lstamour

I might be wrong on this, but I vaguely recall that on macOS back when you could commonly option-click to reveal advanced options, if you held option when clicking a sort it would change how it sorted from alphabetical to lexical or vice versa. I’m not a thousand percent sure of it, though, I think when I needed it I was able to set a directory preference via terminal to change how a specific directory was sorted and it was an option there. MacOS had (or has) a lot of buried options which I presume date back to its origins as a Unix as well as a convenience to its developers. A lot of the command line utilities were hacked calls to graphical settings code though, so it wasn’t very stable version to version as the UI calls changed and nobody prioritized non-UI bug fixes or breaking changes. These days CLI is nearly forgotten or assumed to be an exploit vector - see Screen Time data for example.

It’s crazy that Sonos used to* have local wifi mesh networking and they decided “the cloud is better”.

* technically still does, but they tried to switch before they backpedaled

Meant to say “to deliver the same experience as Visual Voicemail” but accidentally posted it from my pocket before I could finish writing it out.

And the ability to undo deleting voicemails. And record voicemails client side using AI transcription to deliver thnesss

Unfiltered web browsers might be harder to come by these days than when I was growing up, but they still exist. I remember finding out by accident that certain restricted apps would pull up help pages, and from there I could click a link that would take me to an unrestricted web browser due to a bug in the code. I also remember computers where you could show up with pocket apps on a floppy or USB key and bring your own unrestricted web browser. On top of that, just because the web is restricted often doesn’t mean YouTube is restricted. For example, schools need YouTube to show educational content, so it often is unrestricted even when the rest of the web is restricted e.g. by dns.

I agree with most of this post, except the part where you could actually do it. I’ll be the first to admit that I was not in server rooms back then but I’ve heard from those who were. The biggest advantage Amazon had, for many years, over their competitors, is that they would take your order and tell you it was completed and wait to charge your card until it shipped because it was cheaper to write your order down than to spend expensive session compute waiting for the payment to go through. That kind of optimization was necessary because all the networks were slower or flaky then, including payment processing, and often relied on batch processing overnight that has become less visible today.

Meanwhile on the client side, web technologies had a lot of implicit defaults assuming pages on sites rather than apps and experiences. For example, we didn’t originally have a way for JS to preserve back/forward buttons functionality when navigating in a SPA without using hash tags in the URL. Without CSS features for it, support for RTL and LTR on the same website was basically nonexistent. I won’t even get started on charset, poorer support for dates that persists to this day, limited offline modes in a time when being offline was more common, and how browsers varied tremendously across platforms and versions back then with their own unique set of JS APIs and unique ideas of how to render webpages.

It took the original acid test and a bunch more tests that followed before we had anything close to cross browser standards for newer web features. I still remember the snowman hack to get IE to submit forms with UTF-8 encoding, and that wasn’t as bad as quirks mode or IE 5.

Actually maybe I disagree with most of this post. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how it could have been done, but it’s reductive to the extreme to say the only reason web services were jank is because UX polish didn’t exist. If anything, the web is the reason UX is so good today - apps and desktop platforms continuously copied the web for the past 28 years, from Windows ME with single-click everywhere to Spotify and other electron apps invading the OS. I’m not going to devalue the HIG or equivalent, but desktop apps tended to evolve slowly, with each new OS release, while web apps evolved quickly, with each new website needing to write its own cross platform conventions and thus needing its own design language.

Good points. And it probably isn’t formaldehyde. The only thing I’ll add is that formaldehyde can inhibit or kill bacteria. And I also recently learned the hard way that limonene or other terpenes (from fruits or cleaning products or air fresheners for example) can react with ozone and produce formaldehyde even in the absence of combustion. And I’ve a strong opinion now that science and society ignores the dangers of formaldehyde and VOCs about as much as we used to ignore germs and other things we can’t usually see. Until heat pumps with fresh air exchanges are considered standard or specified by housing code, we will probably always have to deal with VOCs as we don’t have an accurate way to measure them and identity their sources except in industrial contexts. Saying this because while an open window is the cheapest way to get fresh air, it often isn’t the temperature or humidity we expect.

Electronics and tightly sealed houses, both of which the Amish might avoid, together allow for a lot more formaldehyde build up indoors. My pet theory (with no proven evidence except my own two eyes, as someone possibly affected by formaldehyde, which means the details are just guesswork right now) is that formaldehyde indoors is responsible for the increase in reported allergies, poor vision (glasses), asthma, ADHD, and possibly increases in divorce rates or staying single - by which I mean that it can cause irritability.

I figure it is the primary cause of road rage, that it can possibly bind to and release microparticulate of metals like iron and aluminum, that it can store itself not just as a solid at room temperature but also in the rubber parts of a scooter while it charges or silicone or foam parts of a CPAP as you breathe in and out (you naturally produce formaldehyde, but increased presence in your exhaled breath has been associated with cancer, for example).

It also causes insomnia and can cause very low humidity in an enclosed space, which might both increase static shocks but also possibly break electronics when combined with its effect on certain metals mentioned earlier.

