Context on "THE ONE", a phrase used in this post, because it wasn't obvious to me initially.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/28/meta/

That's the problem with writing posts both of the "everyone else is doing things WRONG, those dang fools" (e.g. the series on RSS readers) and "oops, I did a stupid mistake, heh, TIL" styles and variety: the latter ones tend to attract comments from "The One" (oh noes) referencing the first kind of posts. Naturally, a humble person would simply read them, note them, and move on withouth replying — but a humble would person would not write the "everyone else is doing things WRONG, those dang fools" kind of posts either in the first place; and so we get the third kind of posts, the ones with "yeah, I did a small mistake, but I've admitted it myself, so no one else is allowed to criticize me; anyway..." disclaimer on the top.

P.S. I do distictly remember how a reply on HN to one of her earlier posts on RSS clients mentioned that her laments kinda miguided since her own feed doesn't set one very well-documented and basic cache-controlling HTTP header that most readers actually do respect; but some time later in her later post she described that header as matter-of-fact knowlewdge, no "I've learned about this one recently" remark or anything, and by that time, her RSS feed had started setting it.

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jraph 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't know, with her RSS saga, she actually provided a tool to test one's RSS feed reader and helped find bugs and this lead to fixes in many RSS tools, making things better for everyone. She put in the work. I find the approach quite constructive.

	▲	Joker_vD 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well, yes, it did improve that particular area of software. Although for about 15 years that wasn't really problem for anyone who didn't self-host their blog on a potato attached to the Internet with a phone coupler and copper-wires; you can find comments at HN in the relevant discussions from the people who apparently serve about the same amount amount of (almost) static traffic she complains about while it costs them like $2 monthly or something. Now AI crawlers, those are quite a problem... While I am personally glad that now there are less infuriatingly stupid network clients around (although, again, those never really amounted to all that much load), and probably adopting a rather caustic attitude at the authors of RSS clients was the only to force them to fix things, but even then: you can do more with a kind word and a gun than with just a gun. Besides, there is some unspoken etiquette between the content servers and content readers; a server that e.g. bans you for exceeding rate-limits when you open the "Full blog archives" page and middle-click at 10 promisingly named links to read them one after another is just rude, personal opinions of the hoster notwithstanding. P.S. Seriously, max-age=155520? Your server/ISP can't handle serving a ~190 KiB (when gzipped) file even once a day, it has to be almost 2 days? Get it off the public Internet then.

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flomo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks, I missed it.

(I should note that in my crowd, references to this movie are always super-negative. "The One" gets damned to hell to eternally fight, but never win his battle.)

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rlpb 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of these blog posts for what is, at best, a simple bug in Debian. When I encounter something like this, I find steps to reproduce and file a bug. That's it.

If someone wants to get indignant and broadcast how terrible it is that a project (Debian in this case) is so terrible that they dare have a UX issue that is probably just an oversight, then they're entitled to do that but can also expect pushback where they aren't perfect either.

	▲	bityard 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Rachel has been blogging for a long time, she knows what topics get clicks and stir up debate on social media.