• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 1st, 2024

help-circle

  • Why not simply say donation

    It’s about setting expectations. The wording is chosen because they believe that paying open source developers for their work should be the norm, not the exception. Calling it a donation would not do that justice. Their wording is saying “Here’s the software, we’ll trust you to pay us for it if it brings you value and you can afford it”. It’s an explicit expectation to pay, unless you have good reasons not to, which is also fine but should be the exception. Whereas a donation is very much optional and not the default expectation by nature.

    In the end it’s just a semantic difference, it’s just all about making expectations clear even if there is no enforcement around them.





  • I’m German, and I would not want that. German grammar works differently in a way that makes programming a lot more awkward for some reason. Things like, “.forEach” would technically need three different spellings depending on the grammatical gender of the type of element that’s in the collection it’s called on. Of course you could just go with neuter and say it refers to the “items” in the collection, but that’s just one of lots of small pieces of awkwardness that get stacked on top of each other when you try to translate languages and APIs. I really appreciate how much more straightforward that works with English.




  • The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they’ll get to play you more ads and cash out more.

    You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it’s just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn’t equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you’ll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you’re just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn’t really have an incentive to make it work like that, it’s just accidental.

    Here’s the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: https://youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI

    Edit: to be clear, I fully agree that YouTube will do anything to shove ads down our throats no matter how effective they actually are. I’m just saying that this example you’ve brought is not really that.