I believe their point was to illustrate the disconnect between the problem and the solution.
They agree with the problem, and experienced "whiplash" when the solution was described.
> For Government, kids on social media are not a big problem, that will only bite them in the decades to come.
In Australia the kids on social media are a problem for the government, today.
A 16 year old is less than two years away from voting.
Successive governments have laughed at the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 or 17.
The government has very little influence on social media -- this is different to older forms of media / communication.
I apologise for talking past the point you're making, but, Bob Ross was a human being, you know, with thoughts and stuff. How could any of these AI toys possibly compare?
I would love to have Bob Ross, wielding a crayon, add some happy little trees to the walls of a Target.
The term 'layoffs' in this context is simply not what you're describing.
These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.
And, yes, of course layoffs are something that need to be justified, just as with firing an individual employee, as you know -- the "employee is not being productive" is a justification.
>These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.
Isn't that most layoffs? Think of the layoffs post GFC. Did the subprime mortgage crisis suddenly make everyone incompetent, or are companies simply trying to trim budgets and need to hit some number? If it's actually due to poor performance, it would be through a PIP or similar.
Yes but the GP used poor individual performance as their only positive reason of layoffs not needing justification. So the reply was that individual performance is almost never a factor in actual layoffs, a point which you and I agree with. Thus, poor employee performance is not a monolith that can be used to explain all layoffs, and these companies should have to give better reasons that align with actual reality.
It's about the immense asymmetry of power here. Yes, a person can leave just like a company can fire. But a single person quitting is nearly never a massive disruption to the business, but the business firing someone is nearly always a catastrophy for that person.
I don't need to justify quitting because I'm not harming you by doing so. Laying off hundreds of people absolutely requires careful and validated justification as your significantly harming nearly everyone impacted.
Of course these companies do pay well usually, but not all of them do, and not every individual has the privilege of cheap health and rent and a cheap family. Any single significant factor in a persons life can cause that "well paid" factor to mean a lot less, especially if it drags out to 6 months or more like it is known to do
Ya, it's an easy mistake though, very subtle difference between general dismissal/firing/layoff. They're interpreting layoff to mean the same as "firing" or general dismissal, but as far as I understand it's more like a shortage of work thing due to lack of income on the company side, compared to insufficient productivity on the worker's side.
A subtle difference in terminology, but a bit difference in terms of outcome. In a layoff you'll likely have no issues getting severance if it was ever on the table to begin with, employment insurance, it's not a mark against you on a resume necessarily or socially.
This really isn't true. Take Microsoft, for instance - one of their recent layoffs eviscerated the Principal band including a number of high performers. I'm talking people I personally knew who had climbed the ladder rapidly, were directly working with multiple external partners driving tens of millions in revenue (that is, external partner has problem, threatens to pull spend on product, this employee is one of the first pulled in to engage and get it solved), with visibility all the way to the VP level and higher happy with their work and partner teams trying to poach them away - still laid off.
> High performers aren't getting let go, even if they are in department being cut, they will be moved.
Wishful thinking. I just survived (yet another) round of layoffs. They are desperate to bring headcount down. If a whole team is being cut, everyone goes.
It's really a question of how flexible upper management is in the numbers they set out. If there's wiggle room - sure. They will try to find a place in an adjacent team. But if the whole department is getting slashed, there is no adjacent team.
A 20% cut across the entire company isn’t the only form of layoffs. When everyone at a factory is laid off individual performance means absolutely nothing.
Sometimes a company decides a specific market it’s worth it and every single programmer in the company is let go. Sometimes companies decide everything making over X$ in a position isn’t worth keeping etc.
>High performers aren't getting let go, even if they are in department being cut, they will be moved.
Dude, no. This is just wishful thinking.
I've seen critical employees get laid off without any backup plan or even knowledge of what these employees do. When those critical tasks then don't get performed I've seen laid off employees be called and begged to come back because there's no one left who even knows how to perform those critical tasks.
Layoffs rarely make sense. I've been though multiple rounds of:
"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."
"Oh wait, admin work is not getting done. We need more admin staff, hire"
"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."
With the way our society is set up to tie a large number of benefits necessary to live to employment, then yes you are actually harming someone by ending their employment.
Severance might outweigh that harm, but it depends on the amount, if any is given. Also I want to point out that the vast majority of companies give 0 severance. I’ve gotten it once in my life and I’m fairly certain it was “shut the fuck up” money as they had done some shady shenanigans to a bonus I was entitled to.
