poopooracoocoo

At least a Pinterest account is truly free. You're not asked to "build connections to prove your identity".

That'd be great but governments often don't make specs and source code available. Governments don't make things open.

The amount of stuff councils and state governments gatekeep about road specs alone... Argh.

Plenty of things are addictive. I don't think this is one that should be intervened. I wish we had more personal responsibility today. America's meant to be the country of freedom, right?

That's not done on an NPU though, even if it could be. That's all done on companies' servers and won't be changing.

Now y'all are just analysing the UX of YouTube and Chrome.

The problem is that by agreeing to close the tab, you're agreeing to discard the comment. There's currently no way to bring it back. There's no way to undo.

AI can't fix that. There is Microsoft's "snapshot" thing but it's really just a waste of storage space.

Incredible. Purism has come a long way. It's amazing to have a truly open phone. A lot of people don't know how hard it is to mod an Android phone. You have to worry about drivers and firmware, security protections and attestation. For me the value of this comes from its freedom. Not from its privacy necessarily, but the hardware switches are great. I hate that I rely on the very many apps for Android and iOS that don't have a web counterpart like Discord. Linux apps on phones are very much a chicken-egg problem and I don't think we can break the duopoly

Why does the acquisition need to go through for Activision-Blizzard's titles to be on Xbox Game Pass?

But that is how licensing works for Steam games (that require it). I don't want invasive rootkits, locked down software, or resource consuming software. Steam is light compared to other alternatives. The best option is to buy games from GOG (or another DEM-free store) or from publishers directly, assuming they don't have a crappy launcher. Epic Games Launcher, 2K Launcher, Riot Client, Rockstar Games Launcher, etc are awfully slow and consume a lot of memory and disk space. Steam just happens to be the lightest of them all and therefore people tolerate it more.

What Steam does isn't what annoys most. It's what game publishers do with their own launchers.

There's no migration path from Skype to Microsoft Teams (Personal). Microsoft hasn't picked one as far as I know.

Microsoft similarly has a bunch of duplicate services and products. They've got chat functionality spread across many apps, specifically Teams, Skype, and Xbox. Windows also has widgets in Windows 11 and widgets in Xbox Game Bar. There's also the mess that is developing apps for Windows that has just become Chromium, partially due to Microsoft's own messes.

Doesn't help that Epic Games has three instances of Chromium. Add that to Steam's and all of the games' instances and you've easily gotten at least 2 GB of duplicate instances of Chromium. Edge and Edge WebView, at least, are hard-linked, provided that they're the same version.

I think it's because the apps have additional functionality and because the services push users to use the apps on their websites. Some of the additional functionality is artificially limited to apps as companies can put more tracking, advertising, and can ensure that people won't leave their service easily by just closing a tab.

Another concerning web API is the Battery Status API. See demo[1]. Firefox and WebKit have not implemented it thankfully but Google refuses to remove it for some odd reason. How it ever came to be boggles me. A low-power API would make much more sense. The Battery Status API does not have a user facing toggle in Chrome, unlike the sensor APIs, let alone actual permissions. Speaking of which, I can't believe the Chrome team still hasn't done anything about the sensor APIs. I've turned it off and see so many analytics tools in websites try to use it. Another surprising browser API that's only in Chrome is the Network Information API - again, permissionless, and cannot be opted-out of.

A lot of the specs say that user agents must provide users with a way to disable support for certain API. CSP reporting is one that many uBO users will recognise. But of course, Google doesn't follow that. And many of the aforementioned APIs are not W3C standards and are merely working drafts.

[1] https://jsbin.com/battery-status-test/edit?html,output

Dopamine is chemical that makes you feel good. The algorithms are made to increase engagement. Some of the most engaging content is content that makes people angry or shocked. Look at the YouTube homepage when you're not signed in. YouTube's algorithms are not necessarily made to give people content they want to watch and were thinking of watching. And often times not content that makes them feel good.

Edit: maybe I'm half asleep and not getting what you're saying lol

This could be because iFixit is trying to be more consumer facing so they can sell more of their repair products. A wild guess. More likely that they're getting paid by these manufacturers though.

Source? "Teams for Life" aka Teams Personal is different to Teams (for Business).

