JubilantJaguar

joined 2 years ago
[–] JubilantJaguar 4 points 1 month ago

Your point is a bit off-topic but I for one agree with you.

[–] JubilantJaguar 2 points 1 month ago

Actually, it doesn't just benefit "geeks who use NoScript". The original audience for accessibility was disabled users, which is why some of the best websites ever made are for government agencies. But sure, they don't count much when there's a deadline to keep. I know what you're talking about, I know that progressive enhancement and respecting WCAG etc is just time-consuming and time is money. I was in the meetings. But it's also just hard, for the reasons you describe, and few developers have ever been able to do it. Maybe precisely because the skillset straddles different domains: not just programming but also UX and graphic design and information architecture. The first web developers were tinkerers and lots of them came from the world of print. Now they're all just IT guys who see everything as an app. Even when it's in essence a document.

[–] JubilantJaguar 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This seems to be the argument that the web was designed for documents and that we should stop trying to shoe-horn apps into documents. Hard to disagree at this point, especially when the app in question is, say, a graphics tool, or a game. I still think that, in the case of more document-adjacent applications, a website implemented with best-practices progressive enhancement is about as elegant a solution as is imaginable. Basically: an app which can gracefully degrade to a stateless document, and metamorphose back into an app, depending on system resources and connectivity, and all completely open source and open standards and accessible. That was IMO the promise of the web fulfilled: the separation of content from presentation, and presentation from functionality. Unfortunately there were never more than a tiny minority of websites that achieved this. Hardly any web developers had the deep skill set needed to pull it off.

I was once skeptical about WASM on the grounds that it's effectively closed-source software - tantamount to DRM. But people reply that functionally there's not much difference between WASM and a blob of minified JS, and the WASM security can be locked down. So I guess I accept that WASM is now the best the web can hope for.

[–] JubilantJaguar 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Interesting read, somewhat enlightening.

But IMO, from the point of view of interoperability, it was bad enough having competing corporate social networks. We don't want to replace that with competing open meta-networks. And yet ActivityPub and ATProto seem to use completely different paradigms, which would make bridging them pretty hard. Frustrating.

[–] JubilantJaguar 11 points 1 month ago

Interesting. Possibly useful to some. I have also discovered that the simplest, most privacy-friendly way to update location is just to do it manually when you change location.

I have a simple script that does this by querying OpenStreetMap's Nominatim server with the city name. It feeds the resulting coordinates thru a Python library that deduces the timezone, and sets the system time to this.

[–] JubilantJaguar 2 points 1 month ago

Yes, someone else made that point and I conceded it. Unfortunately the constructive bit of this discussion got drowned out by a couple of activist types who preferred to sling mud and ad hominen insults.

[–] JubilantJaguar 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Throwing around insults doesn't get you to win the argument.

[–] JubilantJaguar 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Did you join one of those parties and try to do something to fix this problem, or is it always someone else's fault?

[–] JubilantJaguar -1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The "democratic choices of the party base" is precisely why you've got Trump on the ballot. Democracy is a good thing but you can have too much of a good thing. America's founders understood this. They thought the electoral college would be the filter to prevent authoritarian populists getting into power. In the end it was the parties that ended up serving this purpose, until the Republican party broke. So, yes, I absolutely do think you would be better off as a country if your political system had an elitist mechanism to stop would-be dictators getting their hands on power.

[–] JubilantJaguar 1 points 1 month ago

Yes, good point. Effectively, what I argued only applies to swing states. Completely agree that people should always vote anyway, for the reasons you outline.

[–] JubilantJaguar 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The electoral college does not invalidate my argument about third parties. To vote for a third party in the US electoral system is effectively to surrender one's vote to other voters.

[–] JubilantJaguar 0 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016 because the Clinton campaign claimed colluded to elevate him to the nomination

This is conspiracism. Sure, it was convenient for the Democrats, but Trump did not get where he is "because" of Democrats. Trump became the nominee because the Republicans were a hollowed out party with nobody in charge and a voter base that become radicalized and completely unmoored from the official free-market ideology. The Democrats had nothing to do with that.

As for interfering in Republican campaigns since then, yeah sure, and it's even a strategy that worked somewhat. I agree it's cynical and risky and generally a bad idea.

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