finack

I look forward to this never happening again and not becoming a massive problem for the next 10 years.

Corporations really are amazing. They are, simultaneously, in a superposition of getting away with crimes because they don't exist, and providing goods and services and benefitting shareholders because they do. Remarkable.

No they don't. Rules for companies and individuals are different in this country, unless you possess some secret to getting away with potentially ruining the lives of 1.5 times the population of the United States with the financial equivalent of a slap on the wrist.

Ah, so you want a service that forces employers to tell the truth. I think that's called "Congress", but it looks like it's been abandoned for a few years now.

Crazy idea: provide a search box, and when the user hits "enter", POST the data to the backend, which queries the database, and then returns the relevant results.

Until Google decides to give developers the ability to let the browser invade the rest of the system, which, in six months, will suddenly be necessary for everyone to do things like bank online and pay utility bills.

Web browsers can already do that. I'm not sure what else is desired beyond what they already do.

Step 1: don't use tens of megabytes of JavaScript to render some rectangles.

Step 2: stop using MacBooks from 2047 to develop websites.

Step 3: hire people who can write vanilla HTML.

Hire developers who don't cram 20 MB of JavaScript into a page just to display some rectangles with text. The real challenge is finding ones who can still do that with HTML, CSS, and just a soupçon of PHP or Ruby on the backend.

Edit: oh, what are the hopes? Nil, we're probably screwed. If you need me, I'll be in my cabin in the woods hacking on operating systems and yelling at people to go away when they knock on my door.

A lot of people died of heat stroke in India today.

I'm sorry one injury invalidates an entire mode of transit. Better luck next planet, I guess.

It's just kind of the experience, I don't know. It has a certain familiarity, but there's also the shared experience aspect of it. I don't like to be cloistered more and more at home, despite that being the overwhelming arc of American culture. Sometimes it's nice to enjoy a shared, familiar experience (even if the popcorn costs too much).

I'm not, I'm using my decade of experience and nascent alcoholism.

None of these things are in scope for a program that is supposed to browse the web (by fetching web pages and rendering them).

Could it actually be the hundreds of megabytes of JavaScript each website insists on executing?

I truly do not understand the complaints about Firefox, the browser (and not Mozilla's questionable stewardship thereof). Every time someone starts talking about their issue, it's either something super niche and inconsequential, or something that doesn't seem to have sufficient evidence to blame on the browser (turns out, crappy web apps will make any browser slow to a crawl). I used Chrome for a few years back in the mid-teens, then switched back to Firefox, and manage to use the Web just fine. It's a browser, it renders web pages. I really don't understand the fuss. Meanwhile, Google (the advertising company) would totally like you to use Google (the browser), for totally innocent reasons.

Those web APIs aren't actually standard (WebUSB, for example, is still in draft status), and they have some gnarly privacy implications. Google steamrolls over standards bodies, and then somehow people believe their browser is the standard. I'm not sure if this is a concerted marketing effort by Google, or simply intellectual laziness. Either way, though, Firefox is not at fault for not supporting non-standard Web APIs.

Programs that don't require an entire web browser to run can already do all of those things.

Firefox has a low market share because Chrome is the default browser on so many systems and in IT departments everywhere. 99% of people don't think about which browser they want to use.

Disclaimer: ChatGPT is frequently wrong, and will not tell you when it makes something up.

Learn some C, and dabble in assembly, because that's what the computer is actually doing under the hood. Every operating system you probably use is written mostly in C. It exposes you to the gory details of computation: memory management, function calls, fiddling with the stack, etc. The fundamentals are simply what the computer is doing that usually gets abstracted away from you. Learn how your computer actually works, not the Pollyanna version presented by high-level languages. Sure, use Python for playing with trees and graphs, but spend time down in the dirt with the language that still underpins a large amount of software.

OCR and pattern matching on text are computationally cheap and incredibly easy to do. For example, tax documents often bear the name of your government's tax authority, which presumably you are familiar with and can search for. They also tend to have years on them.

No, that's an important facet of compatibility. If a change is purely additive, existing clients will keep working, something the industry has basically forgotten all about, it seems.

Well yeah, who knew that letting your frontend developers blow up your database because nobody talks to each other or designs things anymore would be a bad idea?

I never understood why this was such a big deal... "Hey, we need an endpoint to fetch a list of widgets so we can display them." "Okay." Is that so difficult? Maybe the real problem lies in poor planning and poor communication.

The amount of bush-league mistakes I see because people truly don't know any better is shocking. But we've gone from a world where you had to very intimately understand the machine to do your job, to one where a six-month crash course of very specific web technology is enough to net six figures. What did we expect?

I love movie theatres. I hate stupidly expensive popcorn and people talking and using their phones the entire time.

The solution is painfully obvious for anyone who isn't actually involved in milking every last red cent out of media: make movies people actually want to see, and not just shameless cash grabs recycling everything from 1980 onward. Of course, now every suit expects every movie to gross a billion dollars, so that's not going to happen. It's a fun dream, though.

What a colossal waste of land. We've emitted record amounts of CO2 this year alone (and it's only barely June), and yet we're still full speed ahead on cars. Anything to avoid smaller setbacks and bike lanes, I guess. THAT would be horrible.

Some computers make it harder than others.