ronbenton

>The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less …

Couldn’t have happened to a meaner community

Trump pardoned a drug kingpin exactly one month ago. Of course this isn't about drugs.

Determining the goodness of a blatantly illegal action by its ultimate success is a very Machiavellian view. Why have laws if all that matters is the final result?

Marketed as "for doing" and not "for doomscrolling" but if it can host any Android app then what's really the distinction? Seems like at the end of the day it's a discipl…

RSS is my preferred way to consume blog posts. I also find blogs that have an RSS feed to be more interested in actually writing interesting content rather than just trying to get views/advertise…

I still feel RSS was the pinnacle. Of course it’s a personal preference, but I much prefer letting people pull my content than pushing it onto them.

Not a coincidence if you saw the recent monty hall problem post here (maybe a couple days ago). That gave me an itch to code up a side-by-side simulation with some controls to watch the results conver…

A good saying I heard recently is that the first amendment doesn’t exist to protect the speech you like, it exists to protect the speech you hate.

That’s a good call out, I should be more careful with my words. Practically, I haven’t seen age verification implemented online without some kind of identify credential furnished. But I didn’t mean to…

This identity verification business for porn sites is a nightmare for privacy. Will just result in more personal info being hacked and blackmail given the subject matter.

>You can buy a bigger and bigger house car tv stereo whatever, but it will not make you happy. Well that seems like an assumption! Plenty of people are happier with nicer things. I don't think…

At my first job using Grafana right now. Really enjoying it! I found it to be a steep learning curve having been used to all the plug-and-play SaaS products. But you get such great power out of Grafan…

anything on digital.gov is at best on life support given 18F was disbanded and much of the government digital service efforts have been neglected

This article focuses a lot on runtime computation of css-in-js but much of css-in-js today is compiled (no runtime computation). Ignoring that fact feels disingenuous. There are still arguments to be …

Yeah, this is bad. The page almost seems like someone’s pet project that didn’t have any explicit funding and they got bored or left Netflix in 2020. I’m not sure how that would explain the lack of SS…

Thank you for your perspective. May I ask why you don’t still teach? I have always been fascinated by the idea of being a professor but never had the dedication to get a phd

One thing I am quite hopeful for is customizable selects! It's in WHATWG stage 3 right now. I have seen so many horrors with javascript-based custom dropdowns components. https://devel…

how do you see that something is downvoted? I don't see points on any comments but my own

I don't doubt it. It is quite a while ago so I don't fully recall the talk that my professor gave, but I don't believe he intended to mean adding lanes was useless, just that they didn&…

I think perhaps my professor was talking about adding tolls explicitly as a traffic congestion relief mechanism rather than a way to recoup cost of maintaining the roadway

I took a transportation engineering class a while back and one bit of knowledge that stuck with me is tolls are the only effective traffic relief mechanisms for a roadway. Other mechanisms like adding…

I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.

Anecdata—as one of the oldest millennials, I have seen a very steep drop off in social network usage amongst my peers. Too much IRL family stuff.