A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

  • 6 Posts
  • 204 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • Every browser released since 2020 supports this

    It’s a little paranoid of me, but I like the idea that a basic web app I make can be thrown onto any old out of date machine, where ~2015 or younger seems about right for me ATM.

    You mean the Html template Element? I’ve never really got that to work, but I also never seriously tried.

    Yea. From memory, it’s just an unrendered chunk of HTML that you can select and clone with a bit of JS. I always figured there’d be a pattern that isn’t too much of a cludge and gets you some useful amount of the way to components for basic “vanilla-js” pages, just never gave it a shot either.


  • Yea, I’m unclear on how you can take web components and still have widespread browser support (not knowing enough about their ins and outs).

    Plain template elements are widely supported and have been for ~10 years (which ideologically matters to me along the same lines as the top post’s article) … perhaps a little bit of hacking together can get you close with just that?






  • Holy crap, who is writing all this?

    LOL. No worries!

    they’re enshittifying slower than everyone else - I’m waiting to see if there’s a new Apple TV release this year but my Firestick has become unusable with ads and data collection, as has my TV, and chrome stick, so my only hope is Apple TV. If I can’t get back to enjoying video with that I swear I’m done with anything tv-like

    My “smart TV” is an Apple TV 3 which was released 2012 (and bought ~2015). It’s still going fine. It hasn’t had an OS update for ages. For a while, Apple streaming/tv/movies had a bug that would crash it pretty regularly. But that disappeared, meaning they probably fixed things on their backend. While a number of services have stopped supporting it (youtube and netflix, notably), streaming from a phone works perfectly well and Amazon TV still supports it (or works) indicating that there’s nothing wrong with it at all.

    it’s fantastic that they’re trying to do on-device ai - they almost sold me on the iPad Pro just to better support that. I’ll probably get the Air to replace my old iPad, and grumble when it drops out of support a year earlier

    I agree. I hope they persist with this.



  • Although I’m sceptic of the Vision product line, I wouldn’t write it off just yet. They’ve just launched the first version and we don’t know yet how future versions will look like.

    Thing is, they’re leaning hard into it, which makes sense if they’re going to make any progress in that space in part because it aligns with their strengths. But the big question is whether “spatial computing” is there yet? And that’s the elephant in the room here and where I think there was a lack of wisdom on the part of the execs. As good as Apple have made the Vision Pro, the tech just isn’t there yet as you still need a large device hanging off of your face.

    Not to “if Steve Jobs were still alive” this too much … but I think of the whole stylus v fingers thing here. To blow up as a new “form factor”, it likely has to feel natural and seamless. Which means it probably has to be tantamount to wearing a pair of glasses or small goggles. If improvements of that magnitude are on the table, then yea, maybe the 3rd gen could be interesting. But if not, it’s looking to me increasingly like another Apple Newton where they just go too hard too early on something.




  • Flexibility. And I wonder if remote work has altered that balance lately too. Many I suspect now have chiefly desktop computers, except they’re actually laptops plugged into screens. Because there are still some occasions in which you want to be able to take a working computer somewhere else.

    But a laptop starts to look like a strangely optimised device for this. Too small to be a powerful desktop and sometimes (if you’ve gotten a beefy one) too big to be comfortably portable. However, a nice desktop machine coupled with a very portable tablet that can, in those few times its necessary, be a productive enough work machine, but also just be the nice portable media machine wherever you want, seems like an ideal pairing for many now. That the ipad absolutely cannot do some things you’d maybe, even just once a decade, need to do on the fly is a show stopper for this pairing.

    And so many probably have a laptop used as a desktop most of the time and an ipad used as a kindle most of the time.


  • Well, with macOS there are layers to what the user can do. You can stick to apps (most), or you can open up the terminal and the console and use the machine at a significantly lower level (ie, “hacker” unix/bsd style).

    I haven’t used an ipad in ages … but AFAICT It seems slightly dumb that they don’t just open up a similar possibility with the ipad for those who are happy to go there. A mode that is literally just “Laptop” mode … full macOS with mouse cursor and the full functionality. Then when you want to just browse and read etc, hit a button and you’re back to touch based iPadOS. At this point it should really just be a different UI skin.

    The reality though, I think, is that it’s about market segregation (ie monopolistic money).

    Apple, like Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc are all “IBM-ified”. More about squeezing their well established market positions than doing anything remotely risky or interesting. A fusion ipad/laptop is the sort of thing a younger company would have done by now (with of course microsft having tried that ages ago).


  • Sorry. No. They’re here because they want to be. If you can’t fathom exactly why, that’s your problem. Asking why anyone is “here” in a social media space often implies that they shouldn’t be here. This is clearly the case with your statement given the context of the original post being about quitting tech things.

    If you find it inconsistent that they don’t want to do AoC but do want to hang out here, ask specifically about what you find inconsistent. It will avoid gatekeeping insinuations, but more importantly, actually force you to articulate your point which may often be too vague or incomprehensible to glean from implication.

    For instance, in this case, the difference between social media and competitive coding/puzzles are pretty clearly significant (ie it’s the difference between a hard piece of work that feels pointless and casually talking shop that may also be conducive to actually pleasurable hobby projects). I personally find it hard to believe that you couldn’t imagine AoC and hanging here are different activities in terms of the original post’s statements. If true, bluntly asking “why are you here” is a poor bullying gatekeeping argument. If false, please refrain from asking people why they’re here. It’s gatekeeping or too easily construed as such and be more precise with your questions about such broad topics as what one enjoys in tech culture.






  • Well they state elsewhere in the post, rightly or wrongly, that they don’t think these are fun puzzles but instead promote a problematic junior dev ego thing. Beyond that the main thrust of their reasoning seems to be the whole developer “culture” of “needing” to do work outside of work. If you come to oppose this and don’t find the problems/solutions edifying, then “fun puzzle” is no longer an apt description and I think it makes a lot of sense to see the whole thing as relatively “dark” compared to what a nice or fulfilling “third place” can be.