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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • I think what you’re thinking of is a limited free trade agreement. The UK is free to pursue one of those. The UK would probably have to play by EU rules regarding things like product standards (with little say in what those rules are) but free trade without freedom of movement is absolutely doable.

    A military alliance is also no problem.

    Anything beyond that is going to be difficult, though. For countries joining the EU after it’s inception, points 2 and 3 are hard requirements. The UK doesn’t have much to offer that would justify giving it special treatment.


  • Let’s see how many governments will end up with a D rating. The USA are probably a given but this might set a lot of major companies on fire so who knows who else will run out of money.

    Of course China is laughing all the way to the bank. Their economy isn’t super healthy right now but they aren’t reliant on semiconductor companies that chained themselves to the AI racket. So they might weather the crash mostly unharmed and we’ll all end up buying Loongson in the future because all of the x64 and ARM companies have folded.







  • Like how leaded gasoline, CFCs, and ActiveX cannot be uninvented and are still found everywhere? Regulation absolutely can restrict a technically society doesn’t want around, as can a move to alternative solutions.

    And that doesn’t mean it disappears entirely. Avgas is still leaded and CFCs are still being used in specific contexts like Teflon manufacturing. But they’re no longer everywhere. ActiveX is pretty much dead, though.



  • Mind you, the people who are pushing to replace everything with LLMs are not the people who spend half a billion bucks on tokens in a month. They’re the ones who charge half a billion bucks and the ones who charge them for the hardware. As far as they are concerned, that half a billion dollar bill is a rousing success they’d like to see repeated as often as possible.

    Okay, and then there’s the useful idiots who vibecode a 50 kLOC basic CRUD application with broken auth in two days and conclude that LLMs can craft arbitrarily complex applications instantly at near-zero cost. And then proceed to shill the stuff every chance they get because these days the internet is all about hyping yourself up and they can pretend that their finely-honed 1337 prompt crafting skillz will make them as god-kings among peasants when vibecoding will inevitably subsume all other forms of development, nay, all forms of creative work entirely!

    While remaining cheap, of course, because nobody has ever offered a service for cheap and then made it more expensive.





  • You seem fixated on the idea that OPFS is some kind of ramdisk. It isn’t. When a website stores a file in OPFS, the browser writes some kind of opaque data structure describing all stored files to disk. That data structure can take whichever shape the browser desires excewpt for just dumping those files in a directory in order to isolate OPFS from the regular filesystem.

    You can query the browser for the maximum quota available to you and then just tell it that you want a file that big. Boom, now you own that chunk of the user’s SSD.

    As has been pointed out elsewhere, that’s still of dubious value for fingerprinting but I don’t particularly enjoy the thought that random websites can just occupy gigabytes of space on my computer without even asking.


  • You can absolutely have fancy UI elements that provide additional functionality. Most OSes don’t have built-in 3D visualization widgets but that doesn’t mean you can’t write CAD software for them.

    My point is that your custom widgets should make an effort to look and feel as much like native widgets as possible. Any skills the user has in using native widgets should carry over to your custom ones. So your custom text field should look and behave like a native one until the user types two left brackets. When they do, the menu that pops up should be a native menu or one designed to resemble one very closely.

    Thanks to web-first development and lazy cross-platform UIs, standards in this regard have deteriorated to near-nothingness. Buttons don’t have to look or even behave like anything else on any platform. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect the user to relearn the UI for any application. Modern UIs spiritually follow in the footsteps of Bryce 3D rather than any Human Interface Guidelines. And that peeves me.

    For all their faults, Apple got Mac users to have very high standards in this regard for quite some time, which led to a bevy of good-looking and approachable applications, at least until post-skeuomorphic macOS took care of the “attractive” part. The consistent UI across vendors was something I really liked back when I was a Mac user.






  • Protip: Change your password in the manager first, then copy from there to the form. Your password manager should handle your passwords for you; there’s no reason why that shouldn’t apply when you first set them.

    I generally try to keep to a policy where system passwords and the password manager’s master password are the only passwords I ever enter manually. All other passwords are generated and saved in the manager and then copied over.

    That works pretty well if the website doesn’t misguidedly disable pasting into one of the password fields. Even then I try to paste into the other one.