I'd bet it's because the filtering vendor (Allot) sells a simple interface to the customer (Vodafone) that mostly consists of allowlist/blocklist entries manually added by support agents when someone complains.
There's probably a policy to dictate what content should be filtered, but in practice: a ticket is filed to block a site, someone looks at the ticket, in all likelihood it is added to the blocklist, and then probably ends up there forever until complaints are raised.
You could be correct that the presence of multiple x's in the URL makes it more likely for support agents to think "yep, this is probably sketchy, there's no harm adding it to the blocklist" - I doubt it's the original reason though.
Yes they are built different: one person has no struggles writing and actively loves it, cannot stop doing it; the other finds it effortful and painful. Those two people will have vastly different experiences writing the book. The former will gain energy and feel great, the latter will feel pressured and depressed. We are not all the same, we are all built different, don’t ignore this reality
> Yes they are built different: one person has no struggles writing and actively loves it, cannot stop doing it; the other finds it effortful and painful.
GP probably worded it poorly; yes, we're all built different, but all the successful authors who spoke about their experience all expressed similar struggles.
Terry Pratchett said once (can't be bothered to look for the exact quote) that he literally had to force himself to sit in front of the keyboard for a minimum time each night and type anything, just to get the groove started.
Stephen King said a similar thing in Danse Macabre.
When it comes to achieving something[1], you need to "not break the chain". You need to force yourself to start on it each day. After maybe 30m of doing it you'll get into the groove and continue with less effort for the day.
[1] The actual "Something" is not important.
Spend 30m each day practising guitar and eventually you'll be good enough to be in a band.
Mark off a time slot on your calendar every day to spend working on your side-project, and ensure that you have nothing booked after that time-slot, and eventually you'll release your product.
Force yourself to start typing into your book-in-progress for not less than[2] 30m after dinner every single day and I assure you, you will have a completed book in two years.
[2] My experience is that if I force myself to spend not less than 30m on something, by the time the 30m expires, I get into the groove and can run in that rut all day if necessary.
Getting into that groove is the hard part, and is probably why work productivity for most devs is about 10% less than side-project productivity - at work you are constantly yanked out of the rut.
> all the successful authors who spoke about their experience all expressed similar struggles.
Definitely not true.
Some people really don’t have those sorts of struggles.
It doesn’t mean that those who do need to push themselves shouldn’t write/paint/code/swim/whatever, or that the results of their effort are of any lesser quality, or that they’re not in highly esteemed company.
It just means that people have different processes and motivations and drives, and that there are many paths that lead to comparable accomplishment.
To say otherwise isn’t entirely the encouragement I think you’re trying to offer. It’s denying the reality of other people’s lived experience.
Indeed, there are even several examples discussed elsewhere on this page already!
Some successful authors have shared their struggles with motivation and perseverance, and others have shared their lack of such.
For some people, writing is a refuge from the stresses of the world, for others it’s a compulsion, for others it’s a surge of inspiration that moves through them now and then, etc
This variety of process is common to all traditionally creative endeavors, and even things like athletics or coding. There’s no shortage of “successful” people sharing their experience of such.
I can’t know, but you may be blinding yourself through some kind of confirmation bias.
As a spare-time writer of (self-published) German science fiction novels[1], I believe I have something to say about that. I don't believe that what you say is true in general.
For me writing is effortless and a lot of fun, and I believe that it is effortless for most writers who are far more successful than me. Stephen King could have never written so much so persistently without thoroughly enjoying it. If you don't enjoy writing and have to continually force yourself to do it, then writing might not be the right thing for you. I believe this is true for any work you do - if you have to force yourself every morning to do it, then you haven't found the right profession yet.
That being said, the examples you give sound familiar and don't contradict what I say. Especially in larger projects, there will always be a point when it becomes a chore and it's becoming very hard to finish a book. It's reasonable to assume that every author has such moments. I remember J.K. Rowling once said she had this moment with the 5th Harry Potter novel - which is very understandable, writing so many novels within the same universe is dreadful and tiring. But, again, the same is probably true of almost any other activity. There is no work without some downsides and some occasional chores. For me, it's editing and marketing, which is why my novels are poorly edited and barely marketed.
