firexcy

I also find this painful and have switched to iceraven, a fork of Firefox Android that supports arbitrary addons, and use SingleFile to save webpages as html files.

Idk, but ESL speaker as I myself is, I don’t think localizations are that important for technical writings, where few grammar or rhetoric is concerned, and technical terms can simply be seen as “tokens” that can be represented in any language as long as you can identify their “shapes.” Therefore, if you are among the targeted reader group, that the documentation is not in your mother tongue is unlikely to discourage you from reading it. On the other hand, if you are not comfortable with reading technical descriptions generally, having a localized version will not help much either.

> So far, Apple said it:

> - Removed support for custom fonts. This means only presenting built-in fonts which are the same for all users with the same system.

I really hate this. I'm opinonated on typography and rely on userscripts to replace fonts I think to be subpar (Arial, Times New Roman, etc.) with ones with higher quality. Since ~2 years ago Safari has lost the ability to designated any font with custom 'font-family: ' CSS other than built-in fonts, totally breaking my use case. I hadn't use Safari as my daily driver browser since then despite its privacy benefits.

Yes, and this behavior is also annoying because it prevents you from copying the real URL directly from the result page. Instead you’re getting a rewrited URL that is neither readable or shareable.

Each time a podcast praises the credibility of a VPN sponsor, it reduces the credibility of the very show in my mind.

Then the page is ruined by the disastrous Arial font.

Yes, they wouldn’t do that. But no, checks and balances can not be based on something that would or would not happen.

This. The most refreshing thing I felt when Chrome came out in 2008 was that it let me treat a webpage as an application _per se_, instead of a document being opened by an application (i.e. the browser).

I think the library system does have good reasons to exist and whether to use it depends totally on your needs.

Essentially, the library system and the traditional filesystem are the same, to the extent that they both filter and group files by a select group of criteria. In the case of the filesystem, the criteria are file path, sizes, date added, etc. In the case of a library system, the criteria are specific types metadata that are meaningful for the type of media it manages (genres and artists for music, publishers and categories for books, etc.). Their features do intersect, and you can have both worlds in one system with some hacks, but the convenience and design also matter.

For me, I read ebooks but don’t hoard them, so I don’t need Calibre to manage my petite amount of epubs -- folders and filenames are enough. But I do listen to a lot of music, so I can’t manage efficiently without a music library software like iTunes. A person who is a voracious reader but rare listener, however, may have a choice just opposite to mine, which is also completely reasonable.

Can anyone explain to me the rationale for the recent trend to split the input of username and password into two steps? I noticed more and more services (including Outlook, iCloud, Evernote, etc.) have adopted such an annoying design, which makes no sense to me. I guess the purpose for doing so is to preempt user from typing a wrong/non-exist username so that server resources for checking unmatched credentials are saved and brutal force attacks are prevented? But do they justify all the hassle caused to daily users?

I do find YouTube’s recommendation algorithm prone to low quality contents. Sometimes I click one or two clickbait videos out of curiosity, and as soon as I return to homepage I would find alike videos starting filling my feed. I have to manually unlike them to force the algorithm back to the right track or there will only be more.

Now I simply disable YouTube’s watch and search history and almost never care about what’s on the homepage.

I followed the “Math” topic and found my feed filled with silly, primary- and middle school- level homework questions.

That’s when I stopped to use Quora.

“640K is more memory than anyone will ever need.”

However, I would like the redundant bandwidth and computing power to be used to implement HDR first. It’s a more perceptible and immediate improvement than 8k.

I’m wondering about the legal implications of such feature. By making calls and reservations for the customer, does Google Assistant (and therefore Google) become the agent of the customer as a principal? If it does, shall it consequently take up legal obligations of agents (e.g. reasonable care) and potential responsibilities for its nonfeasance thereof?

I don’t think there’s a problem with their retraction. Shall the original story remain there, (and maybe also indexed by Google,) won’t that do exactly the same harm to the alleged site owner what the story claimed to had been done to the “victim”?

To unpublish the story may lose some informative and educational value for the public, but since NPR's notice is detailed enough to explain what happened, such value should give way to the protection to the wrongly-indicted site owner.

Intense RSS user as I am, I don’t think the recent hype of RSS practical and scalable for daily users.

Algorithm-generated feeds are mostly critisized for buidling filter bubbles and leading to dependency, but either can be avoided by simply switching to RSS. It is you who choose what to subscribe to in RSS, and it’s hard to imagine many people would offense themselves by subscribing to sources contrasting their own ideologies. And any experienced RSS user will understand the stress of out-of-control unread counts, which easily leads to the crumbling of your RSS-based reading system.

You may be like, “well, I’m nimble at selecting non-biased sources and spend a health time on my RSS feed.” Congrats, but one as rational and restrained as you is also unlikely to be solicited or tricked by News Feed. On the other way, you can’t expect one inclined to be biased and addicted to crappy stories to become less so just by using RSS instead.

And that’s without mentioning the high technical barrier of RSS that filters ordinary users away. For many popular content providers, there’s no full text output, even no conspicuous feed address. Shall I suggest my mom switching to RSS and subscribing to her favorite WeChat official accounts by setting up an Linux server running web crawler? I haven’t be nerdy enough to do that.

I do love the simplicity and transparency of RSS but don’t really think something invented in the 1990s can solve the problem of 2010s and decades to come. When the density of information available reaches a certain bar, you have to turn to something like algorithm. Being arbitrary and black-boxed is not inherently a problem. Haven’t we been happy with the works of DJs, curators, and food writers? What can be more arbitrary and black-boxed than we human? What needs be changed the most is not the tool people use to get information, but the mindset with which people live with the torrent of information in such a post-scarcity era of contents.

I’m a Chinese speaker and also on my way advancing English skills. What I learned from my past experience is that don’t distinguish between good and bad sources of contents. Enjoy nonsensical shouts and murmurs in YouTube, Reddit, or other communities. At first I tried a lot to follow recommandations on Top X lists, only to find myself quitting frequently on the half-way because either I lost interest or they were too far from daily English I can learn for practical usage. Now my opinion is that there’re always gold and craps in contents of a certain language, and since languages were invented first for daily communications, which by nature are full of nonsense and improvisation, “crappy” contents are always far more than well-composed ones, but it’s from these craps that you know what daily interactions sound/look like, and get the bonus of less likely getting bored.

Of course it’s always helpful to keep certain doses of more “serious” contents. I always enjoy the challenge of reading longforms from The New Yorker (forgive me if you don’t think that a challenge, but from my point of view as a non-native speaker the vocabulary thereof is quite a challenge) or non-fiction books. You’ll feel improved in both skill and intellect aspects if you can persist.