ikurei

> Linux is not a secure operating system. [Click link for an explanation by the same author]

> There is no strong sandboxing in the standard Linux desktop. [...] This is in contrast to other desktop operating systems such as macOS or Windows 10 [...]. Windows automatically sandboxes UWP applications and provides the Windows Sandbox utility for non-UWP applications.

Is this actually fair? Windows Sandbox is not that different from using docker, or even better a VM, is it? It's great that UWP apps are sandboxed, but they're a minority of the apps people use.

I don't get how Windows gets a point over Linux here. Running all or most apps in a sandbox without the user even noticing improves security, but neither OS really do that effectively. Windows Sandbox is cool, and Linux doesn't have something like that out of the box, but a VM is easy to install and create no?

I've never seen any requirement, or even social pressure, to use caffeine at work. Plenty of people in all offices I've worked at didn't take coffee, or only very ocasionally. It was widespread, but no expected of you.

I wouldn't mind some coleagues taking some drugs, as long as they didn't make them very antisocial or generally bad to be around. But I would very much mind an employer expecting me to take something.

> For most purchases made within its App Store, Apple takes 30% of the purchase price. No other transaction fee — in any industry — comes close.

Isn't this blatantly false?

Android's Play Store takes the same 30%, as does Steam. I doubt most physical retailers get significantly less.

> Users with AMD graphics may experience significant graphical issues

Then, in the bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video...):

> This only happens when the secondary external display is operating at a different pixel width to the internal.

Isn't this a fairly common usecase? My whole company works on high-density laptop displays connected to cheaper 1080p displays. It surprised me to see this kind of bug in a final Xubuntu release, although the bug report says the issue is in the AMD driver.

*

I love Xubuntu, I´ve always appreciated its stability, simplicity and flexibility. It has gotten a bit behind in features, when I use it now I miss a good Exposé-like feature, but it´s not that big of a deal.

The thing that keeps me on Mac or Windows most of the time is solid support for high density displays. I can´t get Linux to look quite as good as Windows, and nowhere as good as MacOS, on a 4k display or retina display, without having to go very deep into experimental features and patches... and I don´t want to do that.

Have you noticed that experience improving lately?

That's snappy but not informative at all. What do you miss in multicursor that macros give you?

I also prefer vim's macros to multicursors, but I think it ammounts to nothing more than habit and preference.

Macros in Vim are going to be much more powerful, with movement commands and selection commands giving yo a more flexible system... I think? Hard to be objective after so many years of Vim.

Web Archive has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20200201105504/https://lucassimp...

How much does it cost to implement GDPR (for a company that isn't in tech)? How much many visits from the EU does a local TV station from Providence get?

It's probably not worth it for them.

Web Archive link for EU citizens (the site blocks access from EU to avoid having to comply with data protection laws):

https://web.archive.org/web/20191226100007/https://www.wpri....

Now the trackpad is enabled by using two fingers on the keybard. To select, you can long-touch where you want the selection to start, and select more by using this trackpad gesture.

At least that's how it works on my iPad Air 2, which is a bit outdated, but has the latest iOS.

> Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides[...]

I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach.

What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start going deeper and reach more specific conclusions.

Politicians have been leveraging this for years, using this division to their benefits. And these applies both to catalonian politicians using independence and blaming everything in Madrid, and national parties in Madrid demonizing Catalonia.

They've been making a huge snowball of this, and it's starting to be too much.

From talking to some catalonian people, I think the last economic crisis, its management, and the corruption scandals in Partido Popular (the party that govered Spain from 2011 to 2018, but is always extremely irrelevant in Catalonia) had a lot to do with it, as it was easy for many to blame those on Madrid, on Spain, or "on the Castilians".

(I'm from Castilla but around half of my family emigrated to Barcelona a generation ago. I don't hate any catalonian who wants independence, they have that right; I'm sick of how both sides use FUD and hatred.)

Can't help but wonder, didn't you think about reporting this, anonimously at least?

If you figured this out, it wasn't all that unlikely that a less scrupulous hacker could have.

(Not judging, both because I don't like to and because you were a kid.)

How are you gonna ensure the binary uploaded to the app store has the exact same code that is on the public repo?

OSS is not the solution.

The only solution is that your OS protects you, giving you tools to see what apps are doing what, and allowing you to finely adjust permissions and access.

You could completely trust this app if you could ban it from accessing the internet.

Great write-up, concise enough but not too dry.

