wldlyinaccurate

If you want to stick with Linux, I can vouch for Dell's XPS range. I've been running Ubuntu and Arch on various generations of XPS 13 for about 8 years now with minimal issues. Honestly, my work-issued Macbooks have been more problematic than my XPS laptops. It definitely helps that Dell actively support Ubuntu and provide kernel patches.

I always find it interesting when people brag about not paying fines — especially when the fine is issued in a foreign country.

To me it shows a lack of responsibility and a huge lack of respect for the local laws. I guess not everyone feels that way though.

I've used React as a server-side templating language on many projects small and large. The main feature that makes React great for rendering HTML is higher-order components. In my experience any project of sufficient complexity starts to get ugly with a "regular" templating language. React encourages composition of small isolated components, which tends to result in code that is easier to understand and maintain.

Admittedly this works best on projects that don't require a massively complex interactive front-end, like news sites[0] and data reporting tools. But at some point you can just choose to start hydrating the interactive components in the browser without changing your back-end setup at all.

[0]: https://wildlyinaccurate.com/introducing-a-faster-bbc-news-f...

Every time I read something like this it blows my mind that there are still places in the world where you can be "let go" so easily. I'm really sorry to hear that this happened to you. I hope your next employer can be more communicative.

Which licence did you distribute the code with? Surely there's solid grounds for a legal case if the licence didn't permit commercial use?

I picked up a RPi 4B the other day to use as a pi-hole[1] and was surprised to see it running at 65C while idling. It doesn't help that I have the board enclosed in the official case, which provides absolutely no airflow.

Everything runs fine at these temperatures, but all of the ports are hot to the touch. Under stress the SoC seems to reach 80C+, which I imagine would make connecting and disconnecting USB devices a fairly unpleasant experience.

[1]: https://pi-hole.net/

Tesla fans will tell you otherwise, but pretty much all of the EVs from "traditional" automakers are more reliable than Tesla vehicles. Cheaper & easier to service too.

I've heard very good things about the Nissan LEAF, Hyundai Ioniq, Hyundai Kona, and Kia Niro. It might be a coincidence but all of these cars are packaged more like traditional cars, i.e. popping the hood allows you to access many of the components.

I've been using Firefox Preview since it was announced in June and so far I'm really impressed. It's much faster than "regular" Firefox for Android, and I like the UI better. There have been a few bugs and annoyances as they release updates, and I really miss having a good content blocker like uBlock. Aside from that, I'm just happy that there's finally a fast web browser for Android that isn't Chrome.

I don't think many vegetarians or vegans would disagree that meat was historically important for human survival and development. Meat was (and still is in many parts of the world) one of the easiest ways to attain calories and important nutrients.

The difference for you and I -and everyone else reading this- is that we now have easy access to meat-free alternatives. Plant proteins and mycoprotein are readily available in most developed countries. Machine pressed oils give us cheap access to plant-based fatty acids. Today we can easily get all of our calories and important nutrients without factory farming and/or slaughtering animals.

From https://status.aws.amazon.com/

Intermittent DNS Resolution Errors

We are investigating reports of occasional DNS resolution errors with Route 53 and our external DNS providers. We are actively working towards resolution.

I've owned a Nokia 6 Plus for the last year and I've been pleasantly surprised to receive the monthly security patches within a week of them being released. If I buy another Android device it will probably be a Nokia for this reason. My previous Samsung and OnePlus devices seemed to receive updates fairly sporadically for the first year, and then nothing after that.

In my experience most hardware works flawlessly, although admittedly some hardware is better-supported. I've owned two (soon three) Dell XPS 13 laptops since 2013 and have always had a really smooth experience running Ubuntu. The worst of my Linux woes were the usual suspend/hibernate issues running Ubuntu on company-provided Thinkpads.

I've also had to use various Macs for work in the past and have had terrible issues with wireless networking and bluetooth.

The Wikipedia article mostly talks about Type I NF. The author of this post had Type II NF, which is not necessarily associated with the same preconditions as Type I NF.

I'm guessing this is not true for all species of salmon. I've "caught" salmon from a farm in New Zealand and the meat was a very deep orange-red colour.

Yes. This is the entire purpose of film rating systems like the well-known MPAA system. People want to be informed about the content of a film before watching it so that they can decide whether it is appropriate for them (or their children, or their friends suffering from PTS) to watch.

The main difference being that instant.page respects users' data allowances by prefetching only resources that it thinks the user intends to load. You could combine it with H2 push and/or prefetch response headers to improve the load times even more :)

I used to work for the companies that build these bloated websites. I spent a year rebuilding the BBC News front page to make it not-awful[1] but it felt like I was fighting against the rising tide.

I've since moved on and now work at SpeedCurve. It's pretty motivating to see so many of our customers making their websites faster and generally better for the people who use them. It's also pretty depressing to know that the web overall is spiralling down the drain and getting heavier slower every year[2]. What a shit show.

[1] https://wildlyinaccurate.com/introducing-a-faster-bbc-news-f...

