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willywanker

28 karma · joined November 16, 2022

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willywanker··on The 49MB web page
This article is just the biggest justification for using an adblocker. Just imagine none of this nonsense affecting your system resources and user experience, just uninterrupted content. It's how I've been surfing since 1999. I get viscerally disgusted if I ever have to look at another person's laptop or phone screen.
willywanker··on Oneplus phone update introduces hardware anti-rollback
What exactly is the threat model here of preventing Joe Nobody Famous or Important Poweruser from rooting the hardware they bought and paid for?

If someone has physical access to your phone, you have a lot more to worry about than mere root exploits. And given those who root their devices are far out of the profile of ordinary users, so a specially targeted hack like this is pointless as compared to the regular kind of exploits in apps that can target a wider base.

willywanker··on Be Like Clippy
People are overreacting to Clippy's intrusiveness - firstly you could replace Clippy with other characters like the red ball Dot, or a dog and cat (the latter would curl up and snooze on the screen). And being introduced in Office '97, later versions allowed you to turn off the Agent feature altogether.

So it's a case of looking back with shit tinted glasses. The current environment is far more user hostile. Arrogant devs deciding they know best what the user should be allowed to do (starting with Firefox post version 4 and Windows post version 8). Design solely for mobile and then stretch it to the desktop. Or create a gigantic bloated mess of an Electron app which is just the webpage bundled with a Chrome instance and call it a day. Any day far worse in terms of resource consumption to end up offering less capabilities and worse UX than similar software running on a much slower computer from 25 years ago.

willywanker··on Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper
What passes for a desktop app these anyway is just some variation of Electron - bundle the website along with a Chrome instance and serve up the resulting 300-400 MB bundle as a 'desktop' app. Who gives a crap about keyboard and mouse focused platform UI/UX conventions. Visually and functionally there's no difference between opening Whatsapp Web and installing this - both the earlier version and now.
willywanker··on Resurrect the Old Web
They always could be local. Thunderbird, MS Outlook and other email clients have supported it for years. Plus there's dedicated desktop feed readers like the Qt based QuiteRSS, which I use.

On Android there's the open source Feeder from F-droid.

There's no rule that says a feed reader HAS to be a webapp.

willywanker··on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
>An OS should be mandated to come with a browser than supports some locked down functionality

What for? Online banking worked perfectly fine on standard web browsers over HTTPS for years before smartphones became popular, why should that change now?

willywanker··on Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources
They have a pre-emptive defense of Electron linked to, that others have refered to here. The criticism of Electron apps isn't merely RAM or sluggishness - it's the modern tendency to completely shit on mature, established, efficient and muscle memory based desktop UI/UX conventions that have been around for decades.

I don't see what this offers over Clementine on Linux - it offers complete local music collection (remember that?) management as well as adding streaming sources & Last.fm integration in a sane, desktop focused UI like there once existed.

No gigantic fonts and icons and wasted space that's more served for a mobile UI, and all that before the idiocy of using Javascript as a hammer for every damn thing instead of what it originally was as a means to add some interactivity to a webpage.

Then again, modern devs don't seem to care about the actual end user experience, this person essentially claims Electron is superior because Javascript and frameworks based on it are all he knows or cares to learn.

willywanker··on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
IBM in Nazi Germany was no different from other German owned companies in being conscripted to do what the Third Reich ordered them to; the headquarters in the US obviously had no control over them during WW2.

Plus it's ridiculous to apply collective guilt in any form by blaming later IBM management, given that anyone involved with 1940s German IBM is long dead by now.

willywanker··on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
Only if you consider hosting the entire infrastructure for concurrent video streaming to millions of users as 'inserting themselves'. Before Youtube there was no way to distribute your home video to a large audience beyond sending the entire physical video file (too large to email, for starters) and the recipients having to deal with whatever mostly proprietary formats it had to be made in.

From the viewers' side, there was no place to go and browse videos, you were limited to short embedded clips or had to download the entire file first.

Youtube was a game changer when it first appeared and Google hadn't yet acquired it.

willywanker··on Progressive JSON
>We technically didn't need more than 640K either.

That old chestnut again - this was true for MSDOS PCs in 1981 when the quote was said. It was still true 10 years later for whatever version of DOS was current then. People keep bringing it up as though Bill Gates said 'no one will need > 640k for all time to come'.

willywanker··on Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
Ah yes, brilliant reasoning. "You carry one device that can be tracked as long as you're carrying it so what's the problem with having tracking baked into your vehicle?"
willywanker··on Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft
>Now, whenever you download some giant 300-500mb Electron app

There's the mistake right there. Electron is to be avoided like the plague; if all I want is the same dumb touchscreen focused web UI of the creator's website, there's no need to wrap it in a Chrome instance and call it a 'desktop' app when it doesn't follow a single desktop UI convention.

willywanker··on What if we made advertising illegal?
I don't have to imagine it at least on the internet - I've been blocking all ads on all my devices very successfully since 1999. In fact now I can't stand having to look at or use anyone else's computer or smartphone (usually when they ask for free tech support).
willywanker··on Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365
>I have little issue with what happened and have no concern about Mozilla and privacy.

Others clearly do, so your dismissing also ironically adds nothing like the comments you referred to. Those who continue to ignore Mozilla's enshittification over the years are part of the problem; as are normies who fall for their marketing about privacy. Spreading awareness about this is important, whether here or other online fora.

willywanker··on uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store
Wrong. Every company exists to be profitable; how ethically they go about it is a different topic. Companies aren't charities.
willywanker··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
>Seem to tolerate high income inequality or even see it as a good thing.

A free society will by definition be unequal; people have different priorities and abilities, and wealth acquisition isn't a zero sum game. If anything, instead of vilifying billionaires, take a look at the unelected but taxpayer funded and vastly bloated bureaucracies in every country around the world. The shocking revelations of USAID spending billions upon billions to interfere in other countries is example enough.

Prisons are the most equal places in the world in terms of living standards and options available to prisoners; nobody sees them as ideal.

Now lack of upward class mobility - that's a separate problem area to focus on.

willywanker··on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Gotta love the change in terminology. 'Unhoused' people instead of homeless, as though their being without a place to live is now someone else's (the American taxpayers') responsibility.
willywanker··on Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
>With the Trumpenreich looming

Weren't they useful the last time around, when 'literally Hitler' totally murdered freedom of speech until Biden the hero restored it?

willywanker··on Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
It uses a hard fork of Firefox's Gecko engine called Goanna, and is independently developed other than a few security patches from upstream. It has considerably diverged from contemporary Firefox so is not comparable.
willywanker··on We're bringing Pebble back
Bought a Pebble in 2018 and used it with Rebble. Loved the OS and interface - but the device was far from robust. The rubberized buttons eventually cracked and it became unusable because I could no longer press them.

A new version needs to have better buttons and please, please offer the option of a steel wrist strap. I've had Fitbits rendered useless because the plastic/silicone strap cracked and there was no way to replace it.

willywanker··on Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
>We have 5-6 small (~50k people) towns, all well connected. Everything happens on Facebook.

Network effect is always the party pooper. If everyone's using Facebook it's unlikely they'll want to switch to anything else.

willywanker··on Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
Mastodon is a Twitter clone, nowhere comparable to Facebook. An endless microblogging format may not be ideal for a local community, as compared to a regular forum (which is just one of the many features Facebook offers).
willywanker··on The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years ago
Just reloading won't help, you need to actively train the algorithm by telling it what videos you don't like and why. It also lets you stop showing recommendations from a given channel altogether. On Facebook I've trained the algorithm to never show me any ads because I keep marking every ad that pops up as irrelevant and then 'hide all ads from this advertiser', and by also not following any celebrity, corporate or brand pages.
willywanker··on Grayjay Desktop App
Of course it's an Electron app that unzips to about half a gigabyte for the Linux version thanks to having to bundle a whole Chrome browser runtime. Totally insane for a streaming video application. If only there was a Qt version, that respects keyboard and mouse focused desktop UI conventions.
willywanker··on DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
What's wrong with 2005 where desktop user experience goes? Why is the new sexy only 'let us remove all user choice and customization, throw decades of stable desktop UI features like menu bars, tooltips, keyboard shortcuts and mouse optimized icons, simply stretch a mobile touchscreen onto a widescreen display with gigantic fonts and dumbed down icons and call it a day'?
willywanker··on DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
I was one of the very few voices against using Chrome when it debuted in 2008. How on earth did it make sense, even for the supposedly enlightened programmer/IT tech/gamer/nerd crowd to use a browser made by a company whose business model depends on profiling user data to sell ads? And mind that in 2008 they had already ditched the 'don't be evil' slogan for those naive enough to think that businesses are anything but amoral.

And splitting hairs over Chrome vs Blink (the engine), or switching to the multiple other Blink wrapper browsers that are there, or Chrome's controlled opposition Firefox() makes no sense either; by using any of these you only help maintain Google's hegemony over the web and its standards.

() - they don't get to call themselves a scrappy little privacy crusading rebel when bankrolled by Mozilla whose multi million dollar revenue remains primarily from Google being the default search engine in Firefox, plus their own shenanigans.

willywanker··on How React, Vue, and Angular Work – Core Principles in One File
What a horrendously complicated mess. No wonder modern websites are so bloated with a fraction of the functionality and information density from before the 'let's design everything for mobile users only, fuck the desktop' era. And this is supposed to be 'simple' and 'minimalistic'.
willywanker··on Hi Google, please stop pooping the bed: a desperate plea from the indie web
Was that content warning really necessary, or do we also tend to use them for liberal websites (for whatever definition of liberal) ?
willywanker··on SmartTube – an advanced player for set-top boxes and TVs running Android OS
No relation to NewPipe. It's an Android TV exclusive and isn't available for Android mobile phones.
willywanker··on SmartTube – an advanced player for set-top boxes and TVs running Android OS
It would not - NewPipe and its derivatives don't support Youtube accounts unlike SmartTube. With SmartTube (and Revanced, on Android mobiles) you can sign into Youtube and use your playlists, likes, comments etc.
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