I have nothing against the previews. However when a website hijacks the link to serve a stripped down version of the content locally, it goes against the expectations of the user, and it can really f*k up accessibility tools. This is a bad use of javascript imo. A really bad use. And unfortunately it is being pushed as a way to retain users, meaning that it prioritises profits over everything else.
I don't want to be served a fullscreen auto playing video in a pop-up window when I click on a YouTube link. I want to go to YouTube and view it there, where I can like, subscribe, comment, and so on. It breaks my expectations in a bad way, and I can see why people are growing increasingly frustrated with javascript on websites due to this.
Sorry for being so negative about this. It's a cool concept, but I also really hope that this never becomes the norm. And that's coming from a web developer, someone that's usually cheering on all advancements in the web.
I do sometimes get similar first impressions, though when you look closer at the implementation - the very opposite of your comments is true.
Accessibility of the previews has been thought through & tested. The previews are clearly marked when they open in a lightbox. When you are using a screen reader, the experience improves(!) significantly; on click you get the content right away, not a website in a tab where you need to find the content, and remember that some websites were not tested for accessibility by their devs.
Separately, you can always do, CMD+Click and get the same auto-playing video on Youtube.com in a new tab to like, subscribe & comment. Or click a direct link within a preview to go to YouTube website when you feel that you need to like, subscribe & comment.
And for what it worth, Linkz.ai makes a planet a bit greener with less traffic going back & forth and less CPU & energy used to render a preview vs. a full-featured website :)
The rich previews on hover are great. I was referring to the "Immersive Previews", and for the things demoed on your landing page like short forms and Youtube videos, they're a nice experience. I worry about a world where every "sticky" web platform gets caught in an iterated prisoner's dilemma and all decide it's in their best interest to do this. In this world, whenever I want to click a link off of Instagram or Twitter or NYT I end up in an "Immersive Preview" iframe of the site I expected to navigate to. Google AMP everywhere.
I would _love_ a world where this kind of thing is closer to a first-class feature of the web -- thinking of Xanadu-style transclusions or even Google's abandoned(?) <portal> element. I would love deep-linking from Github->Jira->Github in the same tab, and this points the way towards that. But if there are a dozen implementations of it floating around, and users have no control or warning over when a link behaves this way, it's just another way to wrest control of the browsing experience away from them.
Please be mindful about how you advertise this, is what I'm saying.
The skyways! They're fun and iconic, but in some ways they're the worst thing about downtown Minneapolis. Since so many office workers use them to get around, the streets feel dead and car-dominated even by the standards of American cities.
I'd like to see more discussion about the nuts-and-bolts infrastructure of web3: the servers, file hosting and streaming, the caching layers. All of these slick websites are probably running on the same old cloud platforms and using the blockchain as an (admittedly powerful) identity or transactions layer.
I know it's early days, but the rhetoric about freedom from FAANG is outpacing the reality. I worry about a new generation of services that lure in and capture users with a thin veneer of decentralization ("oh, your identity is on ENS, but uh we actually host your videos") or those services suddenly finding they have huge cloud infrastructure bills to pay, leading to governance catastrophes, broken promises, and rug pulls/shutdowns.
A potential small step in the right direction: it would be super cool to see a blogging platform like mirror.xyz host its user-uploaded image assets on IPFS. It would be super super cool to see a DAO engineered to put money in trust to keep these assets pinned past the lifetime of the service itself, with as little human intervention as possible.
> All of these slick websites are probably running on the same old cloud platforms and using the blockchain as an (admittedly powerful) identity or transactions layer.
I'd like to second your sentiment. I've written about this topic too [1]. I think we should accept "web3" as a demonstration of what's possible and move into systems engineering now.
- The basic geography of the Bay Area: it's big, it's polycentric, it's hilly, there's a huge body of water on the direct route between many origin/destination pairs. The train ride can take hours and can actually cost quite a bit.
- America's inability to build mass transit cost-effectively. At this point train rides along BART are mostly between high-cost areas, and discussions of expanding the system even a little more have price tags in the tens of billions, and timelines of a decade or more. Besides, the radius of BART is about as wide as it ought to be — it should be filling in, not sprawling out, and that requires upzoning the areas along the train to be effective.
Various people have proposed it. The most recent one I know of was Larry Page.
It'd never pass environmental muster, though. You've got multiple protected species of wildlife in the marshlands, shipping channels, salt flats, whole cities whose selling point is that every house is waterfront property, etc.
Others are free to do the same, except that they have to continue to commute to where the jobs are. If they're lucky they might live on the fringes of BART but increasingly people are just condemned to hours-long gridlocked freeway commutes to get to their $17/hr job in SF. To recover any kind of decent quality of life you're talking about moving to a different region/state.
Firefighters typically work 24 on, 72 off. My family members in firefighting tell me it’s shocking how many of them live in Reno, where they can afford a house. If there is another huge earthquake, they won’t be able to drive in to help.
$17/hr is essentially an unskilled labor rate in 2021. Why not make a move? $15-17/hour jobs are pretty plentiful in other places with a far lower COL than SFO.
