Comment by jrockway

Comment by jrockway 17 hours ago

4 replies

I agree with you. The dinosaur game in Chrome is the classic example; turned off because schools threatened to not buy Chromebooks if kids could play a game in the browser. At least it seems to be a setting now, so your individual locality can decide if fun is allowed.

joshstrange 14 hours ago

That’s quite different from what we’re talking about though. That’s adding games or fun into your product whereas in this specific sub-thread we’re talking about naming code concepts (functions, classes, variables, enums, etc) funny things.

  • notpushkin 13 hours ago

    When you’re building an API, it is your product.

    • potatolicious 11 hours ago

      Not to mention even just this article exposed a just-for-fun API that ended up having a negative effect and had to be removed:

      `isUserAGoat` ended up allowing any caller to determine if a specific app is installed on the system, which is a privacy violation and allows fingerprinting against the user's consent.

      I get the desire to make the job more fun than just implementing a spec, but many of the things we work on are very important and very complex, with oodles of real-world consequences. That unfortunately means everything we do has to be well-considered and not off-the-cuff.

      • pineappletooth 9 hours ago

        Well it was not an issue back then since any app was able to query certain arbitrary specific apps (and yes some apps used to query a big list).

        They disabled the "fun" function in android 11 with the arrive of the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission.