Grumbledour

One the one hand, that many people on here are so opposed to this kind of thinking (your post was flagged) is no suprise, since this is in many parts more of business than a hacker forum, so profit trumps all other concerns.

Yet considering, that many people here are also often unhappy with wasteful and user hostile software, like windows, i think a look at this kind of thinking can be really beneficial. Especially, since at least the actual programmers reading this site can easily have small impacts on these kind of problems, by just making sure, they craft their software with more care on such issues.

In light of the topic (and because of personal gripes), i think a link to the actual podcast, RSS feed and all, would be more appropiate than big techs radio-show version of it.

https://adventofcomputing.com/

Though frankly, that page needs some love, Sean!

But thanks for the submission, and thanks, Sean, for a great podcast!

Later on, in Shadow Warrior, you could even do that, i think they used portals to implement it and i remeber it was a pain to set up in the editor.

Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.

I think the better analogy here would be to tidy the public park for free. It's about doing something for other people, being generous, making the world better with your genrousity. I think that in itself is something worthwile to try.

I don't think it is this novel anymore though. Which easier and cheaper distribution, the same thing is starting to apply to other creative endeveours like music, art, or writing, where the costs of publishing start to get negligible, while there is an ever growing base of creatives who want to ofer their work to an audience. And maybe we should treat Open Source more like other art forms, where you get patronage, or get small payments per download like in the shareware model.

While I find speculating about different models besides capitalism a good exercise, I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.

The problem though is, using undocummented communication channels on private phones by people not technically inclined. That Signal is an american company and subject to NSA scrutiny while the users a politicians of a foreign goverment only makes this worse.

So, national messengers, controlled by experts, that archive communication and run on trusted hardware, would be the best solution for the work of democratic goverments I would think.

Of course, the possibility of software quality and security experts in service of the goverment is probably just wishful thinking.

I think the law is actually pretty clear on that front, that it is not ok, but in the meantime, all the big publishers do it and make so much money, they actually don't care much about fines, especially given the chance they might get levied against a competitor first, at which point they can quickly change that behaviour.

As so often, the biggest GDPR problem is missing enforcement.

The bundestags president, Julia Klöckner, was recently a victim of phishing on signal. While there could be different motives behind her suggestion, I think they are just another facet of her not really understanding technology and security practices.

She thinks she was "hacked" on signal, and now wants to switch to something which is clearly better! Let's wait where she will want to go once she gets "hacked" there too...

While there are valid reasons for germans not to want their politicians to use private messenger apps on their private phones for official business, and american ones at that, this switch would of course change nothing about all of these problems. But at least they can claim they did something, right?

I think Win2k already had that. As far as I remember, the explorer sidebar, the white box with the colored line under the heading, already being HTML. I loved hacking on that back then to customize my windows experience.

I've been using FairEmail[1] for some years now as a replacement and find it superior to the gmail app. Of course, depending on your needs and tastes, I could also understand calling it a bit clunky. It is FOSS, but has a one time pay premium option for some advanced features. But really, it's also just fair to support the dev by buing the app. My only complaint would be, that there are to many updates, but of course, you can just ignore them and do them every few months instead.

[1] https://email.faircode.eu/

And the pandora took years to arrive, got constantly more expensive while waiting, while the hardware got pretty long in the tooth. Still, it was a greadt device! But when it arrived, it was already a curiosity from another time and I feel this even more so for the Pyra.

I had a similar idea a few years ago and tried to set it up, but failed at making it easy to connect to. I wanted the phone to prompt you like when connecting to wifi hotspots where you have to accept some T&Cs before you can connect to the internet, but to then just show you the local services instead of actually offering internet. Honestly, this can't be that difficult, but at the time, I could not get it to work reliably.

I think they just confused bavria with munich. It was the city who had their own linux distribution (LiMux) and the move of the headquarters where part of microsoft efforts to change that, because it means more tax income for the city (Munich is not part of the disctrict Landkreis München).

It's "Rattenfänger von Hameln" in german, so the literal translation would be "Rat-Catcher of Hamelin".

I do remember him wearing brightly colored patchwork clothing in the stories, but I could not say if that was an integral part of the original fable or just added in retellings to make the character stand out more as a mysterious stranger.

The question is of course always where someone draws the line, and thats part of the problem.

Too many people have the "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote internalized to a degree they won't even think about any criticisms or suggestions.

And while they might be right concerning small stuff, this often piles up and in the end, because you choose several times not to optimize, your technology choices and architecture decisions add up to a bloated mess anyway that can't be salvaged.

Like, when you choose a web framework for a desktop app, install size, memory footprint, slower performance etc. might not matter looked at individually, but in the end it all might easily add up and your solution might just suck without much benefit to you. Pragmatism seems to be the hardest to learn for most developers and so many solutions get blown out of proportion instantly.

And to add to that, because some people might not know or have forgotten, colors where easily adjustable in winforms, so dark mode, high contrast mode, green, blue, hot pink etc. were all easily adjustable for all these apps and back in th day that was pretty standard to do for visually impaired people. No extra work from programmers was necessary, so vastly superior to today where you have to beg for good dark mode support.

It's quite interesting, that while this topic comes up from time to time (it has been going on a long time after all already), people on here seem to seldom talk about the organizations that lobby for this proposal for years, with big ties to the US and intelligence agencies. So this is by no means just an European phenomenon but there seems to be a much bigger agenda behind it all.

Now, at the moment, I don't have a good english language source, but I am sure someone else could provide one?

Here is a german language one[0], from netzpolitik.org, who follow chat control for years now an have many articles going in depth about this. I am sure you could use translation software to read it until someone provides a better source. (And if you have not heard of this, you should!)

