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Off-topic, but I hate sites like this. All links in the article are for other pages on businessinsider.com, but there's no link to Tin Can, not that I can find at least.

It's getting more and more normal that sites won't link out of their own "property".


Especially weird in this case since it’s such an over the top case of Submarine Marketing.

Submarine marketing?


Yeah, and that's especially egregious when they're presenting a product, or a scientific result without linking to it.

Depends on the country, but landlines are no long available for new customers and the cables are actively being removed.

There are still VoIP services that function essentially the same. I switched to that recently because the real POTS service had been jacked up in price a crazy amount, probably because we were grandfathered into even having it since the company website didn't even seem to offer it anymore.

Well, I'm sure my landline is not a landline anymore, I'm sure it is some sort of VoIP system, but it doesn't matter, it is a phone with a number, that doesn't leave the living room.

Disable Javascript or use Lynx, Links or Dillo to open the articles from your newsreader. Some pages won't work obviously, you remove those from your feed.

no love for elinks?

Disabling Privacy Badger, reloading the site and scrolling around a bit, I can comfortably stay that the author is wrong, the site is much larger. Within two minutes the site has now transfered 50MB (of 75MB) according to Firefox, but it does indeed keep going, constantly loading more and more stuff in the background.

Looking down the list I can find more features that I'd like to yank out of Safari, and Chrome, than features I'd like to see added.

Things that should be removed, according to me:

* Audio recording

* Geolocation

* Motion

* Media capture


You're right, nobody uses video conferencing in a browser. let's kill it!

You have to explicitly allow all of those features to work in a webpage, they aren't on by default, so I'm not sure what you're worrying about.

> so I'm not sure what you're worrying about.

Complexity primarily.


Complexity for who? The user having to click "Yes I want to enable Web Bluetooth for this website"? Or for the developers? Because if it's for the developers, it's literally their job to make complex things simple for users.

Two stupid calls I've had:

1) I call to cancel an insurance policy on a car I sold. I'm greeted by the IVR, press three to cancel a policy, we're off to a good start. Next follows a long speech about how I need to call a special number if I stuck in the middle east and need to get back home, general precautions I need to take and my rules and rights. All great information, except I've already indicated that I call to cancel a policy. The chance that I'm sitting in an airport in Bahrain, desperately trying to get home, yet I decide that now is a good time to go through and cancel unneeded insurance policies is absolutely zero. You already know why I'm calling, tailor the message to that.

2) Internet is out, for the second week. Customer service dude is typing in stuff, looking stuff up, trying to figure out why the case has been closed. "While we wait let me talk to you about our streaming bundles"... Dude, I know the boss is making you do this, but don't try to upsell a streaming bundle to a customer you can't even get online.

The doctors office is the worst though. Their entire system for guiding you through when to call and where to call take minutes for them to explain. The call it routed to the same people regardless. There are so many confusing and irrelevant messages from the system and in the end you are still routed to the same set of people.

Most of my calls to customer services is because selfservice online absolutely suck and can't do simple things. Every industry could save a fortune in callcenter costs if their websites was ever so slightly better. Often it's not even about being able to selfservice, it can just be providing the tiniest bit of actual information. Your call volume is larger than normal for the past five years, because your stupid website is getting worse every year.


The worst one I've had is that after waiting for about 10 minutes, it passed through to a person who pushed me through the another department, only to end up in the same preselect menu I started the call with but with another option selected which points me to a website where you must enter your question and get an email back with the request to call the service desk and select the option I took in the first place. The circle of help desk life. Kafka would be proud.

This is likely due to them merging two help desks into one making the second part useless as they can no longer see the data they need and thus canceling it entirely since it didn't get the right metrics.

Also turns out that calling the competitors help desk is more useful as they can actually see the thing I was interested in as it is shared between them (fiber connections work schedule when they start to dig, hint they weren't going to). Can't use the competitor since the connections are monopolies...


Here we have an open connect system on fiber in large parts of the country. The ISP lease the fiber each other, power companies or dedicated fiber providers. That means that you can in many areas use the competitors status page to get some idea as to why your connection may be down. The larger ISP do not like being told that you can see that there is an outage in your area, while their own monitoring is all green.

Maybe it looks better on a nicer monitor or something. To me there's nothing terribly broken about the Tahoe UI, but it's clearly rushed because there are a ton of weird little things that just look off.

The dock is suppose to look like the icons float in a class panel, but the reflections in the glass look pixilated and the effect isn't there. The dock icons are centred in the dock, but the activity indicator on the "glass" pane make it look like they're not.

