chrisldgk

AFAICT, Chrome and Firefox on iOS are still just WebKit wrappers. I’d love for that to change though, WebKit in iOS sucks in quite a few ways.

Which is just laundered from real material that real humans put work in to create, only to be regurgitated by a krass homonculous of 1s and 0s for free without any mention of the real work that has been put into creating that information.

I’m not a big fan of the copyright system we have myself, but there’s a reason it exists. AI companies illegally training their AI on copyrighted content to reap the spoils of the hard work of other people that never get recognition for their work is the opposite of „giving back“.

Yeah no, I agree. Still though, I do think people being distracted while driving is a big problem.

Anecdotal evidence, but I’ve been driven into twice over the course of the last two weeks after driving every day for ten years and never having had a crash. Whether it’s touch screens mounted in the car or people being on their phone, something has to be done about people being distracted while driving.

I’m in Germany and using your phone while driving can lead to your license being revoked - the problem is that it’s not really enforced at all in my experience. Maybe it should be.

Rant over, I’m just honestly pissed about my car being wrecked TWICE and me being paranoid looking in the rear view mirror every time I’m stood still because people apparently can’t register a car standing at a signal.

Don’t forget the Tom7 video[1] where he made a „hard drive“ from disposable Covid test kits.

[1] https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio?t=1560

I mean that makes sense though, right? Since it’s only available on Chrome, it’s the only one doing all the computations (GPU or otherwise) that other browsers won’t do, since they just ignore the rule.

People hated it because Google for some reason decided to force it into YouTube by forcing you to link your YouTube account to your G+ account. Remember that stick figure tank guy that was plastered over every comment section?

I believe that’s mostly what killed Google Plus. People were introduced to it in the worst way possible, so nobody actually cared to try it out, even if it was technically a good product.

Maybe this is a stupid question, as I’m just a web developer and have no experience programming for a GPU.

Doesn’t WebGPU solve this entire problem by having a single API that’s compatible with every GPU backend? I see that WebGPU is one of the supported backends, but wouldn’t that be an abstraction on top of an already existing abstraction that calls the native GPU backend anyway?

Turns out „artificial general intelligence“ just means AI can sometimes be exactly as stupid as any other human to the point where it will delete a production DB like any other junior developer if you give it permissions it shouldn’t have.

Welcome to the future you didn’t want, but deserved.

I won’t go on a rant about giving AI any permissions and trusting it blindly here, I’ll just say that I think the typical AI bulletin point list where it perfectly recounted how it fucked up made me fall out of my chair from laughter.

While React and JSX/TSX might be somewhat of an abstraction on top of HTML and CSS, you absolutely still need intricate knowledge of HTML and CSS to build anything good with React.

In the end what you get out of your React code after your build process is vanilla HTML, CSS and JS. While you might be able to abstract some of those things away using libraries, all you‘re doing in your React code is building and manipulating HTML DOM trees within your React code and styling them using CSS (or using some abstraction like CSS-in-JS, CSS modules, etc.). To do so efficiently, you not only require knowledge of how exactly HTML and CSS work but also what React tends to do under the hood to render out your application. Even more so when things like a11y are required. A good dev also knows when to use JS to reimplement certain interactions (hover states, form submits, etc.) and when to use the native functionality instead (for example CSS pseudo selectors or HTML form elements).

All this is to say that I disagree with the notion that React devs don’t know or understand the underlying technologies. It might be different and more abstracted, but it’s still the same technologies that require the same or more understanding to be used efficiently.

I agree with that it’s not a new concept by itself, but the way it’s being done is much more elegant in my opinion.

I originally started as a web developer during the time where PHP+jQuery was the state of the art for interactive webpages, shortly before React with SPAs became a thing.

Looking back at it now, architecturally, the original approach was nicer, however DX used to be horrible at the time. Remember trying to debug with PHP on the frontend? I wouldn’t want to go back to that. SPAs have their place, most so in customer dashboards or heavily interactive applications, but Astro find a very nice balance of having your server and client code in one codebase, being able to define which is which and not having to parse your data from whatever PHP is doing into your JavaScript code is a huge DX improvement.

That might be true, but it’s also the reason we don’t have a Zuckerberg or Musk taking charge of EU politics. There’s a balance to be struck here, and I prefer this over being a slave to American big tech.

Tell that to the developers that are 5 years, 1 million lines and 500 TODOs deep into their legacy React banking frontend. Adding stuff on top of your existing hacks is easy, taking unnecessary code away is hard. Especially if all your training on web accessibility was a one-day workshop where you never actually learned how to do anything, only why you need to do it.

Source: I used a frontend developer working on a big bank frontend. The existing UI stack was horrendous and deadlines and bank politics wouldn’t allow you to refactor anything. Just build shit on top and hope that Jenga tower of a web application doesn’t fall apart halfway there.

I don’t know the exact wording, but from the GDPR and accessibility trainings I had to sit through at the enterprises I used to work at, I believe there is a certain size of company under which the regulations don’t apply. That was somewhere in the millions in revenue each year, so if you’re actually an indie-hacker, this should not apply to you. I’ll check if I can find a source for that claim though.

There are some parts of GDPR that are non-negotiable however, even for indie hackers. If you collect personally identifiable info, you NEED a privacy policy, a process for users to get their data deleted if they request it, for example.

Yea, that’s pretty much what I meant as well. Knowing the project is backed by a significant amount of money makes it a lot easier to rationalize using the product within your stack for the reasons you mentioned. This is usually more spreadsheet-acrobatics than actual reasoning (as is so often the case in enterprise) however, so YMMV for the actual outcome.

