> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
Machine transcriptions are obviously better than they used to be. But requiring perfect human transcriptions in this day and age would IMO be unreasonable for most purposes.
Certainly machine transcriptions are used these days for purposes that most intelligent people would judge to be perfectly reasonable.
This was free content. The end result is that the content was made inaccessible to everyone, adding zero benefit to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
People really believe this. And also if you mention other disabilities that affect a similar ratio to the one they care about, ie 0.16% of people, they'll say it's too expensive and doesn't affect enough people. Like what if I want this content to be consumable by people who have such heavy learning disabilities that the whole content would need to be 20x as long and explained much more step by step?
They were uploading these for free. The end result of the videos being taken down is that they are now even more inaccessible to that 4% than they were before.
Making things more accessible is a worthy goal, but the world is imperfect and making things better requires resources.
This is exactly why we can't have nice things in this brand new world... there's always a guardian of ethics, of what's right and what's supposed to be done so as not to upset absolutely anyone...
You're missing important context, which is that they were required by (federal) law to provide said accommodation, and they failed to do it (some would say they chose not to do it). It was easier (cheaper) to pull the plug.
Don't blame the litigant. If you don't like it, change federal law.
They got sued for not having subtitles… no thanks. I think I’ll blame the chucklefucks that thought, “Oh an opportunity for a quick buck” and resulted in everyone losing a valuable resource.
It's not about money it's about making sure things are accessible. The ADA is one of the reasons America is more accessible then Europe. Lawsuits are the enforcement mechanism
For context: I have cerebral palsy. Play the smallest fiddle for me, it only affects my left hand and slightly my left foot. But I’ve been a part time fitness instructor, properly conditioned I have run decently (10 minute mile) up to a 15K before my slight favoring of my right leg takes it’s toll and I’ve been a gym rat since 1990 and I just left the gym.
But I would never expect someone giving out a free service to spend extra money to make accommodations for me.
Many interest groups in the US are for hire. Meaning, if you don't like a piece of upcoming legislation, you can give them a donation and they'll find out a way the upcoming legislation hurts their demographic. These groups have overwhelmingly passive members, who don't run the organization in any meaningful way.
There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.
It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).
> It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It's a convenient narrative. Here's another one: Senior administrator at the university doesn't like the project. It costs money to provide as it is, and money is always tight at a public university. They should be more focused on income generating patents (which, BTW, UC Berkeley is/was good at). And now they want us to spend even more money? Let's kill the project.
I spent a long time at universities, and I also worked for 1.5 years in the university's disability division, so I somewhat know the needs of the disabled. Part of that division's role was "policing" professors' course pages (albeit only when a student complained), so I'm familiar with the territory. Our position was clear: It's the law.
I also know how university administrator's think - they rarely like initiatives meant for the public good for free.
Finally: How much money did they make suing UC Berkeley? Did anyone (other than the lawyers) make money out of it? Why are people so certain this was a money grabbing lawsuit?
Your argument is that someone sued Berkeley for posting free education materials online purely in the name of accessibility and not to make a quick buck?
Free education provided at zero profit to Berkeley, to great benefit to the public, and it was just the wholesome desire for subtitles that made the case?
Yeah, and without subtitles, the course content is not accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing... which the law says it has to be. UC Berkeley decided not to make their content accessible, and when someone complained, they took it all apart rather than making a reasonable (and legally required) accommodation. I guess I don't see why I'd blame the person filing the lawsuit here. UC Berkeley could have just... put up subtitles.
It had subtitles. The demand was better subtitles, and the project had barely any budget.
While I think fixing it or even having a fundraiser would have been a much better response, I do put a good share of blame on the person that filed the lawsuit against a free side project.
The person could have volunteered to write the subtitles themselves or, if they were deaf, to hire someone or even ask someone to volunteer to write subtitles. Or any other number of solutions.
To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.
Yes but it's stupid to force them to do it. If the state wants to demand this the state can pay for it. To hide free knowledge just because of a few specific pet disabilities... The content is also not accessible to someone with serious enough learning disabilities for example. Should they be forced to create an accessible version of that?
You realize it would cost a significant resources to make the “accommodations” you are suggesting? Money, despite what you may believe, doesn’t grow on trees. Given the range of worthy competing interests where the money could be spent, the university likely had no practical choice but to take it offline, lest it face the bad press and wrath of Progressives.
