Many of these meanings seem to be captured in some modern solutions already:

• We plan to provide a value, but memory for this value hasn’t been allocated yet.
• The memory has been allocated, but we haven’t attempted to compute/retrieve the proper value yet
• We are in the process of computing/retrieving the value

Futures?

• There was a code-level problem computing/retrieving the value

Exception? Result monads? (Okay, yea, we try to avoid the m word, but bear with me there)

• We successfully got the value, and the value is “the abstract concept of nothingness”

An Option or Maybe monad?

• or the value is “please use the default”
• or the value is “please try again”

An enumeration of return types would seem to solve this problem. I can picture doing this in Rust.

Doesn’t mean the defaults shouldn’t be sane

I swear, these bad EULA updates that basically force users to “accept the agreement, or we’ll brick your device” needs to fucking stop and be made illegal. The price that’s set for a product, especially a damn physical product, should include the acceptance of an existing EULA, and it should be honoured even when new ones come out and the user chooses to not accept the new agreement. You’ve basically never owned the product if companies can just pull the rug underneath you, and render your hardware useless. And you can’t foresee such changes too; a predatory company can acquire one that you’ve trusted and pull this shit. It’s borderline daylight larceny.

2 things I like about golang is just 1) the ease of getting someone to start work, and 2) goroutines. I have no complains about goroutines cause I’ve barely used it, and when I do it’s been fine. The first point though, I’d say the simplicity of the language is a double-edged sword — it’s easy to learn with little surface to cover, but it forces you to implement a lot of basic machinery you find in other languages by yourself, and so your codebase can get clunky to read really quickly, especially as your project grows.

Not trying to dissuade you from learning golang tho. I think it’s a good language to learn and use, especially for small simple programs, but it’s not the great language many try to say it is. It’s… fine. There are many reasons why it grinds my gears, but I’m still fine with using it and maintaining it for prod.

Ehhh, golang’s pretty down there for me too. Sure, you have types, but the way you “implement” an interface is the sussiest thing I’ve seen in most well-known programming languages. Not to mention all the foot guns (pointers for nullables is a common one, and oh, if you forgot that a function returns an error, and you called it for its effects, you’ve just built a possibly very silent bomb) you end up building into your programs. I use in prod, and I get scared.

For those who’re interested: https://this-week-in-rust.org/

A washer beep is like a webhook: if the recipient fails to acknowledge it, it’s gone forever. A notification is like an /events endpoint: the recipient can catch up on events at their own pace, and be reminded of and see events they haven’t processed.

Reference

Half-jokes aside though, I think what we want here is a reminder, i.e. a todo with a timed alert. Beeps can be missed and timers can be stopped (e.g. when you’re occupied), so they aren’t the most fool-proof solution here. Reminders will at least sit in the notifications list until dismissed.

Kinda don’t like how my handwavy idea is just taken for the most naive turn. I’m not even trying to give precise solutions. I’ve never worked with software at scale, and I expect the playing ground to be pretty different, but I think you’re exaggerating.

1. Storing all 18 years worth of data in all its iterations is ridiculous in the first place, and should never cross the mind of any dev worth their salt for more than a mere nanosecond. Cut off all that data down to to 3 years, 1 year, or even just a few months, and that’s probably all Reddit needs for backup and analytics. Have separate strategies for backup and analytics if needed. They’ve been doing ads and analytics stuff for a while now, so I expect them to have some architecture in place for that.
2. Dealing with deleted comments is easy — just unmark them for deletion (hard delete is generally not a thing). It’s most probably not in a backup. It’s just not a user accessible feature to unmark deletion. Even if they do get deleted eventually, what’s the time frame for a cleanup like? Every day? A few months? They still need an entry for that comment for the threads feature to work, so at best, they null the content of the comment out.
3. ChatGPT is just an example. No need to beat a bad example to death and use that as an argument against a whole argument. And I’m pretty sure you’ve not read the rest of the last comment.
4. I think you’re over-estimating how much of an impact the API pricing fiasco had, and once again, you don’t seem to have read my previous comment and acknowledged that. Nobody in their right mind is going to do this comment read and scan for every single Reddit user. Not manually for sanity. Not programmatically for cost. It’s why they need some way(s) to identify which users to watch out for. They’re not going to do that manually though, right? That would be costly too, from a manpower’s perspective, and human labor is expensive, and scales much worse than programs.
5. Common sense would ask that if all they did is to restore their database to a certain state, how do they deal with new comments and changes that were added between the PiTR and whenever they make the restore? Are they just gone now? Isn’t that bad, cause they’re potentially losing new, quality content?

Look buddy, all I want to say is that I don’t think your method against Reddit would work. It’s basically gamble though, so I’m definitely not against attempt at it. I just want to point out the possibility of it not working. I don’t think there are surefire ways against their attempt at restoring content.

It’s hard to say that without knowing what their infrastructure’s like, even if we think it’s expensive. And if they built their stack with OLAP being an important part of it, I don’t see why they wouldn’t have our comment edit histories stored somewhere that’s not a backup, and maybe they just toss dated database partitions into some cheap cold storage that allows for occasional, slow reads. They’re not gonna make a backup of their entire fleet of databases for every change that happens. That would be literally insane.

Also, tracking individual edit and delete rates over time isn’t expensive at all, especially if they just keep an incremental day-by-day, maybe more or less frequent, change over time. Or, just slap a counter for edits and deletes in a cache, reset that every day, and if either one goes higher than some threshold, look into it. There are probably many ways to achieve something similar in a cheap way.

