As I've mentioned 100 times before, the powerusers of StackOverflow are completely detached from the core goals of the site and instead prefer to bicker amongst themselves in the Meta forum.

A poweruser named "M--" (profile: "Engineer by day, G*mer by night. Always in the process of learning something new.") says:

I raised an NAA [Not An Answer] flag on this answer Answer to: Blank space appearing at bottom of all webpages in Google Chrome on iOS [closed] which got declined.

Powerusers don't like having their flags declined because it goes on their permanent record, and god forbid one poweruser disagree with another.

The original question has now been blatted from existence, because just like /r/subredditdrama then whenever a post is linked into Meta then it's guaranteed to be brigaded into an unusable mess, even in cases like this where the question is perfectly valid and the complaint is about one single answer.

Now what is the answer that so annoyed this poweruser?:

THANK YOU! Disabling smooth scrolling took care of this problem on my iPhone 14 Pro on iOS 17.2.1.

Note that this answer includes the exact steps taken to solve the issue and the version on which it works. M-- just dislikes it because it starts with "THANK YOU!".

The rest of this Meta page totals over 5000 words of comments and arguments.

Some people just seem to love getting into involved debates of how should a particular turd be classified and how to correctly dispose of it, instead of, you know, just getting rid of it. Meanwhile dozens more are deposited around them... Someone spends ten seconds mashing the keyboard, and then bunch of other people take few man-hours figuring out what to do with it

comments one user with no self-awareness whatsoever.

Another user writes an essay explaining the workflow for handling answers and discussing the intricacies of:

You are the latest victim of a problem Stack Overflow has had for years; there are conflicting rules about how NAA and VLQ flags are supposed to work.

I'll let anyone else who wants to read through all of the answers and comments for pure

https://twitter.com/d_feldman/status/1779194821812367363

Pdf

https://t.co/V1fZUpOJcZ

!codecels

fun fact: SQLite is the most deployed and most used database. There are over one trillion (1e12) SQLite databases in active use.

It is maintained by three people. They don't allow outside contributions.

— v (@iavins) March 31, 2024

https://old.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1bt7agy/exploit_balatros_source_code_is_exposed_easy_to/?sort=controversial

hello~ idk if this has been discussed in the community yet, but there's a really easy exploit to cheat in balatro --- you can right-click the .exe file, go to "Open Archive", and modify the source code directly. i made a video so you can see how it works:

i'm bringing it up because if the editor is smart, there's no way to tell if a game has been modified or not --- you can, for example, increase the droprate of powerful jokers or legendaries and cheat in a speedrun category

i've sent a message in the speedrunning groomercord that they should probably modify the rules so that runners have to verify their game files on Steam before they submit a run. and more generally, i think ppl should be aware that this exists so they can call out suspect videos and runs

i almost didn't want to publicize this because the more well-known this gets, the easier it will be for ppl to cheat in speedruns and tournaments and stuff, but at the end of the day i think it's better if more ppl know and can establish rules to stop it when it matters

EU just ruins things because they can't build anything.

AI often isn't available because of obscure laws. chatGPT had been blocked for a month. Gemini is not available right now. A disaster.

Bureaucrats want to show that they exist.

To my knowledge they've never been "blocked". Google simply didn't release them in the EU for a while.

By delaying something introducing stupid regulations, they block it.

Personally I don't want to be drinking polluted water, eat unsanitary food, live in a place where all housing is owned by a handful of entities that engage in price-fixing, work 80 hours a week in an environment when response to mass worker suicides is to install suicide nets, have my privacy violated by private corporations (foreign or domestic) or have my insurance rates tripled by some opaque discriminatory AI, but you do you in whatever dystopian future you dream of.

You're just a low life europoor communist.

EU just wants to kill tech, because its ever changing nature means that they can't control it.

Quite the opposite, in EU there is no innovation because only big tech can comply with regulation.

EU is just hurting its own startups.

USA, India, China. They all have multibillion AI companies. EU doesn't because nobody wants to deal with unpredictable lawmakers

Edit: @dang came and mopped up, RIP _giorgio_

Edit 2: actually _giorgio_ didn't get banned

Australia’s censorship industrial complex:

“The problem that you’ve got here with this eSafety Commissioner, she’s an activist.

She will continue to expand her role to police the internet, to censor debate in a way that’s consistent with her own ideological views.

You have… pic.twitter.com/GZosiBHAcb

— Ana Mostarac (@anammostarac) April 20, 2024

^ Yeah this thing

Truely unsurprising.

{Its basically just a VNC connection to an android VM with Playwright automation scripts for the 5 services it does. Oh and that VM connection is also how you put in your logins to those services, probably scraping your password}

Huge news for anyone working in tech in the US.

Noncompetes are now banned: not just in California (like before), but nationwide. Very, very relevant for anyone at Amazon (which is the Big Tech that has enforced noncompetes even for low-level engineering positions). pic.twitter.com/H8F4UVxhwS

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) April 23, 2024

https://github.com/Vendicated/Vencord

Obviously, Vencord has stopped uploading their extension to addons.mozilla.org due to the long-waiting review, and they also decided not to go self-hosting. But I need to use that, therefore I decided to try build the addon.

Some packages are required to be installed in advance:

NodeJS and npmpnpm: npm install -g pnpmweb-ext: npm i -g web-ext

Here's what I've done:

Clone the repo with git clone > https://github.com/Vendicated/Vencord (let's call the directory of your clone $ROOT, which should be ./Vencord relative to your current directory.)cd $ROOT (i.e. cd ./Vencord)pnpm i && pnpm run buildWebcd $ROOT/distChange the id to vencord-firefox@sth in $ROOT/dist/firefox-unpacked/manifest.json. (Sorry for my terrible and thoughtless naming flavour 😓.) If you ever need to do it yourself, make sure your id is unique.Sign the addon with web-ext sign -s $ROOT/dist/firefox-unpacked --api-key=... --api-secret=.... The fields left empty can be acquired from here (you need to have a Mozilla account).In $ROOT/dist/web-ext-artifacts, the .xpi file is the extension.In Firefox, open about:addons and drag-and-drop the file to install.