You remind me of people who insist every single new apartment must be ADA compliant instead of a reasonable percentage throughout the city. Another example is banning SROs on the grounds they are “inhumane”. The moral purity results in less housing and forcing people to live in the cars or on the street.
Our society is better when the things that are available are available to everyone, not just the privileged. I don't see why accommodations for the disabled are considered some unnecessary burden; they should be considered a cost of doing business, for everyone who does business.
This wasn't business. There were no profits to divert into making better subtitles.
And the ratio of effort between making a recording versus making a recording and then manually subtitling it is completely out of whack compared to the ratio you have in full produced works. There's a reasonable level of accommodation, and the reasonable level is below a doubling in costs.
I'm someone that would significantly raise the subtitling requirements on youtube if I could. But in this case I just don't feel it.
What's wrong with it? Squads look like regular small teams. Tribes look like several teams working on the same product and having to coordinate their work. Each team has specialists, who like to hang out together and talk shop, forming different "chapters". The number of product owners and agile coaches might be excessive :-) But other than that, what's so bad about it?
What was the "dead giveaway" referred to in the pasted tweet? Was it the dash, that people assume for some reason regular folks never use? Or was it something more interesting?
Has anyone noticed that the response for the blog page has a header: "x-robots-tag: noindex, nofollow"? What's the purpose of this header on a content page?
UPD: Sorry, never mind, I inspected a wrong response.
What does this mean? I suppose it can't literally mean equal opportunity, because people aren't equal, and their circumstances aren't equal; but then, what does this mean?
A clear definition is definitively hard to come by, but I will share what I see as rather large issues that impact society: minimal spending per children for education to allow a good service for most (this will imply that smart kids are selected and become productive as opposed to drop out because they had nobody to learn from); reasonable health availability for children such that they can develop rather than being sick; sufficient food for children to support the first two (can't learn or be healthy if you are hungry).
Currently I know in many countries multiple measures/rules/policies that affect these 3 things in ways that I find damaging for the society overall on the long term. Companies complain they don't have work forces, governments complain the natality is low but there are many issues with raising a child. Financial incentives to parents do not seem to work (for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612)
No. I did want to pick something facebook inspired though. I like fate because:
* facebook’s original developer conference was f8
* It kinda works well for fulfilling (data) requests
* It’s similar to face
* It’s short and memorable
It's RPC. Remote procedure calls. An approach that has made a comeback in the front-end space recently. There was tRPC; then react made a splash with the release of its server components; then other frameworks started emulating the approach. I think Svelte now has something similar with its "remote functions". And Solid has been working on something similar; so that SolidStart now has a "use server" pragma. They probably don't replicate React's protocol; but the idea of calling functions on the server is similar.
> An approach that has made a comeback in the front-end space recently.
It wasn’t really a “comeback,” RPC never lost popularity. We just called them “REST” APIs that were a barely disguised adhoc JSON RPC format with a few CRUD verbs tacked on for routing requests.
You aren’t wrong. I basically stopped using any OSS code backed by Google as a result.
I’d pushed Angular over React[0] for a massive project, and it worked well, but the migration to Angular 2 when it came created a huge amount of non-value-adding work.
Never again.
I don’t even really want to build anything against Gemini, despite how good it is, because I don’t trust Google not to do another rug pull.
[0] I’ve never enjoyed JSX/TSX syntax, nor appreciated the mix of markup with code, but I’ve subsequently learned to live with it.
No one forced you to migrate immediately. (Also, non-value-adding work? You don't think the rewrite to TS did not bring any value? And thanks to that rewrite that app can be upgraded even today to Angular v21. And likely it'll be the case for many years.)
React also went through a lot of churn. (Still does.) There's no magic optimal duration for keeping API stability. Not in general and not for specific projects.
Ecosystems sometimes undergo a phase-shift. Sometimes they take a long time, based on the size. Python 3 was released in 2008, just a year before Angular 1. And the last Py2 release was in 2020, about 2-3 years before the last AngularJS version. (And of course there are many businesses running on py2 still. I know at least one.) These things take plenty of time.
Angular1 was pretty opinionated, willing to break with the tradition of just add one more jQuery plugin.
Miško was working at Google, he persuaded some people to take a look at the framework that he and Adam Abrons were tinkering with.
Angular 2 was announced in 2014 January. And then v1 still got years of support, even the component architecture was "backported" around 1.5 (in 2016?)
You can run old v1 code side-by-side in a v2+ app up until v17. (At least the v17 docs describe the process in full and later docs link to this page. https://v17.angular.io/guide/upgrade )
...
