I think a major problem with it is that it sounds like a porn site. The value of short domains is probably overrated too, a single word is nice but a single letter? so what?
Word 6.0 from Windows 3.11 had a print layout on 800x600. I recall it being presented as new at the time but I didn't have any prior experience to compare it against.
But everything is still clickable and swipable. The program still has as many features, but it's not visually complex: we don't show them to you. Want to commit your changes? Just click on the white space about three quarters of the way left to right, and two centimetres down from the top of the screen. About 50 pixels right of this, we have conveniently placed click listener that will revert all your changes. But don't worry, in the name of eliminating visual clutter, this click listener is entirely invisible.
Yeah I feel exactly the same as you. I prefer JetBrains to VSCode because it gives me labelled icons and menus for the things I want to do. It's true, for the things I don't do often sometimes I have to search a busy menu, but that compares with trying to remember what the name of the command might be in the VSCode command panel, so it seems a lot more user-friendly. Do people actually like being confused? Do people like having to use Google to find out what words to type to use their software?
> He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.
I think part of the problem here is that "high-density UIs" gets used in multiple ways. Some designers, perhaps not those with ready access to users, take high-density UIs to refer to the markings on the screen. A button with borders next to a text field with borders is considered to be higher density than a button without borders next to a text field without borders, because the borders visually divide the field up. And if the border lines provide an affordance (e.g. a button pushed up), then that's complexity (because the lines have different colors, which is more complex than a design where lines all have the same color).
But such an interpretation goes against the research of the 80s and 90s. I have never been directed to evidence that "complexity" and "density" refer specifically to visual complexity and visual density as distinct from conceptual complexity and conceptual density or widget complexity and widget density - all the evidence I've ever come across (as in the old evidence, or the medium post by another descendant comment of my parent comment) suggests that visual complexity and density actually operate to clarify conceptual/widget complexity/density.
So I think the claims made by practitioners need to inspected and made more precise. What kind of complexity and density are they trying to resolve? And what evidence do they have that this specific kind of complexity and density is problematic, rather than clarifying?
If it blocked you until it was finished, then you wouldn't be able to handle a timeout because you would be blocked waiting for it to finish, so you'd have no capacity to realise the task needed to timeout (unless you wrote multithreaded code to detect the timeout "out of band"). If it doesn't block you, then you won't know whether it's been committed or not and so now you have to write some kind of loop to continuously test whether the query you just executed has been committed, abandoned or is still in progress.
In principle, you could have some kind of configuration that says "try to commit this for so long, but if you can't commit it by then just abort". But you haven't really solved the manual retry problem, just made it somewhat less likely to occur.
As far as I know, given the costs of a request, most database servers tend to use the latter approach. But in SQLite requests are very much cheaper, and at least part of SQLite's work happens in your thread, so it goes for the former approach. But from an end programmer's perspective it's only a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.
Also, "the database" is a highly ambiguous term, but in SQLite it can really only refer to a file on disk. There's no database server, it's just a library that you call to manipulate the file. So who even is the database server? Maybe it's the code you're writing. Maybe it's you who should be handling this stuff. And that's SQLite's decision, and fair enough too. SQLite isn't trying to be a database server, it never offered to be a database server, and you shouldn't think it's a database server. You should think of it as a library for executing SQL queries against a file that holds a relational database. If you think that's tantamount to being a database server, then consider what you normally mean by "server". Is a library for manipulating zip files tantamount to an FTP server?
The US doesn't have a minority rule death spiral because of social media, it has a minority rule cycle because the constitution literally entrenches minority rule via mechanisms like senatorial malapportionment, supermajorities, the electoral college and judicial review of policy (see citizens united, roe v wade, affirmative action) rather than merely procedure. It has experienced this before, sometimes devolving into outright civil war, without actually reaching death.
The technologies for resolving America's problems are well understood - majority decision making, parliamentarism, representation and participation of electoral minorities rather than inhibiting the work of the majority, a narrower scope of judicial review and/or a more flexible constitution. But as long as people say, as you do, "it isn't the thing that caused the problem that is the problem, it is some fancy gadget that is the problem", then you will be unable to solve the problems
> It has experienced this before, sometimes devolving into outright civil war, without actually reaching death.
That's not really enough to establish a pattern, though. People in China have furniture older than the United States.
> But as long as people say, as you do, "it isn't the thing that caused the problem that is the problem, it is some fancy gadget that is the problem", then you will be unable to solve the problems
This is victim blaming. US citizens get no say in governance:
"Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens"
Apple and Microsoft generally get their pay from licensing fees rather than advertising fees and are therefore not in competition with news media companies. Reddit has generally been a fairly niche player, although if things change it might get covered. I don't know whether Twitter is as important as people have said it is, or if it is niche: it seems both Canada and a few years ago Australia both decided it was niche. And if anything, I gather than Elon Musk's purchase has made it less dependent on its limited advertising revenue and more dependent on subscriptions etc; if so it is even less in competition with news media organisations today than it was when Australia reviewed it.
Remember that even though people misleadingly call Google and Facebook tech companies, they are in fact advertising companies; and although people speak of news companies, they have generally seen news, opinion and analysis as tools for connecting eyeballs to advertising i.e. they're effectively advertising companies. This bill is about the direct competition between the two kinds of advertising companies - traditional, ~domestic companies with close and personal ties to the people who govern vs new, foreign companies who don't have such essential ties to politicians as journalists do.
If it were literally just about the provision of news, then Canada and Australia fund the CBC/RC and the ABC/SBS so why would they be so fussed? There are people who today make a living from podcasts and substacks who could not make money from traditional advertising/media companies. News would be provided.
(In fact, just to bring the point home, the original version of Australia's equivalent bill didn't allow the ABC and SBS to participate, because as government-funded media organisations they didn't suffer from the transition of advertising from news-sponsoring to tech-sponsoring in the same way as private companies.)
99.9% of consumers probably have never heard about custom ROMs, and I'd reckon 99.9% of consumers who do hear about custom ROMs have boring old fashioned objections like "will it break my warranty" and "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and "I wonder what's on Netflix tonight/I think I shall be washing my hair".
For the few people who distrust Google enough to install LineageOS or some such, they probably distrust Google enough to not care too much about not using Google. Who is in this sweetspot where they want (i.e. install and use, not merely aspire to installing and using) a custom ROM but having no access to proprietary Google APIs is a bridge too far?
"What is Android ? Well you see, there are various operating systems out there. An operating system is the software that allows you to use your hardware. So for example you may be familiar with Windows, macOS or Linux..."
I have been using GrapheneOS for a couple of years and I feel frustration about this announcement. At the same time, sounds like not much of a biggie, but I'd prefer the burden of updating the apps not to be on the GrapheneOS contributors.
On the other hand, I can see Google's arguments and "plausible deniability" that this is not Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: really nobody expects them to "Don't be Evil" anymore, security vulnerabilities in these apps are probably the last thing in their priorities, and the target audience for these apps is really small.
> they probably distrust Google enough to not care too much about not using Google
I think you probably greatly overestimate how much normal people worry about things like that.
Look out your window and count how many tinfoil hats you see people with. If there's more than maybe one or two, you live in a fairly atypical part of the world and it might be time to move house.
