handsclean

Then they tried to catalogue which knowledge had not yet been catalogued, and it all went to hell.

What a shameless load of reframing. Let’s balance that out a little.

Italy is doing something immoral and significantly harmful, foreigners considered leaving rather than becoming complicit, this guy is morally offended that foreigners think they’re allowed to not be in Italy.

Of course predictions about the future are not present reality.

It’s not set in stone, but it’s supported by the times this has happened before and by trends in Apple and in tech. “Nothing will ever change” is a prediction, too, and one much less supported by evidence.

Your experience is starkly different than mine. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro’s much more toy-like predecessor from ~10 years ago?

My experience is that while there’s a feature and community gap for both Pixelmator Pro and Affinity, Affinity just tried to copy Photoshop, positioning it as a worse but cheaper Photoshop, while Pixelmator Pro feels like an attempt to make a better photo editor, losing some familiarity points but also being tangibly better than Photoshop at most use cases it can handle, which is many. It’s also an excellent macOS citizen. Between those two factors, it seems much more up Apple’s alley.

The other thing that’s going to go away is purchasing only what you need. I want exactly one of these apps, I bet virtually nobody uses all of them, and yet the suckers are going to be telling us that being made to buy stuff we don’t want or use is “more value”.

I rejected iOS 26 for a while and boy did my opinion on whether Apple forces version changes do a 180. Everything people lambast Windows for was there. Nags with no “no” option, a red notification badge you can’t dismiss, scare dialogs, and disabling unrelated features. This latest slimy behavior is unfortunately quite consistent with how Apple treats disobedient iOS users.

On macOS they still seem to be stopped by firm enough non-consent, but they really try to force you first, and I get the impression they may do worse any year now.

perceptually free

Bizarre phrase. If you think mandatory bundling is free stuff then your perception is not very good.

I’d argue it’s a strength. You still have classes and custom attributes to reach for when you want an (effectively) unordered set, the difference is just that you define some boundary that’s exclusive. This reflects reality. Some helper classes work together by just slapping them together, but component-like classes, like a toggle and a hero image, don’t. If you do want to combine them, you need to think about how, potentially rearchitect, and implement it whether you’re using classes or tag names.

Apple generally does this transparently and automatically when exporting photos. If you’re not getting that behavior then you could have it off in settings, it could be your workflow, or it could be a Google Drive bug/limitation. What exactly do you mean by “transfer a photo on my iphone via google drive”? Something like open the Apple Photos app, hit share, select Google Drive, save it somewhere there, go to the Google Drive app, and copy a link?

The flight distance is 2,520 miles, Google puts road distance at 3,179 mi = 1.26x, 29,905 mi is 11.87x. Road miles are not even close to accounting for it, it’s just a bug.

FileZilla explicitly and emphatically sells a license, not a download. In fact, technically not even the initial download is included in the purchase. They’re technically within their rights to never even give you the software, just say “all we ever sold you was a promise not to sue”, but we’d all agree that’s a scam, right? So, where’s the line?

Point of comparison, Steam, CodeCanyon, and Gumroad all let you re-download the version you licensed indefinitely.

Well, I wanted to revert and wanted a new phone, so bought an iPhone 16 instead of a 17, which comes with iOS 18 installed. iCloud data synced in fine, and the 17 is a very small upgrade anyway, even a downgrade in some ways.

It was the primary motivating factor behind the previous major browser shift, though there were also other large factors.

Remember that users often don’t correctly figure out which part of the stack is causing something. I’m guessing people generally don’t ID the browser as the performance bottleneck unless they’re familiar with browsers of significantly differing speed, and when not it comes out as asking for faster internet, faster websites, or a faster computer, all of which we hear constantly.

Please consider changing pass/fail to an integer score out of maybe 5. This test is becoming more and more misleading as your apparent desire to give due credit conflicts with quality improvements over already ok-ish models. For example, on the great wave Gemini 3’s excellent rendition gets no additional credit over Qwen technically not failing if one is generous, and on cards, there’s actually no score distinction between results that one could or could not use.

I thought so too at first, but zoom in to where the neck joins the head. What looks like the head’s shadow from a distance is actually a hard seam between thick neck and thin neck, with much of the apparent shadow actually a cutout showing the background.

Looks like the Seedream result here has been changed to fail, which I’d agree with, too. Pose change complaints aside, I think that neck is actually the same length were it held straight.

The university did not take this action directly in response to the issue, it took it in response to a call from a US senator regarding a law restricting freedom of speech. Such calls do not have a “no thanks” option. This is the normal way power is exerted, actually executing a punishment is the exception.

