HN user
Fair enough. I just checked the AdGuard support forums. They agree that this feature can't work with the Content Blocker approach on macos. There's no way they can get any hooks into the browser, so interstitial ads will remain just that: interstitial.
I can see that AdGuard is probably a decent product for most other current browsers, though. Thanks for suggesting it anyway.
Why are you even bothering to type such things? I'm not talking about iOS in this sub-thread. The discussion here is about Safari on macos in the present day, not the effed up macos of the future. Can we just have a discussion about the present day please?
Seriously, you guys are relentless and exhausting! It might be time for me to bow out of Hacker News for good, if this sort of nonsense keeps up in the comments. Getting to be as bad for discourse as Reddit.
All I'm saying is that the browser-external Content Blocking approach Apple has chosen doesn't work very well and is disappointing in practice, even if it's a better proposition in terms of browser security. This currently has nothing to do with walled gardens on macos, whilst one can choose to use other browsers and add in-browser extensions that filter ads more effectively (as well as being able to remove DOM elements).
If you've got a helpful suggestion about Safari and the advertising situation, then please comment about that. As it happens, I'm not using Safari, but I remain interested in trying it again under macos, if Apple or someone else can offer proper ad blocking / ad removal.
Chrome is going that way too (it is proposed to remove permissions for integrated blocker extensions), but that _does_ have more to do with Google's nefarious ambitions with respect to advertising income, just as much as it is to do with security, I suspect.
Hmmm... just tried AdGuard on a couple of high profile web sites using Safari. Sure, Adguard is working to some extent.
On the first site - no ads. Whitespace where the ads would have been because content blockers can't interfere with the DOM and remove fragments.... but not bad.
Then I went to the NYT. Absolutely massive banner ad, full width of the screen taking up 25% of my screen real estate.. and then repeated again further down below the content. Looks utterly gross.
Now of course I don't have to use the NYT and could choose never to go to that site ever again, but this is the problem with Content Blockers that I'm talking about - they aren't enough on their own. So again, Safari is not usable with this approach.
Do you really see no ads, danaris? Perhaps you just don't go to these sorts of websites. Go and look at nytimes.com, using only AdGuard and Safari under macos and tell me what to see.
The claims on the AdGuard website are misleading... get this:
"No ads on YouTube - We'd wager you like watching YouTube and you don't like ads. The same for us! Luckily, AdGuard remover knows how to get rid of ads on Mac (even video ads)".
So I go to YT ... click on the first video on the homepage and there you go: advert... straight in. I mean I expected this, but again, the claims are just misleading. I mean perhaps that works on other OSes.
Whereas, with a browser-integrated blocking solution in Firefox - no video ads. I don't see how macos / iOS Content Blockers can't really be good enough when only inspecting traffic to the browser.
Ooh. Thanks danaris! I thought I'd already tried AdGuard in the past... but I may be mistaken. Will install today and give it a spin.
Ah cool: The Adguard website says that they've just added M1 support. I think M1 support was probably part of the issue when I was last trying the available blockers.
Do I believe that I'm Apple's target market? No. Do I believe they care about me as an individual? No, not really.
However...
I'm not seeing how your comment is relevant to my statement that I don't want to use Apple's browser in its current state, when I can easily use many other browsers in what you've described as their "walled prison", and I do use them.
Whilst the situation may change for the worse in the future (resulting in a true walled garden), I can currently install anything I like on macos - you don't have to use the app store. This isn't iOS.
I don't feel abused by Apple at all. Conversely, I have been relentlessly abused by Microsoft in the past, however; (no choice in some old jobs)... and recent news stories concerning Windows 11 suggest that they're still at it. My experience suggests that things really aren't as bad as you're implying.
I don't use Safari
I really want to like Safari and I try every release, but I can't use it for more than a few minutes because the adverts that get through are just so unbelievably bad (to someone that isn't used to seeing any). The Apple-recommended strategy of using simple OS-level Content Blockers just doesn't cut it unfortunately. It's such a shame (to me) that all that developer effort on Safari is effectively wasted because of the relentless scurge of ads.
I understand why Apple decided to prevent the install of integrated Ad blockers directly in the browser because it's a security risk, but the reality is that the web is unusable without them. I really hope that there is an Apple Engineer reading this, and that some day Apple will find a solution :-)
Perhaps the solution is as simple as Apple curating their own approved blocking database similar to that used by popular adblockers and baking it into Safari in a secure fashion. Then again, that might open them to legal challenges.
