rather than a cold, pre-prepared page, theres some way you can have your web server serve the users a fresh, hot page which has just been made

that a credible threat of a denial of service is able to cause a widespread denial of service is not exactly a novel finding, but it is interesting to see it demonstrated in such a clear and simple way

in C if you use pragma once and if __INCLUDE_LEVEL__ == 0 in every translation unit. and also ccache. you get incremental builds and no header files. you just include the .c file and its fine. there doesnt seem to be any downside, other than your executables end up massive when the debug symbols get copied in over and over. theres probably a way round that problem, like "do the release build instead"

i think the IT-dominated 'tech industry' of the ~21st century is historically distinct from earlier eras, in that it is largely parasitic, using novel ideas primarily to capture existing industries and extract the value from them. all the 'great new things' it has provided are things we could already do before, but now they're a bit quicker and more convenient, and under the total control of corporations. nothing life-changing or life-saving like the tech developed in the 20th century

there's a disingenuous argument i see go completely unchallenged all the time, which is "this <computer thing> deserves to be respected and celebrated, because it underpins the entire world and you wouldn't have {products, services, entertainment, electricity, food, etc} without it". like, we had supermarkets before SQL. we had maps before Google Maps. the world functioned successfully, it just wasn't on Computer. now it *needs* Computer, when it didn't before. strange to brag about that, really

the main thing that's good about the web as a medium, imo, is that you can just chuck something into a directory and then it will appear in web browsers around the world. you can edit the file and hit save and refresh. the magic that you feel is the core of the entire thing. and as far as i've seen, Web Development, as a discipline, has focused for the last few decades on systematically destroying that magic

i really like PHP. in my experience, its full of insane issues and functions called "doThingSecurely_final_FINAL". but it's a tool, like excel or hypercard, that lets a normal person make Web without years becoming a Web Developer. you could just throw it onto a server and make a view counter or whatever. just mash it in there in the HTML for some basic dynamic feature on an otherwise-static page. wow! then 'Developers' ruined it, like with javascript, by trying to use it to make actual software

@jk further vindication for Eagle Mode

i've found that other people seem to be able to just encode structured data in their brain, verbatim, and reproduce it. i can only produce a paraphrased version, with the same meaning and stylistic features, a plausible guess. as a kid, i used to get in trouble for 'improvising' when playing piano, but the only way i can learn is an improvisation that converges toward the real thing. if the syntax has a strict "wrong until perfect" step function (not differentiable?) i can't learn at all

i can remember places i've been to (or only seen in photos) decades ago, and navigate them successfully. i can describe images i saw once when i was a kid. but i have literally no 'verbal memory', i can't remember movie lines, or lyrics to any of my favorite songs, and when it comes to programming, and terminal commands? well. i've been using linux distros for almost 20 years and still, daily, look up things like "linux how to find files with extension". it is NOT a good operating system for me

sorry, i cant drink this milk. yeah i only drink Solar milk

@760ceb3b9c0ba4872cadf3ce35a7a4 @jk it's an amazing comment because I intentionally stopped using those web browsers and part of why is I did not like the look

@jk I'm no longer an iOS user, but it reads like my experience of the Met Office redesign of their website and application: forced dark mode, large tiles of single bits of information, lots of wasted space, and no longer any option to get an at-a-glance gestalt understanding of the weather. The 'give us feedback' made to feel like whining, and they've roundly ignored everyone who dislikes it, as far as I can tell - they're just going to get rid of the old Web layout. Same approach.

@jk this has just broken how I use the app on my iPad, which is mostly how I use it.

@jk what upset me a little in the design blog post was one offhanded remark that rounded corners were used because they match the design that web browsers are moving towards. but is that what we want? to make the web page look like the web browser? is that rlly a goal ?

the thing is - they could have made it even worse than this. the designer(s) clearly showed restraint. there are a LOT of horrible new UI trends that i'm not seeing here at all. you can see they thoughtfully considered them, and decided they should include only a small, tasteful sprinkling of, say, 20-25% of the horrible new UI trends

tomorrow or sometime this week i'll look into whether it's possible to apply some kind of user styles. i haven't done anything like that for years, since websites these days are written using some frontend thing that obfuscates all the element class names and hierarchies, and i hope that's not the case here. but maybe it's worth trying because what i'm seeing right now is rough as hell and i'm not betting on any drastic improvements anytime soon

@jk yeah, agree. just off the top of my head I've found that the colour range is trash (area/element delineation is *bad* now), and wtf with shoving so much into the left column?

and whyyyyyyyy are we replaying 2018-redesign twitter, this isn't a fun game

one example. let's ignore the insane default background color for a minute. why is the line spacing so huge on the 'selected' post? for me at least, not only does it take up more space, but it's oddly harder to read. i bet a good designer has a LOT of reasons why they'd style text like this, and could argue convincingly for all of them. you would not win the argument. so you'll just be stuck with the new, improved text, that wastes space and is harder to read

one of the big problems with design is that "this is functionally broken, so i can't use the website" is easy to argue for. but "this is ugly and strange in a hundred little ways, so i don't like using the website anymore" just sounds like a set of personal grievances, because you're not criticising the premise of the design, but its execution, quality, attention to detail. you're just saying the designer isn't very good at their job. it's hard to say that to someone, it sounds mean and horrible