Emily (she/her)

They use Vimeo’s OTT platform (which makes a lot of sense especially considering Vimeo was founded at CollegeHumor/Dropout)

What is it with the far right and school girls?

Yeah this account stinks of jaq-ing off

I am not only a Wikipedia editor, but I used to be a fairly prolific one. I probably plugged thousands of hours into research for various articles over the years. I don’t want a cut of the donations - I didn’t do it for money.

Websites are more than their hosting costs and to be frank only an amateur or someone looking for a cheap “gotcha” would present that number. For one it leaves out all the staff administering and designing that infrastructure - which I assume would at least consist of multiple teams. That number also doesn’t even include the salaries of the staff developing and maintaining the software itself (again, multiple teams), nor the management structure expected (and legally required) for an organisation of that size.

Actually looking at their financial statements, and to quote them: “Our expenses totaled $190.9 million, of which 77.4% went to programmatic activities, 11.4% went to fundraising expenses, and 11.2% went to general and administrative support. These percentages are well within the range of best practice for nonprofits”. Indeed, an administrative expense ratio of under 35% is generally the goal for an organisation and which they more than beat. Their programmatic spending rate is likewise excellent.

I have plenty of problems with Wikipedia - largely relating to the editing culture - but the fact remains that it is an invaluable service run efficiently and at a fraction of the cost of similarly trafficked websites.

It’s been a while since I watched his content, but isn’t most of his stuff just clips of him reading back someone else’s article at you with inane commentary added in between?

In my experience, Wikipedia has a pervasive cultural of false balance, and it does not surprise me at all that this attitude extends to the founder of the site. Despite their many policies dictating otherwise, in my experience adjudicators often end up weighing authoritative academic sources equally with outdated or lower quality references. Looking through the talk page, it sounds like there was already an extensive RFC for the wording of the lede. Policy was already applied correctly in this case - the system worked as it was supposed to - and it’s incredibly inappropriate for Wales to pull rank, reopen discussion when there has been no notable change in circumstance, and advocate for this exact kind of behaviour.

This is awful. One of my favorite differences between Android and iOS, as both a user AND developer is sideloading.

My absolute last resort is to disable breakpoints and watch network traffic for the image or video. I’m pretty sure there are still ways they can detect the developer console is open but it usually does the trick

I agree that this is ultimately a problem with developers lacking security knowledge and general understanding, but my issue with Firestore specifically is that it is a powerful tool that, while it can be adopted as part of a carefully considered tech stack, lends itself most naturally towards being a blunt force instrument used by these kinds of developers.

My main criticism of Firestore is that it offers a powerful feature set that is both extremely attractive to amateur or constrained developers while simultaneously doing a poor job of guiding said amateurs towards creating a secure and well designed backend. In particular, the seemingly expected use case of the technology as something directly interfaced with by apps and other clients, as evidenced by the substantial support and feature set for this use case, is the main issue. This no-code no-management client driven interaction model makes it especially attractive to these developers.

This lack of indirection through an API Gateway or service, however, imposes additional design considerations largely delegated to the security rules which can easily be missed by a beginner. For example:

1. Many examples of amateurs take an open-by-default approach, only applying access and write restrictions where necessary and miss data that should be restricted
2. Some amateurs deploy databases with no access or write restrictions at all
3. There is no way to only allow a “view” of a document to a request, instead a separate document and security rules containing the private fields needs to be created. This can be fairly simple to design around but seems to be a bit of a “gotcha”, plus if you have similar but non identical sets of data that needs to be accessible by different groups it must be duplicated and manually synchronized.
4. Since there is no way to version data models, incompatible changes require complicated workarounds or an increasingly complicated deserialization process on the client side (especially as existing clients continue to write outdated models).
5. Schema validation of data written by clients to the database is handled by security rules, which is seemingly unintuitive or missed by many developers because I’ve seen plenty of projects miss it
6. If clients are writing data directly, it can become fairly complex to handle and subsequently maintain their contributions, especially if the aforementioned private data documents are required or the data model changes.

All of these pitfalls can be worked around (although I would still argue for some layer of indirection at least for writes), but at this point I’ve been contracted to 2 or 3 projects worked on by “professionals” (derogatory) that failed to account for any of these issues and I absolutely sick to death of it. I think a measure of a tools quality is whether it guides a developer towards good practices by design and I have found Firestore to completely fail in that regard. I think it can be used well, and it is perfectly appropriate for small inconsequential (as in data leaks would be inconsequential) single developer projects, but it almost never is.

I absolutely despise Firebase Firestore (the database technology that was “hacked”). It’s like a clarion call for amateur developers, especially low rate/skill contractors who clearly picked it not as part of a considered tech stack, but merely as the simplest and most lax hammer out there. Clearly even DynamoDB with an API gateway is too scary for some professionals. It almost always interfaces directly with clients/the internet without sufficient security rules preventing access to private information (or entire database deletion), and no real forethought as to ongoing maintenance and technical debt.

A Firestore database facing the client directly on any serious project is a code smell in my opinion.

I mean yeah, but people also regularly steal things despite it being against the rules. Like those, wiki rules are enforced (theoretically) as a best effort.

You can’t edit Wikipedia pages on a topic to which you have a close connection/conflict of interest.

Also WP:Notability

I had just turned 17 when the gay marriage plebiscite happened in Australia. I still remember the anger I felt at not being able to vote on my own right to marry.

I was more naive then than I am now, but I also was at twenty.

In my experience, an LLM can write small, basic scripts or equally small and isolated bits of logic. It can also do some basic boilerplate work and write nearly functional unit tests. Anything else and it’s hopeless.

Women have been historically and presently marginalised, yes.

If people want a respectful space to discuss among themselves I don’t see any good reason to force myself into the conversation. Not every space on the internet (or real life) needs to be a stage for the free marketplace of ideas, especially when you’re talking about already marginalised communities who are easily disenfranchised by many of the kinds of people attracted to that style of space.

Personally, looking at the interaction between yourself and the mod, it reads to me like you was the one who was sarcastic and rude.

I hope she makes a full recovery and I’ll be keeping my thoughts with her 🩷

Oh yeah no fair enough, thanks for hearing me out. Those kinds people are exhausting

I agree, it feels like we’ve been arguing over semantics. When I (and I’m assuming the person you originally responded to) say “real”, I don’t mean to claim that it doesn’t have material effects, I mean that it has no biological basis - i.e. it is socially constructed.

You do not need to believe race is a biological reality to acknowledge that the perception of others as you (+ your ancestors) being a member of a race has materially affected your identity