paulgpetty

It’s great to see the original author update the article & admit that he was incorrect. He even goes as far as to say that despite the embarrassment he’ll leave the article up. My favorite assetrtion from the article is "Apparently though, someone decided that they’d do it in software” referring to using software to illustrate when a camera is active. That statement alone is a red flag. When would Apple let a lone person decide something like that? But he does site an unnamed friend who has a PHD in Computer Science and thus would be intimate with the inner workings of Apple’s hardware for the last decade. To me, the issue with that article has nothing to do with laptops, cameras, or bloggers; it’s the lack of facts and fact checking. How we do we solve this? This isn’t really “fake news” … it’s bad news at best, based on mistaken assumptions. Seriously, how could software detect that this was a terrible article? This seems to be the biggest problem to solve today ...

I think Google should embrace the naysayers & should have named this “Catch Up” … tagline: “Don’t be slack, catch up with your co-workers as we catch up with the competition."

I think there is a lot to weigh on many different levels about whether a bailout juxtaposed against buybacks is a good or bad thing. But I’m surprised by how little talk there is of individual investor opportunity. This seems like the bottom of airline stock prices. Here’s a list of their tickers: https://topforeignstocks.com/stock-lists/the-complete-list-o... … which stocks would you buy? JetBlue, American & United seem like bargains & no one can guarantee returns financially but lots of people will fly again.

Two questions this raises, for me at least:

How do I know I’ve completely uninstalled all the things Zoom installed?

And, if Zoom provided a separate uninstaller (like many apps do) and it was verified to purge all of the stuff they installed (along with the uninstaller); would that appease people's concerns?

For now I’m sticking with the iOS app for video & their web-based experience for desktop sharing...

The age of the article says a lot; but I think there are overuses of rem, even today, where it’s used for dimensions (width, height, padding, margins) which is not a good idea. Especially when mixed with containing elements that use a mix of em & px units. Where for a while sites were using em & rem, using viewport-percentage lengths is more apprpriate for _both_ font-sizes and dimensions.

And for what it’s worth Variable Fonts are a game changer that didn’t exist 7 years ago (along with a whole bunch of new standards and capabilities that make typography and layout so different today), which makes me wish there was a timeline view of all the W3C standards.

What’s interesting is that the blog for that article uses a theme with a lot of that new stuff: css vars, flex box, margins & paddings with vh, calc, css grid, font properties that probably aren’t widely supported — so @supports is cool to see, and wait for … it:

max-width: calc(30rem * 2);

rem units

It looks like this is the Author’s own theme:

https://vasilis.nl/nerd/wp-content/themes/nerd-mississippi/s...

It seems like it had to have been updated since the article, so indeed maybe he’s softened on rem, if not ...

Why use rem if you don’t like it & why use it for 2 max-width declarations? There are a lot of % based dimensions so why not stick with that?

I’m not trying to judge, but the if the author created the theme for code consistency and writing consistency that should get cleaned up.

There’s also some neat bleeding edg stuff like this:

h1 { font-family: "Mississippi Regular", impact, serif; font-weight: normal; font-size: 15vw; font-size: calc(2em + 14vw); line-height: .7; margin: 0; position: relative; font-size-adjust: .42; }

Where those two font-size declarations provide a responsive size where calc is supported … But if you’re using @supports in some places that’s great to use everywhere, for example he uses it here:

@supports (font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures) { body { font-feature-settings: normal; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; } }

At some point font-variant-ligatures might be widely supported & using something like postcss could let you purge or optimize that automatically & if manually maintained rules like that just stick out do the road.

Rem is awesome, CSS can be painstakingly difficult to keep up with.

I get the attitude regarding it’s February & he probably eeked out one last bonus; but there’s some funny stuff there:

* https://skyenet.dev/robots.txt * coincidence that it was posted at 4:20 * https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

… maybe it’s all fake, too.

There still is — for legacy users — Campfire at 37 Signals (home of Basecamp): https://basecamp.com/retired/campfire

From 2014: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

… the “blog post” ABS CBN references might be a tweet Elon Musk wrote in January 2019 referring to the 2014 post.

Hard to tell if there was anything new other than the tweet 10 months ago. ABS CBN fails to link to any source material.

Nah. I get the argument that maybe American laptop makers are complacent or that we shouldn't create borders within which to judge technology. To be fair, if Matebook is a rip off of the Macbook design, devices are getting to be a lot like cars. Ford & Toyota are both composited of parts made all over the world. The Macbook is probably just as Chinese by weight as a Huawei.

But compare the integrity & intangibles … If HN is a developer community shouldn’t we appreciate originality? Shouldn’t we depreciate a company that is heavily inspired by another & offers no credit where credit is due?

Apple’s designs aren’t the end-all-be-all & their software lags well behind the innovations we’ve seen in their hardware through the years. But they & any company that does something original enough deserves some credit.

"The Mac option: Apple MacBook Pro” should actually say: "The Original option: Apple MacBook Pro” … and all of the scores should be weighted against that original. (Why is that section the second section? Would making it the last make it stand out more?)

In fact, I don’t think it’d be out of line to rate every other device by how well they copied the form factor from Apple, how well they varied and added to the number of ports, what they did differently than Apple & how that impacted usability and security among other things.

There’s a really objective way to gage devices … I know I’m biased but at least I know I am. The Verge is as clueless as most sites I’ve seen that rate laptops like each one was an original idea that coincidentally all happen to look alike.

It might not seem like this is a big deal. For now that’s probably right; but Netflix has aspirations to do nightly news and if that’s intended to be live or near real-time we should be comparing their uptime with broadcast TV. When was the last time ABC or Fox went off air?

Again, not right now, but at some point this sort of outage becomes critical and will probably deserve more scrutiny.

I’m impressed by how reliable Netflix is, hopefully this just pushes them harder.

And maybe even prepares them for a less neutral internet.

So was the “Don’t be evil” principle or mantra that we’re all disappointed about documented in a blog post? For some reason I thought it was on a page like this: https://www.google.com/about/our-commitments/

Either way it’s just a statement on a webpage which has all the permanence of a sign in their HQ lobby. It’s going to be hard to convince people that statements like this from a Google, a Facebook, or an Uber really mean anything — especially long term.

Will their next leadership team or CEO carry on with this?

I think anyone can write an article like this favoring their choice platform. Doing real complete comparison is hard. There are literally hundreds of features to compare. Include apps like this author and you’re writing forever. The hard part about choosing iPhone or Android is just the sheer magnitude of differences. Security, cost, aging, support, apps, os, hardware ... but maybe more than anything perspective matters.

iOS supports seamless call blocking via inexpensive 3rd party apps like Hiya. Hiya works great, calls that are suspect get labeled and calls that are verified fraud or marketing are never seen but available in call history. This been around since iOS 10 maybe longer.