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Yeah, I'm conflicted about Ars. They present themselves as firmly on the side of user-friendliness and privacy, but they're not above scummy ad/tracker practices, autoplaying videos, and obnoxious popups. They also charge you to delete your account.

I've pretty much stopped reading them because I was losing respect for the people who ran the site.

I, uh...actually don't find it difficult to believe he spent $44 billion just to create a better version of Microsoft Tay.

Fhfkdj: command not found

You don't, technically speaking, pay for it, which is why it's making news lately. They give you a free TV crammed with ads and trackers.

(It's a little amusing to me to see this discussed on Ars Technica, a site that is also crammed with ads and trackers. This is really just the physical real-world model of every crummy ad-supported site out there.)

Also: https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/telly-free-smart-tv-privac...

I'm looking forward to the threads about how people are hacking these things—perhaps "exorcising" is a better word—back to the dumb screens they should be, and I am very much looking forward to the inevitable thread 1–3 years from now where HN dissects how and why Telly went bankrupt.

It's astonishing to me how many people wanted the heir to BeOS to look like Windows XP.

I was being somewhat sarcastic, since at least for me, I don't use Twitter anymore. A lot of the people I followed on there left too.

Yeah, it's a toxic shithole. I think paulpauper is partly correct that much of what makes Twitter bad is more the results of internet culture than something specific to Twitter, but there's always been a particular ugliness to Twitter that I attribute to their engagement engineering. It was bad enough before Musk took over, but at this point, I think Twitter is so bad as to be increasingly irrelevant, which was the point of my earlier comment.

(This is the point at which someone might say "come to Mastodon, everyone is so much nicer over there", but they really, really aren't—same kneejerk viciousness, just left-er instead of right-er.)

TIL that Twitter still exists

I don't know, the stupidity here seems very believable. Someone whose proverbial uncle works at Nintendo wants to earn prophet points on one of the top Apple rumor forums? I'd buy it.

My guess is that the account-deletion thing is them freaking out about (1) Apple's lawyers—which, assuming MacRumors's host has backups, is likely a futile gesture—and (2) random crazy people who will target them for whatever reason.

Although if I were them, I'd be worried most about my sister. Putting your own career on the line for internet fame is one thing; risking someone's else's is some deeply bad shit.

This is fantastic.

I'm so sick of rentware; I think most of us are.

That sounds pretty impressive until you remember that an ape did the same thing: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-succ...

Yes, there's absolutely no downside to taking already disaffected, unemployed young men who can't find a wife, giving them weapons training, and then sending them off to a meat grinder somewhere from which they—well, some of them—will return even more angry and messed up than they were before.

If I were China, I definitely would not be worrying about the social impact this sort of thing could have at all.

Owning my content means it's on my local drive, like with Obsidian (or, well, Apple Notes). I realize that may not be the case with a web-based tool, like Notion or Asana; that is justifiable, but I'd like to know that from the outset. This is where a simple product page explaining the functions and features would have helped.

Automatic backups and sync are great—ordinarily I'd consider that a valuable feature—but if that's optional, as you said, it should not be a requirement for using the tool. Besides making me suspicious, it's a speed bump. I was ready to experiment with your tool until I realized I had to set up an account. At that point, I decided I didn't want to bother.

My assumption is that, until proven otherwise, every tool is trying to sell my data or drive me towards a subscription. If you're doing that, be clear about it. If you're not doing that, be very clear about it. Clarity would engender a lot of good will here, since most of us have learned to assume the worst from SaaS tools. Not having ulterior motives is the exception, and that's great, but I think you need to be extra clear about that.

This is a 500 MB app that demanded a login the first time I opened it. So I don't own my content, I guess?

The author couldn't even take the time to provide any screenshots, or a brief overview—you have to sit through a video.

Note-taking apps are one of these areas where I'm always interested in alternatives, but I also have some very good options that I'm already using. If I'm going to switch, there had better be a damned good reason. And so far, all this app is doing is giving me very good reasons to not take it seriously.

No, I said the OS didn't look like something you'd use for heavy-duty development work.

I was being a little sarcastic, but I was just amazed at all the people who spent ten seconds looking at this and said "this is useless, it clearly wouldn't be very good for all the extremely complicated powerful things I want to do. Can it handle fifteen different terminal windows? Fail!!1"

Yeah, this whole thread is why Hacker News has the "orangesite" reputation it does. I wouldn't have shared anything like this on here, and that is a criticism of HN, not projects like Mercury OS.

I thought this was an interesting project. The site is well-designed. The UI is attractive. As a designer, I really enjoy reading about these things. The fact that this isn't something you'd build your personally customized Linux distro on is not a problem for me. (And no, I don't know the designer or any of his friends. I think the challenge the guy took on was interesting, and I liked reading about it.)

I like HN because of what people share here, but I've never liked the community itself, and this thread is a pretty clear example of why.

I also suspect that there are more legislators than you'd think becoming very well acquainted with VPNs right now.

> until a journalist went and ruined his life.

That's a very strange way to describe a violent criminal finally being held accountable for years of theft.

This is an absolutely fantastic app. No subscription bullshit or anything—does what it's supposed to, which is a lot. I think my favorite feature is the ability to include custom CSS for sites; really helps to hide adblock whine screens and other garbage.

(I'm not affiliated with either the app or the devs, I just hate bad websites and find this really useful for mitigating the issues.)

Musk has done a lot of stupid things, but I think the absolute stupidest was regarding Twitter users as freeloaders to be milked, mocked, or both.

I doubt anybody would argue against finding ways to make Twitter profitable, but Twitter is one of these companies where the users really defined the culture, service, stature, and even their most iconic features (@replies, hashtags). Musk's attitude towards them from the beginning has been one of hostility and resentment, so it's hardly surprising that the company is crumbling.

There's certainly discussion to be had about his personality flaws, but from a basic business perspective, he didn't understand the first thing about the company he spent $44 billion on, went in there with no plan to speak of, and has been managing it ever since by trial and error, with a particular focus on the "error" part.

Never mind the fact that he's an asshole; that's just bad, lazy business.

“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. “There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

—Twitter employee, fall 2022 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/17/twitter...

This can't be said enough.

The "capitalism encourages healthy competition that works to the advantages of innovation and the consumer" only works when companies are prevented from cheating. And the natural inclination of anybody who wants money and power is to cheat.