DamnableNook
Even if the OS “renders” the menu or “owns the pixels”, it’s still being driven by procedural code within the app in order to create those menus. This is not some declarative spec that apps just hand off and wipe their hands of. The app “owns” the menu bar, it just uses OS libraries to help with it.
If the app code misbehaves or doesn’t follow the API contract, it’s completely possible to have bugs with the menus. For example, if an app just deadlocks, the menu bar hangs with a spinning beach ball the same as any other GUI element drawn inside a window. Switching to another app will cause the menu bar to work (because that other app is now rendering the menu bar), but it will remain frozen if you switch back to the frozen app.
The hubris of HN posters never fails to astound me. The most niche of workflows, then wonders why regular users don’t all learn esoteric keybindings and use TUIs.
I also dislike Dan Goodin’s reporting. He tries to talk the talk, but nearly every article he writes has some tell that he doesn’t really understand the thing he’s reporting on. Which is fine if he was relying on third-party expertise and quoting that, but he tries to make it sound like he has the expertise and it just comes up short. I feel like he’s a good example of that old fallacy that you think the news is correct about everything, until they report about something you know.
For me, Ashley Belanger is the best reporter they have. She might not have the subject matter expertise some of the others there claim, but she has the best journalism of anybody there. Lots of direct sources, well written, and the right level of depth. I honestly feel like I’m reading a different (and better) publication when I read her articles. More than once, I’ve had to scroll up to see if the article I’m reading was one of Ars’ licensed outside pieces, as the quality bar was higher than I’m used to, only to find her name.
Beth Mole is a close second. She has subject matter expertise, good journalism, and loves to slip in some humor or justified “get a load of this idiot” comments.
You’ll need to back that up with facts, not “it seems to me…”. It’s easy to say “the data are wrong, think about it,” but that doesn’t make it true. That’s just a nice way of saying, “of course those people are criminals, just look at them, but there’s a conspiracy making reality say different.”
Affiliate links create misaligned incentives between content creators and consumers. This includes on the products listed themselves, where the affiliate is incentivized to select the products that give the most kickback rather than the ‘best’ for the consumer. But it also includes the content itself. Affiliate links create incentive to (a) write reviews, where a site wouldn’t have bothered before; (b) churn out lots of content with lots of links, that can be picked up by search engines; and (c) to not invest much in the actual reviews, and instead generate quick, low-quality content, since the content creator doesn’t actually care about finding the “best” product (which takes lots of time and money to do correctly), only on having readers click their links.
This is why sites with names like Celeb Rumor Central have dozens of articles like “top 10 coffee makers 2024”. They just hire a freelancer to do a few quick Google searches for coffee makers, then churn out 10,000 word articles with sections like “the history of coffee” and “why do people drink coffee?” Then the actual review is “this machine is purported to boil water and drip it through coffee grounds, and has high ratings on Amazon (we may earn a small commission when you click a link on our site)”. Increasingly, they’re just using AI to do it, cutting out the cost of a freelancer.
In my personal opinion, affiliate marketing is one of the worst things to happen to the modern web, and the source of a ton of content farm SEO spam pages.
The worst part is, you can’t even talk to Uber support chat unless you put in the account’s current email, phone number, and last 6 digits of the credit card on the account. I have the attacker’s email address, but not the phone number, so I couldn’t even chat with support. They have an “email support” form, but it asks for the same info. I put in what I knew, but I haven’t heard back from support since the attacker took my account this afternoon, and I fear I’m not going to get it back.
This is especially true given it’s a security library, which perhaps more than any other category I would want to be stable, compatible, and free of surprises.
“You must upgrade to the latest release the moment we release it or else you risk security vulnerabilities and won’t be able to link against any library that uses a different version of ring. Also, we don’t ‘do’ stable APIs and remove APIs the instant we create a new one, so any given release may break your codebase. Good luck have fun!”
[1] https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/blob/master/docs/configur...
In china. That is an important note that you left out to make Apple seem worse.
But as this article articulates so well, that’s a red herring. Like, you can come up with all sorts of wild scenarios where central authority can be bad. But ultimately, these are scenarios you’re unlikely to encounter in the real world, and if you do, there are much simpler solutions.
Blockchain technology always reminded me of that XKCD about cryptographer expectations vs. reality (https://xkcd.com/538/): it’s solving a problem that only really exists in fantasy for 99% of the population.
Now, there are other reasons you would want on-prem other than air gapped networks, but that’s not the discussion we’re having.
Edit: oh, this guy is a troll. Just read his other comments. Sigh.