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Comment by jug | Hacker News Reader

Refreshingly simple, almost to the point of an aversion to other minimalist competitors like Milligram.

I like it. As someone else said here, it brings my mind to an alternative web with browsers that had a better default and standardized stylesheet. Oh how I wish for this. Can't just Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari all just adopt this one?

Setting up no-CSS sites would be a more sensible thing and we would have less need of Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/).

One can dream... Of course, now sites widely rely on a random set of margin defaults, base sizes etc. brought into their websites, so ripping out and changing those wouldn't be quite that simple.

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To be fair, to create a web that has no need for Gemini I think no-JS sites would take us much further than no-CSS. It's relatively easy to disable CSS (Firefox: View - Page style - No style), and generally not much will actually break. But disabling JS would more than often break the website functionality completely.

re: Project Gemini - Gemini in 100 words

Reading that reminds us how far we have *not* come. We were promised jetpacks, and instead we got the internet. A pro-distraction, privacy violating, social fabric tearing, power tool.

More Big Brother, less prophet / savior.

My honest hot take is that we made computers too easy to use.

I appreciate how liberating computers and the internet can be for a lot of people but it has been far too easy to implement dark control through them.

If I dare reply your hot take with my hot take, It was engineers who implemented those dark patterns. I think that still “lots of people” see excel formulas as stuff that geniuses do, so I think it comes down to us. Will I write that privacy invading, psychologically manipulating code, or would I say no.

Sure, if I don’t do it “somebody else would”, but I wonder if that mentality has taken us here

If it's possible it will get done, with or without you.

This is not a technical problem, it's just the symptom of a political power.

If no one can decide for someone else, there's no political power to be acquired. Without it, there's no need to brainwash people with tv and the internet.

We need to destroy power centralisation, starting by shifting the power from the public to many businesses, and ending up with dismantling the government all together once all functions are provided by corporations and nobody holds the monopoly on stealing = taxing.

I obviously can't speak for all engineers but I've certainly refused to work on dark patterns and explicitly told leadership why I believe they are dark patterns.

I appreciate that not everyone has that luxury and ultimately it's an empty gesture because of course at some point, someone's morals will be overcome with money, or threats but on an individual level we do have agency.

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