I don't diagree with you on some of the Dyson products being gimmicky with a premium price tag, and the air purifier does look suspect to me. However, the Dyson v11 cordless vacuum I just bought is phenomenal.
It has far better suction and cleaning effectiveness than anything I've ever used - which is partly why I bought the v11. Our mains powered central vacuum just wasn't cutting it, and was bothersome to use.
That's been my impression for as long as I can remember. Very puritanical compared to, say, Europe... and yet violence is no problem. I honestly don't think that I'll ever understand what the hangup with nipples is all about.
Agree - This GitHub theme is unfortunately too dark. Which is a shame, because I was genuinely excited to read that GH has released a dark mode.
I use many dark mode themes and have even created them. The important thing to constantly keep in mind whilst authoring a dark them is: resist the urge to go "too dark" and contrasty, and to keep checking against a known "good" reference.
If any GitHub execs are reading this, and would like to see an example of what we're talking about here, then the JetBrains "Darkula" theme in IntelliJ is a well done dark theme.
Clojure and F# are my two favourite languages and I have similar experience
Same. I have worked in both F# and Clojure profressionally. I love them both for different reasons.
As a fun thought experiment, I have often tried to force myself to choose between them, even though one doesn't really have to make a choice. Turns out that it's a tough choice to give one up over the other.
I tend to lean slightly towards Clojure at present, but then I'm using it a great deal at work.
However, if you're looking for a modern strongly typed, immutable functional language with type inference, then F# is really excellent.
I haven't used Haskell professionally and have only played with it but my feeling is that I prefer F# to Haskell because it has some "escape hatches" built in, in order to interop with C# and other .NET languages; So no IO Monad is required. It feels like more of a supporting structure and less of a straightjacket to me.
It's just one of those things where the different context between countries doesn't translate well.
In the UK, if you say "TCP" everybody knows that you're talking about the antiseptic phenolic liquid that can be used for gargling but never swallowed. It's present in most househould medicine cabinets.
It's important to note here, given that the subject is loss of the sense of taste and smell, that this stuff absolutely reeks.
A lot of people don't seem to mind building on top of tech owned and developed by a telecommunications company - Erlang.
The only members of the ML family that I'm aware of are Ocaml and the flavours of Standard ML. Only Ocaml is fit for production.
F# is also a member of the ML family and is totally fit for production.
Came here to ask the same thing.
Infuriating as hell that we are forced to pay for something that not only we don't wish to use or support, but it also inflates the Windows sales figures and percieved install base vs Linux installed base. Grr.
Electron contains the Chromium browser code, yes. But you still have to render to that browser.
Electron also contains a back-end Node.js process and a bunch of related JS APIs for building and hosting these apps.
Anyway, I accept your point that I'd be replacing a browser with... well a browser and some other stuff.
The problem though is the proliferation of Electron apps everywhere... suddenly your OS is full of these things and you don't get the memory management benefits of running just one Chrome or Chromium. Each app having its own copy of Chromium and Node.js merrily consuming CPU and RAM like they're the only ones doing it.
Signal, GitHub, Slack, VS Code, Skype, Notion, Tusk, WhatsApp etc. It's a cancer, I tell ya!
Ughh. And We're not even talking about the security issues here.
Sigh. I'm going out now, to buy more RAM.
"Consider minimalist browsers like Min ..."
Oh! Exciting!
I dutifully went to check out the Min browser web page. "Oh shit, it's another Electron app". Noped it out of there.
Many people seem to be comparing Janet and Clojure here as if one had to choose to use only one or the other.
Most of my daily work is done in Clojure or ClojureScript and that will continue to be true. However, I am excited by what I've seen in Janet and I'm already thinking that I'd love to call this from bash scripts to do system tasks (devops for example) that don't need the JVM cranked up.
I'm choosing both :-)
Disappointed? Not at all! I worked with it many years ago.
Whilst WCF made some notable improvements over what existed within the ecosystem before it, it was still a sprawling, complex PITA and full of developer friction. Killing it off in this case was definitely the right thing to do :-)
Oooh. Nice details. I have bookmarked all of this info.
Thank you for taking time to write a detailed response.
Thanks. When you say "without much issue", have you ever lost more than a few hours to "required tinkering" over those years, or was it pretty much plain sailing?
Anything else I should take a look at? What would your ideal next laptop be?
It sounds like a number of things p*ed you off, but what was your biggest gripe with the Apple stuff? Or perhaps it was everything (!).
Excellent! Now the positive news is rolling in :-)
Looking at that 7th generation model now. Actually... that looks really nice. And 20.04 LTS would be pretty good for me.
Ahh... good to hear.
I have been keeping an eye on the system76 stuff too - not just Dell. For a long time system76 seemed to only make laptops with large keyboards with extra number pads and asymetric mouse pads which put me off (many manufacturers do this, so it's not just them).
I notice that they finally have more tenkeyless models, so slowly but surely my checklist is being satisfied. Are you still able to use a recent version of Pop!_OS after all this time, or are you using another recent version of another distro? I'm interested in the longevity in terms of being able to install up to date OSes over the years. I mean that really shouldn't be an issue with Linux - support usually only gets better as time advances and new drivers / modules are written, but it would be nice to know how you got on, regardless.
Thanks. I'm am aware of this. I research this all the time, and regularly come away disappointed. I don't know if I verbalised clearly enough, but I have actively wanted good options for years, and I'm always open to whatever alternatives are current at the time of purchase.
Seriously, I'm in the market for a new laptop and there are still too many concerns relating to support for these devices... not just Dell but usually for whatever manufacturer I'm looking at. Once you start reading about people's experiences there are always issues - many of which have been discussed to death on HN.
Just because Dell claim that Linux is officially supported does not mean that it will be a smooth ride. I don't think that has changed much at all over the last few years? But perhaps this year is different.
Do you own this though? If you're using this new XPS model without power consumption issues, excellent wifi (wifi chips issues seem to always be the main downer), good mousepad behaviour? Perhaps it's finally not a problem? I will gladly lap up any positive news that you can give on this front.
Useful figures, so thanks for providing those. It's been a few months since I last looked into the latest prices. I agree with you that it's still worth it.
However, I feel that without comparing the OS and tight OS integration, this doesn't represent one of the most important aspects of a comparison between the two, when considering a purchase.
I go through this same loop every time I buy a new machine... yes, usually it's "no more Apple for me!" especially when I do the price comparison. So I waver for a couple of weeks whilst I research the latest hardware and Linux distros. But then I end up buying an Apple machine. It's been the same story for me for the last 17 years.
There's plenty of people like me out there that definitely don't want to use Windows, and that want a Unix that gets out of the way. I love Linux, especially on the server, but it's generally too much hassle on a laptop and so I always gravitate back to macos.
If the $600 is an Apple tax for that, then I will gladly continue to pay it. Over the 3 years lifetime of a developer machine (or more!), my time is definitely worth more than $600 compared with constantly fiddling with Linux kernal modules and other hardware support issues. I just want to get some work done without interruptions.
Definitely would love the exact same machine without the TouchBar, though. Perhaps that would shave off $100?
The in-app notifications are nnoying for sure, but I've never received emails from them.
Email prefs are here: https://www.netflix.com/EmailPreferences
Marketing prefs are here: https://www.netflix.com/MarketingCommunications
I appreciate your positive encouragement and that you took the time to write. I'm glad that you jumped in at the deep end and that it worked out so well for you :-)
I'm still not convinced that it would be good for my wellbeing and happiness, given that I've experienced PP for a couple of weeks on and off (not anywhere near 6 months like you!).
I do like to collaborate with co-workers to solve problems, for sure, and we will often share screens and benefit from putting our minds together. But PP for 6 ... 8 hours a day, without periods of quiet contemplation, spent with my own thoughts? When I think about it like that, my heart sinks.
I read through this quickly, but I couldn't find any mention of pair programming not being suitable for sensitive and introverted people - especially those that suffer from anxiety and other mental illnesses that can be made worse by the stress of pair programming.
Whilst the article mentions that it "can be hard and stressful" there is still the assumption that most people are more or less the same in terms of mental resilience, that most people would be okay and that everybody should "give it a go". I don't feel that's true at all, and certainly I'm one of those people that would be made ill by an environment of constant forced pair programming _even though_ I manage to hold down a job, appear "fairly normal" from the outside and do pretty well as a mostly solo programmer.
Quite simply, advertising is visual pollution; whether it be on large billboards, on bus stops or freestanding in the middle of the sidewalk.
It's visual pollution and it has ruined our towns and cities. I'm excited to read this article and see that people are taking a stand.