I'm the person who originally set Cara up on Vercel in late 2022, before I stepped away to focus on my own startup.
I chose Vercel for a few reasons:
1. When you have 0 users, worrying about scale is a huge time sink. I wanted the team to be able to focus on building a product people wanted, acquiring users, and retaining them.
2. Vercel's preview branches make it lovely to preview work in progress, and QA pull requests. This is critical given Cara was and still is a small team of volunteers.
3. NextJS is lovely to work with, and choosing something both popular and with a JS/TS base made it easy to onboard new volunteers.
If I was doing things again, I'd still choose Vercel. The only difference is I'd enable spend management for their team (a feature Vercel released in late 2023: https://vercel.com/docs/pricing/spend-management).
> You couldve accomplished this at the webserver level
That's true, but only if you have access to your web server!
If you're using something like Vercel (or some other hosting service) to run your application, having a little middleware that handles subdomain routing is pretty common.
edit: Sorry if I've read this comment out of context - the linked repo has been taken down.
If you're curious what an implementation looks like: Charlie Gerard's article[1] shows how to accomplish a similar effect in-browser. It's pretty straight forward although not sure what performance looks like in large scenes.
I like the idea, but don't know if people are ready to grant webcam permissions to untrusted any websites.
My understanding around how this works (and I might be wrong!) is that Apple tracks a variety of usage on device and your device itself knows which ad to serve, versus say Google or Facebook collating your data on their own servers.
I'd not be surprised to learn there was some level of phoning home though.
There’s a common misconception that ad tracking is all about targeting ads. That’s part of it, but the truth is that tracking conversions is a more important differentiator for advertising platforms. A conversion is where the user clicks on the ad and then makes a purchase. The top digital ad companies (Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon) all charge for conversions. There is no way to charge for conversions without sending data about the user’s behavior off the device (which ads they saw, and which purchases they made).
That’s not true. They could use differentially private on-device joins using anonymously downloaded ad data. Or they could securely aggregate the results. Or both.
Can you elaborate? I see an ad in the News app, then click on it and make a purchase from Clash of Clans in the App Store. Apple needs to charge Clash of Clans for the conversion. How do they do it?
Apple knows that I bought the app (they charged me for it).
In order to charge Clash of Clans for the conversion, my phone needs to connect to Apple and send them a record of the ad click. What if clicking on that ad and buying the app are the only thing I ever did on the phone? There’s nothing to aggregate locally, and Apple knows they got the conversion data from me.
Perhaps the claim is that my phone is going to send all these records to Apple, and Apple is just going to do the right thing and run programs that do the business without letting any of their people look at anything they aren’t supposed to look at (they could internally accomplish this by differential privacy, rigorous internal controls, etc). That’s the same claim Google and everyone else is going to make.
That's not at all how adtech works. You cannot download all activity between ad supply (website/app/etc) and advertisers and every vendor in the middle onto your device for some joins.
You misunderstand, completely. A device needn't download all activity, or indeed download anything additional at all. It knows which ads it clicked on and it knows the conversion signal for each ad the user saw. It can thus easily count the user's conversions on the device, then privately aggregate the result with its peers using secure multi-party computation (or a secure enclave).
Even the ads can be anonymously downloaded using a shuffler/mixer, such that nobody knows which ads out of the universe of ads the device chose to target the user with.
This just has all of the negative privacy implications FLoC does[1], which is also something pushed by Google that was heavily criticized. I guess now that Apple is doing it, it's okay.
Similar! The biggest difference in my mind is that any website using FLoC would be able to know what cohort I belonged to.
FLoC is definitely more anonymous than "davidlumley visited nytimes.com twice on December 1st 2022". However, that particular usage information was previously only available to nytimes.com, any ad/data vendor using third party tracking cookies that were present on nytimes.com at the time of my visit, and finally any company that purchased data from the ad/data vendor.
My FLoC was theoretically available to any website and had much of the same intent data that intent ad/data vendors were/are selling.
If my understanding of Apple's ad platform is correct, advertisers don't know which cohort the user davidlumley belongs to, or that their ads are being served to me because that's all handled on device.
is that Apple tracks a variety of usage on device and your device itself knows which ad to serve
This is a distinction without a difference. Do you regularly share your phone with other people, to the extent that "device data" can not be correlated back to you?
The taxes can also be due when you receive your options. That can depend on if you purchase your options or if they are granted to you and entitle you to a discount.
YMMV but an NQSO purchase agreement can be your friend.
1. Our frontend editor, where you edit content, is open-source. You can add new field types with react components easily.
2. The editor is also mounted on your site and lives there wherever you want. So, yousite.com/cms. We handle auth as well.
3. You define your schema in your code, like a DB schema, instead of in a GUI. Your schema lives in git with your app.
4. You can get started completely from the CLI, never touching a web app.
5. You can extend your schemas with plugins from the community.
6. We give your features like content previews right out the box with no code setup.
Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building. It sounds like you're engaging in a "no true scotsman" argument if you're claiming that nobody associated with the political right uses violence against the state.
It's quite telling that you have to go back to Timothy McVeigh for an example of this. That was quarter of a century ago, and it was just one dude, and his connection to the right was tenuous at best.
In 2016, a bunch of right wing goons with guns occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. They didn't kill anyone, but it was an armed standoff with federal agents.
The author of this Atlantic piece (dismissed above as "so far detached from reality") makes the exact same observation:
> The boogaloo groups disagree when it comes to racism. Some members are white supremacists. Others compare the movement to the left’s campaign against police brutality. Many boogaloo memes are focused on police overreach, equating the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and FBI sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, in the ’90s with the recent high-profile police killings of Black Americans.
Can you explain what you mean by "folkish"? I googled and got very little except this wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lkisch_movement but it seems to be only based on a literal translation from German.
The sibling comment is circumlocutious but it's what you might think it is when you read the Völkisch wikipedia page. Here's another link that uses the term directly:
"If there was ever a time for bois to _stand in solidarity_ ..."
Emphasis is mine. That phrase is used almost exclusively by far leftists, and comes from Marxism/Leninism (haven never actually read any of it, the vast majority of leftists do not know where the phrase comes from).
It could be that this exact phrasing is used on purpose, actually, as a form of trolling IRL to appeal to the far left types and try to provoke violence against the government (which will eventually blow back pretty hard - patience is wearing thin already, even in ultra-liberal places like Portland or Seattle).
I still can't really imagine, however, that the overwhelmingly pro-police conservatives could advocate shooting cops. This seems like far left, "tear down the system" shit to me. "The world is about to change its foundation. We are nothing, let us be all." The Russian translation, BTW, literally translates as "We will destroy the world of violence to its foundation, and then, we will build our new world, those who were nothing will be all".
Name changes of popular OSS projects feels contentious, but like anything built on language it's inherently political and full of bias. As with anything, it's worth striving to improve things where we can. There are a few great examples including:
The irony that rather than engaging in the conversation and attempting to understand where people are coming from, bbatsov wrote a code of conduct then enforced it is not lost on me.