I’ve an even crazier pet theory that in the presence of other VOCs and sunlight, formaldehyde can multiply, but I don’t have anything to back that up. Formaldehyde with CO2 and UVA can react to become ozone, but ozone with UVA and other VOCs can become formaldehyde. As a result, on a particularly sunny day, I think even outdoor formaldehyde levels can rise and cause the day to feel even warmer than it otherwise should, and that it’s the formaldehyde that can then cause more inattentive accidents.

I’ve another theory that if you take something on to a train with micro metal particulate offgassing and formaldehyde, that it will bind itself to the heat of the wheels over the tracks and be released along with microparticulate from the metal rails every time the train runs by.

I could give more evidence of why this might be so, such as increased rates of emergency repairs of train tracks in my area, Toronto, and a study from 2017 that says Torontos subways have the most metal particulate in NA, but since it’s just speculation right now, take everything I said with a grain of salt, please.

I should add that burning natural gas indoors without appropriate airflow is a wonderful way to introduce a lot of formaldehyde to your living quarters over the years. If I could ban all forms of combustion indoors, I would, I really would.

Isn’t it possible though, that if a role is gender stereotyped or if senior managers are a particular gender, that those of the other gender might need to prove themselves more to get the same job? That managers tend to hire people who appear to fit in, which usually means they are more like themselves, or those who already have the job? Also, it seems weird to suggest that only women have the failings you’ve noted, as men can also have the same shortcomings. In a way, this entire discussion is really highlighting that while some get hired, some do not, and somehow blames those who do not get hired as failures who should not get hired rather than as disadvantaged individuals due to circumstances partly or fully beyond their control.

An interesting point about choosing to leave the workforce to care for children is that re-entry into the workforce or even the ability to work and care for children is something a social net could be established to support. If we have networks that allow army recruits to enter the workforce after their service, we could do the same for parents, but instead social nets seem to devalue the act of raising children, maybe because they are driven too much by short term profit. Taxpayers accept that too, preferring tax breaks for families with children over support networks and job opportunities to re-enter the workforce full-time. One imagines it again is about hiring those like you - managers hiring individuals who worked from home are unlikely to have worked from home - they needed the time in industry to become experienced managers.

Edit: upon rereading my last comment, it is possible that work from home norms established under covid might be the best thing to happen to stay at home parents and their continued full time employment. This could then boost the number of relatively younger parents who could continue in the workforce after mat leave while also providing child care. But it’s not a replacement for better social nets and better social norms.

Or perhaps formaldehyde release from hair spray and other chemicals partly due to the heat of the hair dryer, but also released because of the agitation and wind.

Technically I think perfume, sweat and trace amounts of smoking residue, including formaldehyde, from personal belongings could probably also raise VOCs as hotels often have very, very poor airflow by design - open windows and balconies have historically encouraged smokers so they were removed, but now you can rarely find any hotels with fresh air in the rooms, and those you find often smell of cigarette smoke for obvious reasons. (Smokers will often stay at hotels with airflow or balconies and take advantage of these features when they can. Also, airing out a room will kill a scent temporarily but only cleaning the room or replacing natural textiles will permanently remove the scent when the window is closed.)

Can’t speak to this exact circumstance, but more generally: The ONT translates the SFP+ networking to fibre optic, but the modem is still somewhat necessary for logins if you use PPPoE as a wrapper for example. In telecom fibre optic, it often also assigns a particular vlan to internet packets and separate vlans for TV and phone. But I’m not an expert here, just explaining why I needed a modem function in my router as well as a media converter to house the ONT.

As far as I know, nobody uses separate boxes for the modem and router, that kind of thinking died when wifi became more widespread and included by default with ISP plans.

I vaguely remember that being the start of the browser prompts to set your current browser as the default. It was so hard to just configure that they had to build a way to set it within the browser.

You saw that again in more modern times when Microsoft removed support for the APIs they provided to set browser defaults, forcing browser makers to write step by step instructions on what to click to set the default browser.

I believe they walked that back, but it left such a bad taste that I switched my installation of Windows from default mode to EU mode in order to avoid it. And come to think of it, I haven’t used my windows machine for much outside of AI in about 6 months.

But Microsoft is not alone in these sort of defaults games - every OS or browser maker, Apple, Google, Firefox, wants to create moats so they can more easily monetize your usage of a product. I never thought I’d prefer the business model of free to play games, where they just outright ask you for money and have to keep finding new ways to entertain instead of relying on hard to change defaults and selling your data.

While there might be incompatibilities with GPL and the App Store due to Apple’s insistence that developers must accept Apple’s terms to run Xcode and apps on developer devices, LGPL and other open source licenses are generally compatible with the App Store and Apple’s licenses. You can ship programs that use open source or are themselves open source within closed ecosystems by providing source code to end users via a website linked to within credits within the app. This distinction is because LGPL in particular permits more usage than GPL, allowing you to use the library in non-open source apps or those licensed under different terms, so ffmpeg has been somewhat adopted by a variety of open and closed source apps when a shared codebase is desired or particular codecs or functionality is required. That said, Apple themselves would prefer that you use their audio/video frameworks, due to device performance optimization, binary sizes, licensing and ecosystem lock-in. As far as I know, ffmpeg has adopted some of these Apple optimizations when appropriate frameworks are detected and configured at compile time.