As an indie hacker using better auth, I’m somewhat skeptical of there now being VC money in the mix (enshittifcation is a process that starts with VC money). But from my time working for enterprise, they often prefer OSS products that are well-funded for their stacks so they can rely on them for a longer amount of time. So I’d suppose this would help in that regard. Also having a cloak-like SaaS solution might be nice for those who don’t want to host their own infra, though I‘d advise against relying on third parties for auth.

At our company we use better auth for every product that has any kind of user account logic. It’s great since it’s drop-in, the plugins give so much functionality that you’d have to roll on your own in so little time and the integrations with ORMs like drizzle and prisma mean that your schemas stay the SSOT that they should be, even for auth. It’s extensible where it needs to be and brings defaults that are more than sane. Also the RPC-like TypeScript client that you also get for free is so good I don’t know how I could live without that.

Glazing over, I just wanted to give props and say that whatever good happens to better-auth, it deserves it.

Sorry, I should have been more specific. In Europe (or Germany at least) it’s required by law that you provide an imprint with contact information for every site you host, as well as a privacy policy that includes contact information of your GDPR officer if you collect any kind of personalized data. Since I’m a one-person company, that includes my personal phone number since I don’t have a business phone. Also chrome webstore for example requires a phone number if you host an extension on there.

Edit: Also this wasn’t about collecting phone numbers, but about providing one for your business if you host a publically accessible site

I wouldn’t necessarily agree that WhatsApp‘s spam protection is that great. I’ve been invited to quite a lot of pyramid scheme/scam WhatsApp groups, however that’s mostly happened after having to expose my private cell number on the internet (thanks to app stores and GDPR requiring some kind of phone number for businesses of any size).

That’s hilarious, I was just using Sakura not long ago for a small mvp I made where I couldn’t be arsed to write any css myself. Good stuff

100% what you said. One thing I ran into as well was that horrid after effects -> Lottie workflow. Many layers and styles also just don’t work when you export them, so you have to explain to motion designers which features they’re allowed to use and which they aren’t, which a lot of time they’re not thrilled about.

In many cases just rendering a video and binding playback to interaction is much more lightweight and less work-intensive than using Lottie.

I’ve heard about Rive before and a lot of the choices they make seem to be exact fixes for the issue of Lottie. I haven’t worked with it yet however, so YMMV.

I have a similar, though less horrible story. We recently launched an app where we wanted to have a Facebook sign-in button since our target audience would be people that use Facebook a lot. Being Gen Z and not having a Facebook account at all (anymore) I made one for Meta developers, set everything up for development and tested stuff for a few weeks. When we finally did want to go live, we went through the Meta for Business verification process, which succeeded, but a minute later my account got banned. I got to appeal (sending a video of your face looking multiple directions), but for some reason that wasn’t enough for them. I got fully banned with the only option to appeal going to court. So now apparently I have a Facebook developer account and a verified business, both of which I cannot access at all anymore.

We do not currently have a Facebook sign-in button in our production app.

This is as good a time as any to throw in a shameless plug and say that my sister, Sarah Kolb actually voiced the German tutorial for Beatsaber [1]. If you need a voice actress for German and English content, she’s your gal! [2]

[1] https://youtu.be/QNZh2lvd5gs [2] https://www.imsarahkolb.com

Have you ever worked in a monorepo? With at least 5 apps and at least 5 packages, each with direct dependencies, devDependencies and testing libraries? The amount of packages you’ll need to download for a full dev environment can get really big really quickly, even if your end-user bundle doesn’t have many dependencies at all. I’ve worked on projects where an npm install took five minutes and a bun install took 10 seconds. In the real world this makes a big difference.

Because switching to a competitors option is a much bigger task that just staying on whichever version you’re on currently, which you can’t do anymore since Adobe only offers subscriptions.

Switching to a different creative software solution is a much bigger task than just buying the new license and installing the program. You have to relearn basic tasks that are second nature in the other thing, change workflows due to different file formats or you might just not have the option to because the rest of the industry depends on the competitors software. This is true for individual professionals as well as big companies, where switching to a different software package also means dropping efficiency for a while and hiring people to teach your employees your new software. This is a step that no company will ever take and Adobe has recognized that and taken away the only opt-out of paying them assloads forever, which was buying a perpetual license and staying on that version.

Another great reason to drop the great „For Profit (Creative) Software“ video[1] for insight on why Adobe‘s and Autodesk‘s hostile business practices hurt creative professionals so much

[1] https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc

Main difference between all of them is speed. There’s some differences in how npm, yarn, pnpm or bun handle workspaces and hoisting (and stuff like dependency overrides) but if one of them works for you, you rarely have to switch between them.

Edit: also npx is just an alias for npm exec, allowing you to run scripts in npm packages

If the JS is embedded within the HTML file it should’ve always worked, but when the HTML loads the JS file from somewhere else (that isn’t a relative path or a full URL that’s hosted somewhere else) it would usually fail, thus it wouldn’t work without running it through some kind of server that resolves the path

Yes, it does a quite decent job in both high and low frequencies. The place I live in actually used to have a quite large construction area right next to it, so having something like this during the day was a godsend. You can still hear it of course, but it’s a lot more quiet. With earbuds specifically it helps that they also act as earplugs even when off, though enabling noise cancelling does get rid of even more noise.

Sony Head- and earphones have in my experience been the best at both. The WH-1000XM series are the best noise cancelling headphones I’ve tried so far and the WF-1000XM series are the best earphones I’ve had. My personal favorite tip is the Sony Linkbuds S, which aren’t as good as the WFs at either sound or noise canceling, however they’re the best price to performance you can get on the market IMO

Edit: I should also say that the tuning on the WH headphones is pretty bass-heavy (somewhat obnoxiously so), so make sure to use an equalizer to remove some of that.