And while someone already linked to patrick breyers website[1] which has a good overview, I do so again so maybe more people will see it. This thing is not new, but it is also not easily ignored and everyone should be informed whats going on here. They will try to pass this again and again since they have done for years now and it's mostly been close calls until now.

[0] https://netzpolitik.org/2023/anlasslose-massenueberwachung-r...

[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

This is a good time to remember the short span when Firefox actually would show an RSS Symbol in the address bar after it found a feed on the page, allowing you to click on it to view it and subscribe. I thought, the future of RSS was bright back then. They removed it shortly after.

That they removed even the formatted feed view a few years back was just an insult!

But they could also never manage to cash in on microformats. So much potential there.

I am so conflicted about this project every time it comes up.

I think I understood for quite some time what it wants to do (Though when checking the website there always creeps in doubt, because it is so incomprehensible) and every year when I download the application again, it looks a bit more cleaner, a bit easier to just use. But still, basic things always elude me. Do I really have to read the handbook to figure out how to format text in the knowledge base? Half the windows and symbols just make no sense, etc. Try pressing a button to see what it does and now everything looks different and what even happened?

It seems to glacially improve on that front and I know to really use it, I have to learn to program it, but I am also of the mind basic functionality should be self explanatory. And pharo itself as the basis of this seems so convoluted and complex, I wonder if I even want to get into this.

And then, the community seems to solely be on discord still, and that is then always the point were I bow out and wonder if cuis smalltalk or other systems with simplicity as core tenant are not much nicer to use and I should look there. Of course, in the end, I never get more than surface deep into smalltalk, because while I want the tools to build my own environment, if I need to build them first, there is always more pressing work...

But honestly, a great knowledge base and data visualization I can intuitively just use and then expand later on with my own programs sounds like a dream workspace. It's just, that it is really hard to get into at the moment. I don't know any python, but I could just use jupyter know and learn as I go, but sadly, I never get that feeling here.

This is such a bad and reductionist take.

When progressive enhancement was the thing, nobody wanted to "disable 1/3 to 2/3 of their browser's technology", browsers mostly lacked many of modern CSS and JS enhancements across the board and having them fail graciously while still using modern features for the few who would support it was just the professional thing to do.

It sill is today of course, but it is obvious there are not many professionals left in webdev.

But, at least speaking for Germany here, the anti-technology stance of politicians and Germans in general certainly has a huge part in hampering the startup scene. This always goes both ways. It's not wrong to be skeptical and wanting privacy etc., but it also means it's harder to make bank by tracking everyone and selling their data, which has been a huge part of American technology startups for over a decade. And it often also just means, people don't trust new things and will not try them. Not sure this applies equally to the Netherlands though.

It also gives you something hacker news mostly lacks (besides the occasional Ask HN) and that is discussing topics organically vs. just discussing what people elsewhere have said. I think this is also an important distinction older type of forum software have before the newer "link share" type.

This is the main problem of the "Hacker News for [x]" type sites. Lobsters got lots of people interested, but it is itself mostly not interesting to read, because there is very little discussion. Sure, you keep out some noise, but you also keep out what makes hacker news great, and that is the comments from all sorts of people.

All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.

While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.

No, because this is about more than just supporting non-js use cases, it is about the type of design from the ground up and how you structure your application. JS is very welcome on these kind of interfaces, but also really unnecessary for what it actually does. It just adds bells and whistles. Or it should "add", if designed correctly. As another comment pointed out, now it takes more network round trips and uses more ressources. And now it does not work without JS anymore.

A good designed web app works just with plain html and minimal ressource use and than adds on top of that the get even better with css and js niceties. This used to be called progressive enhancement, if the client supports a feature, make your website better for these clients. It's just better and well rounded design with the added bonus of supporting clients with less capabilities.

Well, they claimed for years they wanted to strengthen civil liberties, stop surveillance, progress digitalisation of government etc. That all should have worked well with their coalition partners and the fact that they never actually intended to do these things and thus didn't certainly plays a role in that they lost so much voter approval, even if the keep telling themselves the only reason is that the were not neoliberal enough!

It used to have darkmode++ back in the day, because windows allowed you to just choose all the controls colors in any way you wanted. Of course it lacks features we want today, especially things we are used to from the web, like highlighting fields with errors in them etc., but I often think new features can't entirely explain why the newer toolkits are so much less ergonomically useable.

Personally I have seen a few over the years come and go. Podcasts (Adio and Video) for example often tried to use youtube as an additional channel, but still maintain their websites and RSS feeds.

It seems these days, most Youtube creators are at least somewhat aware of the problem and have websites, discord channels, patreons etc. While I still think many would struggle if they lost their youtube access suddenly, they do have additional channels to reach out to at least part of their audience.

If the shops are full of people working, are they not a second place? Of course it sucks if removing the free second place also removes the third place, but it really seems to stem from a cultural problem of people using coffee shops as coworking spaces? Of course, the market could correct with starbucks's business going to other coffee shops that could offer these services, though they probably need to reign in the abuse a bit to make it profitable.

Easy. Just slice of parts into your bowl until the scale shows the desired weight. I am a bit envious of American butter packaging, because it saves so much time, but if they ever change anything about it, you are all hosed, because nobody will know what 5 tablespoons was supposed to mean. ;-)

Depends on the manual. In my experience "How to read" either indicates the manual is borderline incomprehensible, or more often, the manual only describes trivial concepts that won't help you at all, for example, that clicking save will save the file.

So in addition to not helping you understand, it will waste your time. Which can make it worse then having none.