It's just the part where you have to do 2000 hours of it each year for somebody else that I never got along with, so I spent the first 20 years of my career making sure I didn't need to do that.

I "retired" in my 30s from fulltime jobs, and focused on building SaaS products and contracting. That left me not really needing to work at all anymore somewhere in my 40s, though I kept at it a while after that since the companies I was working with were full of fun people.

Now, I dip in and out as I like, picking up the odd contract but mostly doing my own thing. I've been proper, capital R, Retired for the last few years, building a game to keep the brain fed and the skills up.

With luck, I'll also write some code on my dying day. But it'll be on my terms.

As I said above, the only thing my site does with your cat photo is show it back to you when you ask to look at it. No training. No selling your data to anybody. All I'm doing is storing it because you asked me to, and showing it to the people you ask me to.

You can certainly ask me to stop showing it to people. But please don't get all excited about how your rights have somehow been violated.

The fact is, people click delete buttons without thinking about it. Those people get way more mad when they can't undo that delete than you are now.

It's simple, really. You have a website where people can upload their cat photos. There's a delete button. People click the delete button, read the "This will really Delete your Thing. It's Permanent. You CAN'T GET IT BACK!" warning, and click the confirm button.

Then you get an angry email (and twitter post, and blog entry, and Reddit mob) saying "I can't believe you deleted my photo without asking. That was my favorite cat photo it was my only copy I'LL SUE YOU!@!!"

So you go into your console and flip the .isActive bit back to 1 on that photo, send off your stock apology, and get on with your day.

To run your business any other way is madness. You're not training or selling or otherwise misusing that cat photo. You just don't want to deal with that hassle every day. So you "delete" things by moving them someplace where they're not public anymore.

It's just what you do...

That was just a copy paste of one of the options.

Frankly, it's surprising that we'd even need to stipulate something like this. It would never occur to me to post to a "show us what you're cooking" thread with: "Look what I asked DoorDash to bring me!", but I guess that's where we are now...

I'm building a video game. It's part Valheim, part Ultima IV:

https://stravaeger.com/

You can play the demo in the browser now (mobile as well as desktop), but I'll be packaging it up for Steam soon.

It's all vanilla javascript, html and css. No AI, no 3rd party game engine, no build system even, and just a couple external dependencies for things like networking that I didn't want to reinvent myself.

It's been fun. I'd love to get some feedback!

All your best stuff will get downvoted by at least somebody eventually. For some reason, that somebody always gets in early enough that you notice.

That’s what you get from listening to “successful people”. You get to learn about all the things they tried that failed, then the things that did work on that 24th try, which was successful.

The “survivorship bias” people always seem to assume that the “survivor” lucked into his fortune on his first try ever, so he can’t have learned anything, so we don’t have to listen to him. But that’s seldom the case.

I’ve written about this before:

https://expatsoftware.com/Articles/survivorship-bias.html

I used YouTube as an example earlier. OSM is a good one too. Neither needs to care about you. They only need to care about their own job, which is knowing about their list of things (videos, roads, electronic part numbers, etc.). So long as they continue to do that, and have an easy way to tell them about the things they do care about, you're good.

They're already "putting in the work". Because it's their work to keep the list. That's all they do.

It still lives in both places, but (assuming other websites also use the same Single Point Of Truth) if the title changes or whatever, everything stays synced up everywhere.

In my concrete example, bleau.info doesn't need to know that a given line has never had an ascent by anybody shorter than 165cm. So I write that down on my copy. But I don't need to track anything else about that line to use it and to link to Boolder, 27 Crags and 8a.nu's pages about it.

It's just a matter of dropping a link to that route's page into an importer to scrape it in and have it be usable at our end.

But yeah, for a space where the Big Database didn't often have a record for the things your users want to add, I could see it being more of an issue.

I have to deal with this in my little bouldering database as well, since the source I mentioned does in fact change or reuse its IDs every so often. There's already a periodic update that has to happen on any given boulder problem, to pull down changes from the other end. That also needs a way to self-heal if a record at the other end splits off into two pieces, and my ID now points to the wrong half of it.

It's all stuff you have to keep on top of, but your idea of keeping your own table with each record pointing back to OSM seems like the only path that avoids madness. Even it it does take some work to keep those references up to date.

Being The List of anything is a big, thankless job filled with nonstop toil to keep it up to date. It's not something you want to do unless it's truly your passion or somebody is paying you (a lot) to do it.

The problem is that building to tools to Be The List is pretty straightforward and fun. You only learn about the toil you've signed yourself up after the fact, once people start relying on it.

Good luck!

Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.

Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.

Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?

There needs to be a Single Point of Truth, and it should not be your little website.

BigCentralThing should be the official database that knows about where all the Whatevers are. Your little Whatever Locator site should only ever _pull_ from them. Need a new Whatever in the database? Get BigCentralThing to add it, then pull it in.

As an example, I run https://bettybeta.com/, a select guide to bouldering in Fontainebleau tailored for Women and short folk. We have a list of boulder problems in our database, but no way for anybody (even an admin) to add a new one. Every boulder problem record includes a link to its page at https://bleau.info/, who are dedicated to cataloging every climb in the forest.

Bleau.info is the Single Point of Truth. If one of our users does a First Ascent and wants to log it with us, we'll point them at that other site with instructions on how to get their climb in there, and tell them how to get us to import it. Any other path would lead to our database and the "official" database eventually diverging.

There are half a dozen other websites doing similar things to us. Some do what we do, but the ones that don't quickly find themselves out of sync and end up with a lot more work on their hands.

It's tough because, as the author says, writing the flow to import at our end is really easy (I've written it, before coming to this realization and hiding it again). But doing it is a trap.

But this is just more of the pedantic developer nonsense that everyone is complaining about here.

I’ve built tons of sites in my time, and the logout “button” is always a link to “/?logout=1”. In 30 years, this has never caused a problem.

For 6 years I’ve been reading hype about amazing productivity boosts from this stuff, but until now the expected flood of cool new products never arrived. Just lots of tools and harnesses and swarm coordination stuff to help companies spend more money on the hype cycle.

But finally somebody actually built an app and released it. I call that a milestone.