pronik

There has been a lot of pushback from the professionals, just like typesetters were horrified by all the word processing normal people have done over decades. The correct question is rather, will we have the same sort of nostalgia five years down the road and I think we most certainly will.

Whenever someone complains about AI-generated images being everywhere, I try to remind people about WordArt and cliparts (especially the lightbulbs and the ones called "screen beans", never knew that name, thanks Claude for finding that particular tidbit) being absolutely everywhere back then. I consider our timeline vastly superior, but I understand how people may think differently and how anything from thirty years ago can invoke nostalgia, for better or for worse.

At that time, Mozilla refused to implement some new CSS standards as they deemed it impossible in their engine. Chrome came along and a year down the road Firefox had got the features for some reason without much trouble. Revisionism is failing to accept that Chrome ate Firefox' lunch within months, for extremely good reasons.

Every time people talk about e-readers I have to wonder whether I'm an outlier. I've been e-reading for over 20 years now. I've been reading on my Nokia 6230 by using an ebook to J2ME converter. I've been reading with AlReader on my HTC Tytn. I'm still reading on my Android phone now. Sure, e-ink is superior, but it's a bit like with cameras: the best one is the one you have on you, not the one you left at home -- and I personally won't be hauling two devices if I can avoid it. If you want to read on the go, you'll find a way that fits you.

I agree on my personal worries being least important ones in the greater sense of things. But they are important to me and like you said, it's completely on xcancel to keep things on, either deliberately or by accident. Figuring out which part of XCancel they really shut down is trivial and it's certainly nothing secret that I evilly exposed.

I don't want to lose my feeds and someone might tell XCancel to actually shutdown everything instead of just the website. And not, I've user other Nitter instances before and they either had their RSS feeds disabled or were particularly unstable.

I might cut into my own flesh right now, but the funny thing about that XCancel shutdown is that while the website is down, the RSS feeds still work. Almost like they've just been required to shutdown the visible website and they complied with exactly that.

At the project level, there should be no need for an AGENTS.md. Whatever you might want to let agents know you would let a human know too, so you should be writing a README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, ARCHITECTURE.md and whatever else.

Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.

I'm probably not the only one to have a deep distrust in passkeys. I've deep-dived in to what they are and how they work and I think I can accept them on their technical merits, but I can't shake the feeling that the adoption has been way faster than we've been used to, for whatever reason. I think it was half a year between the settling down of the specification to being bombarded by a "Get a passkey!" from every goddamn website on this earth. I don't really see what the conspiracy to move the whole world to passkeys would be here, but it certainly feels like there is one.

I think my problem with passkeys is the same as with almost everything today: if I lose my phone, my digital life will be almost as difficult to recover as if I lost my ID and my birth certificate at the same time. Yes, that's why you don't create one passkey (phone), but maybe two or three (browsers), but that's mental load on myself -- I don't even try to explain that stuff to my parents, even something as (somewhat) easy to use as a password manager is out of their scope. Add TOTP and passkeys on top of that and you've got perfect security that no-one in their right minds is using. No idea how to resolve the problem, but it's not by shoving a solution down our throats with a vengeance.

Which was completely bonkers -- it happened completely in the open, people were just outraged that something like this happens without asking them and not on a schedule they perceive as adequate. Most of them haven't really grasped what was happening and why. Many still don't.

> blanket-closed all issues submitted before the rewrite

You'll need a citation for that. While I'm still not sure whether Claude Code's issue tracker is worth much (Anthropic doesn't seem to engage with individual issues a while lot), it still has 5k+ open issues ranging back to March 2025. Bun also still has all of its Zig-timeline issues, all 5k+ of them. So what's this about?

If you need to point to Anna's Archive for knowledge preservation, then we as a society are not intentionally preserving knowledge, quite the opposite actually.

To me, this seems like a typical "how hard can it be" startup mentality. People, especially those "fast to the market" type, tend to vastly underestimate all the corner cases of the technology, mostly tending to the happy path and outsourcing the pain to their customers. The reason they still have customers is because most of the market has the same problems and a solution that covers those corner cases is way more expensive and also way more extensive in terms of infrastructure you'd need. You would have hoped there is middle-ground there, i.e. a startup on the cheaper side with a vision for corner cases, but knowing how markets and marketing works I'm not holding my breath for that.

A big part of those corner cases is the assumption of the user being an independent responsible adult without problems. Voice control is only acceptable if you don't startle anyone with or don't have anyone talking or screaming while you are talking. Booking tickets with "one ticket per smartphone" doesn't work when you have kids. Doing basically anything that's smartphone-only requires you to have it on you, charged and for the most part with an internet connection -- great for underground parking garages. God forbid you have lost your smartphone while drunk or have been robbed -- forget driving home with the virtual car key only being in your phone, forget paying for a taxi, forget entering your home protected by a smart lock. All of this assuming the tech works perfectly and durably, which we know is not the case for most of modern tech.