I generally agree with dropdowns being overused, but this seems too much to me:

> Picking a date from dropdowns is the worst. If I ever do this, then I’ve really failed as a UX designer.

Really? On a laptop, native dropdowns use keyboard input as search, so using tab (granted, not everyone knows this) I can generally enter my age almost as if I was writing it.

On mobile, scrolling through the iOS dropdown control is fine, more comfortable than typing. Scrolling 30 options back to enter my age is the worst part, and getting worse every year, but it isn't that bad.

> And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder?

Huge strawman. Who's arguing for total and absolute equality of our outcomes?

I live in one of those "safety net" countries. We aren't all entitled to the same share of the pie, it's just that hard-working people don't have to go hungry or work 2 jobs just to get by, or at least not that often. People can get a very good and valued education without going into debt, and cancer doesn't make you go poor.

I get a greater share of the pie than most of my friends, because I was wise at choosing degree, and worked harder at it, and also I was lucky enough to be born with some mild gifts. But when friend's parents get sick, the families don't have to go into debt to get a great treatment.

I can't be expected to know how the economy and society will change, and whether they will leave me stranded after a bubble bursts or something. We can't all be great economists; not that they get it right either. I'll work my ass off to avoid that, but I'm glad to know my compatriots have my back (to some extent), as I have theirs now.

There is no "how it feels to lose a X", there is "how throwaway713 felt when they lost X". One may have a good but not very deep relationship with a close family member, but spend every day with their pet for 15 years, so to them it might be comparable.

Of course, saying "I know how you feel about your mother cos I lost my dog" is incredibly insensitive and stupid.

> you're going to claim that it is comparable to lose a human being that meant everything to you because an animal died

If that person was that important to you, of course it's not comparable. I don't think that's what the other comments were saying though.

I lost grandparents I was close with; one was after many years of several diseases fighting for the kill, death itself came as a mercy. I love my dog dearly, he's very old and his last breath is near and I get teary-eyed just from writing about it. And still, he's nothing compared to the loss of my grandmother. But that's me.

I don't think (yeah, please answer if I'm wrong) that's true for anyone.

You may value a dogs life as much as a human, some do. But those same people don't go around with extreme care to avoid stepping on an ant, and would kill insects if they where an annoyance or risk to health. So they do stablish a difference between some animals, where ants are in a different tier than dogs, but humans and dogs are together in the same tier.

Personally I don't think it makes any sense. I do value animal lives greatly, and between a dog and a man I might save the dog in a split-second gut decision (and regret it later).

I reckon many people use feelings to guide (or greatly inform) their morality. Which might or might not be that bad to be honest, I don't really have a solid basis for my morality either.

I'm honestly curious, this topic (how people arrive at their morality) fascinates me. We would probably agree a lot (I don't eat meat mostly out of a similar logic).

Why innocence? How does innocence make a life more valuable? It's true that the kid has done nothing wrong, whereas the 40yo has sinned thoroughly, but on the other hand the kid has done nothing good for the world, and the 40yo probably has.

And vulnerability? If a high-speed train/cancer/thug is going to kill a 40yo and a toddler, how does the increased inherent vulnerability of the toddler make any difference?

Towards the end: "View website icons in Safari tabs"

It's funny how such an apparently-tiny detail can be so important for the usability of an application. I find myself using Firefox and Chrome much more than Safari, even though I'd rather have Safari's performance, just because finding my tabs is awful with those half-cut titles.

Can you point to or explain where this claim comes from?

I'm far from an scholar on Plato, but I've read a few dialogues and The Republic whole, and I never saw anything that made me think of it that way.

I'll wait at least a few months before believing any of this.

Apple being Apple, they might not be telling us whether this new keyboard actually does mitigate the issue. If they said something about this keyboard being more reliable, but then the improvement is not big enough for the bad press to stop, they'll look worse.

Not that I have any interest in defending Apple; I'm still using my 2015 MBP and avoiding the new ones, and I use Linux and Windows desktops. It's just that Apple can be really smart with PR sometimes, and I don't believe anything. Not even what they say they didn't fix.

> Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture.

I would describe it more like a model. And yeah, those never capture the whole picture, and don't need to to be useful.

> heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people.

You can do creation of stuff on iPads, of course. I use it a lot as a very-portable writing machine. But still, I think that marketing was just... marketing. Every one wants to think of themselves as creators, and their kids to be doing things rather than watching YouTube, but still iPads are mostly used for consumption and are much better at it than at creation, except for a few jobs/hobbies.

