meet that criteria.
Not quite the same thing but some non-negligable percentage of ads I see on Facebook are outright scams which purport to be selling musical instruments at a 'markdown'. First guitars supposedly from the Sam Ash bankruptcy sales linking to an obvious fake site and more lately 'free' giveaways of high end Gibson acoustic guitars. When I've reported them I got the feedback that it didn't violate community standards, but my insta account got perma-banned when I posted the original of a song on youtube from 1928 on a thread which started with a cover from 30 years ago. That was considered spam.
Smart scammers should know that peopel know if something is too good to be true ("free Gibson} etc), it is probabaly fake. But people keep clicking, for what it's worth.
This is a narrative I've heard many times, with very little evidence to back it up.
An alternative and more accurate view is that, as the world came online, people became exposed to the very low-effort scams, representative of criminal elements from around the world, which befuddled most due to their child-like naivety.
None of those confused individuals would fall for it but they require an explanation. Someone came up with a theory that it's actually a stroke of 4D genius and it stuck.
edit: ok, I bothered to look this up: Microsoft had a guy do a study on nigerian scams, the guys who wrote Freakonomics did a sequel referencing that study and drew absurb unfounded conclusions, which have been repeated over and over. Business as usual for the fig-leaf salesmen.
I had that reaction as well, but consider: clickbait is such because it takes more work (emotional or logical) to reject it than an ad which is merely not relevant to you. Thus, your (and my) recall of ads is probably biased towards clickbait, and we overestimate its prevalence.
In the last 6 months, I've had to buy a few things that 'normal people' tend to buy (a coffee machine, fuel, ...), for which we didn't already have trusted sellers, and so checked Google.
For fuel, Google results were 90% scams, for coffee machines closer to 75%
The scams are fairly elaborate: they clone some legitimate looking sites, then offer prices that are very competitive -- between 50% and 75% of market prices -- that put them on top of SEO. It's only by looking in details at contact information that there are some things that look off (one common thing is that they may encourage bank transfers since there's no buyer protection there, but it's not always the case).
A 75% market rate is not crazy "too good to be true" thing, it's in the realm of what a legitimate business can do, and with the prices of the items being in the 1000s, that means any hooked victim is a good catch.
A particular example was a website copying the one for a massive discount appliance store chain in the Netherlands.
They had a close domain name, even though the website looked different, so any Google search linked it towards the legitimate business.
You really have to apply a high level of scrutiny, or understand that Google is basically a scam registry.
Scammers can outbid real stores on the same products for the advertising space simply because they have much better margins. And google really doesn't care about whether it is a scammer that pays them or a legit business, they do zero due diligence on the targets of the advertising.
Parent says it's an outlandish claim that they can reliably tell whether ads are clickbait.
I believe that detecting whether an ad is clickbait is a similar problem -- not exactly the same, but it suffers from the same issues:
- it's not well defined at all.
- any heuristic is constantly gamed by bad actors
- it requires a deeper, contextual analysis of the content that is served
- content analysis requires a notion of what is reputable or reasonable
If I take an LLM's definition of "clickbait", I get "sensationalized, misleading, or exaggerated headlines"; so scams would be a subset of it (it is misleading content that you need to click through). They do not provide their definition though.
So you have Google products (both the Products search and the general search) that recommend scams with an incredible rate, where the stakes are much higher. Is it reasonable that they're able to solve the general problem? How can anyone verify such a claim, or trust it?
That usually means you tend to visit trash sites. Higher quality sites have higher quality ads. In fact, for the highest quality media, people actually PAY for ads. See things like Vogue September issue or technical shopping magazines, which earn value for being 90% ads. People used to buy local newspapers because of the ads as well.
Yes, as Fall/Winter clothing is sold starting around September, and fall/winter apparel are generally the more expensive than spring/summer clothes, and so more advertising dollars go into it.
In my (fortunately uncommon) experience, all ads served by Google are clickbait, or even blatant scam (like fake interviews of celebrities that explain how they earn lots of money without working, magical health enhancers, etc).
Not at all! It's great when a language (or anything) gets an active community that's working to identify and ameliorate its pain points.
My point is that these occasionally break out of their bubbles and become more "mainstream" than you might expect from the raw population-of-interest numbers. It's not all that uncommon (e.g. for a while there were more "how I cope with the difficulties that come from living off grid" stories out there than "how to live off grid" or even "why live off grid?") but I still find it noteworthy.
Could you elaborate on "subsidies don't scale"? In the US, farm subsidies are a huge chunk of our budget and, to the best of my understanding, help keep food prices low. I'm not informed enough to know if it's an inefficient solution though.
that is incorrect. 2023 US Payments to agriculture [1] were $10.972 billion. That is 0.04% of GDP or ~0.697% of the federal budget[2] for 2023. It spiked slightly in 2020, but has been a small portion of the budget for a long time.
I guess it's a matter of perspective, I know 0.7% isn't the biggest item in the budget but it's a fairly large line item to my mind. Either way I still wonder what the "does not scale" comment meant.
Edit: re-reading my comment, I regret my word choice, "a huge chunk" is obviously incorrect.
First of all, 11 billion is 0.17% of the federal budget. (Which is ~6 trillion). You were looking at a quarterly budget, not the annual one.
Secondly, that 0.17% that is spent on food security has dramatically better ROI than the 1.7% of it that is spent on, to pick a random line item... maintaining 5 (of 11) carrier strike groups[1].
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[1] For contrast, the entire rest of the world put together has exactly 2 carrier strike groups. Somehow, I'd have to prioritize people getting three meals a day over nearly anything else the government could be doing.
This reply is a little off the cuff but the "Indentured" is referring to the fact that the workers cannot just pick up and leave without consequences. They do not have transportation so would have to just walk home and are not holding the visas so hey could face consequences involving law enforcement.
Based on this response I have to assume you spend 100% of your time in your house and can't understand why diesel trucks would ever impact someone in another setting.
So I guess all the cars and trucks should be taken off the road to improve my safety right? How dare they pollute with their engines and break dust, that is harmful to my health! I should not have to wear a mask to bike safety in a city because vehicles emit dangerous emissions and pollution.
FYI the local garage truck is a diesel and I can hear it because my windows are old and crappy
Assuming you mean a bicycle, yes, you absolutely deserve safe segregated infrastructure to keep you away from conflict with vehicles. It's better for everyone and I think many cities are now catching onto that.
And you should also feel entitled to clean, breathable air while walking and cycling. Any local government that cares about the safety of residents would agree, I think.
No, ICE emissions and brake dust from heavy EVs is bad for my health and therefore should be banned for the safety of people without a giant machine that has air filters
"I should have to wear a mask to bike safely in a city because vehicles emit dangerous emissions and pollution" is the most sane libertarian take I've read this week.
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