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It is what it is. One does not simply steel man arguments online.

Well yeah, that is the broader issue for sure. As you say, the change needs to come from regulation or consumer pressure. The power that the data brokers can provide to businesses is too great to ever reasonably expect them to resist. If you are an online business and refuse to utilize their services, you unfortunately are at a very significant disadvantage against your competitors.

Advertising for prescription drugs is not allowed in Sweden. Pharmacy ads are for non-prescription items like sunscreen, deodorant, whatever. I'd guess that the largest margins are on those items anyway, considering the subsidizing/reimbursement system for prescriptions.

You can argue that they trust developers to be responsible. Having a user friendly and powerful SDK with tons of possible data points isn't inherently a bad thing. All of the features could be used in a responsible fashion, and FB thinks you're smart enough to do so.

I'm not entirely convinced of this personally, but it seems like a somewhat sound argument. I think that they know that it will inevitably be misused, and that they have enough incentive for allowing the misuse to continue.

The reason is almost always to be able to do conversion tracking. I.e. to follow the trail from a specific ad campaign to a completed purchase in order to evaluate the campaign performance. There are of course ways to do this while preserving anonymity of the individual customers, but it's way too easy to mess up and/or give in to the allure of providing too much detail in the quest to further evaluate user behavior.

The tools are built to make it as easy as possible to provide as much data as possible about the users. Whether it's nefarious is debatable, but FB should definitely have some checks and balances on what they allow to be stored on their own platform.

I don't understand how this would be an escape hatch though. If some sort of quantum randomness is essential for the emergence of consciousness, it could be incorporated into an algorithm as well. It wouldn't be strictly deterministic, but why would that matter?

Maybe I'm missing something.

The only major downside with hooks is that they are sort of non-intuitive imo. Writing UIs with hooks once you grok it properly is really nice and terse. What's your beef with them?

The problem is that all tigers want steak, but only a fourth of them can afford it. That number is increasing as the tigers get richer in general. And the steak industry is ruining the world.

I'm not referring to quality of life, but "living" in the broader sense including the enabling infrastructure and resource dependencies as they stand today.

I don't think the point is to describe a probable future where everyone lives like the Dutch. The whole point is that it wouldn't be possible.

It's just an easy to understand illustration of how our current civilization is largely resting on unsustainable foundations. Finding solutions to the engineering and societal challenges that you mention seems to be the goal of the project.

You are right, I glossed over the description and saw mentions of sex-ed, but it's apparently just part of it. Thanks for the correction!

It's interesting to see population growth being listed as one of the prime factors, and that "Girl's Education" is proposed as a solution to this. I get why sex-ed and more widespread access/knowledge/acceptance of contraceptives might help the situation slightly, but aren't there much more deeply rooted problems than "girls don't know what a condom is"?

And further, it brings up interesting moral questions touching on eco-justified anti-natalism. Would it be morally justified to have a hundred kids?

EDIT: I largely take back the first paragraph, but I'll leave it for posterity. Helping girls to create a career for themselves probably has a larger impact on population growth. The anti-natalism thing is still interesting though.

I just summarized what I read elsewhere. I have never seen one in real life.

It does look good in the comparison you linked. It is being backlit though, while the E-ink is not. Maybe the mentioned blandness is more of a problem when used fully passively.

It seemed to have been a good competitor regardless, and it's sad that it got mothballed.

Had to read up on this, because it's very interesting.

The short of it seems to be that production runs of Mirasol panels had very high fault rates, which lead to delays and losses. Qualcomm ultimately decided to abandon it and to fully focus on the Snapdragon processors which were perfectly aligned with the booming IoT space at the time.

Mirasol was apparently very promising and ahead of its time, albeit immature. It was based on electro-mechanical mirror pixels rather than dye. The biggest technical downside seemed to have been that the colors were pretty washed out and bland.

EDIT: It actually did make it to market. There was even a smartwatch powered by Mirasol (the Toq). It was never implemented by the big e-Reader brands though.

> 7/10 would not recommend

Why no recommendation? Seemed like a positive overall experience.

Your dismissive tone is almost comical.

I'd personally love to have an e-ink laptop. Currently it's unthinkable for me to be in a beautiful spot in the sunshine while doing some light coding or writing. Seems like this product would make it viable to some extent. I wouldn't expect it to become a daily driver though.

If it were convertible (folding) it would be even better.

I'm well aware of hybrid apps and Ionic. I wouldn't call those solutions properly "web" though. They're basically only using web tech as a presentation layer, and deferring to native plugins to do the heavy lifting when required. Very similar to how Flutter does it.

So if your claim is simply that CSS/HTML/JS is capable of creating good user interfaces, I'm not arguing against it.

That was painful indeed! Why you would use Flutter for something that seems to be web-only, and on a govt website that presumably values accessibility, is beyond me.

It's hard to quantify exactly what "everywhere" means, but for the vast majority of end-user devices, you'll have a more efficient Flutter build target than web.

You're probably right in that they are pushing the "first class web target" narrative a bit far, though.

The way it atleast used to be framed is that web is a fallback target. Meaning if the target device isn't running Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS or Android (unlikely), then hey, you can atleast build a passable version that will run in a browser.

I don't know if this has changed, but I know only a mad man would try to build a proper website in Flutter. It's not the tool for the job.

