green-bottle

A bit tangential to the main topic of the post. They mention that they are working on another optimizing compiler Ion which will replace the cranelift compiler (which is still in nightly) as the new compiler for WebAssembly.

They link the issue [1] tracking the change which also speaks about disabling cranelift.

To my knowledge cranelift was made for the purpose of compiling WebAssembly in Firefox, so I am not sure if I am missing something here (it's not yet production ready maybe). The Cranelift README[2] mentions that it will be a backend for IonMonkey.

I am a complete layman here so I am curious if someone here has a better understanding.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1687626

[2] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/tree/main/crane...

The article makes an argument for why you should consider Pixel series phones that still have official support from the vendor if you are in the market for Android phones.

While it may not have been the point of the article it gives no reason why you should consider CopperheadOS.

This is my perspective taking the article at face value as a complete layman in Hardware and OS security who cannot provide any critic or judgement on the technical content of the article.

I noticed today that youtube-dl was no longer working. I am on the latest version so there is no update that will fix things right now.

It wasn't hard to whip up a cli wrapper for NewPipeExtractor which I am already using on my phone for Youtube via Newpipe.

It is pretty limited currently, but sufficient for my purposes.

There is correlation between surnames (or the lack of one), language dialects, dietary habits and caste. But the signal here is very noisy and unreliable except for a few cases like having a well known surname.

To my knowledge there is no correlation to place of birth. While there may be statistical differences in the distribution of characteristics such as say skin colour among communities which I am unaware of, you will find a reasonable representation of all physiognomies? in each community.

Most of the Indian population lives in small towns and villages where everyone knows one another. People would notice if you suddenly start claiming to be from a different community.

The classification of higher and lower caste itself is an oversimplification.

Wearing the thread implies that you are from a Brahmin community. Brahmin is just one of the many communities that exist in India based on geography, language (including numerous dialects), wealth and religion (including different sects). Each of these communities think they are better than some subset of indian ethnicities.

Some groups (Dalits being one of the prominent examples) are unfortunately at the receiving end of biases from almost everyone else.

If you are living in the more progressive parts of the country (generally more urban) being found out things will make things... awkward. Not in the sense that there will be consequences, but you will have aired out your insecurities to others.

I feel that you are making a mistake that many native language speakers make in saying that their language has a complex nonlinear history compared to other languages which they happen to not know much about.

It just seems so for native speakers as they know a lot more about the history of their language than others.

English speakers seem particularly susceptible to it since its lineage has been extensively studied.

It may also just seem so to me since I hang around primarily in the English speaking Internet.

I have noticed a tendency among people to rationalise things that suck in life to actually be good for you. Phrases such as "It builds character" or "It is necessary for the society/people/..." are not too uncommon.

It seems to be a universal characteristic of people to co-opt largely harmful activities such as smoking for useful things such as social interaction or relaxation.

Android Chrome and Firefox (via add-ons) have dark mode options. I do not know about iOS Safari.

While a dark mode option made by the website itself may be able to handle certain edge cases that the browser dark modes may miss, for most part part the browser dark mode features handle most cases quite admirably.

I feel that rather than going behind individual website developers, making the need known to the platform browser developers is a more scalable approach. Even if HN gets a dark mode, what about the websites it links to? Do you also plan to ping the the Devs there for a dark mode option?

From my experience multiple independent dark mode toggles for each website I visit are a pain to manage. I never use them. Dark mode is purely and globally handled by browser extensions.

I am a bit tired of seeing this topic come up again and again on Reddit or HN. You may have as well, asked if someone preferred blue or orange.

The choice of a programming language (without considering specific details of the application) is very subjective with a low signal to noise ratio. What looks aesthetic or ergonomic for others will most likely not apply to you.

For most practical applications things like the runtime, library ecosystem and other factors become more important and just "Rust or Golang for backend development?" isn't very helpful.

My aunt and mother use a bunch of websites I've never heard of for free streaming of movies and TV shows. They may not be the most informed about potential hidden costs of these services, but they are definitely resourceful in finding them. I think you overestimate the difficulty of using technology. All you need to do is learn to type "How do I get $web_service for free?" in the search bar.

Like all other internet bans in India I doubt this one will have any teeth. Everyone has a "Free" VPN app that they use to bypass these restrictions.

Most people own Android phones where they can sideload apps downloaded from some third party APK website (of questionable trustworthiness)

iPhones have negligible penetration in India so are not even a part of the equation.

