AlienRobot

Why would they remove the ads from users who have proven that they would even pay for a Facebook subscription?

Imagine paying for the privilege to display an animated icon.

I blame Bethesda and their horse armor for this.

That surprised me as well.

I thought the whole point of cookies, local storage, session storage, and indexed DB were to avoid what origin private file system is doing.

You mean I could have just saved stuff as a file this whole time instead of serializing it to a string? Why didn't we just do this from the start?

Is this tailwind?

The problem is smartphones.

You literally can't make a website from the 2000's nowadays, because that means you want a 800px fixed width layout or something of sort.

If you do that, your website will look absolutely gorgeous since the 800px width + precise pointer + hover requirement allows you to get rid of all unnecessary whitespace, explain the UI with tooltips, and guarantees you always have enough width for one sidebar, but it won't be responsive.

The real solution to the modern web is to destroy all mobile devices on the planet.

This platform could have been a single article titled "10 projects made with Claude." You'd just need to find another 9.

My short experience with Claude and ChatGPT via web is that:

1. the way GPT writes is simply fundamentally annoying. I pretty much had to create a project with a file that said "do not use headings, lists or emojis" to make it bearable. It feels like, as a product, this sort of thing should be a general preference the user sets before they even start talking to a chatbot.

2. Claude just loves wasting tokens doing things nobody asked for. You ask "how do I calculate the distance between 2 points?" and it's probably going to compile some C code in the background with tests to make sure it works, then generate an interactive diagram on the fly to show how the math works, and then give you a downloadable file with the code. Like, dude, I just want some text. Why are you doing all of this?

Both of these problems come from the obvious lack of any UI controls in the software. there is no way for the user to know what sorts of things the software can do, because it's not exposed via UI as a checkbox like "generate interactive diagram" or "avoid using emojis." Discoverability is burning tokens to figure out what prompts work, or looking at example prompts the developer placed in the welcome screen.

I just feel it's completely ridiculous how LLM's are essentially the culmination of a trajectory of bad UI practices masquerading as "good UX" and now they're being implemented everywhere because people think it's good UX a blank textbox where you don't even know what you're supposed to type to do something.

What?

You can't run Node on embedded systems, because there isn't enough memory.

A compiled zig program can be only several kilobytes with no depedenencies.

Array access programmed in low-level languages can be optimized with SIMD and parallelization, which will be orders of magnitude faster than the same thing on Javascript. Text processing, image manipulation, video processing, hashing, etc.

There is like infinite reasons to not use Javascript.

Yo dawg, I heard you like gambling.

You don't have an expectation of privacy. I do. I don't want to go outside and have my every move recorded. There is something deeply disgusting about that notion.

If people really thought it didn't matter, they would just label their AI-generated stuff as "AI" and let consumers choose. To do otherwise is to scam.

That's because the only thing that became "realistic" were the graphics. People don't really want realism anywhere else, because realism means infinite complexity. They just want to hack'n'slash.

Wow, has it really gone all the way down to zero?

To be fair, that was 8 years ago. Github now has all that days and users + 8 years of data and users.

It could be many things. Microsoft mismanaging stuff. Azure. Vibe-coded Github. So much AI slop being committed it adds an extra burden on the servers, etc.

What I'm afraid of is that this is all a ticking bomb that is going to explode VERY hard on the most technologically vulnerable.

>In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.[0]

This, but web scale.

- https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks

My favorite example is how Google implemented "AI" in their search console, because it just shows how completely worthless "AI" is even when used by a company that should have all the resources in the world and all the expertise to do it right.

One of the sample prompts is "How is my traffic compared to last month?" So if you type all of this text, click send, wait for Google servers to burn a liter of water to calculate a probable answer, what it gives you isn't even the answer, but an option that you can "apply." If you click on "apply," it refresh the page with a filter using the functionality that already existed in the search console. In other words, this entire LLM can't do more than you can already do by clicking on the extremely simplified buttons of the existing UI. How do you do the same thing via the UI? Click "More -> Compare -> Apply". A whole LLM to replace 3 clicks with 2 clicks + typing the prompt.

By the way, just think: if we gave people an LLM in this analytics thing, what is the number 1 question people would ask? The answer is obviously "how do I increase my clicks?" or "how do I become number 1 on Google?" You don't even need to be a product person to figure that out. That's obvious. Just completely obvious. And of course, the Google's chatbot can't answer that. Because they probably realized, instantly, that is going to be a lawsuit if they said "do X to get more clicks" and you did X and you didn't get more clicks.

Good website. It's responsive.

I was writing a comment after some code I wrote and Copilot autocompleted saying "This is hacky, but..."

I thought it was funny so I put a comment above saying "This is what Copilot said about my code:" and it autocompleted a line after it saying "Copilot was correct, but..."

Yes, and I wish Linux developers would see their own hypocrisy.

Linux users love to say that "fragmentation is good" but they also depend fully on root, sudo, users/groups, and RWX file permissions. Those are "standards" enforced by having only 1 way of doing something, the kernel.

Just look at lotteries.

I don't believe in them because when you consider operational costs, less money comes out of the lottery than goes in, so if everyone simply didn't bet on the lottery, they would have more money than if they bet on it.

But everyone who bets thinks "but what if I win?"

Vivaldi is the only browser I feel actually has features. Built-in RSS client, mail client, vertical tabs, workspaces, notes, saved sessions, tab groups, side by side tabs, profiles, etc.

To put more simply, just look at how many preferences its preference dialog has compared to other browsers. It feels like nobody else is even doing anything except coming up with a new CSS property nobody is going to use every 3 months.

Everyone says they love Firefox, but every time Firefox adds a new feature it's a feature Vivaldi already had for years.

Just prevent VS Code from accessing the entire $HOME.

The idea is that a well-made, modern desktop operating system would extremely limit an executable's access to user files and provide intuitive tools to allow access. Most applications shouldn't even need any access beyond their own configuration directory and maybe something like ~/Document/Source Code for source code editors and IDE. It shouldn't need to access ~/Pictures, ~/Videos, ~/Downloads, etc.

The problem is that Windows would rather sell you OneDrive, and Linux is very far from a well-made modern desktop OS, so a transitive dependency on a linter installed by a VS Code plugin can rm -rf $HOME, I guess.

So you want websites to rely on traffic from Google instead of building their own newsletter? Interesting.

People don't like Google because it's bad. If competition wins, maybe they'll stop being so bad. But if they become badder themselves, that's not good.

But Reddit also doesn't want you visiting new websites.

The impression I get from Google's own marketing material is that Google doesn't believe in "the web". And it hasn't believed in the web for years.

Think about it. Pretty much every time they show a search box with someone asking for directions to reach a physical place, what hours is it open, etc.

The greatest thing about the internet is that it has removed distances around the whole world, but Google's major value proposition seems to be that... it can accurately index and query information about local businesses?

This is a problem of their own invention.

Nobody said you have to index the entire web.

The web would probably be a lot healthier if we had several small search engines that focused on niches rather than 5 failed search engines that tried to index everything that was ever written and then ended up paying Bing.