I have yet to see a world in which local file access, background services, local notifications, timers, alarms, native media controls, etc, works as well on web as in native apps. A lot of it is there "in theory", but web tech has the achilles heel of only allowing stuff that would be safe to have in a random website that some asshat links you on twitter.

Of course this is only relevant if that deeper plumbing into the OS is needed, and of course it's quickly changing. Perhaps the day comes when web apps can truly be first class citizens in all major OSes, but it ain't here yet.

Congrats! Flutter is such an amazingly crazy concept that when I started my current job it was on the condition that I could learn and use it for our app. I'm not regretting it in the slightest. In fact I get more impressed with it the more I use it. Great job!

What do you mean? Dart has decent support for encoding/decoding JSON, with revivers or to Maps.

I never coded React Native, but I have a lot of experience with Flutter. You can definitely run into build issues, but it's almost exclusively when doing precarious things like upgrading third party packages, SDKs or Flutter versions. As soon as you've traversed the depths of dependency hell and it builds, it builds without a hitch repeatedly in my experience.

As the framework is maturing there have been some major transitions between APIs and project structure. My main app that was scaffolded two years ago has had no shortage of duct tape fixes and tweaks to especially Gradle/Cocoapods config to keep it building.

I guess it's a fair price for what has otherwise been a fantastic developer experience. All in all I'd strongly recommend it.

While the sentiment is good, I don't think that this approach scales very well. The unfortunate truth is that doing things the standard, bloated way has a lot of benefits. Speed is the obvious one. Mind share is another.

You can do your tiny bespoke thing in a vacuum, but when push comes to shove and something needs to get delivered ASAP or worked on by a team, you're better off just sticking to the most common solution.

My worst experiences in software development is stepping in to someone else's bespoke solutions to common problems. The LOC was certainly less and there were no unused parts. But wheels had been reinvented poorly, and the only ones who truly understood the intricacies was the authors.

For hobby projects and playing around, creating minimal cruft and having full control of every bit of code is really nice and fun though. And it really makes you grow as a developer.

I played for a while in both large alliances and smaller niche corporations. It's a very flawed game that is completely unique and mesmerizing.

The bad:

- The dreaded "learning wall" is/was very real. Nothing is/was properly explained or introduced. Best tip is to join a new player friendly corporation ASAP to get some proper explaining.

- The combat is janky and a lot of the skill involved is/was learning how to abuse or sidestep technical limitations such as the one second server tick time and the quirky methods of manually controlling your ship.

- A lot of players prey on newbies to scam or troll them out of what little they have. There is a certain edgy attitude to a lot of pirate players that are attracted to the games "full loot" model.

- Most of the "missions" or "dungeons" feel really stale, and it's slow as molasses.

The good:

- Looks completely amazing. As in jawdroppingly beautiful if you like hard sci-fi.

- Everything that matters is run by players. This is the most unique aspect of the game. No other game has a constant ongoing player driven lore like Eve. The market, the social constellations and much of space itself is run by players. There have been huge market plays, alliance mutinies, assassinations, mineral cartels and colossal battles that has raged for days. All is talked about by players, and since everyone is playing on the same server, it's relevant for everyone.

- The setting is pretty good, and the atmosphere is great. The "races" all have very distinct motivations and character.

- It has a "full loot" PVP-model. If you fly something and it's destroyed, it's gone. Including everything you were carrying. Some of it is dropped so that other players can pick it up. This means that PVP combat can be incredibly sweaty, and I have never had actual adrenaline shakes the same way I've had from Eve. It also makes every kill incredibly satisfying. The rush of flying something relatively inexpensive and managing to kill someone flying a pimped out super expensive ship is quite incomparable.

I probably skipped a lot of stuff, but that's some scattered aspects atleast.

It's not that weird. Before PLEX, it wasn't "grinding for $0", but it was "grinding to get the Ishtar heavy assault cruiser". Making the monetary value visible the way that MTX does sort of kills the allure.

There are both, but the NPC ones are largely holding players that are very casual or new. Most of what you read about are probably not corporations though, but alliances. Alliances are groups of player owned corporations that work together. The massive battles are mostly fought between these.

What makes Eve interesting is that all star systems except for those in the very middle of the map are controllable by players, and actually provide value to those holding them. So that's why you have these gigantic, drawn out conflicts and large battles where player blocs with thousands of players each are fighting for territory.

> except for titles where the launcher you bought it on launches another launcher

That's just comedy. I know this happens for a lot of Ubisoft games in my Steam library. I guess they want to keep the cake and eat it to. Exposure on Steam, walled garden in Connect.

I'll definitely check out Playnite. Thanks for the tip!

I'm sure there are some significant downsides to Steam being a dominant platform, as is always the case. That being said, I think Steam has been pretty decent for Indie devs in other ways. The Greenlight program seems pretty successful, and the barrier for entry into the Steam catalog isn't too steep. However, you are right in that you are pretty much forcing indie devs to come in under the Steam umbrella to get exposure, and that's of course questionable.

As for pure practicality as a gamer, Steam was unbeatable in the 10's. There were a lot of other offerings like you mentioned, but none were really competing on a large scale. The push of every publisher to restrict their games to their own Steam clones is a thing that seems to really have ramped up during the last ten years or so. Some were early though, Blizzard being a prime example.