gridlocdev

“Better” is entirely subjective, complexity can provide improved power for advanced users but make it more difficult for new / average users by compartmenting the “happy path” regular actions into multiple composable disconnected features.

For example, LibreOffice doesn’t have the “Format as Table” feature from Excel, which in a single action combines adding sorting arrows along with a color scheme on a selected range of grouped cells. The range of grouped cells and the background colors in the Excel version auto-expand as new columns or rows are added. Sure, I could press 3-4 different hotkeys and manually update all of this in a sequence for LibreOffice Calc each time I modify the group of cells, but ideally the software would have some single unified action to not make me need to do that without resorting to creating custom possibly flaky macros.

I’ve thought about doing this, what kind of device do you use for input?

I have a Logitech K400 Plus portable keyboard and it works great for general use, but I end up using my Apple TV on the couch instead since I prefer using a TV remote / gamepad to navigate.

It’s unfortunate the HDMI forum is dragging their feet on this, but it’s kind of the nature of their business model so I’m not holding my breath waiting for things to resolve.

To use Linux at 4k at a high refresh rate with a TV or other screen that only has HDMI ports, they sell high-performance DisplayPort to HDMI adapter cords for like $30 on Amazon. My Bazzite machine works just fine on a 4K tv at 120hz, and even enables HDR now which it didn’t before with the regular HDMI cord.

If the HDMI forum thing doesn’t work out, I totally could see Valve offering a DP to HDMI cable just so folks don’t need to do extra searching to get the best performance out of their new hardware.

I can’t wait for QUERY to become an official RFC.

It's felt quite awkward to tiptoe around the existing spec when building features that retrieve data; we've had to either use POST to keep sensitive filter criteria out of http logs or just create a usually massive URL-encoded query string.

Or if on the iOS side of the fence, I’ve found the Octal app is fantastic

This is a very confusing move if true, for a few reasons:

- A folded iPad wouldn’t necessarily be easily pocket-able for most people. - I regularly see iPads being used for gaming and media consumption, neither of which really benefits from a folding screen that gets smaller than its regular size. - The ergonomics of touch controls with apps in a side-by-side multi-tasking view is already difficult enough on existing folding phones, and would likely be very uncomfortable on an even larger device.

Obligatory link to https://killedbygoogle.com/

I switched to Linux around the time the TPM stuff started since my hardware was “no longer supported” on Windows 11, and honestly more people should try Linux. I feel like aside from multiplayer online gaming (where anticheat is basically a self-inflicted rootkit) there’s not much missing here. Most Steam games are playable thanks to Valve, I legitimately almost never need to touch the terminal since apps are containerized now and distros ship a software store application to manage them, and the major desktop environments (GNOME, KDE) all have a stable and modern-looking UI.

This looks awesome, can’t wait for it to include speaker notes and/or videos so it’s easier to use for self-study!

Maybe 5-10 years ago, but today’s Linux desktop has evolved to be much more user friendly and stable. Applications have a standard containerized format (Flatpak), the most popular distributions ship a software store to update your apps and system with one click, and the stability of things has improved to a point where (in my experience) things almost never break unless you’re running the absolute bleeding-edge latest-gen hardware. I would highly recommend giving it a shot if you haven’t at least tried it as a daily driver before. (To get started, just look up a tutorial for how to dual-boot with Windows or play around with it in a Virtual Machine)

That’s one reason why I love the devlog videos from Randy. Not only does he not hide it when things get hard, he truly takes you on the journey to see his most painful-est of moments in a way that really allows you to either learn from it or just simply laugh at the absolutely absurd circumstances that he threw himself into.

I’m pretty optimistic about V, it so far has great language ergonomics, solid performance, and memory safety through its “autofree” memory feature flag. https://vlang.io/

Those restrictions seem intended to prevent people from creating a bunch of bot accounts that exploit the free tier. (Which is a common problem among free tiers for CI services and free online games)

I’m curious, what are some better alternative authentication methods to combat that problem than requiring a phone number?

C# with ASP.NET Core has been pretty great in my experience; it has both reasonable language syntax without that many footguns and reliable performance

Why doesn’t Twitter require and enforce that display names of Twitter Blue users unique?

In the event a legitimate party is name-jacked, they could just triage those incidents like they have done pre-acquisition.

TLDR: Brave asked USPS to send out a mass physical mail ad to folks in a specific set of US zip codes. The “New User” message is a mishap from the marketing team; Brave themselves did not collect or purchase any user data to serve the advertisement to any specific person(s).

To play devil’s advocate here; while ideologically it’s sort of backwards from a privacy standpoint (utilizing USPS for using non-anonymized user data), I understand how difficult it really is to market a new browser for non-technical users where a similar advertisement of whom it would likely never reach online. To gain and keep the trust of informed users alongside average joes though, I do hope that in the future a more anonymous method is used to acquire eyes on the product than delegating the non-private business to third-party vendors.

Here’s the exact responses from Brave rep on the explainer Reddit thread.

I want to stress that Brave didn't buy any data. Not even anonymous data. We sent these mailers through the United States Postal Service. They have names and addresses, but none of that makes its way back to Brave (by design; we don't want any user data). We don't even want names printed on the mailers; we've asked (and will stress again) that this not happen.

This is understandable confusion, likely due to the "New Brave User" message. In reality, these were mailed only to residents living within certain target cities. Brave gives the USPS a zip code, and that's it. The "New Brave User" wording, I'm told, is not uncommon in marketing. Personally, I find it a bit confusion as it seems to imply the recipient is already a Brave user (which we do not know to be the case). I hope this helps to clear up any confusion!

I actually was a victim of this recently, and ended up unintentionally signing up for their $25/month subscription while attempting to create an account to freeze my credit with that bureau.

The subscription sign-up form is nearly identical in both theming and content to the free sign-up forms, and they can be easily mistaken for one another. TransUnion also does not use a singular identity provider shared between any of their free or paid services, meaning you must go through a sign-up form to create a unique account for each of them.

The TransUnion "Member Login" website also either partially or fully obscures the links to all three of their free services using a message banner on standard 1920x1080 desktop monitors https://www.transunion.com/customer-support/login (one of which was the "Freeze Credit" service I was looking for). There is also no "X" button to close this banner, meaning you must actually physically scroll the page to see these links. The only available links to click without scrolling the page are the ones that sign you up for a subscription.

The only other accessible page link that isn't obstructed by the banner is to the Credit Monitoring $25/month subscription sign-up page https://membership.tui.transunion.com/tucm/orderStep1_form.p...?. This user sign-up form lists the "You have chosen Credit Monitoring ... $25/month subscription" over halfway down the page on the right side, which at that point in using the webpage an average user (including me) would have been already several form fields into the process of filling out the signup information and are no longer reading things anymore on the right sidebar. If this page actually intended to convey this information as one of the first things a user should know on this page, this subscription information and what it offers should be at the top so it can be scanned before beginning to fill out information. At the end of this subscription process, I also did not see a single easily-discernible confirmation dialogue box or button such as "Confirm subscription" informing me that I was actually signing up for a subscription as well as an account.