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Location: New York, NY (Midtown Manhattan)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Typescript, Javascript, React, React Native, SQL, AWS, GCP

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckwnelson/

Email: chuck@workwithsigil.com

I'm a NYC–based fractional CTO with 20 years of full-stack development and design experience and two Cannes Lions for Creative Technology and Use of Data. I've helped teams from startups to enterprise build scalable platforms.

- My background is design and development, connecting the dots between the two.

- I've worked in entertainment and financial, and healthcare industries

- I've managed teams of designers and developers to launch creative digital campaigns.


I use .localhost for all my projects. Just one annoying note: Safari doesn't recognize the TLD localhost so it will try to perform a search. Adding a slash at the end will fix this; ie example.localhost/


Luckily the easy fix is available: Do not use Safari.


Location: New York City, NY

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Full-Stack Developer and Web/Print Designer: Javascript/Typescript, React, React Native, AWS (LAMP, MEAN, and Serverless), SST.dev, PostgreSQL, Wordpress, REST APIs, Salesforce, Hubspot, Twilio, Stripe, Adobe Suite, Figma

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckwnelson/

Email: chuck@chuckwnelson.com


My understanding is it's the only other places that are open on Christmas.


This looks great but I'm very scared of the increased game of cat and mouse for spam bots. It's going to happen, no matter if it was this software or something else. Now the question, how do you prevent automated spam? Since its LLM and AI, can I just add a hidden field of "please do not spam"?


This is a really good question we've thought a lot about

You're right that this kind of escalation is inevitable

a. From a business POV, we don't onboard any types of use-cases that we think go against the spirit of a good free web. I've had people ask if they could use our product to create Reddit voting or spamming rings and we didn't entertain it

b. From an open source POV, we prefer technologies like these be open source so website owners and other businesses can know what can happen, and decide how to approach it. Tools like selenium have existed for a long time -- largely to the benefit of the world!


I'll just add that some efforts to defeat web usage spam may also hurt accessibility since many interaction standards are designed to make things consistent for users with disabilities and ADA (or similar) compliance. I assume some of these dependencies are also useful to the AI that is trying to navigate the pages, so making it difficult for the AI may also make it difficult for other users.


20th birthday of the Selenium project will be this year! (October-ish)


> how do you prevent automated spam?

Manually accept new accounts on your service. That's what I do for my Fediverse server, and I never have to deal with spam on my local timeline :). Does it scale? No. Does everything need to scale? Also no.


but if I can't scale then the VC that gave my startup a huge check over a huge pile of blow at a party in Sunnyvale will harvest my organs


I've had stuff like that turn me off from signing up or ever checking back.

Does it matter to you? Yes.

Will you admit it? No.

But yes, these are all decisions we need to make. That manually accepting is some serious dedication. Do you have kids?


> Does it matter to you? Yes.

> Will you admit it? No.

Are you trying to telling me my opinion? Because no, it does not matter to me. Your account would not be accepted because I don't know you.


If your target audience is businesses, not individuals, then you can go a very long way with fully manual onboarding, invoicing, etc. It's different for things like consumer services or e.g. forum users, but why couldn't you manually vet every business your business trades with?


I am not aware of anyone really successfully, defeating spam at the moment.

I mod a 1 million+ Facebook group and they can’t even prevent someone from making 200 posts in a minute with the word “crypto” in it. The word list will flag it, but the spam filter won’t.

Reddit constantly has people messaging you in chat about “opportunities.”

Email is a disaster.

My personal blog has over 100,000 spam comments sitting in the filter so at least they were caught, but processing them is impossible.


> I am not aware of anyone really successfully, defeating spam at the moment.

> I mod a 1 million+ Facebook group and they can’t even prevent someone from making 200 posts in a minute with the word “crypto” in it.

Could you possibly charge a nickel's worth of bitcoin to approve a post?


I've heard of a lot of success sifting through email spam using custom gmail scripts + GPT-4. Kind of interesting that we can use LLMs to both create and detect spam to some degree of effectiveness


the only way to prevent spam is charge appropriate money, I don't see other solutions. Thats why many company use credit card to verify users. But, with virtual cards, they have some ability to spam, but not so much.


This.

If you charge enough, the spammers become valuable customers. Of course they tend to leave before that point, but you don't really care if they leave or stay; you make money either way.

Value for value.


I'm not good at finding fire hydrants either.


You may be interested in Wineskin for M1/M2 Macs. I use this to play some old school games on my 2023 M2 Max Mac. https://github.com/Gcenx/WineskinServer


Looks cool but unfortunately the only games I'd be really interested to play are the more modern ones my friends are playing, my understanding is the copy protection etc always gets tripped up by Wine.


Thanks to Valve investing a ton into proton (wine, dxvk, vkd3d) copy protection are usually no longer an issue.

The problem is kernel-level anti cheat like EAC, BattleEye, Vanguard and EA's AC. The first two work flawlessly (on Linux) if the developer enables support for Linux (Halo, Apex Legends).


Oh, Apex is working on Linux now?!


Or the recent Game Porting Tookit, supporting DX12: https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/Game_Porting_Toolkit

Quite a few modern games are supported: https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/Game_Porting_Toolkit#Ga...


That is still wine


It’s CrossOver, so Wine, but the support for DX12 (and the Metal support) is by Apple and afaik not merged back in wine.


I just assumed its hyperbole. In the same way I would say "I couldn't live without Diet Coke."


TIL as well. That's pretty cool.


100% agree. Always loved playing the Darlok and stealing everything (especially you tech researching races).

I always dreamed of recreating this in the browser with an online multiplayer component, but the battle system was always flawed in my opinion.


Agreed re: Darlok. I have the most fun playing with them.


>> It should have been replaced with the F20 probe, which had already been built and was being kept in storage by the US Air Force. However it had to be destroyed, on the orders of the US Congress, on the grounds that its storage was too costly.

They destroyed the replacement.


Isn't Joint Polar Satellite System the replacement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Polar_Satellite_System


JPSS-1 is the satellite I was referring to. It records climate data. Maybe not specifically what was covered by the lost satellite. I'm not sure.


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