In about a decade. UIs tend to linger for long

At least in UK we don't turn off half the internet when football matches are on. Looking at you, Spain

AI as a term is getting synonymous with low quality slop which is a shame since weather forecasts are almost certainly not done with LLMs and it's likely an improvement than slopification

You're either free OSS that gets flooded with AI slop PRs to overwhelm maintainers or you're a corporate OSS that uses AI slop to frustrate contributors. Are there any positive stories I've not seen?

Same author, even!;)

I'm hopeful. However so long Meta, Apple and Google use them for interviewing, new grads going to have to keep grinding for best odds of landing internships and offers

Only if they want to work for the likes of Meta, Apple, Google, etc. But the dev world is so very much larger than that.

It really bums me out that these mega corps can't spend a little to ensure nearby residents are not left worse off. Maybe you can't fix the water wells, but perhaps you can just pay for a filtration system for nearby residents. All in all a fraction of a penny compared to costs of raising these data centres in just a few months

Is this just Elon shitposting through Grok's account

Why do we still have SMS. It seems to be solely used for weak 2FA, account takeovers and scams.

Right? It's simultaneously becoming a unique identifier for aggregating a profile about you across the web as well as the way your account is snatched away from you. What cools my cockles is how not all phone numbers are allowed (VOIP, prepaid).

When sites ask for a phone number what they are really saying is: give us this identifier that you can only acquire with a government-issued ID and a paid up ransom to a telecom. And if you later stop paying the ransom we can hand over your account to anyone who picks up the payment.

Despite the weaknesses in it, SMS has some pretty huge advantages over the alternatives.

Generally I ask, "Why do social platforms like Bluesky still support DMs?" On any platform that has DMs you get messages from randos who say "Hey!" who, if you reply, seem to start qualifying you for a romance scam ("How old are you?")

I've been collecting "signatures of hostility" from Bluesky profiles and "No DMs" is one of the most common, common enough that my agent [1] and I don't see it as a "no follow" sign.

[1] Still unnamed since it is in pieces on the floor, it probably gets named after a Tsunako character. KUrUMi?

Majority of my phone usage outside of reading HN is through dedicated apps. News, social media, chats and even substack. If I was building a product today, web would be quite low on the priority list outside of SEO capture.

I absolutely hate this state of affairs. Apps don't allow me to open multiple tabs, as an example.

But they do allow showing unblockable ads and notifications, so some 'people' absolutely love that state of affairs because they benefit from it.

I don’t know what the state is on Android, but on iOS (and macOS) unblockable notifications aren’t really a thing (notifications need permissions that you manage on a per-app basis) and many app ads can also be blocked (1Blocker does it), though it’s not as powerful because it’s essentially domain blocking.

I’m not disagreeing with you, merely providing more context. Companies like Reddit and Facebook definitely push you more to the apps so they can extract more value out of you.

What if you want to see some notifications but not others? But the developers are scammy and didn't separate ads into their own channel?

Then that’s a shitty company and perhaps you should consider not using their service anymore.

Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard.

> Then that’s a shitty company and perhaps you should consider not using their service anymore.

That's not always possible. There might not be enough quality competition and I don't see others following my example to beat the shitty company into submission and make them change their ways if I do that.

> Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard.

Web is very different in that regard. You can pry any app open and change basically anything with a single press of F12. Most of the time, people already did that for you and submitted an ad blocking filter for everyone to use. This isn't even close to the crapware of a typical app store.

Web is the last democratic platform we have left.

Some do, MacOS has builtin support to add tabs to any application: https://support.apple.com/my-mm/guide/mac-help/mchla4695cce/...

The problem with dedicated apps is that you often have to fight with the OS vendor for basic functionality in your app just to distribute it and these days you don't actually gain much with a dedicated app since modern sandboxing is so aggressive and web apis are relatively complete.

> you don’t actually gain much

Some of what you gain is pretty important though. For example, well written native apps integrate better with the platform’s accessibility features and they typically consume less power, storage, and memory.

I'd contest the storage point pretty strongly.

Well written web apps can be very accessible too and some companies do actually go out of their way to ensure this.

IMO as an end user - aggressive sandboxing is a feature, not a bug

A browser is a sandbox.

Browsers already do this much better. If you don't trust something that's where it belongs, not as a local app.

It used to be that cli tools were the power users preference but now I feel like that's shifted to web apps (over native). The ability to have multiple tabs/views, load extensions to customize behavior, adjust sizing, etc.

As an example: an absolutely vital tool for me is the Vimium keyboard control extension for navigation, which unfortunately can't be used in dedicated apps.

All the more reason to stand up against it and choose the web.

I'm wondering which of us is the outlier, because I heavily use browser apps on my phone and tablet and ignore vendors' prompts to install their native apps.

(Other than Google apps, that is.)

If you want to climb the career ladder this is a good mindset to have. As someone who got into engineering cause I like to build neat products for people, it's a hard mindset to adopt. It switches your goals from what is the best for the people using it to what's going to make the most $