Beautiful
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
191–200 of 230 posts
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#192Love stories like these. I miss the old internet where people just created things for the shear joy of it. I've tried my hand at two different things so far, but neither has found much steam.
https://toggles.codewalkers.net/ https://trust-trials.codewalkers.net/
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> After this window closes you draw lots. Couldn't someone use a bot to register interest a million times so they have a much higher chance of winning the lot drawing?
IIRC they require that you submit your license plate number when you register for parking, so no, you could only register once per vehicle.
Type many fake invalid license plates, and cancel them, freeing a spot at a time of your choice.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
(i'm the author) there were a bunch of bots run by different people, but for the most part they coordinated in the discord so that they weren't fighting over the same "territory" at one point there was a group not in the discord trying to draw in the same place as the people in the discord, which lead to the bots constantly changing checkboxes to try two different images! but it was mostly cooperative
what was the technical nature of the bot, a local shell bash/python script running constantly to make curl-esque requests the clicks on defined parts of the grid? Or something on top of the browser like a chrome extension? I'm curious because I wonder what the defense would be against it (I'm naive to such things).
Most of the bots were in python or node afaik. Bash would be a little hard because you had to send data over a websocket.
They had some notion of the squares they were watching and what their values needed to be (to draw the images). And then they subscribed to the full state of the grid (which my API made really easy to do) and would respond by sending websocket requests to check boxes when they got toggled to the "wrong" value.
I'm sure people did other things - lots of people wrote scripts in the browser console. But I think the above is basically what people in the discord did.
I had some basic protections in place. There's some client-side rate limiting that prevents the really trivial "run the script in the console stuff" and then some server-side per-IP limiting to prevent really aggressive botting. Plus my server got slow at some points which inadvertently slowed people down.
The big difficulty with the server-side stuff is that you don't want to be too aggressive with IP based limiting because sometimes a large group of people resides behind a single IP (like at a school) and you want to make sure that all of those people can play. So it's a balancing act.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#195author here :) this is my favorite story from running the site, and possibly the best story I've ever been a part of. I'm not a big crier but I have cried so many times thinking and trying to write about it over the past 2 months. And of course, the process of discovery (and going from panic to excitement) was pretty crazy too. One of my favorite things about this is that it validated one of the core beliefs I have w…
I had a massive "discussion" (argument) with a friend the other day, they were convinced that the internet is just a place full of trolling and nasty commentary and social media was the thing likely to ruin things for our children. My position was that if you spend your life looking at X, Facebook or whatever then, sure, it can seem a bit of a hellish landscape, but the Internet is and can be so much more than that.…
I was about to comment something similar but you said it so well - this is the internet at it's best, bringing people together to have fun in interesting ways. I remember when it was all like this, but you can still stumble across little moments like this
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Somehow, those joyful feeling of engineering no longer feels like the blue sky. I think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray. Beautifully said. I'm glad to hear that you feel hope for rekindling this feeling. It sounds like you've already figured this out, but I want to highlight that this a symptom of burnout, and that people who resonate with this should take it seriously. I rem…
I'm not sure it is burn out for me. I think part of it is it feels less special. Maybe that's selfish or delusional on my part. Basically, I used to feel like I was doing something at least somewhat unique. Now, via Youtube and Github, I see that everyone is doing the same thing and repeating the same stuff so I end up with a "why should I do it if it's already been done" feeling. It's similar to blogs. I ran blog si…
I've been burned by that "why should I do it if it's already been done" feeling. I'm still grappling that but the thing that helps me is a quote from Brian Eno where he basically says "f--- originality". Don't try to be original, just do the thing and it will be unique because it's you who did it.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#197I don’t know. Reading this made me tear up a bit. I learned software engineering when I was in junior high school. I learned it because I sucked at math, and I want to write programs that solve my homework. Then I continue writing LAN chat, HTTP server, Anti Virus, and a lot more things just because it was fun to do. It was fun, it was challenging, it was rewarding, it was amazing. Now that I’m working, with the endl…
> Somehow, those joyful feeling of engineering no longer feels like the blue sky. I think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray. Beautifully said. I'm glad to hear that you feel hope for rekindling this feeling. It sounds like you've already figured this out, but I want to highlight that this a symptom of burnout, and that people who resonate with this should take it seriously. I rem…
I have similar feelings these days, but I don't think it's burnout for me. I still love programming and making cool stuff.
I think it's just natural cynicsm when you see what the industry does. Making you cross moral boundaries to keep a job, the realization that the best workers may not be guaranteed job security, that there so much cool tech but you may mostly be stuck with CRUD work for business, etc.
I'll still keep at it as I still have much to learn. But reality can be more disappointing than the dream.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I enthusiastically agree - and really all that matters is that you feel good about it. As a software engineer who's built (and shut down) many projects, I have always been envious of art forms in which the artist gets to create a piece of work and then "finish" it. We are often at the mercy of perpetual maintenance. Well done and nice execution.
I don't think I've ever officially shut anything down. Endings are too sad for me.
Just because you've never officially shut anything down, things have still ended. May as well throw a party.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in 1999 while I was in high school, I played a goofy harmless prank on one of the school computers. I created a 2-page slideshow presentation. Both of them had the same black background with grey text that appeared to be a DOS session indicating that Windows was deleted, except one had an underscore at the prompt. By telling the program to automatically advance the slides every second, and to loop the presentati…
I love that story, and that's actually such a fantastic punishment IMO (even if it was a bit unwarranted). I did some similar harmless "hacking" in my high school that accidentally ended up crashing a major switch causing the whole schools network to die for the day. I told my programming class teacher right away, but unfortunately in my case the superintendent decided to press charges. In the end all it taught me wa…
Yeah, pretty sure I would have simply been suspended for pulling off the GP's prank. Maybe even expelled, but then parents would talk it down. Your event would definitely have me gone. Sorry your experience was like that.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a massive "discussion" (argument) with a friend the other day, they were convinced that the internet is just a place full of trolling and nasty commentary and social media was the thing likely to ruin things for our children. My position was that if you spend your life looking at X, Facebook or whatever then, sure, it can seem a bit of a hellish landscape, but the Internet is and can be so much more than that.…
While you're right that the Internet contains a lot of wonder and exploration, the vast majority of people (and kids) will not interact much with that part of the Internet, if at all. Additionally, social media platforms have collapsed what would have been standalone, somewhat magical experiences into their own uniform platforms. I've heard someone say that kids today tend to think in terms of "apps" and not "website…
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