Mozilla “sold their soul to Google”? What did I miss?

Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.

Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?

I’m gonna assume by “contributing to the opioid” you mean over-prescribing pain medication for the commission? If so, that comparison is so far-fetched that it’s completely meaningless. You’re really going to compare that with independent creators having skippable ad reads that have to be clearly marked as such on content you get for free?

This is a bit unnecessarily tough on independent content creators… what exactly do you expect them to do? Make no money from their content? How would they be able to make a living?

Doomerism like this is fucking stupid and definitely leads to the wrong thing, which is to do nothing. If we’re already fucked, why even try? The truth is that IF we try, we very well might be able to avoid the worst. Which is worth fighting for.

I know. Just the “full-stack meta frameworks” part alone makes any ADHD person feel nausea.

But why? What’s bad about this?

I disagree. Geminispace is very usable without scripts

That’s great, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to make usable apps without JS. I’m saying that the capabilities of websites would be greatly reduced without JS being a thing. Sure, a forum can be served as fully static pages. But the web can support many more advanced use-cases than that.

If only one paradigm must remain, then naturally I pick mine. If not, then there’s no problem and I still shouldn’t care.

So you can see that other people have different needs to yours, but you think those shouldn’t be considered? We’re arguing about the internet. It’s a pretty diverse space.

For me it’s obvious that embeddable cross-platform applications as content inside hypertext are much better than turning a hypertext system into some overengineered crappy mess of a cross-platform application system.

Look, I’m not saying that the web is the most coherent platform to develop for or use, but it’s just where we’re at after decades of evolving needs needing to be met.

That said, embedded interactive content is absolutely not better than what we have now. For one, both Flash and Java Applets were mostly proprietary technologies, placing far too much trust in the corpos developing them. There were massive cross-platform compatibility problems, and neither were in any way designed for or even ready for a responsive web that displays well on different screen sizes. Accessibility was a big problem as well, given an entirely different accessibility paradigm was necessary within vs. the HTML+CSS shell around the embedded content.

Today, the web can do everything Flash + Java Applets could do and more, except in a way that’s not proprietary but based on shared standards, one that’s backwards-compatible, builds on top of foundational technologies like HTML rather than around, and can actually keep up with the plethora of different client devices we have today. And speaking of security — sure, maybe web browsers were pretty insecure back then generally, but I don’t see how you can argue that a system requiring third-party browser plug-ins that have to be updated separately from the browser can ever be a better basis for security than just relying entirely on the (open-source!) JS engine of the browser for all interactivity.

I ask you for links and how many clicks and fucks it would take to make one with these, as opposed to back then. These are measurable, scientific things. Ergonomics is not a religion.

The idea that any old website builder back in the day was more “ergonomic” while even approaching the result quality and capabilities of any no-code homepage builder solution you can use today is just laughable. Sorry, but I don’t really feel the burden of proof here. And I’m not even a fan of site builders, I would almost prefer building my own site, but I recognize that they’re the only (viable) solution for the majority of people just looking for a casual website.

Besides — there’s nothing really preventing those old-school solutions from working today. If they’re so much better than modern offerings, why didn’t they survive?

So what does it say about us diverting from purely server-side scripted message boards with pure HTML and tables, and not a line of JS? Yes, let’s get back there please.

Ironically, proper SSR that has the server render the page as pure HTML & CSS is becoming more and more popular lately thanks to full-stack meta frameworks that make it super easy. Of course, wanting to go back to having no JS is crazy — websites would lose almost all ability to make pages interactive, and that would be a huge step backwards, no matter how much nostalgia you feel for a time before widespread JS. Also tables for layout fucking sucked in every possible way; for the dev, for the user, and for accessibility.

people want nice, dynamic, usable websites with lots of cool new features, people are social

That’s right, they do and they are.

By the way, we already had that with Flash and Java applets, some things of what I remember were still cooler than modern websites of the “web application” paradigm are now.

