I feel UI trends have gone in the direction of making things worse, not better.

I remember when it was pretty much unanimous that “mplayer” was beautiful in all its square corners glory, while “Windows Live Media Player” was seen as a horrible abomination.

Now it feels like everyone is on board with inefficient UI designs like the latter for some reason.

I don’t understand the posh stylistic decisions around padding, rounded borders, etc. How do those things make the UI better exactly?

As someone who used low resolutions for most of my University years (I did my thesis in a tiny ultralaptop), I relied heavily on a custom gtk2 theme I had to write to remove most of that padding that made the UI feel so unnecessary and my screen so cramped.

Gnome now pushing for removing theming completely and relying on just color scheme customization feels totally backwards to me. I don’t have an answer for OP sadly… other than just using terminal / tui apps more whenever possible.

True. Same for Android. I feel some form of that should be part of the approach. Splitting it carelessly would likely either:

A) result in no real change: ie. instead of allocating budgets within Google, they’ll just exchange money through deals and partnerships, as separate companies, but still having pretty much the same relationship between projects and level of control (Android & Chrome would continue favoring Google interests, even as independent companies), and they’ll keep being monopolies each within their own fields (I don’t see how that’s being addressed with the split).

B) result in independent projects that push for monetization and shady schemes to try and be profitable on their own (although, to be honest Mozilla has proven that being non-profit is not a shield against this either). This actually might be a good thing if the enshittification manages to get people to switch away from Chrome to a better alternative… but I wouldn’t be so sure of that (both that they would move, or that they’d choose a better one …as opposed to say MS Edge which has just as bad of a ruler).

I think that’s the difference right there.

One is up for debate, the other one is already heavily regulated currently. Libraries are generally required to have consent if they are making straight copies of copyrighted works. Whether we like it or not.

What AI does is not really a straight up copy, which is why it’s fuzzy, and much harder to regulate without stepping in our own toes, specially as tech advances and the difference between a human reading something and a machine doing it becomes harder and harder to detect.

Which is why you should only care about the personal opinion of those people when it actually relates to that reliability.

I don’t care whether Linus Torvalds likes disrespecting whichever company or people he might want to give the middle finger to, or throw rants in the mailing list or mastodon to attack any particular individual, so long as he continues doing a good job maintaining the kernel and accepting contributions from those same people when they provide quality code, regardless of whatever feelings he might have about whatever opinions they might hold.

You rely on the performance of the software, the clarity of the docs, the efficiency of their bug tracking… but the opinions of the people running those things don’t matter so long as they keep being reliable.

Saying that I dont trust a homophobe is not “sharing my political opinions”

That’s true.

However, you did not just say that. You mentioned how he supports some homophobic politics (ie. regulation against gay marriage), which you (and I’m sure a lot of people, me included) disagree with. That’s politics.

You also shared your opinion about why you think privacy is important for our society. That’s also politics.

I’m not saying that what you said is wrong… I’m saying that what you said is political. Sharing political opinions is ok. It’s not like talking about politics is somehow a bad thing. At least not in this context. A lot of what surrounds the choice of a web browser like this is political.

You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.

Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.

In Iceland (and also Alaska) you can have the Sun for a full 24 hours in the sky (they call it “midnight sun”) during Summer solstice (with extremelly short nights the whole summer) and the opposite happens in Winter, with long periods of night time.

I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour.

Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?

Bash. By default it might seem less featureful than zsh… but bash is a lot more powerful and extensible than some give it credit for. It might be more complex to set it up the way you like it, but once you do it, that configuration can be ported over wherever bash exists (ie. almost everywhere).

This.

I don’t understand the appeal of microblogging. The content is generally very low quality, the signal-to-noise ratio is horrible… I’m not interested in the shower thoughts of any particular individual …or in marketing stunts.

The only individuals I’m interested on are my family & friends, and even for them I’d rather use a more private platform.

And when I want to read a public post I’d rather it’s well thought and ideally not restricted by micro-limitations. Even better if it’s curated by a public voting process among a community of people with my same interests, or some other process that makes it so I don’t have to waste my time going through tons of content I’m not remotelly interested on.

I think part of the reason why the long extension is often preferred is because it’s much clearer and it’s guaranteed to be supported and decompressed by the respective tools. Even when they don’t suppot tar archives, they’ll just give you the uncompressed tar in that case.

It’s also very common to do that with other extensions (not just .tar) when compressing big files. For example, when archiving logs they’ll often be stored as .log.gz, which makes it automatically clear that it’s a log file directly compressed with gzip and meant to be examined with tools like zcat and zless to view it.

And in cases like that you really need it to be clear on what data does the gzip stores, since it does not keep metadata about the file so you might not be able to get back the original name/extension of the file if you rename the gz file.

It’s provider/consumer (not customer, something being a “provider” doesn’t necessarily mean they are selling stuff).

We are consumers, we consume the content that the instances provide, as content providers.

You can grow potatoes for political reasons too. Everything a human being does might be politically motivated, but that doesn’t mean potatoes are political.

Anyone can take that same software, that was created as a particular political statement, and use it for the completelly opposite political reasons to make a completelly different political statement. Just the same way as many have used songs in contexts that are completelly politically opposite to what the original author of the song intended.

In the end, the only thing that’s political is the goal/purpose/motivation of an action, not the result of the action. No piece of software/hardware/thing is political when you dettach the artist from the art and just see it for what it is, regardless of what the author might have wanted you to see it as.