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Wrote a parser to extract image metadata once, and got massively frustrated with the amount of undocumented, semi-documented, wrongly documented, or partially documented attributes. You’ll find references online, but most of them lack half of what you encounter in images. Every image processing app under the sun adds its own range. Some use metric values, some imperial; finding out which can be guesswork. Aperture is given in f-stops, decimals, or literal fraction strings. Some attributes hold sentinel values. Some vendors have custom conventions for undefined data.

It’s a jungle out there.


Sounds like a worse version of non-standard (X-*) HTTP headers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

Happens a lot when standard is not specific enough.


I work on the receiving end of media processing nowadays, and the overlap of variety in formats, codecs, and configurations is frustrating. No two encoders work the same way, and they often "innovate" in fun and varied ways that almost feel like renewed attempts to make decoders crash.

My hell was trying too make sense or and organise audio/music ID3 tags. What a nightmare that is. EXIF seems much nicer to me.

that sounds endlessly frustrating

I wouldn't bet my money that Israel won't be, eventually. The public opinion is turning against them right now.

You need to draw red lines somewhere. If you wage attack wars on other countries or reject our shared values, you can't be part of Western society or enjoy its amenities. Don't do that, and you can. It's that simple.

You mean randomly attacking countries like Venezuela or Iran?

Honestly, I don't really consider the USA a western nation anymore in the sense that European nations are.

This is categorically wrong, but even then - those that do not vote at all bear even more responsibility, and are traitors to democracy itself. By not participating in shaping it, you're dishonouring everyone that fought and died for your freedom.

> which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens

err... you guys voted for the administration that fucks over the rest of the world. Twice. So tell me, why would you expect the rest of humanity to show any kindness to the populace entirely responsible for what is happening right now?


You do know not all of us voted for him, not even a majority. You could argue the non-voters allowed this outcome. Should we discard the whole democracy thing because we don't like a result?

I lament that there wasn't a stronger candidate running against him, but the Democrats didn't have a primary, and even if they did, I'm an independent and do not vote in primaries ( this has changed in Colorado thankfully). A different, stronger candidate could have likely beaten Trump


Democracy means that you bear collective responsibility for the government you voted for, regardless of the choices of the individual.

I disagree and don’t see where you get that from. Why would that be the case?

History has shown over and over that that strategy is doomed to fail - see communism, nuclear energy, or meddling with the Middle East for some arbitrary recent examples.

Seems a little slippery-slopey to me

The only way to fix things would be proportional representation and moving away from the two party system.

On the one hand giving parties more power sounds a little gross.

On the other hand I don't know a solve for every bill having less than a handful of votes that are bipartisan...


3 or 5 member multi-member voting districts determined by a geographic clustering algorithm using approval voting.

There's a fair bit of frequency illusion involved here. A lot of brilliant human minds aren't, in fact, working on ad tech, and a lot of the people working on ad tech aren't, in fact, that brilliant (as evidenced by them working adversarially against their own fellow humans, for one).

There's a wide world outside big tech, Silicon Valley, and software in general. It only tends to be a bit less visible online.


That seems to be more of an emergent phenomenon than conscious design decision to me to be honest - never assume malice when stupidity will suffice and all that.

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