100days

These posts are a part of #100DaysToOffload. You can directly check out other participating blogs or take part yourself.

May 27, 2020. How to not consent to cookies tags: satire, 100days
You know, I really appreciate the innovative feel of all those “This page uses cookies” banners, all featuring a huge button “Understood” or “Agree”. I marvel at my wealth of user choice when I see the lack of a “Disagree” button.

I don’t want to burden these wonderful sites, you know? Clicking that Agree button fires quite a lot of tracking requests to… whatever hundred trackers that were birthed into existence this week. And isn’t that a huge load on the network?

Not to mention that by having cookies, I’m basically forcing the site to cross-reference and identify me for ad targeting purposes, which must be an utterly exhausting task for some database server somewhere. Ever open a phone book?

I bet it would be good for “User Retention” too, if 40% of my very limited screen space wasn’t blocked by a banner. I’ve learned a thing or two in my web design courses, and I think blocking half the screen for people who don’t hit Agree counts is not good UX or something. Isn’t good UX something sites care about?

Gosh, it would be such a good thing to do for the web if we could just have Disagree buttons on these cookie banners.

The real Disagree button was the friends we made along the way

One day a tech code programmer friend linked me to the Kill Sticky Headers bookmarklet by Alisdair McDiarmid. A bookmarklet is like a bookmark on your browser, except clicking it runs code or opens some data URI rather than taking you to a bookmarked website. This bookmarklet basically runs this code:
```
[...document.querySelectorAll("body *")]
  .filter(elem => getComputedStyle(elem).position.match(/fixed|sticky/))
  .forEach(elem => elem.parentNode.removeChild(elem));
```
meaning “outright delete every element that’s displayed with position: fixed or position: sticky”.

Apparently this includes
- banners that follow you as you scroll down
- sidebars that follow you as you scroll down
- social media sharing buttons that follow you as you scroll down
- a lot of modals, like “Subscribe to my newsletter today” popups
- cookie consent banners that follow you as you scroll down
outright delete… cookie consent banners…

Ah, so the Disagree button was in the bookmarks bar all along!

I’m an emacs user at heart

Jokes aside, the above is a perfectly workable solution for disagreeing with cookie banners. You get your screen space without having to click Agree and triggering some JavaScript that does who-knows-what.

It’s actually not what I use today, because I no longer use a bookmarks bar. Nowadays I use TamperMonkey to bind ctrlalts (s for sticky) to run that code above:
```
window.addEventListener("load", ()=>{
  window.addEventListener("keydown", e=>{
    if (e.ctrlKey && e.altKey && e.keyCode == 83) 
      [...document.querySelectorAll("body *")]
        .filter(elem => getComputedStyle(elem).position.match(/fixed|sticky/))
        .forEach(elem => elem.parentNode.removeChild(elem));
  });
});
```
and it became second nature to tap ctrlalts to clear up some screen real estate.

This is my Disagree button. This is how to not consent to cookies. Think of the network load you’re saving, and the phone book cookie database servers you’re liberating, and that precious “site quality” you’re optimizing. Save the web, folks.

sidenote: The only reason I don’t have this run by default is because it sometimes hides useful things. Like site navigation bars, or various floaty hamburger menus. Some sites use sticky elements to great effect. (example)

Now if you were really cool, you could extend ctrlalts to add the current domain to some blacklist, and delete sticky by default for that blacklist. Because really cool programmers spend some fraction of their time doing instead of reading blog posts all day. If only I was a really cool programmer…

I’m writing this as part of #100DaysToOffload. You can directly check out other participating blogs or take part yourself.
tagged: satire, 100days How to not consent to cookies (permalink) (tweet)

May 24, 2020. Why even own a Raspberry Pi? tags: linux, 100days

When I first got my Raspberry Pi, I was convinced it’ll be my personal smart home device. I was thinking of all the neat projects I’d do with the hardware bits. You know, the GPIO pins and the USB ports. Not to mention the onboard wifi card, which would save me from having unsightly wires taped around my apartment.

It’d be just like an Arduino but also Linux.

Software is the worst

Arduino is really easy because everything’s set up for you. You don’t need to worry about versions or support because you’re pretty sure that your Arduino supports Arduino code.

Not so with Raspberry Pi and Linux distros. As soon as you’re worrying about a Linux machine, you have a million moving parts that all depend on each other.

To get to the point, I spent weeks trying to figure out how to interface with the GPIO pins. There are a handful of GPIO python libraries. I think I tried a C library as well. None of them worked. I’m pretty sure it was a firmware problem, or something involving kernel extensions.

At that point, I gave up trying.

