sysmuird (u/sysmuird)

sysmuird commented on It's easier and faster to pirate an e-book, than it is to buy it · Posted by u/leoff

slavak · 3 years ago

Illegally downloading creative works is most assuredly _not_ theft, according to either the dictionary or the legal definitions, as no possessions are being taken and no one is being deprived of their property. Downloading creative works may or may not constitute copyright infringement; Relabeling it as "theft" is nothing more than a dishonest attempt at re-framing the conversation in a way that maximally benefits corporate interests.

sysmuird · 3 years ago

You’re right. That one time my employer didn’t pay me for 3 pay circles- it wasn’t theft, it was piracy or copyright infringement. Simply a breach in contract.

sysmuird commented on Things not available when someone blocks all cookies blog.tomayac.com/2022/08/... · Posted by u/0xedb

user3939382 · 3 years ago

> The only browser feature we leverage are click events

Do the users want their click events fed into an advertising engine? Did you ask them? If you made this opt-in, how many would say, yes, please track my clicks in order to advertise to me? Even if its anonymized/aggregated.

A huge amount of advertising is enabled by tracking users against their will, exploiting the fact that many users aren't aware of what's going on, don't know how to stop it, or aren't as invested in their preference as the adtech companies are in their revenue. "A man is always right in his own eyes". If you're smart it's easy to justify this stuff to yourself because you're getting paid, but that doesn't make it right.

sysmuird · 3 years ago

I should have known my comment would only make you more aggressive. Walked into that I guess.

You are right in that a huge amount of ads leverage user data at the expense of the user.

The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive. We do zero ad targeting based on user data. You make a search for specific products, we take the response and shuffle the order a bit based on vendor campaigns. That’s it. Nothing is associated or even collected from the user. It’s all system metrics.

The greatest harm that my team does is hurting optimized relevancy, which is inherit to advertising but also something we work hard to alleviate.

That misused proverbs quote is a nice touch. Shows a lot of self awareness.

sysmuird commented on Things not available when someone blocks all cookies blog.tomayac.com/2022/08/... · Posted by u/0xedb

user3939382 · 3 years ago

I just want to take this opportunity to thank "adtech" and everyone working in it for making local storage way more complex than it otherwise needed to be because you couldn't/can't stop yourselves from abusing users.

sysmuird · 3 years ago

I’m in adtech and we manage to do ads in a completely user respecting way within the retail space. We monetize on search traffic without user data, cookies, local storage. The only browser feature we leverage are click events and img tags.

Though I appreciate your frustration, your aggression is a little off target. :)

sysmuird commented on Tell HN: I made $1000 with my app and now making $500/mo · Posted by u/strongpigeon

dataflow · 3 years ago

> It doesn't matter how well you code if people can't understand the user interface

The variation on it I like to emphasize is: it also doesn't matter how "readable" your code is if the user/customer finds it broken, so stop trying to optimize for readability as the primary criterion.

{correctness, usability} to the customer > code maintainability > code readability

sysmuird · 3 years ago

I agree with your point. However, I think I look at it from a slightly different perspective.

When it comes to any code I produce (with the exception of some learning projects), I try to keep it: effective, efficient and simple. In that order.

Effective is essentially what you were saying about correctness and usability from the user perspective. Peter Drucker would say to be effective is to "do the right thing." This is always an outward focused item. Does it impact the user in the right way? Does it solve the right problem? Etc. This is hands down the most important thing. Nothing else matters if you're doing the wrong thing.

In contrast, efficiency is to "do the thing right." Once you're doing the right thing, minimizing your costs, increasing your quality, making it so your code doesn't "consume the whole world" all fall under this category. Poor efficiency can negatively impact the effectiveness of your code. "It does this really cool thing, but it takes far too long to load so I can't use it."

Then lastly, keep it simple. That is not to say ignore the natural complexity of the problem, but rather to keep the solution to the essential complexity of the problem. Keeping things only as complex as they need to be covers a whole lot of dimensions in software. It makes things more explicit and understandable, it helps with code readability, and code re-usability. It decreases the surface area of what needs to be maintained. All good things for the health of the dev and the project.

It's all in that order for specific reasons. They move outside in. As the dev, I'm not the most import person with respect to the code I'm writing. The user is, and so the code needs to be purposeful to them (efficacy). Efficiency is more about the product, making sure it works properly. Keeping things simple, although it impacts efficacy and efficiency, is largely a positive for me and helps me maintain sanity.

I think it's important to note that it's all of these things, not just one of them. We'll approach tradeoffs in a prioritize way, but we're striving for the three of them. Obviously a very difficult task. But I find that approaching engineering this way has helped me grow a lot as an engineer.

Anyway, first time post here. Your comment made me think of this. Thanks for coming to my tedtalk.