Ah yes, I forgot that surviving treatable diseases is a luxurious first world lifestyle.
If you don’t believe that US regulations and law are set up in a way that pressures people to maintain employment at a company, then you have your head in the sand
> These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.
There’s no reason to think that you need to evaluate individuals to have a reason to let them go. I might be the best iOS developer in the world but if I’m working for a company that doesn’t need a custom iOS app, they should lay me off.
If you're an individual or a small business owner who wants to no longer pay for my services, you should be allowed to stop doing so. If you're a megacorp, however, you wield extremely disproportionate power over thousands of people, and your moves can send shockwaves through an entire industry and have severe consequences for your employees that have no real power in comparison to you. I think that moderating the actions of huge businesses will be far better in these situations, especially if their reasoning for mass layoffs is maximizing profit-wringing rather than actual desperation and an immediate need to cut expenses.
Absolutely not, if megacorp feels need to lay off half its workforce that is its prerogative. Employment is a business relationship. Businesses have to be flexible to be competitive.
The whole point of a business is to make a profit. If its not making a profit or growing, its at risk of dying, then layoffs hit 100%. The ship has to stay afloat.
There's no fundamental diff between a small business and large business here except scale.
That just is not true, though. A company externalises a lot of its cost on the rest of society; laying off older employees, for example, that likely won’t find another job until retirement, are a liability society has to take care of. The only thing separating Workers with insurance coverage via their employer from eternal financial ruin is their very job.
When the auto companies fucked up in Detroit, they wreaked havoc on an entire town. The tech giants raised rent in the valley so much, it essentially became uninhabitable to anyone but software engineers. There are more examples.
Businesses are just as much part of society as individuals, and they have to do their part of this relationship. IMHO this includes being considerate about layoffs, and taking care of your employees.
A company generates value for society, or it ceases to exist over the long run.
We have unemployment insurance for laid off workers and most people at megacorps also get severence when they get let go. Older employees can find the same jobs at different companies there are almost no jobs that are exclusive to any one company and even where that is the case you can still find related jobs. There is no excuse.
Unemployment levels are near 4% right now, historically near all time lows.
Silicon Valley is expensive because of nimby zoning laws. We do not have that problem in Austin as Texas is pro-growth and allows for dense, high rise buildings and apartments to be built at will. As a result, our rent has gone down significantly in the last several years despite population growth. Fix your regulations and the supply problems in housing will fix themselves.
Just look up any town that had a single large employer and what happened to those towns after that employer left. Small companies do not posses the same ability to impact an entire town of people and everyone who lives in it, even those that didn't work for the employer.
They don't have to cease to exist. They can just choose to relocate or close that location because they're big enough to do that. Maybe extorting another town for tax breaks if they relocate there while they're at it.
I also believe that the fact 1,000 employees can be laid off at once, and then flood the market with applications, is not something we should prevent. Rather, it's a sign we need to make more small independent companies. This is a concentration problem.
That would of course require that maybe we shouldn't have the Magnificent 7, but the Magnificent 100. Maybe instead of the Fortune 500, we need the Fortune 5000, with each one much smaller. Not happening anytime soon with current incentives, but I think it would be better for everyone. We shouldn't split Google into two, but into thirty.
It would be radical... but imagine if we set an aggressive, aggressive cap on employees and contractors. Like, limit 100, with a 1% corporate income tax on every additional person. Projects at scale - 50 companies cooperating; maybe with some sort of new corporation cooperation legal structure (call it the D-Corp, it manages a collection of C-Corps working together, and cannot collect profits for itself or own property, a nonprofit that manages for-profit companies who voluntarily join in a singular direction).
That wouldn't just be radical, it would be a violation of free market principles. If smaller orgs are actually more effective than big ones, then the market would self-correct. I'm inclined to argue that we have the economic data to prove your theory wrong.
Imposing a hard headcount limit would be the definition of pointless government overreach.
This libertarian fantasy where you can do as you please, pretending your company is a person and your employees are furniture might be what you think is a "properly ordered society".
But guess what? , most of us don't, and it's a common view across both the left and the right :-). It's same reason most people left and right didn't really care when some guy that denied people their health insurance got denied himself.
I too am a selector of text. I select text for many valid reasons. I have never selected text for an invalid reason.
A lot of websites include (anti-)features that make it extremely difficult for me to read and this severely limits the amount that I interact with the site.
Features that hijack text selection in some way or preventing it entirely for whatever misguided reason are some of the worst offenders.