Flash and Java Applets were a disaster and a horrible attempt at interactivity, and everything we have today is miles ahead of them. I don’t even want to get into making arguments as to why because it’s so widely documented.

And we had personal webpages with real names and contacts and photos. And there were tools allowing to make them easily.

There are vastly more usable and simple tools for making your own personal websites today!

Oof, that quote is the exact brand of nerd bullshit that makes my blood boil. “Sure, it may be horribly designed, complicated, hard to understand, unnecessarily dangerous and / or extremely misleading, but you have nOT rEAd ThE dOCUmeNtATiON, therefore it’s your fault and I’m immune to your criticism”. Except this instance is even worse than that, because the documentation for that command sounds just as innocent as the command itself. But I guess obviously something called “tmpfiles” is responsible for your home folder, how couldn’t you know that?

Sorry but “they could slip in a chip that enabled a wavelength their satellites can access” is ridiculous. Sending a real-time video stream to a satellite would require a large and very power hungry transmitter on the drone. It’d be super obvious.

People won’t do that at scale.

It’d take only one person to recognize a sudden large traffic spike caused by the app and post about it online to ruin such a setup. As soon as it’s confirmed by a few more people, it’d immediately be a major news story. And it’s not like it’s particularly hard to spot unusual traffic; especially on a phone where the OS monitors per-app data usage both on mobile and WiFi.

They definitely do not send video though. That would be super obvious.

Please explain how Google would get my location if I don’t run a phone with Google location services and / or don’t allow Google services and apps to access my location. Sure, they may know where you are roughly based on your IP, but that’s just within a very broad region, and can easily be obfuscated by a VPN. Google siphons a shitton of information from everywhere they can, but it’s not like they’ve secretly implanted everyone with a tracking chip either… And neither can they get around any device’s OS-level location permission system.

Vast majority of people do, and on iOS and Android these days turning it “off” really just keeps it from connecting to peripherals. It’s still scanning even when “off”.

Well yes and no. Market cap is the total value of all shares for the particular stock combined (not including those held by the company itself). The value of each individual share is determined on the market. No-one directly “owns” this value, since the whole point of stocks is to distribute ownership, so no-one including Apple as an entity “owns” their market cap entirely. If that were the case, there would be no trading, and ergo no value to the shares, and the entire idea of a market cap no longer applies.

Individually though, the value of shares is of course very real. If you own shares and the stock is liquid (as in: there are people willing to buy), you can sell those shares for real money whenever you wish, at the current market price. Unless you want to sell a substantial amount, in which case you may run into trouble finding buyers and / or create significant downward pressure on the price.

No, “most valuable” is accurate here, since we’re talking about its market cap (value of all shares combined essentially). “Wealthiest” would refer to the company’s total assets.

For sure, my point is just that they could if it made sense — so clearly they don’t think it does, at least for now.

It was most likely HP, through Windows Update (which handles device-specific driver etc. updates that OEMs are in control of). Microsoft doesn’t concern itself with pushing BIOS updates to some random 4-year old HP model

If they wanted to companies could put a camera in a smart watch easily. Samsung was doing it ages ago.

Does it though? Having it pull down your shirt, having to rely on projecting a GUI on your hand, and being unable to hear it in loud environments all seem like pretty strong limitations of the form factor

Where do you download them from?

If you read the original report, it says that it basically just displays a fake banking login page. It also says that it requested accessibility service permissions, which makes me think maybe it brought up the fake login pages “in the right moment” (as in as users opened their banking apps) to make it more convincing, even though the article doesn’t specify that.

Either way, IMO the problem here is clearly with the Play Store allowing this app in, and not with Android’s security itself. These apps are misusing the accessibility service system, which is obviously necessary for a ton of important use cases (and of course also requires the user to grant very explicit permission). The fact that the accessibility services are a thing doesn’t delegitimize Android’s security improvements over the years.