nicksloan

@[email protected]
2 Followers
99 Following
100 Posts
I’m the head of engineering at Matter, the cofounder of UpContent, and a software developer working on the web and iOS. Talk to me about vinyl records, music technology, comedy, Minecraft, Pittsburgh, Detroit style pizza, Democratic politics, or software development if all else fails.
Websitehttps://nicksloan.com
GitHubhttps://github.com/nicksloan
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/nicksloan
Show threadnicksloanMar 31, 2024
@davidism I’d also say that “Attach this post to your homework submission” might be more effective than telling people to not complete what they may see as an easy assignment.
Show threadnicksloanMar 31, 2024

@davidism I think “don’t do it” is bad advice, especially when you give much better advice at the end of the post.

I wonder if GitHub and others could surface some kind of opaque metric that gives you an indication of how engaged with a project the user already is, perhaps looking at their repositories both public and private that depend on a project, and the history of those repositories. This could open the door for moderation features that could help at least contain the mess.

Show threadnicksloanMar 30, 2024
@Crell @ramsey @derickr @mwop Helpful to remember that Android abandoned the open messaging platform that they originally shipped in favor of chasing the Apple model, and only went back to pushing an open standard when their attempts at a closed system repeatedly failed. There are no heroes.
Show threadnicksloanMar 30, 2024
@ramsey @maxalmonte14 @grmpyprogrammer For any set of things that people have opinions about, there will arise a consensus about which one is the one to make fun of. Cleveland is a good example. This even applies to Beatles. I think a lot of times the derision is very loosely held. The trouble for PHP is that people may make decisions about it based on the ridicule and not any first hand experience.
Show threadnicksloanMar 29, 2024
@sean Not that I would expect that crowd to get it, but we make declarations about the data we track to get into the App Store. Apple reviews our apps for inclusion. I don’t know how seriously they evaluate our privacy practices, but each release *is* audited by a third party prior to distribution.
Show threadnicksloanMar 28, 2024
@bruce Thanks Bruce! Hope we can catch up sometime, it has been too long!
nicksloanMar 28, 2024

An ongoing highlight of my career has been working with Sean to build products that respect our users. At Matter, Sean’s leadership in this area has challenged us in the best ways, and he has set a bar that I will measure against for the rest of my working life.

This is very much worth a read. https://scoat.es/@sean/112174277905316470

Sean Coates (@[email protected])

For the past ~2 years, I’ve been working on a neuroscience startup (called Matter). We have an app that—by its nature—needs to operate on private user data. Some of that data is so private that we never actually want to handle it ourselves. So we don’t. We can’t leak data we don’t have. We can’t mishandle private info that never leaves the control of the user. We’re taking a mostly-unique approach to user data at Matter, and I’ve finally written a little bit about it: https://seancoates.com/blogs/matter-and-privacy

scoates
nicksloanMar 26, 2024
Larry GarfieldMar 26, 2024

Videos that auto-play but muted are wrong in every possible perspective. Even if I want to see it, then by the time I unmute I've missed the first several seconds. And if I don't want to, I'm wasting a ton of bandwidth for video I don't want.

There is no situation in which "autoplay muted" is the correct answer. Absolutely none.

If your website is doing it, you are wrong. Please stop. Now.

#Rant

Show threadnicksloanMar 26, 2024
@malware We invented a self-destruct for the web.
nicksloanMar 26, 2024
Joël Perras - jperrasMar 26, 2024

I'm getting really frustrated by the huge amount of AI generated blogspam that I have to filter through.

While researching some esoteric Postgres operation I came across an (unrelated) article that was adamantly suggesting that you can perform batch `DELETE` operations in Postgres with a `LIMIT` clause, with full examples and output/results.

Well dear reader, Postgres has _never_ allowed `LIMIT` in anything except `SELECT` statements. The whole article was hallucinated GPT shit.