Yes, I realise that not everything is for me -- I am getting that message loud and clear.
Preventing text selection is one of the most egregious and hostile ways to make your software unfriendly, but those insidious "share this quote" popout drawers are slowly fading in right behind it[0], hyperactively reflowing the layout and appending random snippets of selected text to the URL.
Reading is the most basic, most fundamental way to interact with the web. It's fundamental to using software in general.
It seems to be necessary to point out that 'reading' and 'looking at' are not interchangeable terms.
Frankly, designers should know better.
[0] Except they're not, because you can't select the text, obviously.
The dismissal of the security concerns is pretty shallow.
I don't know how many vulnerable drivers the average gamer has installed. I'm sure 'at least some' is a safe assumption.
The issue I have with this is that although it may be expected, I don't find it acceptable.
The article presents having this exploitable software on your computer as benign. I don't think that's a particularly healthy attitude, especially in an article oriented towards a more general audience.
The author hasn't had a problem with the anti-cheat software that they like. This is not an argument for why this is a good solution, or why kernel-level anti-cheat is not a security risk.
Further, normalising software vulnerabilities weakens whatever case is being made. The more acceptable it is to have broken, exploitable software installed, the more acceptable it will be to ship anti-cheat software that is broken and exploitable.
By the way, on trust: having trust in the vendor is ... inadvisable.
I'm not saying it's guaranteed to backfire, but it can only backfire in one direction.
The situation in which you trust an entity with goals that are (at best) unaligned with your own is better described as one where they have leverage over you.
I think you're taking it a bit too seriously. In turn, I am, of course, also taking it too seriously.
> I do have an issue with claiming that the newly inspired creation is equivalent in any way to the original source
Nobody is claiming that the drawing is Anubis or even a depiction of Anubis, like the statues etc. you are interested in.
It's a mascot. "Mascot design by CELPHASE" -- it says, in the screenshot.
Generally speaking -- I can't say that this is what happened with this project -- you would commission someone to draw or otherwise create a mascot character for something after the primary ideation phase of the something.
This Anubis-inspired mascot is, presumably, Anubis-inspired because the project is called Anubis, which is a name with fairly obvious connections to and an understanding of "the original source".
> Anime culture does this all the time, ...
I don't know what bone you're picking here. This seems like a weird thing to say.
I mean, what anime culture? It's a drawing on a website.
Yes, I can see the manga/anime influence -- it's a very popular, mainstream artform around the world.
I like to talk seriously about art, representation, and culture. What's wrong with that? It's at least as interesting as discussing databases or web frameworks.
In case you feel it needs linking to the purpose of this forum, the art in question here is being forcefully shown to people in a situation that makes them do a massive context switch. I want to look at the linux or ffmpeg source code but my browser failed a security check and now I'm staring at a random anime girl instead. What's the meaning here, what's the purpose behind this? I feel that there's none, except for the library author's preference, and therefore this context switch wasted my time and energy.
Maybe I'm being unfair and the code author is so wrapped up in liking anime girls that they think it would be soothing to people who end up on that page. In which case, massive failure of understanding the target audience.
Maybe they could allow changing the art or turning it off?
> Anime culture does this all the time
>> I don't know what bone you're picking here
I'm not picking any bone there. I love anime, and I love the way it feels so free in borrowing from other cultures. That said, the anime I tend to like is more Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon and less kawaii girls.
Hey there! The design of the mascot serves a dual-purpose, and was done very intentionally.
Your workflow getting interrupted, especially with a full-screen challenge page, is a very high-stress event. The mascot serves a purpose in being particularly distinct and recognizable, but also disarming for first-time users. This emotional response was calibrated particularly for more non-technical users who would be quick to be worried about 'being hit by a virus'. In particular I find that bot challenges tend to feel very accusing ("PROVE! PROVE YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT!"), and that a little bit of silly would disarm that feeling.
Similarly, that's why the error version of the mascot looks more surprised if anything. After all, only legitimate users will ever see that. (bots don't have eyes, or at least don't particularly care)
As for the design specifically, making it more anubis-like would probably have been a bit TOO furry and significantly hurt adoption. The design prompt was to stick to a jackal girl. Then again, I kinda wished in retrospect I had made the ears much, much longer.
Viewing the challenge screenshot again after reading your response definitely sheds light as to why I have no aggro toward Anubis (even if the branding supposedly wouldn't jive well with a super professional platform, but hey, I think having the alternate, commercial offering is super brilliant in turn).