There is another thing worth mentioning: Successful creative professionals of all kind tend to over-emphasize the work aspect of their profession. They're fighting an image of being lazy against people who do not understand creative work. For example, the maximum number of hours anyone could write on a novel per day is 6, but 4 or less hours is more realistic. Some of them might even fight their own guilt for being successful, believing or knowing they could have improved their works by spending more time and being more diligent. In summary, you shouldn't take claims about "hard work" in these professions too seriously, it's mostly a defense against the many people who will be openly hostile to anyone successful due to envy.
This claim is most likely taken out of context. As I've said, every writer struggles with something from time to time but that's not the same as what you've described in your post. I'm sorry if my reply offended you somehow, that wasn't my intention. My point was just that you're overgeneralizing. Every writer has their own work mode and everyone works differently, e.g. the German author Günter Grass used to write in handwritten calligraphy on special paper. What's easy for one is hard for someone else, and vice versa.
Absolutely! Noticing that it usually takes ~20min for me of getting into the groove was a profound revelation for me a few years ago. I noticed a pattern that if keep on powering through those initial 20min, there is a good chance you can continue being productive for a few hours or even the whole day.
*SOME authors expressed struggles and this made the news.
There are many, many successful authors. Some of them, it just flows. One of the best selling non fiction authors in the world over the last 10 years is a friend of mine. He doesn’t describe it as a struggle.
Then better to find the thing that energizes you. For me it is getting to know a good framework like NextJS and working on small solo projects. For me it is not writing books … I find it fairly tedious. Nor is it the typical day job of old
complicated codebased and small
incremental improvements on big established software products.
Even if you struggle, having a little commitment every day helps building habits and actually relieves the struggle (because a habit creates familiarity and ease).
The "we're all different" part plays a role in how long it takes to adapt and bind to this new/building habit.
I agree. It is quite clear that it is impossible to write large code bases safely with manual memory management. Even very small programs often have massive problems. I think many programmers are simply in denial about this.
I see Rust as a counterexample, serving as a formalization of provably safe patterns of manual memory management. I do wish it made it easier to write human-checked code the compiler cannot verify; unsafe code is so painful with unnecessary pitfalls, that many people write either wrong-but-ergonomic unsafe code (https://github.com/mcoblenz/Bronze/, https://github.com/emu-rs/snes-apu) or add runtime overhead (Rc and RefCell).
I had horrific and long lasting negative effects from LSD. My wife absolutely laments that she convinced me to take it the two times I did. I saw mortality and impermanence directly, I felt entirely alone, and also I got extreme motion sickness and was passing out in a mess of white fractals and intensity in my body. I developed severe flashbacks to the trip and every time I had one I became extremely suicidal. The only good thing that came from it is that it pushed me towards an actual solution for me, which is practising zazen (goalless sitting in the Soto Zen tradition of Mahayana Buddhism). Resting in this moment, as Buddha, unmoved by external conditions. If I did not learn this, my life would be over, and indeed taking a break from the practise for 6 months the old grasping mind returned and I found myself heavily desiring death again. I sit and this all goes. My life after LSD was so traumatic that I was forced to find a way. The worst part is that therapists had no idea how to even consider the cosmic horror I felt, they just said it was “weird” and tried to shift the focus to tangible things, but it was the ineffable infinity that I was scared of.
Anyway, I always say that LSD fucked up my life so much that I had to turn to _religion_ to cope!! As a former militant atheist, that’s an incredible thing to say
There's a whole class of therapists who won't dose people on psychedelics because they feel the risks are too high (legally+medically) but will gladly take in people like you to help integrate the experience and helping with coming to some closure and insights.
Might be worth a session or two. Also sounds like you took a really freakin high dose... Yeah acid has its own agenda and lasts waaaaaaaaaaaay too long, there's a reason a lot of the recent research is on psychedelics that don't blow you away for up to 12 hours straight.