Your definition of freedom of speech is wrong per both US and international law. It is a freedom, the issue is the restriction of it, not just any punishment unjustly inflicted.

Sounds like a hard life. So much time spent on buggy, unintuitive, jumbled, and half-assed OS, then the only time they get away from it, they have to use Windows.

You’re right, my bad, Spigot (from Bukkit), not Fabric. I got the impression it’s actually using ~~Fabric~~ Spigot code for this because you’re using plugins compiled for Spigot and both a paper.whatever and spigot.whatever config file, but after looking it up I see that they forked it.

I’m not really clear on mod vs plugin vs mixin, I was just trying to refer to whatever software does the decompilation work rather than just consuming APIs provided by projects that do.

Sounds like it’s correct that Paper didn’t do its own mod API, but incorrect that Paper doesn’t do its own decompilation work.

By playercount, it is the largest (custom, standalone) MC server software in the world.

Do you have a source on this? Not trying to accuse you of anything, I just know that a few servers claim this, and don’t know if we have reliable numbers.

Paper isn’t a mod loader, it uses Fabric under the hood. Also, what makes you think it’s the most popular server? I thought it was fading. I switched my server from Paper to Fabric years ago.

No. Almost everybody hated it out of context, but in context many understood that one man was about to obtain unprecedented power over all three branches of government and use it to vindictively pursue personal vendettas. These people were correct, this then happened.

Personally, I’m reminded of how every dysfunctional country’s deposed regimes flee or are killed. We sheltered Americans find it easy to forget that peaceful transfer of power is an accomplishment of lawful society, and as rule of law weakens we have only more chaotic, ignominious, and probably eventually violent transitions to look forward to.

Reaction to the Biden pardon is a pretty huge thing to be completely unaware of. You should reevaluate whether you’re in a media bubble.

Imagine if you have, let's say, a text document model, and you need to create a new copy every time the user types a letter. That's not going to work fast. And there will be no granular updates, because the signal only tracks the value (whole document), not its components (a single paragraph).

Funnily enough, back when storage was slow enough that saving a text document involved a progress bar, one of the big advantages Word had over competitors was lightning fast saves, which they accomplished by switching to an immutable data structure. That is, while others would update and save the data, Word would leave it untouched and just append a patch, skipping lots of time spent rewriting things that an in-place edit would shift.

The “copy everything” mental model of immutable programming is really about as wrong as a “rewrite everything” mental model of mutable programming. If it happens it’s bad code or a degenerate case, not the way it’s supposed to happen or usually happens. Correctly anticipating performance requires getting into a lot more detail.

I think you missed the point about bundling. In this instance, the first choice is your laptop choice, and the second is your charger choice. Because the first choice is far more important than the second, the party that’s chosen in the first can also dictate the second. There is no competition for who supplies chargers that come with MacBooks, nor should one expect there to be. This is a generalization of the mechanism by which many segment monopolies work, for example regional ISPs, where the two choices are most of your life vs your ISP.

Most consumers want their laptops to come with a charger, even if you personally don't. That's why they're sold that way.

Citation needed, on both counts. Plenty of counter-examples in this thread. Non-tech people I know aren’t charger crazed, they’re mildly amused or annoyed by their inexplicable excess of chargers.

Like, nobody says the free market is failing because Coke forces me to buy carbonated H2O along with their syrup at the grocery store.

I’d say it is indeed failed / nonexistent there, it’s just that nobody cares, because its potential benefit is so small it’s outweighed by overhead. Chargers aren’t laptops or cars or houses, but, as you said, there’s a lot more to them, and they’re more expensive and contribute significantly to e-waste. There actually is a charger market, and it’s better when it’s more free.

To be clear, the healthier market I’m envisioning is one where consumers can make charger purchasing decisions freely, not one where nobody’s allowed to also offer a bundle.

If you sell your old laptop when you buy a new one, you generally sell it with old charger.

Sounds like a symptom of incompatibility. I’ve only ever included the charger when it was specific to the laptop.

And different Apple laptops take chargers of different maximum watts (they're compatible but not optimal), so they're not all the same anyways.

Chargers automatically provide whatever power level is needed, up to their max, and charging power isn’t the steady tick upward we’re used to elsewhere. The MacBook Pro did get a faster charger a few years ago, relegating old ones to that “compatible but not optimal” state, but meanwhile MacBook Air chargers got slower, and most releases didn’t change the charger. Certainly there are sometimes benefits to buying a new charger, but it happens much less often than new device purchases, and even when there are benefits purchases should still be the customer’s choice.

