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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I’m curious how many of those opposing the current trend would agree with statements as simple as “It is a good thing that Adolf Hitler, author of the blitzkrieg and holocaust that killed millions of people, is dead.”

    Like, I get that anytime Hitler comes up, a part of our mind sorts it into exaggerated allegory. But he was a real person, who existed - and, if he hadn’t died in mysterious circumstances, it would be up to Berlin’s invaders to decide what to do with him.

    And, speaking honestly, would giving him an extensive trial and then spend the rest of his life in prison, able to spread his ideology and beliefs to other prisoners, be any better?







  • I just did my install of Linux Mint. I have a number of complaints that are really the fault of Microsoft, other things tripping me up that are just about me learning differences; BUT I still find there’s some things Linux could take as lessons.

    One of them is keyboard shortcuts. I learned Windows shortcuts because they followed intuitive logic, like what role the “Tab” key has and what the Shift key is doing to adjust its action. Linux apps often make up their own logic around this, which even if it made sense internally, doesn’t work with apps like Firefox which are still using Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs, possibly to keep Windows parity. Then, since Linux is supposed to be built to customize, if I try changing the terminal to switch tabs using Ctrl+Tab…it just doesn’t let you; pretends you didn’t press anything. Stock boot of Linux Mint 22.

    You’re right that they shouldn’t be changing just for aping the dominating competitor; that’s how we unfortunately got Chromium supremacy. I still think there’s gentle UX considerations they could handle more often though. Basically the type of thing decided in board rooms that engineers would lose interest in.


  • Is there any organization out there that could actually promote an “Acceptable ad standard”? Like, maybe even something within web specs?

    A long time ago, ads were slightly irritating, rarely useful, and considered a necessary evil for gently monetizing the web. We’ve had this slow evolution to draconian tracking nightmares that are genuinely dangerous and often written by malicious untraceable actors. I almost feel like we could pressure back towards decent ads if there was some standard by which they only received basic info about the user, showed basic info about a product, didn’t pollute the experience or ruin accessibility, and were registered to businesses by physical address with legal accountability for things like false advertising.

    That is…perhaps a vain hope though. It’s just hard to picture futures where all websites run off of donations or subscriptions, because advertising is fucking hell now.






  • My biggest worry for this is, there’s probably dozens of black hats out there that have found some very large exploit for Windows 10, and are holding off on abusing it until the day Microsoft ends support.

    Currently, my plan is to make a partition for Linux Mint, set up dual boot, see how much of my daily computer obsession I can execute through there, and then try to slowly transition while slowly moving stuff from Windows. (I am vaguely worried I’ll run into that Windows issue where files accessed from outside the OS login are security-restricted. That has even screwed up my Windows reformat fixes)



  • Citing SASS feels like “Who codes HTML when we have Dreamweaver” type of comment.

    SASS just translates your styles to CSS, so even if you write one simple line, it’s polyfilling 13 - and for various technical reasons it’s better if one line polyfills one line for consistency. Just to give one example, an app might bloat its page load by inadvertently having 1MB-large CSS files post SASS translation.

    I’ve heard the comment about “not keeping up, wasn’t working” in regards to Edge several times, but I haven’t heard any concrete examples of that that didn’t relate to Chrome flexing its position or jumping the gun on standards. It’s even realistic a large percent of that was people, web devs included, having trailing feelings of “Ugh, IE - I mean Edge” long after that stopped making sense.


  • You can get Firefox and Opera on the Windows Store. Ostensibly, this is how every other OS works now, although on Linux it’s usually less of a storefront with Candy Crush pushed up front, and more like a commandline entry to get apps by known name.

    I think people are just used to the Windows colloquialism of not having a central store, thus getting every app on the web through an installer file - and then, through meaningful distrust and horrific memories of Windows 8, choosing not to use that store when it was added.


  • I agree with you completely on their over-pushiness. They could do without that.

    But the first time choice thing doesn’t sound tenable long-term to me.

    Welcome to SuperOS! What would you like to use as your web browser? E-mail reader? Calendar app? PDF viewer? Image viewer? File explorer? Porn viewer? Weather app? VPN?

    I can think of distros/OSes that, depending on the use case, people really appreciate having something pre-installed for them. And yes, other times people would prefer their own. But imagine amateur users making a pick from that constant stream of questions, not to mention having weird incompatibilities if they make bad choices.


  • I’m a web dev, fully disagree with you. I don’t even think this comment is based in any reality, just MS hatred (which, to be fair, I currently hate them for other reasons, but it’s a big company with many parts)

    I warned my colleagues against doing all development and testing in Chrome, because they would inevitably code towards “Webkit features” unknowingly, and leave both Edge and Firefox in the dust. I set up Edge as my default because, in an effort to catch up in popularity, they were being very strict and communicative with standards. If I wrote a page to work in Edge, it would work in other browsers. Meanwhile, there were horrific features like linear gradients that needed a full 15 lines of CSS specifically because Webkit would implement it, realize their implementation had gaps, reimplement it, and end up with 14 used-in-release syntaxes that you needed to account for, instead of the Edge/Firefox “Build it right” philosophy.

    I sincerely doubt the current YouTube situation is actually because YouTube is a complex site. 90% of the motivation for whatever feature they’re putting in is to push Chrome and fuck over other browsers.