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abanana

566 karma · joined February 3, 2024

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abanana··on Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why
Opera and Firefox, "actually" (along with some lesser-known browsers), introduced tabs around the same time as, or very soon after, the launch of Windows 2000.

Alternatively, read "tabs" as "windows" - we know the word "tabs" is not the important point of that post (and that the number 200 is exaggerating for effect). Right clicking a link and selecting "open in new window" opened a new window in the same browser instance, not a separate instance, although there wouldn't be any visual difference.

abanana··on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
Thanks for that link, which confirms xdennis's post above is correct. A few lines from that article, emphasis mine:

> blue’s connection with boys and pink’s with girls wasn’t solidified until the mid-20th century... the gendered nature of the colors was either reversed or at best inconsistent (Paoletti’s original argument, which has since been misconstrued as a total reversal).

> ...5 million books published in the U.S. between 1880 and 1980, he found many examples of the standard “blue for boys” and “pink for girls” association, but virtually none for the reverse... “remarkable consistency in gender coding over time” rather than a sharp shift around the 1940s, leading him to conclude that the magazine excerpts often cited as proof of the reversal were anomalies.

> ...follow-up analysis... published between 1881 and 1930... recorded 34 instances of the standard color coding and 28 instances of the reverse... “Pink-blue gender coding showed a certain degree of inconsistency (though not a reversal)... “However, the true extent of that inconsistency is still unclear, as different kinds of sources return dramatically different pictures.”

@ternaryoperator: perhaps that's a good example of AI not being real-world-helpful, if you did ask it for "specific citations of pink being recommended for boys", because that sounds like it was asked to cherry-pick, and did.

abanana··on Private Jet plane crashes in Florida
The italicised paragraph at the start of that article is not what I was expecting to read...
abanana··on Pico CSS is no longer maintained
> Vivaldi 5.6 which uses Chromium 108

Yes, that's right. I thought I'd try it in that older browser that I still happen to have installed, as the user above didn't immediately let us know what that mobile browser was. It may or may not help by at least giving you a browser version you can use to test. As I mentioned somewhere else, it makes sense to use some sort of older browser as a proxy for older browsers in general, when testing.

Developers are always looking for new ways to do what we've always done, often using more technically complicated ways to recreate the simplest things. It's fun from the puzzle-solving point of view, but your choice of earliest browsers you want to support depends on your user base.

abanana··on Pico CSS is no longer maintained
> Seems to be a bad decision from the beginning

I don't disagree! But at the same time, part of our job as web developers involves acknowledging the reality of what our users actually do.

What do early flexbox implementations (something like 12-15 years ago?) have to do with anything? We're not talking about browsers as old as that! They weren't even bugs, they were early implementations of early versions of the standard, so who exactly is the one with no idea here? That level of browser inconsistencies is long gone.

Those of us with years of experience of building user-centric front-ends are not the ones who jump to use new browser features too quickly.

I won't be continuing this conversation, due to the general arrogance and condescension displayed in your posts - following "stupid", "insane" and "lazy" with "bad decision", "where have you been" and "you have no idea".

abanana··on Pico CSS is no longer maintained
It's a shame such an arrogant attitude exists, to call everyone who can't afford to replace their iPhone with a newer model "stupid". And developers really should know better than to fall for the marketing nonsense that anything more than 5 minutes old is "insecure".

> expecting developers to waste time working around all the bugs in those old browsers is just insane

What bugs? The ancestor posts are talking about frameworks immediately using features that were just added to browsers - i.e. more recently than those older versions. Nothing at all to do with bugs. Can you help us to see what you've misunderstood here? Perhaps not dismissing users as "stupid", developers as "insane", and admins (?) as "lazy", would be a good starting point.

abanana··on If IPv4 were land
It's not. It's something like Equal Earth (I'm not familiar enough with all the projections to say for certain, but it's a long way from Mercator).
abanana··on Pico CSS is no longer maintained
It's broken in the exact same way in the last version of Vivaldi that works on Windows <10.

From a quick look at the second horizontal strip that starts "what is this?", and without wasting time doing too much digging, it appears to be ultimately caused by using a grid layout for a heading followed by a few paragraphs, all of which fill the available (constrained) width, which amounts to one of the absolute simplest layouts possible in CSS - block. Last time I saw something similar, albeit with flexbox not grid, it was from a junior developer who appeared to have only learned flexbox and nothing else.

As a quick semi-fix, just disabling grid-template-columns on .base-layout is enough to fix almost everything except the constrained width.

abanana··on Pico CSS is no longer maintained
Exactly. Ad creators know that the purpose of what they're building is more important than their personal dev experience of using shiny new tools. It's such a shame the fashion is the other way for so many web developers, largely the younger and less experienced ones.

