Notices by Marijn (marijn@mastodon.social)

Yearly reminder that if you need a GDPR cookie dialog you've already failed your users and are normalizing manipulative behavior. Do the thing you'd do if the user clicked no, without asking. Get rid of 3rd-party stuff that makes this hard.

ProseMirror's OT actually gets the example case they use (concurrently editing/deleting a chunk of text) right, because it does think about user intention. It's still not suitable for big merges though. No automatic conflict-resolving system is, because conflicts are going to be too involved, subtle, and human for automatic resolution.

I've been saying for ten years that the algorithms used for collaborative editing are no good for merging offline editing sessions. Such merges require user intervention. CRDTs will not solve this for you. Seems these people came to the same conclusion.

https://www.moment.dev/blog/lies-i-was-told-pt-1

Now that I think about it, I'm sure someone will throw a language model at this problem any time now. It'll mostly work and, of course, make catastrophic mistakes the rest of the time.

Simple global self-serve namespaces like npm/crates.io/cpan packages really break down at a given scale. At this point 99% of desirable names on npm are taken by some one-off half-assed project sketch abandoned eight years ago.

I guess requiring at least a little stake (such as domain registration) might help. Or making it easier to pick an abandoned name and use new major version numbers for another project (though that has its own issues). Any registry that does a better job at this?

Oh eww Medium pulled a Xitter and won't let you read stuff without logging in anymore. There was a nag for a long time, but now it's a hard requirement. Don't publish on platforms that are hostile to web links. (Or if possible don't publish on commercial platforms at all since, eventually, they'll either go away or go to shit.)

I feel like “this software is language-model free” might soon be a real selling point

Web accessibility question: A block of text is styled in a given way to indicate its status (in this case, deleted/inserted text in a diff). I want to communicate this role to screen reader users as well. Is there a good way to do that? A hidden bit of text at the top or a block would be a start, but doesn't effectively communicate the extent of the block.