Many people have deep ties to a place — as caregivers to aging parents, as members of diaspora enclaves, or as young people willing to struggle through a few years of hardship for the chance of success. Many others have seen the writing on the wall and moved elsewhere, and more power to them. It's a question of whether individual solutions (people can just move somewhere else) compose into societal solutions (we need lots of "unskilled" labor or our cities will collapse into chaos within days).
If you're making $17/hr in an unskilled job in SF, and move to somewhere cheap, you're probably now making $12/hr. Maybe that change is worth it, maybe not.
i live in des monies iowa. the local burger king is starting at 15/hr. if you can live on 17 in SF, then 15 here will seem like riches) i know of plenty of other jobs that pay more as well with little experience needed.
That's great to hear that people are able to earn a living wage where you are.
You cannot live on $17/hr in SF. Your post-tax income wouldn't even cover the the rent of a studio apartment. Not sure how you'd pay for food and transportation on top of that. Let alone actually doing anything fun that would make it worth living here.
That's 40 hrs/wk, of course. Many people end up working twice that, or more, across several jobs, in order to make ends meet here. And at that point I wonder why they stay.
> Shaun has joked that “brute force creativity” is the attitude to take when solving a problem in Pulp. This simple toolbox gives you just enough flexibility to expand the game’s featureset beyond what seems possible at first.
I learned to program using Scratch and I loved this about the language community that developed around it. For the first few years it didn't even have arrays, procedures, or text input, and people (kids!) worked around these things by encoding state using the powerful graphics tools, clever math, and brute force.
People in the forums would clamor for more powerful features, but they were rolled out slowly and carefully. Later on I had a brief internship with the Scratch team and got a sense for why. The dev team was small, but more importantly they thought very carefully about how to whittle a language feature to its essence to enable maximum creativity with minimum cognitive overhead. I really appreciated that.
Of course I also quickly developed an appreciation for Snap[0] (née BYOB) which veered off from Scratch with a more "f*ck it, have everything" philosophy towards language design :)
There's a heavy implication here that most browser vendors sell your browsing data, but you don't state it outright because (aside from Chrome, arguably) I don't think it's actually true. Let's look at the others:
- Edge is probably sending all kinds of invasive telemetry to Microsoft
- Firefox is maybe(?) sending your email address to Pocket if you have an account with them
- Safari is a product that you pay through the nose for
None of these things are the same thing as selling data the browser collects. If you have any evidence that this is happening, you should put it on your website, because I'd love to hear about it! If you don't, you should probably not prey on people's deep confusion about who is tracking them on the web, and how.
Let's not shift established expectations away from the idea that there ought to be a browser that's both free to use and free of spyware when we already have such a browser in Firefox.
> Edge is probably sending all kinds of invasive telemetry to Microsoft
I think there's a useful distinction between product analytics, which might include basic details about web usage but likely in a privacy preserving way, and actual web history.
All of the browsers, Sigma OS included, are going to do product analytics. But I'm not sure that any are going to actually track web history. They'll track what web features you're using, and Chrome is known to track domains but I believe in a statistical way that doesn't give perfect info on who's using what. They all sync some state if you sign in, but that's a feature not analytics, if you trust them, and Sigma is no different here.
Apart from browsers like Brave selling ad space or dodgy Android browsers selling full web history, I'm not sure that any of the major players are actually doing anything fundamentally different to what Sigma is here. Firefox and Safari push the privacy side a little harder in their own ways, but are still roughly equivalent I think.
Totally. I don't think Google is necessarily doing anything as blatant as directly selling your browsing history to third parties.
Since I went to go check, I might as well share what I found: in my Google account "Activity controls" there is a toggle (off for me, not sure what the default is) that grants them permission to use Chrome history for "faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences". As I understand it, this is not selling away your data so much as letting them use it to auction your attention to advertisers.
Yeah exactly. Third parties can bid on keywords as they have always been able to do, and Google might give you better ads based on that data, but they aren't telling the third party why. That's a pretty big difference!
I like the perspective offered here but I don't really think the author's perspective on the "leftward end of the climate activist movement" comports with my own experience. Most people I know that I'd bucket as such are eating ~vegan, driving less, stretching the lifespan of their built-to-break consumer goods and (this is the real litmus test in my opinion for upwardly mobile techies) seriously limiting when and why they fly.
Or maybe he's talking about "climate envoy" John Kerry and his private jet. At any rate I hope he meets some climate activists that he likes someday because this is a valuable addition to their conversation and a good antidote to some of the worst doom-and-gloom tendencies in those circles.
Yeah, the random straw-man divergence in the middle of the article was a bit off putting.
I like framing climate change in a further reaching time context, but if anything I think the author has reached too far. The point I took away was something like “it’s all going to happen anyway, and we’ll all be dead, so why bother”.
I think the sweet spot of forward-thinking is somewhere between next financial year and the next geological epoch; I propose around 5 generations (150 years?).
I think if we spent more time imagining and talking about the world our grandchildren’s grandchildren will inherit, it’s close enough to feel a personal connection, and far enough away we can meaningfully direct our destiny.
Fun weirdness of even limited multilingualness: For some reason my brain first parsed this as "a pollo in real time" - or, from Spanish, "a chicken in real time".