Google did a pretty good job IMHO. Google throws products under the bus, but not so much OSS projects. (Though the sate of AOSP comes to mind.)
> Google throws products under the bus, but not so much OSS projects.
It abandoned the Material Design web components project, which, I think, attracted some Polymer people.
Speaking of Polymer, it has evolved into Lit; but I understand there is no more support for that project from Google. Lit has joined the OpenJS foundation to stay afloat. The Googlers that used to work on Lit, and on Material Design web components have mostly left.
Also, remember the Workbox project? A simple setup for service workers? It's barely alive.
The angular material design library is so much better than the react one. And it is supported by google. The material CDK is amazing to create custom components easily
I think JS is still overall more popular than TS, but if your team forces TS then yeah. It's like Java devs reluctantly switched to JS and were like, this needs more boilerplate.
Yeah, I spent years in Java and then even longer in .NET and it felt like everything I was getting a bit fed up of in those worlds had invaded JS. 20 years ago I could never have imagined defending JS as a language but, as time wore on, I started to appreciate its more stripped back syntax. And then a lot of what’s been added in later ES standards has been great so it seems even more unnecessary to layer TS on top.
It took me a while to appreciate JS too. Thought it was just the beginner language until I used it. Also had to learn the hard way that a web backend is hard to do efficiently without an event loop.
It was one hell of a ride, but I would say the Angular team did one hell of a job too, supporting the glue code until v18 (not sure if the latest version still does).
Having both old and new Angular running in one project is super weird, but everything worked out in the end.
Well, the official statement is that 1 and 2 are 2 different frameworks. That’s why they were later named to angular JS and angular, to avoid confusion.
The migration path between angular 1 and 2 is the same as react and angular, it’s just glue holding 2 frameworks together
Easy migration was promised but never delivered. Angular 2 was still full of boilerplate. “Migrating” an AngularJS project to Angular 2 is as much work as porting it to React or anything else.
So yes, people got burnt (when we were told that there will be a migration path), and I will never rely on another Google-backed UI framework.
For people with social or performance anxiety, it could be just the opposite. In fact, I'll wager that some people diving into an extensive study of leetcode problems are doing it to procrastinate attending actual technical interviews. ("I'm not quite ready yet, gotta make sure I don't blow any interviews.")
That's been me before. If you're wondering why people ghost at the technical when they seemed like great candidates: sometimes, at least, they like engineering because it's a discipline where they can get things "right" within some defined band / acceptable tolerance. In interview context, where there's somebody watching and judging, the degree of tolerance is unknown, and you know you won't be given time to choose the most correct approach regardless, and that solving the technical problem is just an indirect proxy for solving the "is this person a good social fit" problem (because you know you have the technical ability), all acts as anti-motivator for practicing for leetcode style interviews.
Its easier to say "I just didn't study and that's why I didn't get the job" than it is to say "even though I spent a bunch of time optimizing for this interview scenario and know I absolutely aced the technical interview, they still didn't like me."
Heck, I've been in interviews where I found the technical aspect a relatively easy bar to pass, and I blurted out something strange just to sabotage myself. If they can look past that and still see that I know what I'm doing and bring a lot to the table, I know they are people that I can do my best work with without needing to be constantly second guessing myself in conversation.
Some companies seem to forget that interviews go both ways, and that job candidates are screening for something different than what companies are screening for.
The fear of failure also comes from the concept of "cool-off". I recently failed a coding challenge in Zoox only to find out after the rejection that the cool-off period is 2 years!!
I would have never applied to Zoox had I known up-front that I'd have to wait for so long to interview with them again.
> - The homepage right now is extremely lightweight and uses next to no javascript. The new design just looks like the same generic Starlight template
I'm not sure we want to use a javascript framework. While it provides a lot of features, bitrot in the javascript ecosystem happens at a very fast pace (and pulls in thousands of dependencies). I have sites written both in gatsby and vuepress and between major version breaking changes and deprecations as frameworks cycle, it's a ton of work to keep up (e.g. vuepress -> vitepress/vuepress v2). Even mdbook upgrades have been a pain since we need to merge down theme updates. I'd prefer to see something simple, e.g. (https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/). What do we do in five years when Starlight is deprecated by another framework, and Astro is several major releases ahead, with breaking changes?
This is a very valid point, and a mark of a mature developer who has been bitten by frontend churn, and wants something stable, simple, reliable, and predictable.
Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
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