In the control panel, and other windows with a left panel, it's clear that the window curve and the panel curve aren't the same and the transparency of the panel makes it even more clear. I don't understand why some panels can be transparent, but other parts of the window isn't. There's no reason for the transparency.

The Tahoe looks like Gnome theme from 2005, it's interesting, sort of pretty, but the details makes it clear that the authors doesn't quite have the skills to perfect it.

Apple have been slacking in the UI quality control department in the past few years. I have similar issues on my iPhone SE, Apple (and app authors) clearly doesn't test on this phone, because UI elements frequently overlap.

Also I'm still annoyed about the control panel being ported over from iOS. You can't find anything and the window can't even be made wider.


I absolutely love this, because to me, this is what software development should be about, solving actual problems and providing faster calculations, improving the workflow for people.

It does strike me as a little odd that they didn't hire a developer earlier and got the code written. Sitting back and waiting for someone to drop by and present a solution is a little naive, but it's also the world we built in the IT industry over the past 20 years. When I started my first job, we frequently had customers ask for bespoke solution, most of which was small one week to a few months of work. Multiple co-workers in the mid 2000s has side businesses, where they did contract development, most of which was these types of small one off solutions. Most of the software companies, in my area, that did these types of jobs are all gone now.

If AI accidentally created an environment where people can once again solve small programming problems on their own and massively improve the workflows I'm all for it. Serves the industry right for abandoning these customers.


Yeah the whole tech world did a weird side quest over the past 20 or so years huffing its own farts due to how the internet/adtech/etc sucked all the air out of everything else tech related. And the economy as a whole.

It also coincided with the hollowing out and offshoring of practically all US industrial and manufacturing capability.

I will be very happy if the result of AI means we go back to how things should actually be - where technology/IT is used to support real world things and acts as a backstage enabler to get shit done. Not the main event.

I often said since the early 00’s my dream would be to have made enough money in the insanely stupid “tech for tech sake” world to go back to just being one of a few “IT guys” supporting a factory and keeping the machines running. These jobs of course exist, but due to tech salaries very few small manufacturing businesses could support hiring such a person.

There is now a generation or two of technologists who don’t understand that the job isn’t to learn the latest hot web framework or yammer on about best practices or whatever. It’s to support a business in shipping actual products to customers.


I love it too. It's a really positive aspect of AI. And it's NOT because it "takes jobs away from developers". In this case, there was NO (professional/career) developer and NO software product focused on what this guy did.

We've long made fun of excel-jockeys getting carried away with VBA, but they came into being because engaging with turgid and expensive software companies to do important but small jobs was such a pain in the ass. This is the start of a new era, and while I am sure we're going to see some wild fiascos, it is a move in the right direction for people that need to solve problems with computers.


In my experience, I've worked with a number of people in non-tech industries who tried to pivot their company into software, and a huge obstacle was that ultimately the code became unmaintainable.

Maybe they didn't have the expertise to pick a software stack that would serve them in the long run, or they just didn't have the budget to hire a SWE or team full time, or their contractor team just wasn't super invested in the project.

So tech people look at "vibeslop" as unmaintainable technical debt, but they ignore that in a lot of situations their own salary is what makes the tech debt unmaintainable. Maybe that's uncharitable, but I do think many techs are very far removed from the "solve a problem and then dogfood it" cycle


You’re telling me that salesforce CAN’T actually solve every problem in the world more simply and efficiently than just building a tool to fit the job??

The software industry has just abstracted every problem to the point of being unable to solve anything.


Love "manually start X", because I've been considering just doing that. In some weird sense it seems easier.

You can choose the middle ground and start X in whatever file is executed by your shell at login, after checking that X is not already running and that the login has not been done remotely through SSH. Instead of using "startx" (which on a properly configured system would also start whatever desktop environment you use), you can use the start program of your desktop environment, for instance I use XFCE, whose starting program is "startxfce4".

This eliminates the need to do the start manually when you login, but like after a manual start you can stop the GUI session, falling back into a console window, and then you can restart the GUI if needed.

I prefer this variant and I find it simpler than having any of the programs used for a GUI login, which have no advantage over the traditional login.


That was my understanding. You have two services, one validates, another logs. The validation triggers a failure, and requests that to be inserted into the audit database, but the audit log services fails and that apparently doesn't block the validator from sending a response back to the attacker.

Reading through the article I can't help but think that many of these authentication/authorization flows are entirely to complex. I understand that they need to be, for some use cases, but those are probably not the majority.


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