And ChatGPT is just an example. I’m sure there already are other out-of-fashion-but-totally-usable language models or heuristics that are cheap to run and easy to use. Anything that can give a decent amount of confidence is probably good enough.

At the end of the day, the actual impact of their business from the API fiasco is just on a subset of power users and tech enthusiasts, which is vanishingly small. I know many that still use Reddit, some begrudgingly, despite knowing the news pretty well. Why? Cause the contents are already there. Restoring valuable content is important for Reddit, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t want to sink some money into ensuring that they keep what makes em future money. It’s basically an investment. There are some risks, but the chances to earn em back with returns on top of the cost is high.

You misunderstood my comment. Reddit probably has every version of your edits, so all they need to do is to put all your past comments through ChatGPT or something, by time in descending order. The first sensible one gets accepted. In some sense, that’s just like how a person would do it. This way, they don’t have to deal with individual approaches to obfuscating or messing with their data.

I was gonna just wait till this whole fiasco dies down, let it sit for a couple of months to a year, before going ahead and slowly remove my comments over time. It’s easy to build triggers for individual users to detect attempts at mass edit or mass deletion of comments after all, which may trigger some process in their systems. Doing it the low profile way is likely the best way to go.

Not too hard to defeat this solution though: put your comments through something like ChatGPT and if it can understand what you wrote, it’s probably good enough for em to restore it.

Maybe the answer is to write some nonsensical answer that’s understood by human readers as utter nonsense, but still recognized by LLMs as a “good comment”.

Just like my luck IRL! :’)

Information is power. Telecommunication have changed the landscape of business, warfare, and how we live. It allows us to make “better” decisions for what we set out to do. Whoever holds more information, and has the chops to analyze it, controls the board. The closer that information is to individual people, the sharper it is as a weapon.

Having power too concentrated in one place or a few has led to disastrous consequences in human history. Privacy is simply a way to hold that power back, so that the most sensitive information are kept away from unknown hands.

Privacy also allows us to be ourselves, in the sense that we have different fronts of ourselves. We have sides we don’t necessarily want to show to our parents, but we show it to our friends or spouse. Not everyone has the best of relationships with everyone around them, and so there are sides we don’t want everyone to know, lest they get used as a weapon against us, either for others to exploit, or hold us ransom. If you’d like an example, imagine having an overly possessive religious parent, and you’re an atheist, but you don’t want to confront your parent because you’d like to avoid trouble. When thought in that way, privacy is a right that humans should have, and it is each person’s right to release what information they have about themselves to whoever they wish.

Not sure why artists are brought up here but I guess that’s one of the highly affected groups.

Just to talk about that particular consequence, however, I don’t agree with your take. There are AI trained on works of specific artists, and the end result is that the AI is really good at producing work that’s similar to that artist’s work, effectively creating an alternative to that artist, even if it’s of slightly lesser quality and a lack of depth of the original. While this would likely not affect the artist in the short term, in the long term, new prospects who don’t yet know the artist well enough would likely be unable to tell the difference in quality, and may even go straight to the AI model since that’s distributed cheaply or even free. It may also negatively reflect on the original artist to people who don’t know the artist, as the works from the AI would likely be more abundant, and people not in the know may think that the original artist was in fact just producing their works through AI. It is highly discouraging for artists who have worked hard to hone their craft, only to have people think that their works have little difference or even a mimicry (don’t underestimate misinformation).

There has been many instances where such training was done without the knowledge of the artist. Imagine just waking up one day, and finding that there’s someone or something that can very closely reproduce your works, one’s you’ve taken many years of practice to produce, of which its quality is almost unique to yourself. There’s a blatant lack of respect for the hard work that people put into their craft, one that seemingly belittles their blood and tears, and could even be a mockery of their existence. Some artists don’t have other jobs; their art and craft is their job, and some may have even sacrificed learning the skills needed for other jobs to pursue their passion.

Saying that AI is not intended to replace artists, but to improve accessibility, is like saying ATMs weren’t meant to replace bank tellers. True, there’s much less skill required for bank tellers, and getting cash out of banks is an important process that should be swift with almost no errors, so replacing bank tellers with ATMs is a general good, except for the bank tellers, which then banks can retrain them for other jobs. Since then, the job has virtually gone extinct, and almost nobody would want to become a bank teller, and if anyone would like to, they would need to perform better than ATMs. Artists require great skills and creativity, many of which are not easily trained or obtained. Seeing an automated system produce works that are acceptable by most people would either greatly discourage new artists or perhaps even entirely remove the idea of becoming an artist for most people. It raises the barrier to becoming an artist: not only do you need to stand out, you also need to be good enough such that people can’t just train an AI model on your work to produce results that are highly indistinguishable from yours. How many more years do people need to train to be that good? For those with a job but wish to become an artist, abandoning their job to focus on their craft will likely become a much more difficult choice to make. Also, I don’t doubt this would further rise the prices of commissions due to how much work artists would have to put in, and this would only get worse at a rate that’s much faster than a scenario without AI.

So a line should be drawn somewhere. AI trained on public works or artist-approved works are definitely okay. All other options will likely need further discussion and scrutiny. We’re talking about the possibility of ruining an already perilous career path, whose works are coveted.

And so you end up driving up food and housing demand, with no guarantee that the revived population can provide to the supply side. :P