Sometimes letting the free market decide actually gives customers what they want and find most useful.

I agree, but “free market” doesn’t mean lawlessness, it means an actual market that’s actually free. Actual market: companies compete on economics, not e.g. violence or leverage over consumers. Actually free: consumers freely choose between available options. Bundling is a very classic example of an attempt to circumvent free market economics, using the greater importance of one choice to dictate a second choice.

Many people got played on the charger thing. It’s never free, it’s a mandatory bundle. But companies only put one line item on the receipt, never refer to the primary component separately but instead conflate its name and idea with the bundle, and when forced to de-bundle (usually) bump the primary component’s price to compensate, and people buy it: “the EU took away my charger!”

Chargers don’t change quickly. If I lost my charger from 2019, the ideal replacement in 2025 would be literally exactly the same model—and mine still works like new and looks good. I have nothing to gain from buying a new charger.

We should be cheering the EU for ending an abuse that the US has long failed to.

Also, it still bundles a USB-C to MagSafe 3 cable.

Showing up in a thread you haven’t even participated in and saying “I’ve already made my choice, quit giving me second opinions” is comically self-centered.

A performance problem I’ve run into with small websites like this one is many caching systems are tuned for bigger companies or hotter programs, and basically every load ends up an “exceptional” cold start case. VMs wake up, Cloudflare actually only keeps your data one place, there’s no sane HTTP caching value, and, yeah, files are read from disk. Worse, it’s easy to miss during testing by loading things more frequently. I’m sure there are filesystem or server parameters to tweak, but I do think small websites that want great performance should be, somewhere somehow, managing caching manually.

Never knew that. I think that in combination with CSS grid auto fill, that may have solved a huge chunk of paged columns.

I want this and am eventually going to try harder to implement it, but the reason is basically because CSS can’t do it. What do you do when you still have more content than fits on the screen? If you just stick with default CSS behavior and make the columns taller than the screen, now you’re scrolling all over the place constantly, it sucks. If you add more columns off to the right, you already probably need to use JS for layout, and it still isn’t nice on desktop, you need to scroll more for each bit of content and most desktops don’t have intuitive side scrolling controls. What you want is viewport-sized “pages” with a dynamic number of columns per page, but this is basically a whole extra layout mode that you need to implement in JS. There was a whole project to let JS plug into the layout engine better, I think it’s stalled now, I don’t know if it got far enough. Then there’s the weird bottom right -> scroll -> top left jump, you probably want to implement a hint or UI there, maybe even column to column since we’re breaking norms here. Scroll snapping is thankfully in CSS now, so we don’t have to worry about scrolling precisely to the next screenful, but we do cost people the ability to put what they want where they want it within the viewport. You’ll need to implement something to make anchor links work again, users can no longer just look at the top of the page. Everything’s going to go nuts when users resize the window, and maybe even more nuts due to browser attempts to keep them “in the same place”, you need to make it some semblance of ok. As soon as you want something non-text your columns will be too narrow, so you’re really going to have to implement complex column-spanning stuff off the bat. CSS thankfully has tools for controlling things like “don’t split this across columns”, but I bet they’ll prove inadequate if you dig into it. You’ve also reduced linearity, it’s now much less true that what’s above is before and what’s before is above, etc.

I’m still interested in this layout, but that’s why nobody does it: it’s far more complex from the web dev’s perspective, bad if not executed perfectly, and still has downsides even if perfect.

I think it’s still popular in places where the viewport size and content are both known at design time.

It’s gotten a little old for me, just because it still buoys a wave of “solve a problem with a regex, now you’ve got two problems, hehe” types, which has become just thinly veiled “you can’t make me learn new things, damn you”. Like all tools, its actual usefulness is somewhere in the vast middle ground between angelic and demonic, and while 16 years ago, when this was written, the world may have needed more reminding of damnation, today the message the world needs more is firmly: yes, regex is sometimes a great solution, learn it!

I get the feeling you’re saying this because the harm caused by privacy loss is complicated, uncertain, time offset, etc, while “harm” feels to you like losing $100 or getting punched. You should think about the 1960s civil rights movement. Imagine you’re in the midst of it, without the hindsight of settled history, with actually many authority figures telling all these silly “activists” to get a real job and stop making such a fuss about something we all got on fine without until they started on their tantrum. What thought process would you need in order to correctly analyze whether the things being fought against were genuinely harms? What is the result of applying that thought process to privacy?

This is, by the way, playing catch-up, privacy has been an internationally recognized human right for many years. I’m just trying to help you see human rights from a perspective other than “something somebody is ordering me to care about”.