[2] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/

There are hurdles for sure. I guess I'm just publicly venting my frustration at having HTTPS on one of the world's biggest news websites be under-prioritised for years and years :)

I'm really glad to hear that btw. I wish I could have stuck around for longer!

There's actually not much to stop the rollout of HTTPS on the BBC News site now. In fact, the major hurdles were overcome nearly a year ago. The final hurdle is convincing the product and editorial teams that enabling HTTPS is more important than whatever features they want to build.

I wouldn't say it's by design - more of a fun consequence of the way the BBC's web platforms have been retired so far. Most of the retired platforms generated static content (some XML, some HTML) so when the platform needed to be switched off it was relatively trivial to archive all of the content. In about 2013 the website was transferred piece by piece to a dynamic platform, which it (mostly) still runs on.

The current platform is already slated for decommission some time in the next couple of years and there's still no cohesive plan for how pages on that platform will be archived. My guess is that they will be rendered on the new platform(s) indefinitely, since everything is driven by a CMS API now. I think it's kind of a shame - there's something nice about being able to look back in time without the pages being distorted through the lens of the wayback machine.

When you put it like that, yep, pretty costly! But a large chunk of this project has been building up the frameworks, infrastructure, tooling, and processes that enable us to migrate from our legacy PHP 5.3 apps running in 2 physical data centres to ~the cloud~.

Also, did you read the part about we have collaborated with over 60 other developers and testers from all around the BBC to build this page? That's actually the best part — News websites are pretty simple; you just display headlines, summaries, and images in various formats. So part of this project was building the lego blocks that we're going to use to rebuild not just the rest of the BBC News site, but also parts of BBC Sport and potentially other BBC products too! So yeah, costly for one page. Hopefully very cost-efficient in the long-term.

We've found that React is actually really great for building complex UIs out of small reusable components. I often struggle to put into words just how much better it is than, say, using Mustache templates or PHP/ERB/etc. I think it mostly comes down to how React makes component composition super-easy, and support for higher-order components makes component reuse a breeze.

Just to clarify: We aren't redirecting HTTP -> HTTPS and don't have any plans to do so, at least in the short-term. All we're doing is enabling HTTPS for bbc.{com,co.uk}/news because at the moment we issue a 301 for HTTPS -> HTTP.

Thanks! We'll take a look at this ASAP. In the mean time, I guess all I can do is apologise for the broken experience...

We use a technique called cutting the mustard to determine whether a browser is modern (read: >=IE9). This allows us to write one set of CSS that should work in pretty much any web browser (we call this the "core" experience), and another set that uses modern-ish CSS (the "enhanced" experience). One of the major drawbacks to this technique is that the technique relies on JS — it is literally just modernBrowser = ('addEventListener' in window && 'querySelector' in document && 'localStorage' in window).

So when you browse the BBC News website with JS disabled, you are getting a page that has been styled to work on a Nokia E65, BlackBerry OS4, IE8, and everything in between. Unfortunately right now we don't have a way to give you the enhanced version of the page without JS. In the future it might be possible for us cut the mustard at the server (or the CDN edge) based on User-Agent but that isn't something I can see happening in the foreseeable.

I'll raise this with our product team. I think it's totally reasonable to expect the banner not to appear as soon as you load the page — if there's a breaking news story, it will already be on the page, right? So there's no need to also pop up a banner with the same story.

But —this is a big "but"— I wouldn't expect this to happen soon. Changes take a long time at the BBC :)

Sorry about this... The BBC has some extremely strict rules around not showing advertising to UK users (who already pay a license fee to the BBC). We attempt to prevent this by redirecting people to the "correct" edition based on their location.

Unfortunately, for legacy reasons, the geolocation lookup and subsequent redirect happen in the browser. It might be possible for us to issue the redirect from the edge soon, since most non-UK users now come via Fastly which does some geolocation.

In the mean time, you can prevent the redirect by ensuring you go to bbc.com or bbc.co.uk, depending on whether you are in the UK or not.

On your last point — the new breaking news banner doesn't have the infuriating jump-to-top behaviour. At the moment the new banner is only on the new front page but I think we're going to backport it to other pages in the not-so-distant future.

Wow, this is awful. Would you mind telling me what combination of settings/add-ons you have so that we can reproduce this?

Our "no JS" fallback styles are not done in a very nice way at the moment: they rely on the browser reading noscript tags. We never did any testing with NoScript or similar add-ons, and I remember hearing somewhere that those sort of add-ons don't always evaluate noscript tags.

The breaking news banner is a source of much internal conflict, at least within the engineering teams. I think most people agree that it's too big, and most people also agree that it's over-used. Unfortunately it's one of those things that editorial will not back down on — they must be able to push their breaking news to people, and it must be prominent (and therefore quite intrusive).

There is a small improvement to the banner on the new front page (/news/0), which is that it's about 4 pixels shorter, and it's now grey instead of black which I think is much less abrasive.

H2 support is happening at a much higher level (like, the BBC-wide infrastructure team level) but I think it's coming pretty soon. We did some testing and saw a positive impact on all front-end metrics: first paint, interactive, DOM complete, document onload.