- This incredibly simple text-based website doesn't work without enabling JavaScript and allowing XHR in uMatrix.
Why not "just use HTML"?
- You forgot to mention Google's upcoming developer verification push, which will prevent users installing apps - even from third-party sources - if the developers have not verified their identity with Google:
- > "a modern AI browser"
No thanks. Absolutely not.
- If anyone from Planetscale is reading this, please know I hate what you did to your website. I previously had it bookmarked as an example of excellent, usable website design. About a year ago it turned into a plaintext nightmare. The first time I saw the new design I genuinely thought that a CSS file had failed to load in my browser. It's awful.
*Edit:* It also fails to load other pages if you have JavaScript or XHR disabled.
- I'm not at all a fan of mass surveillance, but is it possible - just possible - that your statement might contain just a smidge of hyperbole?
- Modern web developers: "Oh I just use Gulp, Jenkins, Babel, Yarn, Bower, Grunt, Slurp, Vite, and Rollup"
Me: slowly backs away in disgust
- I just checked out this game on Steam and was pretty excited to buy it until I read that it requires a kernel-level anticheat which acts as a rootkit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NProtect_GameGuard
Why on earth is any self-respecting person installing this on their machine?
- > made possible with support from Nixxes Software, best known for developing high-quality PC ports of Sony’s biggest PlayStation titles
Now if only Nixxes would stop using Sony's stupid proprietary audio system in PC games, I'd be happy. Every Sony game causes my sound card to freak out and I lose the ability to control anything - even volume. My surround speakers stop working completely and I'm effectively forced into accepting mono audio.
- https://vimeo.com/39768998
> This video is not rated. Join vimeo to watch
No thanks. Here's a YouTube mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufs0Rwx8sOk
- Giving Windows 11 the highest rating and XP one of the worst ratings clearly demonstrates that this author is not a serious person.
- Incredible! In an astounding feat, it has only taken a mere two decades to enable the world's largest tech companies to provide the most basic levels of interopability.
At this breakneck speed of technological development, one can only imagine what wonderful boons await consumers in the next few decades.
- Why is the UX around photos and videos in WhatsApp Web so incredibly poor?
I have clients who regularly send me photos/videos to publish on websites. There are many usability issues around this:
1. There is no option to "download all", which means you need to click through every photo manually and hit the download icon.
2. When navigating through photos, the download icon is often hidden behind a submenu which means it takes two clicks to download a photo instead of one.
3. It's impossible to download videos without first having fully buffered them. This means you need to click through the full video to ensure it's streamed to your device before the download icon appears. This is super annoying especially with longer videos.
4. Bonus non-web annoyance: if a user sends you multiple photos, your phone goes insane with notifications and sounds like a rapid-fire pinball machine. DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING
As a web developer I find it incredibly difficult to even think of releasing software with these kinds of basic inadequacies.
- The article text does not display properly on Firefox for me. The text gets cut off.
- Honestly the site[1] is very basic and pretty damn slow. When I click into a different category there is a noticeable delay of 1-2 seconds before the new page loads. I don't want to replicate this in any of my own projects.
- > The team at Berg invested a lot of time developing the visual language and aesthetics of Little Printer, across the physical device and their web service.
Shame they didn't bother to invest any time in making sure their expensive devices wouldn't end up as paperweights. Seriously, it's infuriating that they were lauded for the creativity of this project but it's fallen to hobbyists and volunteers to engineer an entire suite of software to make this dead hardware work again, just because the initial developers were either too lazy, too shortsighted, or too restricted by bean-counters to develop open source (or at least self-hostable) software for these machines. You can't even change the server address of these things without hardware flashing and risking bricking your hub.
- They are not conservatives. They are selfservatives.
- How do you explain away things like lobbying money (i.e. bribery), or politicians remaining in their post despite glaringly obvious physical and cognitive decline, or insider trading, or the stacking of courts with biased judges, or total lack of enforcement of the law, or the media being so obviously controlled by state-aligned actors? To name but a few.
- Let's be honest: most users don't know what they don't know. Even tech-literate people have no real idea of the enormity and scale of tracking which goes on across the web. And the tech giants love it that way.
But the truly troublesome issue is how an entire ecosystem of (very expensive) hardware is allowed to be tied to an identity controlled by a giant black box of a corporation.
What I mean is: you can spend thousands and thousands on devices and configure them to be almost invaluable to your everyday life, but you are ultimately completely beholden to Apple. You require their ongoing permission to continue using those devices. You are completely at their mercy.
And sure, you can argue that people willingly sign up for that kind of agreement when they make the decision to purchase Apple/Google products but that's also missing the point. Phones are now essential utilities. Accessing vital services sometimes requires an iOS or Android device.
Permitting giant, uncontactable, merciless tech corporations to control the digital lives of virtually everyone on the planet is absolute insanity.
The scenario described in the OP's article should simply never be allowed to happen.