And yes, it makes sense to use one particular old browser as a general proxy for older browsers in general, so people shouldn't get hung up on the particular version of Safari you happened to mention.

abanana··on Pico CSS is no longer maintained
To be fair on this particular point, talking about iOS Safari before version 14 isn't "some random old build". It depends on your own users, but I saw plenty of 6-year-old iPhone user agents in the web logs when dealing with a doctor's surgeries app.
abanana··on StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month
Oh that's a new change then, thanks for pointing it out. It was only last week I was annoyed at how it was hiding that the answers were from 2013-2014. I wonder if they've suddenly got someone there with a bit more sense?
abanana··on Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English
Using "South USA" instead of "South America" would remove the ambiguity.
abanana··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
It's the VC/Silicon Valley mindset. They want to be able to call themselves "entrepreneurs" and "founders"; the product has little importance compared to that. It goes some way to explaining why the vast majority fail.
abanana··on Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
It should have said maximizing screen height, not space (on desktop not mobile), in these modern days of widescreen monitors. If we have title bars, menu bars, toolbars etc, while using the full screen width, we're peering through a letterbox. (Fixed headers on websites contribute too.) Line length needs to be kept shorter for readability, leading to wasted space at the sides.

Perhaps, if you're not using a sidebar for bookmarks or vertical tabs or whatever, it suggests something ought to have changed in UI design back when widescreen monitors became the norm?

abanana··on Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
Yes, I'm glad somebody's pointed that out. I read that post, "Users only click on the start menu 0.1% of the time...", and thought, well yes, what do you think the start menu's for? The user will use it to load something from time to time, then spend all their time in that application.

I've seen similar before - people not understanding that certain things are at their most successful if they're unobtrusive.

abanana··on Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)
That's interesting to read, thanks for the link.

It does sound like the counter-stance is mainly also the view of one person, Dr Miles Russell at Bournemouth Uni. But from bits I've read before, Sir Mortimer Wheeler was from the same era as Sir Arthur Evans, that time when they enjoyed absolute authority and could not be challenged. That meant their mistakes, and even deliberate lies, had to be considered to be 100% known fact and would not be corrected until after their deaths.

abanana··on Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you bought
(Source: owned and ran a netcafe for 10 years)

Just a correction: Netcafes don't have to get special licences. I'm not aware of any such licences existing anymore. They just buy however many standard retail copies or online accounts they want. Sometimes a publisher will see the marketing value and will provide some copies/licences at no charge.

Going back 15-20 years or so, Valve used to run a "Cybercafe Program" that was a large monthly expense for cybercafes, but shut it down after a while because it wasn't worth the cost of administration. Now cybercafes buy Steam accounts same as any end user. Asking any publisher for a cybercafe or "commercial exploitation" licence always invoked the response "Um - no idea?" from any department you asked, coupled with "We're afraid to suggest anything" from the legal department and "just use standard copies I suppose?" from the marketing department.

abanana··on I reverse engineered a board game
"Reverse engineering" is also a misnomer here. Surely - this guy doesn't even know what it means? It means working out how to get to the end result when you only have that end result to look at, you don't have full access to the methods that get you there. All he's done here is read the code!
abanana··on What Is Gridifcation
I just looked up that Shaboozey song on Youtube, because I hadn't heard of it and wondered how different it might sound from usual modern pop. I liked the start of it - not modern-pop-styled at all. Then after a few lines of the verse, the autotune hit me like a brick in the face. Autotune feels like it hurts my ears. It's like nails on a blackboard. I wonder if there's a non-Autotuned live recording of it somewhere - refreshing would be the right word. Probably not though, even live recordings have the life Autotuned out of them.
abanana··on The Future of CSS
Flexbox is still fairly new! Hmm, maybe I'm just old.

While a lot of devs love to use brand-new stuff that's only just been added to some browsers, some of us are not willing when we know it won't work for (almost) all users. The scroll() function is too new for use in production, IMO (but good to know it exists, to revisit after a while). If I have to code something else anyway, or copy-and-paste a polyfill, then why not just use a more robust option in the first place.

abanana··on Why Windows 11 still ships with Windows 95's memory manager hidden inside it
> The tradition goes back to SimCity, which only ran on Windows 95 because Microsoft wrote special code for it... Yes, Microsoft modified its OS just to cover up one game’s bug... The SimCity hack was a one-off

The stuff around SimCity in this article is poorly written. It seems the author has misunderstood it to have been a one-off special case. I looked back at Joel Spolsky's article, and he does make it quite clear that the SimCity example was just one of many: "it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95".

