The constant "By the way..." from Alexa drove me nuts.
If you say "Alexa, stop by the way", it'll get the device to stop responding with follow-ups for ~24h. I ended up creating a routine that runs every night at 4am to lower the volume to zero, automatically say "stop by the way" to the device, and then raise the volume a minute later, and Alexa has stopped with the follow ups
I just discovered this today, but if you whisper to your Echo, it will skip all of the "by the way" BS (it will also reply in a whisper, which is kind of creepy, but you win some, you lose some).
I've been tickled by the idea of a follow-up version, Send Me To Hell, where users instead throw their phones _downward_. High scores are awarded based on the maximum speed achieved as the phone hits the ground.
The second example for each language sample where the generated squid ends up being “B4aajs” essentially reads as “P0ooop” to a Swedish speaker.
Which is fine, they don’t propose to filter “bad” words in other languages, but kind of funny when that’s one of the highlighted examples, right next to the goal of filtering words. Goes to show how hard it is to filter profanity generally for international audiences
Could you just remove vowels and hit 99.9% of profanity in all languages? Ditto for removing their 0-9 equivalents, if you're really worried about it. Quick out of the box support for that via being able to define a custom alphabet.
Well until we figure out a way to remove pattern matching from humans... use GUIDs if that's an issue. Removing vowels fixes "spelling almost all bad words explicitly", though I'm open to being proven wrong with fun new swears in exotic (to me) languages :)
The problem of "pick any N symbols that don't make any profanity in any language across all time" isn't what this is solving, nor should it have to. Take the same concept but use whitelisted words to build the token if you're that adverse to computer generated, fill in the blank naughty words. Keep "pen" and "island", among other things, off that list ;)
EDIT: My reply below is wrong - you _can_ deal with in-flight requests with E-Tags as well using the if-match header. I had only seen them used with if-none-match. TIL.
E-Tags would probably not help here, because the client won't have a tag to send along with its request until after the original response returns. But the thing we're trying to prevent in the first place is multiple concurrent requests being processed.
The Idempotency-Key header[1] is probably a better fit, but that relies on the server implementing the spec, including properly dealing with multiple in-flight requests with the same header. I found this blog post[2] pretty good for exploring some of the implementation challenges.
The Common Paper app[1], though not quite a git workflow, has always struck me as being pretty close to how an software engineer might approach contracts:
1. An immutable set of standard terms, with variable references.
2. A collection of cover page variables, that modify the standard terms by reference.
3. A structured negotiation workflow, where users "propose changes" to the cover page variables with automatic "diff-ing" (redlining).
It's not a product targeted to software engineers, but has always appealed to me as a way to sneak in some engineering best-practices into the world of lawyering :)
Nisus Writer Pro [0] has been around for 40 years this year IIRC (IANANWP) and has a user base who can vouch for many of the features that HN readers want something to offer.
Betterment's Cash Reserve[1] might be of interest to you. It's a similar concept, where they spread your deposits among multiple program banks to give you a higher level of FDIC insurance.
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