And people don't even know about the issue mentioned in this post until after they've bought it. They don't know where the issue lies. They don't know what AptX is, let alone AptX Voice.

While Android shows you which codec and even lets you pick, Android doesn't let you customise output and input devices so you can't avoid the low quality hands-free profile like you can on desktop operating systems. Windows doesn't show you what codec is being used. You have to buy Bluetooth Tweaker. Windows 11 was a step down in my experience and also broke compatibility with a lot of Chinese headsets.

Just the other day I browsed through the PipeWire and PulseAudio repos. They do heaps of work to make Bluetooth work a lot better than it would usually. And yet we still see how rough Bluetooth is. There's no way for individuals or open source contributors to even contact the Bluetooth SIG. But yes, the situation on Linux is better than on other operating systems.

https://medium.marco.zone/apple-implemented-the-biggest-impr... is a great article that talks about the limitations I mentioned earlier.

Windows Ink? Do you mean Windows Ink Workspace or Windows Sketchpad?

It was Windows Sketchpad that I really loved. After Microsoft axed it, they released Whiteboard. It felt very... not-native but had the titlebar of a UWP app. It was terrible compared to Sketchpad but new functionality like being able to select elements and reposition and resize them was great. UWP's own restrictions meant I could set certain expectations with windowing and suspension. And then they made Whiteboard a pure Electron app which was just too choppy for drawing anything at all. The closest I found to replacements were Inkodo and Scrble.

Windows Ink was just one of Microsoft's phases, just like XR. They now refuse to add support for a partial eraser in WinUI.

With services you get a lot of lock-in/exclusives. Two examples are Discord and Netflix. I wouldn't say you have much of a choice if you want to join a popular place to chat or if you want to watch Stranger Things. The user experience doesn't matter so much if there's no other way to do something. This is what I think the person you were replying to means.

On that note, Google Sheets became popular because you can use it in your browser and because of Google Drive which is what locks you in. Sheets is much more open than my examples.

Google's fight against Firefox isn't so visible on YouTube. I'd say it's mobile, Google Drive and their video calls. Google does a lot of A/B testing and I'm surprised someone on HN wouldn't blame that first. I'm not ruling out that Google may have done that against Firefox though. It's worth noting that YouTube's Polymer site was always very slow on Chrome too and it was never just about shadow DOM v0.

And truth is, as long as you have exclusive content on a service, the quality of your app (and thus the satisfaction of your end users) doesn't matter all that much.

The McDonald's app. Pokemon Go.

I don't see why this article paints this as specific to teenagers. You can find social networks that use iMessage in various countries among tons of age groups. /nit

When I wrote that comment I had performance in mind.

Isn't Windows Defender one of the worst performing AVs?

But I'm pretty sure Samsung Buds (perhaps the first gen?) use some sort of standard battery.

> they'll just keep forcing up and coming competitors out of the industry through predatory practices

They don't need to. The only alternatives to YouTube are social media platforms like Twitter, FB, IG and TikTok.

There's a million things wrong with that* but my main quarrel is that they're not searchable. YouTube may be closed off and may have a limited API but it still has discovery outside of the platform and videos can be downloaded.

*Like no one uploading let's plays, repair tutorials, indie songs, etc.

The benefit of YouTube is its past content. We're trapped.

I love how one of the top things Google pushes with AMP is its performance when Google sites are quite slow. YouTube flunks Google's own Lighthouse benchmark and it's not like it has sorting, filtering and searching features or a very complicated interface, especialy when the old site had the same features at half the memory cost. How hypocritical.

As a user I've always disliked AMP and how it was never the original page. Websites always have a separate AMP page and a separate real page.

yeah idk about the macos app personally but i can say that the windows app is definitely electron. at least last time i checked.

by 'react native' i'm guessing you're referring to RNW, although a port of their iOS app is possible Facebook had previously just used a port of their iOS for their Windows app too.

I've seen the same posts you have linked and can only conclude that they've currently been using either React Native for Web or are using a React website in an Electron app, and are planning on releasing a RNW app. The current app could perhaps be using RNW but targeting win32.

But note that someone from Microsoft linked that tweet in response to a question of who uses RNW: https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/6050#i...