discostrings (u/discostrings)

discostrings commented on AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing rakhim.exotext.com/ai-is-... · Posted by u/ambigious7777

cestith · 20 days ago

Neither broke web pages, honestly. XHTML requires a DTD named at the top of the document, and browsers will happily fall back to HTML 3, 4, or 5 as they can if there’s no DTD specified.

discostrings · 20 days ago

My interpretation of "break web pages" was serving XHTML with MIME type application/xhtml+xml, in which case browsers don't render anything when the XHTML isn't well-formed, which is really just a strict / validate-my-syntax mode you can opt into.

In either case, I agree!

discostrings commented on AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing rakhim.exotext.com/ai-is-... · Posted by u/ambigious7777

headcanon · 20 days ago

I feel like I see this attitude a lot amongst devs: "If everyone just built it correctly, we wouldn't need these bandaids"

To me, it feels similar to "If everyone just cooperated perfectly and helped each other out, we wouldn't need laws/money/government/religion/etc."

Yes, you're probably right, but no that won't happen the way you want to, because we are part of a complex system, and everyone has their very different incentives.

Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google, but unless every browser got on board to break web pages that didn't conform to that standard, then people aren't going to fully follow it. Instead, browsers (correctly in my view) decided to be as flexible as possible to render pages in a best-effort way, because everyone had a slightly different way to build web pages.

I feel like people get too stuck on the "correct" way to do things, but the reality of computers, as is the reality of everything, is that there are lots of different ways to do things, and we need to have systems that are comfortable with handling that.

discostrings · 20 days ago

I think you're confusing XHTML and semantic web on the "break web pages" part.

discostrings commented on More on Apple's Trust-Eroding 'F1 the Movie' Wallet Ad daringfireball.net/2025/0... · Posted by u/dotcoma

adeelk93 · 2 months ago

Account > Settings > Communication > Marketing Preferences. Uncheck them all. A bit hidden, but it does work.

discostrings · 2 months ago

At the point in time when I disabled notifications for the app, it did not. I tried that. Even after navigating dark patterns, digging into the menus, and turning those options off, I still received promotion notifications.

Perhaps they've fixed it since? I don't know because they've already burned my trust and they've done nothing to earn it back. Publicly acknowledging and apologizing for this would have been a way to start getting off my list of bad actors.

Even if they've made it possible to successfully turn those off deep in the menus now, whatever dreamed-up definition of "opted in" it's operating under is a tortured legalistic one that undermines the actual meaning and spirit of opting in.

discostrings commented on What UI first distinguished radio buttons from checkboxes with circles/squares? retrocomputing.stackexcha... · Posted by u/azeemba

exiguus · 2 months ago

When I see UI radio buttons, I often think about old radios, dishwashers, or washing machines, where you had two or three buttons aligned, and when you press one, the other(s) pop up (if they are already down).

discostrings · 2 months ago

Push button light switches that had two circular buttons with this behavior also used to be extremely common.

discostrings commented on More on Apple's Trust-Eroding 'F1 the Movie' Wallet Ad daringfireball.net/2025/0... · Posted by u/dotcoma

aqme28 · 2 months ago

Interesting. I feel like this clause is violated very often by major apps:

> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

discostrings · 2 months ago

Uber violates this. At least as of a few years ago, there was no way to get notifications about driver arrival without also getting special offer and Uber Eats spam notifications periodically. Not only was there no opt-in consent, there was no way to turn them off without disabling the status updates.

It's particularly bad when apps with legitimate time-sensitive functionality do this.

I denied the app the ability to send any notifications on principle, and now it's very annoying to have to check the app to see the driver status. It makes things worse for both me and them and I use it less as a result.

discostrings commented on Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates into 2026 arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/jmsflknr

goosedragons · 2 months ago

It's literally like 5 min a day. Not even. They just cap how many points you can earn in a day.

discostrings · 2 months ago

For many, and hopefully increasingly more and more of us, time and attention can be more valuable than money.

Manipulating our behavior to develop familiarity with a product by seeding the habit of using it as an ad-clicking serf and nurturing that habit by drawing it out across a series of days as the means of acquiring security for our tools and information is a coercive and corrosive exchange.

It's designed to seem like such a small thing that it's benign, as if attention is worth infinitely less than money. By changing us, forming new and often bad habits, and extracting ongoing attention interest payments without us noticing, the cost can end up being far greater.

discostrings commented on Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates into 2026 arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/jmsflknr

KronisLV · 2 months ago

I have to say that after switching to Windows 11, I don't hate it as much as I thought I would. I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us, but some things like multi-GPU support is better than in Windows 10: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/what-is-ruining-dual-gpu-setups

On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing.

With news of many games also performing better on Linux distros nowadays like https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s... it feels like vendor lock (certain anti-cheat and software not running on anything else) and familiarity is increasingly what's keeping folks on the platform.

While I've also seen my friends struggling to get an Arch install just right, it's nice to know that if I'm willing to say goodbye to some games (e.g. looking at https://www.protondb.com) and software (I actually like the Windows version of SourceTree and tools like WinSCP and MobaXTerm and even Notepad++), then I could go back to using Linux Mint with Cinnamon as my daily driver again - pretty pleasant setup.

discostrings · 2 months ago

Missing vertical taskbar is probably the most egregious omission, but it's not so much they took it away as it is they created versions of a number of Windows Explorer components in a higher-level technology without implementing half the features and shipping it with 50x the number of bugs. I at least weekly (and often daily) run into issues with taskbar icons overlapping one another, menus not coming up when clicked, the tray icons breaking, etc.

Same story with navigating the file system--the new implementation has a multitude of issues, including getting into a state where clicking files to select them only works below a certain invisible horizontal line in the window, windows not refreshing when files have been added/removed, trying to rename a file you just copied being an exercise in frustration with the view refreshing and exiting the rename state 5 - 10 seconds after the copy, the address bar breaking in about a dozen different ways... it's really frustrating software that's a full few tiers down from the quality standard set by Windows 10 and previous versions.

It's gotten slightly better since the initial Windows 11 release, but it still feels like pre-release quality software. I was hoping they'd get it up to release quality and add the important features back by the sunset of Windows 10, but it looks like Microsoft really doesn't care about the quality of the experience of using their UI.

If it were only missing the vertical taskbar as a design decision that would be one thing, but instead it's the very obvious tip of an iceberg of lack of user focus, care, quality, resourcing, and skill. They don't add it back because they know in their current state they're not going to do it well, and the money's in dreaming up new ways of force-feeding trash "news" and promotions anyway, not in helping you get things done and providing a well-functioning tool and bicycle for the mind. What if someone put the taskbar on the left side of the screen, it interfered with them seeing the clickbait brainrot of the widgets "feature", and Microsoft didn't get its average $.0003 for each interaction?

discostrings commented on I built an app to backup Live Photos from iPhone to external hard drives · Posted by u/xmasterdev

criddell · 2 months ago

Plug it in to the USB port on the phone. iPhone Pro can transfer at up to 20 Gbps but the non-pro models are much slower.

The iPhone camera can also shoot directly to an attached SSD.

discostrings · 2 months ago

> iPhone Pro can transfer at up to 20 Gbps

Citation/proof strongly needed on 20 Gbps

discostrings commented on Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads timsh.org/tracking-myself... · Posted by u/apokryptein

sneak · 7 months ago

How about a no/limited internet setting? So many apps spy on you and they don’t need network at all to function.

discostrings · 7 months ago

Fully denying internet access for an app is actually in iOS and has been there for many years.

But it's only available in China.

https://tinyapps.org/blog/202209100700_ios_disable_wifi_per_...