I doubt Xi's going away anytime soon. He got constitutional term limits on Presidency removed.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43361276

I do not think a typical Indian farmer would own anything close to 2000 acres of land. Most farming in India is not mechanised but is instead highly dependent on human labour. From what I know a typical farmer would probably own only a couple of acres of land (many in single digits? anecdata with no citation) which is cultivated by their family subject to further fragmentation when inherited by the next generation.

The majority of Desktop browsers support extensions that provide support for dark mode. On mobile I know Android Chrome (via chrome://flags) and Firefox (via extensions) support dark mode. Don't know about Safari and other mobile browsers but I feel that overall there are plenty of options for dark mode on HN without a separate site specific implementation.

I also have noticed that I never use the site specific Dark mode implementations as it is a lot more convenient to globally enable dark mode (at night) rather than playing around with toggles for every website that supports it.

https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=<PhoneNumber>

I use this link which will open in WhatsApp by default to send a WhatsApp message to someone who is not in my Contacts and don't want to add to my Contacts just to send a WhatsApp message.

It will be a pain in the arse to use for all your contacts and probably not worth the effort as if you use WhatsApp regularly (for an Indian there's no way around it) you will have sent a message to almost everyone on your contact list at least once and Facebook will know about it rendering the whole thing pointless.

I don't have much of an idea about Windows or OSX. Regarding Desktop Linux, I think I wouldn't be far off if I said it has no desktop security model. The permission system on *nixes (and Linux by inheritance) were formulated in the context of it being a multi-user system with multiple people logging in via a terminal. Your data had to be protected from access by unauthorized users. I don't know if security aspects of running untrusted or unverified programs was even considered which are significantly more important in the current context.

I think Flatpak is trying to improve Linux application security but still has a really long way to go compared to the likes of Android and iOS.

Due to the planned obsolescence (via stoppage of security updates) of Android phones within 2 years I had been seriously been considering buying an iPhone SE2.

But I can't really justify myself buying it at the hefty price tag of $555 in India. (The extra $155 being added due to the high custom duties on imports in India.)

Salaries (at least for software developers) here being 1/4th of that of US developer salaries or lesser makes even the $400 price in US not quite easy to digest.

It seems I will be stuck with buying an Android One phone instead.

Firefox. When I first got to use a Computer to surf the internet I remember using Firefox and that is what I have used ever since.

A lot of people here have said that Firefox was a slow and bloated mess pre-Quantum. I suppose I stuck to Firefox when most people shifted over to Chome because my internet connection had been slow enough that internet was unusable without javascript and images disabled (this is no viable as a significant proportion of websites don't work without JS). Hence my browser ran pretty light and never gave me any issues.

At work for development I now use Chrome (for devtools) as Firefox still chokes up on really large javascript files. For anything else Firefox remains my default as it is comparable to chrome now in terms of performance (this only means I haven't noticed any noticeable difference for my web browsing workloads) and has a lot of features that I like (containers, customisability,...).

edit: The above refers to my choice of browser on Desktop.

I feel this is a problem in the majority of Indian cities. Perhaps Mumbai stands out here as it has more Traffic hence greater levels of unnecessary honking.

Having worked at Bangalore and Hyderabad, living along/nearby any road with regular traffic lead to poor sleep quality due to sound pollution from senseless honking. Poorly enforced regulations regarding the hours when construction is allowed don't help either.

Perhaps a bit tangential to OP's question, but in a similar thread on HN in the past someone had posted that you will probably be more successful if you try to fit in your hobbies/ side projects (tech or not tech related) before you start your workday as you will be less tired and more fresh.

I sort of agree with this as when I come back from work I often find myself lacking the willpower to do anything more than skim HN, reddit or watch something on youtube and then sleep.

I've found myself to be more productive if I get some time in the morning before I go to work.

Last I checked Kiwi is not open source. There are bits and pieces of code lying around in the Github repo, but not the full source code.

The browser seems to get regular enough updates on play store, has decent ad blocking (at least good enough for my purposes) and to date has the best night mode out of all android browsers I've tried.

No white flashes like I've faced in Firefox for Android. The dark mode applies to the whole of the browser UI.

I use Bromite, Firefox for Android or Fenix mostly equally during the day and Kiwi at night.

Though the fact that it is not open source may put some people off.