Can you believe some of us do that for FUN? Maybe it helps to be spiritually seeking to begin with. I think learning your lesson with these tools is kind of like getting in a fight. You might get your ass kicked but some of us throw hands professionally with a shit eating grin on our faces the whole time.
Feels like this might be an example of "worse is better".
Or alternately, that the community that SerenityOS has built and the joy they find in tinkering matters more than their technical foundations, in terms of getting something built that works and is maintained/maintainable. Servo looks like it could have been a technically better browser engine, but it seems the window for it becoming relevant is closing, while the future looks bright for SerenityOS's Browser. (I wonder how different things would be if Servo had reached the point where it was easy to run inside of a browser, in terms of dogfooding and getting people excited about it.)
What I would like to see is SerenityOS's joy and welcoming, vibrant community using better technology (in terms of security, if nothing else). Zig seems like a candidate for this, although people may debate its security features and technical merits. I'd love to see more projects like these.
I agree with you about the project being a joy for the developers.
But as a user, in no way I would rely on a browser started in 2020 written in c++ (or in zig, given other comments about its security characteristics). Keep in mind that gecko/webkit were written initially in c++ because c++ was the best language available at the time for these projects. This is not true anymore.
The beauty is when you build your own OS with it's own desktop environment, and browser and tools from scratch you can use the language you feel is appropriate. Would you write a brand new project in a language you don't feel comfortable with just because it is perceived as "safer"? Especially when the project was just for fun, and really to help the creator get through some tough times in their life. Like he didn't start the project to compete with mainstream OSes or browsers. This is just a terrible take especially considering you probably use an OS written in C and a browser written in C++.
zig has many of the same footguns as C++ and C; it just has better developer ergonomics.
Use after free, double free, invalid stack RW, uninitialized data, race conditions, etc. They're all possible to be found in Zig programs, because the language doesn't provide assurances against them.
Does the design of the language make them less (or more) likely to occur, though? e.g. all these things are possible in Forth too, but the design of the language definitely seems to conspire to make them less likely than C in my experience (I probably have about as many hours in each now? Roughly 1k, maybe 1.5k?).
(I suspect that this is the case in Forth because the stack gives a "linear-like feel" to most code; it's more obvious that you're accidentally not freeing something, because you need to explicitly discard it.)
The design doesn't do anything particularly different or cumbersome regarding memory and ownership, so I'll hazard a guess and say no, it doesn't make it less likely.
Not sure why you are downvoted, you are totally correct about the footguns that C++ has and why the same issues found in the other browsers will still apply here.
> If we just look at the browser, they seem to make much faster progress than Servo, but there is no doubt it will have security flaws.
Servo was supposed to be the promise of better security in a new browser thanks to Rust. Unfortunately in reality that was just either hype or it was just slow moving progress or perhaps both.
But yes the SerenityOS browser seems to be moving faster than servo whilst sacrificing security.
> Servo was supposed to be the promise of better security in a new browser thanks to Rust. Unfortunately in reality that was just either hype or it was just slow moving progress or perhaps both.
AIUI, Servo started as a project to prove out Rust that would also be a research testing ground for working on prototypes to improve aspects of Firefox. I don't think Servo was ever intended to be a browser on its own. Although others may have imputed that goal on to the project.
(I wasn't involved in Servo, but was in Rust, so was pretty adjacent to it.)
Polemic opinion, the C++ libraries that used to be bundled with compilers, like Turbo Vision, OWL, VCL, PowerPlant, CSet++,... were much convenient and safer to use by default than STL, but things are as they are.
I agree. While money has always been there, there hasn't been such intense "statistics" and micromanaging behind every decision. Directors could get away with doing many things out of the respect for the art rather than money. The systematised nature of it, this automated process of using statistics to automate creative decisions, is the worst part, because you can't escape it. In the past we had a base plot that must be interesting and make money, but there were so many avenues for being subversive on top of that. Now, everything is in service of the machine