On the other hand, I immediately see red when I get stopped in my tracks by all the widely used (and often infinitely-unpassable) Cloudflare/Google/etc. implementations with wordings that do nothing but add insult to injury.
Thank you for the thought you put into that. I think you guys hit it out of the park.
What does all of this have to do with (depictions of, references to, etc.) Anubis though? You responded to a comment about the mascot surely being a "jackalgirl" as opposed to a "catgirl" because of the Anubis name and other references. It seemed like you had an issue with the artwork, that it wasn't Anubisy enough, or something. Why would the drawing being more like the statues improve the situation?
Now you seem to be saying that anything that isn't what you wanted to find on the website is the problem. This makes sense, it just has nothing to do with what is shown on that page. But you're effectively getting frustrated at not getting to the page you wanted to and then directing your frustration toward the presentation of the "error message". That does not make sense.
> I like to talk seriously about art, representation, and culture. What's wrong with that? It's at least as interesting as discussing databases or web frameworks.
I don't have a problem with talking about art, you'll note that I responded in kind.
When I said "I think you're taking it too seriously" I wasn't expecting that to be extrapolated to all subjects, just the one that was being discussed in the local context.
>I like to talk seriously about art, representation, and culture. What's wrong with that?
It's no fun.
For one, you pulled your original response out of your ass. That the mascot is not a "catgirl" as identified by OP, but a canine variant of the same concept, because the project is named after the Egyptian god, is both obvious and uninteresting. You added nothing to that.
You're running around shouting "I get the joke, I get the joke" while grandstanding about how serious you are about art, one of the human pursuits helped least by seriousness, considering.
If you've decided you also need to be silly about it today, then at least have the decency to make up a conspiracy theory about the author being in fact a front for an Egyptian cult trying to bring back the old gods using the harvested compute, or whatever.
>massive failure of understanding the target audience.
Heh.
The anime image is put there as an intentional, and to my view rightful, act of irreverence.
One that works, too: I unironically find the people going like "my girl/boss will be mad at me if they see this style of image on my computer" positively hilarious.
>Maybe they could allow changing the art or turning it off?
They sure do. For money. Was in the release announcement.
Not enough irreverence in your game and you can end up being the person who let them build the torment nexus. Many such cases, and that's why we're where we are.
>That said, the anime I tend to like is more Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon and less kawaii girls.
Yes, I think you're right.
The commentary about its (presumed, imagined) effectiveness is very much making the assumption that it's designed to be an impenetrable wall[0] -- i.e. prevent bots from accessing the content entirely.
I think TFA is generally quite good and has something of a good point about the economics of the situation, but finding the math shake out that way should, perhaps, lead one to question their starting point / assumptions[1].
In other words, who said the websites in question wanted to entirely prevent crawlers from accessing them? The answer is: no one. Web crawlers are and have been fundamental to accessing the web for decades. So why are we talking about trying to do that?
[0] Mentioning 'impenetrable wall' is probably setting off alarm bells, because of course that would be a bad design.
[1] (Edited to add:) I should say 'to question their assumptions more' -- like I said, the article is quite good and it does present this as confusing, at least.
> In other words, who said the websites in question wanted to entirely prevent crawlers from accessing them? The answer is: no one. Web crawlers are and have been fundamental to accessing the web for decades. So why are we talking about trying to do that?
I agree, but the advertising is the whole issue. "Checking to see you're not a bot!" and all that.
Therefore some people using Anubis expect it to be an impenetrable wall, to "block AI scrapers", especially those that believe it's a way for them to be excluded from training data.
It's why just a few days ago there was a HN frontpage post of someone complaining that "AI scrapers have learnt to get past Anubis".
But that is a fight that one will never win (analog hole as the nuclear option).
If it said something like "Wait 5 seconds, our servers are busy!", I would think that people's expectations will be more accurate.
As a robot I'm really not that sympathetic to anti-bot language backfiring on humans. I have to look away every time it comes up on my screen. If they changed their language and advertising, I'll be more sympathetic -- it's not as if I disagree that overloading servers for not much benefit is bad!
Yeah, I think it's obviously a pretty natural conclusion to draw, that {thing for hinder crawler} ≅≅ {thing for stop all crawler}.
Perhaps I should have stated that explicitly in the original comment.
As for the presentation/advertising, I didn't get into it because I don't hold a particularly strong opinion. Well, I do hold a particularly strong opinion, but not one that really distinguishes Anubis from any of the other things.