The article does later mention "Windows XP’s hidden database of app fixes" but doesn't appreciate that the concept really started with Windows 95, and in a big way, not "just to cover up one game’s bug".

abanana··on What I learned from six months of being stupid on purpose
True, I've always thought it's unfortunate that so many people define themselves by their job and expect everyone else to do the same. It works for some but absolutely not for all, and ideally speaking it shouldn't be our default means of labelling others.
abanana··on Tiny possum and glider thought extinct for 6000 years found in remote West Papua
Indeed, it seems the interior of the country is so little-known and so unspoiled by modern civilisation, it would be surprising if we don't have any unexpected discoveries coming out of there in the nearish future.
abanana··on What I learned from six months of being stupid on purpose
It seems these days everybody is determined to call themselves an entrepreneur.

Alan Sugar was right when he told off a contestant on The Apprentice UK for doing it - it's not meant to be something you call yourself, it's something others call you as a means of recognising your success if you've earned it. Pity that doesn't appear to be the dominant viewpoint.

It's also noticeable how the vast majority of well-known people are described on Wikipedia as either an entrepreneur or a businessperson. The rationale is sometimes as simple as "their management team sells merchandise with their name and image"! I've read that it's a very deliberate attempt by their marketing people, who push their ideas via Wikipedia etc, to give them more credibility than they supposedly get from things like sports or acting, by jumping on this fashion.

abanana··on PHP 8.2.35
There are rare occasions when circumstances are more important than preserving an "EOL" designation. This appears to be one of those times where "official" centralized patches really should be made available for at least PHP5.6 and PHP7.4, and perhaps even 5.5 and all of 7.x. They're not covering themselves in glory by refusing.
abanana··on The Future of CSS
"State management" is a fancy way to say "your Javascript stores data in variables in some way, which are updated as and when needed".

"Reactivity" means "when those variables change, some generic code already exists to update the DOM instantly". As opposed to writing specific pieces of code to make those changes directly.

Unfortunately, with React, "updating the DOM automatically" generally means: you update the data; React recreates the entire DOM as a new copy in memory; React runs a diff checker to find out what changed from the real DOM; React makes each individual change in the real DOM. With React (or other virtual-DOM-centered alternatives) being used for the smallest of web projects, so many small sites do all that work when the procedure ought to be as simple as: you update the data; you update the DOM directly.

It comes down to inexperienced devs not being able to consider which tool is best for the job at hand, and just hammering nails into every web project in the same way.

abanana··on The Future of CSS
> you end up recreating React or another library along the way

That's always the trotted-out response, most often recited by people who've read someone else saying it but not had the experience to form an opinion for themselves.

You absolutely don't end up recreating a massive, bloated, slow framework that tries to be as generic as possible to try to be everything to everyone. What you end up creating is a relatively tiny, fast, piece of code that is specific to that site's needs. The difference in size, speed and simplicity tends to be absolutely enormous.

abanana··on Why do we have so many meetings?
Indeed, the enjoyment in software engineering may come from problem-solving (for many of us at least) - but that means that at the end of it, you've created something that solves that client's problem; you've built something for them that they're now going to use. The requirements stage, and subsequent refining based on what the client needs to do, absolutely is the most important stage.

> a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community

I've never heard it argued otherwise, although it probably doesn't get emphasized enough. It was very interesting at the time to watch how closely he interacted with the community, asking opinions and listening, while also making them feel involved by being open about the details of what he was doing. It was a massively refreshing counter to the way the big game studios were coming across so arrogantly at the time, being certain they knew better than their users about what the users wanted. Notch's attitude created that community feel around the game, and made you feel unusually close to the development and even the decision-making processes. That in turn led to word-of-mouth advertising that resulted in Minecraft becoming one of the biggest selling games of all time.

abanana··on JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases
Sorry for the late response. I did it in Firefox 115 ESR by setting "image.webp.enabled" to false in about:config. I just looked in there to get the exact name, using latest Firefox, and realised they've removed it. Next time I want it I'll have to look into browser extensions - looks like some don't work anymore - or stick to using the older browser for now for some sites.

If you're sure cURL is sending the Accept header correctly without WebP, e.g. just "Accept: image/png,image/jpeg" (note my error in my earlier post, it's Accept not Accepts), and the server is still serving WebP, then it's misconfigured and there may be nothing you can do, short of swearing at it.

abanana··on JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases
Regarding real-world use of WebP - what makes it much worse, in my experience, is that so many web servers are set up to do a lossy conversion to WebP from the original file, most often JPEG (to cut down on bandwidth, or just to satisfy a web speed report originating from Google and therefore pushing Google's technologies). The difference is often very noticeable, e.g. textures smoothed out of existence. Helps to remove WebP from the Accepts header to force servers to serve the original.

It means the technical differences between format, and the real-world choice of which file you want, don't match.

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