Having a personal Linux server is pretty great

So instead of a smart home toy, my personal Pi is just a general-purpose Linux server. I have a Syncthing relay running on it, as well as various game servers. It’s also a music library (which plays via Bluetooth) and a general-purpose database server. At some point it was running a Discord bot and a Phoenix site. If I wanted to, I could run a Pi-hole, or seed torrents, or do whatever you people do with a general-purpose headless Linux box.

Most importantly, it’s a nice playground for various Linux toying and misdeeds. A lot of my often-used commands.md notes were a direct result of Pi hacking.

It’s pretty great, even if only because I don’t need to rent any more Amazon EC2 boxes (for whenever I need a 24/7 Linux box).

Is it worth it?

No. Yes. My expectations for the Raspberry Pi weren’t exactly met, but I’ve gotten enough use and learning out of it to justify the $35 price tag.

I’m writing this as part of #100DaysToOffload. You can directly check out other participating blogs or take part yourself.
tagged: linux, 100days Why even own a Raspberry Pi? (permalink) (tweet)

May 20, 2020. Karma-agnosticism tags: 100days
Why do you post anything online?

To add your perspective? To tell someone they’re wrong? To meme?

To make someone happy?

To make yourself happy?

To gain karma?

Let’s talk about the last one.

Karma as motivator

I’ve always been iffy about this whole karma thing on link aggregator sites. (Reddit, Hacker News, lobste.rs)

The only personal value I’ve seen in it is feedback. Not good feedback, obviously, but probably enough feedback to judge how many eyeballs liked what they saw in your words.

But for me, karma became a motivator for posting itself – “I want to post in order to increase my internet points,” and I found myself optimizing for popularity. What better way to do that, than to present a divisive opinion, or dive into the nuances, and point out why OP is wrong! All so more people can say “ah yes very good point, OP is wrong!”. No, this doesn’t promote interesting discussion.

Just delete karma

Since I don’t really use karma as positive feedback, I decided to opt out, which meant removing all traces of karma from my perception. Sometime in January I wrote some CSS to remove all instances of popularity counts on Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters.

The result was pretty disarming at first.

As a result, I’ve spent a good while now being blissfully ignorant of the existence of karma counts. My findings so far:
- When someone is wrong on the internet, it makes more sense to DM them, rather than go the harmful route and call them out in a comment reply to get internet points. I admit to doing this in the past. Most people would appreciate a DM over having to publicly defend themselves, anyways.
- It is much easier to ask questions, since you won’t care about inevitably being downvoted by the big brains. You know, the people who can’t believe you don’t know (thing), just because public disbelief gets you internet points.
- Unpopular opinions (not the “unpopular opinions” that are actually popular) are easier to write.
- There’s a lot more motivation to praise the post or praise other comments or pose innocent, non-divisive opinions.
Life without karma

I don’t know if I am in general nicer on the internet from this, but it couldn’t have hurt.

When I read comments I’m looking for opinions to praise rather than opinions to take apart.

I’ll ask where the misconceptions come from rather than immediately pointing out the wrong things in a post and getting more internet points via people agreeing.

Posting is less about getting internet points by making provoking conversation points. It’s more about being understanding of how my posts impact the people I respond to.

This extends to more than just karma, but I’m going to call this “karma-agnosticism”.
```
"Think of calliagnosia as a kind of assisted maturity.
 It lets you do what you should: ignore the surface,
 so you can look deeper."

    - from the short story "Liking What You See", by Ted Chiang
```
I’m writing this as part of #100DaysToOffload. You can directly check out other participating blogs or take part yourself.
tagged: 100days Karma-agnosticism (permalink) (tweet)

May 19, 2020. Dear ad networks tags: rant, 100days

Dear ad networks,

Please, stop recommending me a hundred brands of lactase.
No, I’m not worried about qualifying for a mortgage,
and no, I don’t want more colorful, soul-sucking mobile games.
I’m not interested in things I’ve already got.
It’s almost like you’re training your network on the past.

Have you heard of newsletter ads?
Well, I subscribe to some newsletters
solely for their curated ads.
Like ads for apps I may find useful.
Ads for books I might enjoy reading.
They introduce me to things I haven’t already got.
You could say they explore the world around my interests.
That’s the one thing training on the past can’t do.

Cheers,

Marv

I’m writing this as part of #100DaysToOffload. You can directly check out other participating blogs or take part yourself.
tagged: rant, 100days Dear ad networks (permalink) (tweet)

100days

The real Disagree button was the friends we made along the way

I’m an emacs user at heart

Software is the worst

Having a personal Linux server is pretty great

Is it worth it?

Karma as motivator

Just delete karma

Life without karma