You can download the vencord-sth.xpi file and simply do the 8th step above. The current version is 1.7.6.

Maybe.... maybe Mao was right about the influence of academics...

So apparently if someone knows / guesses the name of your S3 bucket - even if it's private (!) - they can just bankrupt you by sending infinite PUT requests and there is nothing you can do about it.
> requests get rejected
> but AWS still counts it as a write operation against… pic.twitter.com/oFavRPau2N

— Laura Wendel (@Lauramaywendel) April 29, 2024

I am probably not the first person to notice this but I don't think I've seen anyone else talk about it in these terms before.

As we all know, the internet sucks compared to 10 years ago. Specifically, search engines and easily accessible information sources are much less useful than they were in the past. As many have pointed out (and as I like to bring up whenever relevant) a lot of the blame lies with SEOshit, and another sizeable chunk of the blame lies with the groomercordification of communities.

In case you've missed all of my own and others' rants on the topic, what I mean by groomercordification is the currentyear+9 tendency of online communities to use groomercord instead of a forum or subreddit or wiki for everything from community organization (meh) to information archiving (very, very bad).

To use an example most of you incels should be able to relate to, take vidya gayme mods. A decade ago, developers of a mod would use either a legacy self-hosted forum, self-hosted wiki (usually in combination with a forum), or a dedicated subreddit to share general information with each other and with their users. Information such as installation instructions, community feature requests, compatibility details, current status of codecel efforts, details of codecel efforts (I believe the codecels call this "documentation"), et cetera.

In CY+9, it is increasingly common for vidya mods to have no web presence other than a splash page referring you to their groomercord. Want installation instructions? Refer to groomercord. Want to request a feature? Refer to groomercord. Want extremely basic FAQ-tier tech support? Refer to groomercord. Want to know some details about the code in order to diagnose compatibility problems with other mods? Refer to groomercord. Want to ask other users an extremely basic question about the mod? Refer to groomercord.

This phenomenon has taken over all kinds of communities, but modding is an example where I've personally observed it multiple times over. A lot of the types of information I listed above are going to be frequently requested by users. In the old times, we had these things called "installation instructions" and "FAQs" on static web pages. The best thing about these static web pages was that they could be retrieved on demand, at any time, with no action required by anybody but the requestor, by entering keywords into a search engine. Similarly, we had these things called "forums" where you could check whether somebody had already asked the question you're about to ask by searching for it before asking.

Finally, my novel (to me) point: why are we backsliding to a state where basic information is gated behind a login wall and mandatory interaction with other people?

One more sidestep: chatbots.

Chatbots are an innovative way for companies to outsource their tech support to a computer/not have to pay for call centers. They're pretty good for 90% of tech support problems, since 90% of tech support problems can be solved by walking the tech-illiterate customer through the process of turning their device off and back on again. Having a robot do this instead of a person saves a looooot of money. More recently chatbots have taken on a new meaning as the most common frontend for AIs, probably because they're easy to interface with even if you're tech illiterate. Can you see where I'm going with this?

The groomercordification of everything, and especially of things that should not be groomercordified (anything that would traditionally be on a wiki), is just another result of the normie takeover of the internet. A loooooot of people (apparently the vast majority) strongly prefer to consume technical information in a conversation style versus reading a document, so the state of things has drifted towards enforced conversation-style information consumption. This has had horrible consequences for the general availability of information that should logically be retrievable on demand from a static source.

Yes, this is rather galaxybrained and obvious in hindsight.

Great thread from Kathryn Tewson about how rslurred this thing is

Based AI telling employer to take worker's tips lmao

Don't ever use Reddit again. pic.twitter.com/ynSlWFt844

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 23, 2024

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/04/how-dating-sites-automate-sexual-racism/

Edit: Browsers?

Edit 2: She also wrote a paper about "Algorithmic Reparations":

Rooted in theories of Intersectionality, reparative algorithms name, unmask, and undo allocative and representational harms as they materialize in sociotechnical form. We propose algorithmic reparation as a foundation for building, evaluating, adjusting, and when necessary, omitting and eradicating machine learning systems.

[...]

We make this case in the body of the text above, suggesting a move away from fairness, replaced by an anti-oppressive, Intersectional approach. We intend for this approach to guide algorithmic design and to act as an evaluative standard by which existing algorithmic systems are judged, adjusted, and where necessary, omitted or dismantled. Our proposal is thus geared towards building better systems and holding existing ones to account.

I use Bluebubbles to sync my texts between all my Android devices and my iPhone. Uses my Mac server as a imessage forwarding relay. I have 6 phone numbers and keep the main number in the iPhone, call forward to my primary Galaxy Fold 5.

My main girlfriend turns 21 Tuesday. I'm taking leave from work for it, but sleeping in before taking her out. She sent me a text for my birthday at like 1am saying she wanted to be the first to tell me happy birthday.

I go to bed early, not staying up to send a text. Just scheduled that shit to send from my server. Automating thoughtful gestures, lmao.

You gotta understand though, they've only got 160 million per year to spend, you have to prioritize.

Microsoft just open-sourced DOS 4 https://t.co/iOeLUVfVok (as well a release of beta binaries, disk images, and PDFs from @rozzie's archives!) (but who did the PR?!) pic.twitter.com/g3VyOCsT40

— Scott Hanselman 🌮 (@shanselman) April 25, 2024