A better counter argument, for me, would be to just watch a non-technical person use a Windows PC. Many would be better served by a safer, simpler iOS on a 20-inch screen with an ok keyboard.

We wouldn't, because we want a more-than-just-ok keyboard, and many windows, and bash, and a many-core CPU that is great at virtualization, and...

I wonder how the economic and environmental costs of the extra tubing (the tube in Anyway Spray bottles is longer than a straight, conventional one) compares to the costs of those few last drops for most sprayed products...

I'm really curious about this; thanks for adding this and iluminating so many of us that fail to consider deaf people when thinking about these things.

But I'm not sure I totally understand what Animoji does for you. Your deafness is irrelevant in the context of messaging apps, isn't it? Hearing people, when using Messages, have just writing/reading, just like you.

Is it that, being deaf, you are more used to puting extra emphasis on non-verbal communication, and thus the transition to Messages from "real life" conversation feels more limiting than for us? How is it any better than sending a short video, or may be recording a gif of your actual face? Doesn't the loss in fidelity make it frustratingly hard to express the nuances we get from facial expression?

I tend to think all of those grandiouse statements about "Opening new ways of communicating" or "Creating new connexions between people" are total bullshit. Most animoji users communicate equally well with or without them, it add's nothing except fun. And that's fine! Fun is good.

But it's really hard to put oneself on anyone else's shoes, and I'd love to know if anyone has found more value in animojis.

The only part that's translated to native APIs is the rendering itself. Instead of rendering a WebView with an HTML <button />, it renders a UIButton from the native UIKit.

The app logic is still in Javascript, never compiled to another language.

IMHO this is perfectly fine. I have a fairly large app in react-native, and most users that have tried it are fine with its performance. Scrolling in lists and maps, being native components, is as snappy as in a real native app. I'm only having performance issues in page transitions, and I think I can fix that with a bit more work.

You are right there are differences, but I don't think they are so huge.

Collecting something, having a binder with your collection, showing it to people... is an attractive activity for many, and may not be that different from playing against said people.

I was deep into MtG (playing in tournaments, wining a few small ones, throwing a few hundred bucks at it), although I've never gotten into any other collection hobby.

To me, playing was the best part and what gave meaning to the rest of it. I loved the competitiveness, and coming up with strategies... but also the social aspects of it, of seeing others do the same activities. Many of these social aspects can still be there for "collecting without playing"-alternatives right? I enjoyed greatly seeing rare cards in other peoples collection, and getting a few of my own (rare editions, customized units, misprints...)

So yeah, for people that only care about the competitive aspects, MTG is totally different from baseball cards; for others, both hobbies may share many aspects.

Those two events have nothing to do with each other.

In Paypal people send each other money, and the man in the middle is blocking it.

In YouTube, Google decides whether or not to put ads on your video and give you part of the money. You aren't entitled to that cash just because you uploaded a video and people saw it.

It's still terrible and irresponsible for YouTube to be arbitrary about it and have no clearly defined rules; it's clear they're unfair. But I don't think the comparison with PayPal makes sense.

You can speed it up, and I've done that for some books, but I agree it's not the same. Specially for books from which you want to extract actual concrete knowledge, there is nothing like paper.

However, for the right books, audiobooks can be even better in my experience; books where you want some "wisdom" and feelings more than concrete stuff, and where a peaceful, somewhat-slow is appropriate.

I listened to Lab Girl, an intimate autobiography, read by the author, and it was fantastic. I am now going over a book on buddhism, and because I don't really care about remembering the details of Maharana's life, I love listening instead of reading. With such a book, reading faster doesn't seem to make much sense, I wanna go slow and savior its lessons.

In any case, it's been a good complement to my traditional reading; even when it isn't the best way to read a book, it's a fantastic way to make the most of commuting or doing chores.

Yeah, our experience of the American presidency has certainly been improved :P

That was only half-serious.

But it's not only use for improvement, but also to manipulate us in ways that may not be in our best interest.

Of course, it's your information. If you are OK with sharing it, it's your right. I say the same about smoking: you hate your lungs? Smoke away! But when tobacco companies lie about the effects of tobacco, and make it seem normal and cool, that's when I get angry.

We shouldn't be ok with our lungs going to shit and with our lives being constantly spied. But we have a right to accept this things, if anyone doesn't agree with me they can do it and I respect them.

I don't respect those who misinform, lie or deceit us to make us OK with it though.