I'm fully onboard with what you're saying -- I find this sort of software extremely hostile and the fact that so many people don't[0] reminds me that I'm not a people.
In my experience, this particular jump scare is about the same as any of the other services. The website is telling me that I'm not welcome for whatever arbitrary reason it is now, and everyone involved wants me to feel bad.
Actually there is one thing I like about the Anubis experience[1] compared to the other ones, it doesn't "Would you like to play a game?" me. As a robot I appreciate the bluntness, I guess.
(the games being: "click on this. now watch spinny. more. more. aw, you lose! try again?", and "wheel, traffic light, wildcard/indistinguishable"[2]).
[0] "just ignore it, that's what I do" they say. "Oh, I don't have a problem like that. Sucks to be you."
[1] yes, I'm talking upsides about the experience of getting **ed by it. I would ask how we got here but it's actually pretty easy to follow.
[2] GCHQ et al. should provide a meatspace operator verification service where they just dump CCTV clips and you have to "click on the squares that contain: UNATTENDED BAG". Call it "phonebooth, handbag, foreign agent".
(Apologies for all the weird tangents -- I'm just entertaining myself, I think I might be tired.)
For one thing, I don't think they think they have a silver bullet here. I think they want some financial support and if some users of the project pay the fee that will be some success.
To the specifics, it's not a software license fee -- they aren't selling access to the software. It's a "maintenance fee", to fund the project. So the license of the code isn't a problem, you can (still) choose to license that under whatever terms are available.
From their FAQ[0]:
> Q: What if I don’t want to pay the Maintenance Fee?
> That’s fine. You can download the project’s source code and follow the Open Source license for the software.
> Do not download releases. Do not reference packages via a package manager. Do not use anything other than the source code released under the Open Source license.
> Also, if you choose to not pay the Maintenance Fee, but find yourself returning to check on the status of issues or review answers to questions others ask, you are still using the project and should pay the Maintenance Fee.
I really don't think they can limit who can download their releases with their license.
>If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
>each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce its contribution, prepare derivative works of its contribution, and distribute its contribution or any derivative works that you create.
I'm not sure how their rules comply with their own license, and I truly don't think they do. They're granting additional restrictions to a binary they're distributing (if you download this give us money). They're just hoping to scare some contributors into handing over some cash.
Maybe some licenses do allow for this, but the one they chose for Wix almost certainly does not.
> > Also, if you choose to not pay the Maintenance Fee, but find yourself returning to check on the status of issues or review answers to questions others ask, you are still using the project and should pay the Maintenance Fee.
I think this is going to hard against the "economy of gift" and isn't going to play well in the end. If they were hosting their own forum / mailing list, charging to access the community would make sense. But the forum is hosted by a company that gives it away for free. The people posting are posting freely (and may not be associated with the project). Some of the people posting answers are members of the project, but some are not. If the maintainers get an answer from someone else are they obligated to pay the answerer a maintenance fee?
I would limit this to "if you find yourself asking about an issue or posting an issue", since those are points where you are looking for help not just from the community at large, but from the maintainers in particular.
I can't imagine that clause in particular is actually compatible with githubs own eula. It's hard to believe github would be okay with people attaching additional licenses to make use of any of their features. Could I throw a $10 fee to use git clone too?
Maybe it's a play like any of those license less open source projects, corporations will be so horrified to use your software they'll stay away, but hobby devs won't really worry about it.
I would encourage you to read through the first couple pages of the Open Source Maintenance Fee website. I think you'll see there are a lot costs you're not taking into account.
> I don't think they think they have a silver bullet here.
I don't think there is a silver bullet. But I do think we can do better than we are today supporting the sustainability of Open Source projects. The OSMF is an attempt to do just that.
Hi, I realise I'm replying to a comment from over a week ago, but I happened across this and now I'm here.
I don't think you got what I intended with my comment.
You may have missed the "they think" in the sentence you quoted, it was a bit dense.
In any case, it sounds like you agree with me, if not what my comment conveyed. I agree with you.
(I also think my bullet metaphors might have touched and I merged 'bulletproof contract' with 'silver bullet'.)
I believe their point was to illustrate the disconnect between the problem and the solution. They agree with the problem, and experienced "whiplash" when the solution was described.
> For Government, kids on social media are not a big problem, that will only bite them in the decades to come.
In Australia the kids on social media are a problem for the government, today. A 16 year old is less than two years away from voting. Successive governments have laughed at the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 or 17. The government has very little influence on social media -- this is different to older forms of media / communication.
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