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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • SEO is of course a problem, but it’s been a problem for a long time, and there are ways around it for those who know how to seek information. Proper use of keywords, blacklisting sites with known spam information, searching specific sites, mandating specific words and phrases to be contained in the search etc. It’s true, however, that information has become less discoverable during the latest decade – at least reliable information has.

    While AI-written spam articles and such have been a pain sometimes, gatekeeping content is in my opinion as big of a threat to the proper use of search engines for finding information. As more and more sites require you to log in to view the discussion (social media is the worst offender here) much of the search results is unusable. Nowadays the results lead to a paywall or a login wall almost more often than to a proper result, and that makes them almost completely useless. I understand this kind of thing for platforms which pay for creating the content, e.g. news sites, but user-generated content shouldn’t be locked behind a login requirement.

    I fear the day StackOverflow and Reddit decide the users’ discussions should be visible for only logged-in users. Reddit has already taken the first steps with limiting “NSFW” content to logged-in users only (on new reddit). Medium articles going behind paywall also caused some headaches a while back.


  • I wouldn’t call OLED a minor upgrade – considerably better battery life and color rendering. Also better blacks without background bleed, which is a major annoyance when gaming in dark (bus, plane, bedroom etc.)

    800p is for a good reason – although e.g. 1080p would be more crisp, personally I’d pick better colors and higher refresh rate over resolution in this case. When gaming with the APU, most games (especially AAA) can’t be upped to 1080p either way without considerable performance drop. I kinda understand the need for higher resolutions from a strategy gaming standpoint, but to me at least the compromise isn’t worth it.

    When PPI is considered with standard viewing distance, it’s still better than my 1080p 13" laptop. With proper anti-aliasing there’s no need to push it further, at least IMO it’s not worth it compared to the reduced performance.

    2560x1600 would make a bit more sense, as you could drop the resolution to 1280x800 without having to smear pixels due to pixels not lining up in the smaller resolution. That would also be better for strategy games. Don’t really know how good the panel availability for those is, though, since it’s probably using a tablet screen.


  • If you’re using powdered detergent, make sure yours doesn’t have zeolite as the water softening agent. It will deposit in the machine, and starts eventually covering the fabrics with a talcum-like powdery substance. It gets especially bad if you either have to use a lot of detergent because of hard water, or are overusing the detergent.

    Zeolite was brought in to replace phosphates due to environmental concerns, but it has its own problems with the washing results.

    One other thing that often ruins the freshness of clothes for me is overly scented/perfumed detergent. The smell can get quite overwhelming, and contribute to a chemical-y smell and feel.


  • Just in case someone misreads this, add the vinegar as the softener, so it’s not in the first load that contains the detergent. The detergent is a base, and relies upon that fact to get rid of some of the stains, and vinegar as an acid will neutralize that. Vinegar is meant to be in the rinse cycle when washing laundry, where it can help get rid of any extra detergent by neutralizing it and do any other magic it does.

    Also, though I don’t usually encounter them often, do note that vinegar can wash away zinc and silver oxides used for some sterile clothing, and can supposedly damage lyocell.

    But overall I second these suggestions. Most times the amounts listed for detergent are far too big, and you can often get by with less.


  • Not an expert on this, but I’d assume one thing is that in 3-2-3 two people need to stand up and give way if the person in the window seat wants to stretch their legs or go to the toilet. 2-4-2 only one person has to get out of the way in all situations. Would guess that’s actually somewhat important in widebodies since those are used on longer routes, and having to stand up twice as often in the aisle seat would be something of an inconvenience.

    There’s probably more, I’d guess that would also affect boarding times and so on, but this is the first thing that comes to mind.


  • And we’ve nowadays taken it even further, in spoken Finnish we’ve even got rid of the “hän” and mostly use “se”, which is the Finnish word for “it”. The same pronoun is used for people in all forms, animals, items, institutions and so on, and in practice the only case for “hän” is people trying to remind others they consider their pets human.

    Context will tell which one it is.


  • My best guess is the dates on which the feature was added, which can also be seen on CanIUse. Firefox added OPFS support in March this year, and much of the userbase (AFAIK e.g. Firefox ESR) is still lacking the feature – in any case it’s a very recent change on Firefox. However, webkit/Safari has had OPFS for over two years by now. I was personally unaware of the support having been added to Firefox as well, last time I checked the discussion they told they weren’t going to implement the API.

    By no means is this an acceptable excuse in my opinion, this kind of check should always be done by checking the existence of the feature, not the UA string. Though it might be that the check is still performed in the correct way as Safari users stuck on older version are also encountering the issue. But if they’re fine with using OPFS, where you need to export the files separately to access them outside the browser context (as the storage is private), there’s no reason to complain about recent Firefox versions that support this feature.

    But, the same point still stands, kind of. The main underlying problem is Google forcing new standards through Chromium, without waiting for industry consensus and a proper standard. Then, as 80% of the userbase already has the feature everyone else is forced to get on board. I still don’t really see Adobe as the main culprit here, despite the apparent incompetence in writing compatibility checks, but Google with their monopolistic practices with the Chromium project. Adobe isn’t innocent and has done the industry a lot of harm in the form of being one of the original pushers of subscription software, but I don’t think this instance should be attributed to malice rather than incompetence.

    Edit: So, a bit of additional advice for someone trying to get this to work: in case the UA spoofing doesn’t help, check the Firefox version in use – it has to be 111 or newer, as 111 was the release where File System API support was added. Firefox ESR probably doesn’t have it available. Also check that FS API / OPFS doesn’t need to be enabled through some flag or configuration parameter, and that it’s not blocked by some plugin.


  • Well, in this case it might even be a technological limitation, which can be solved with a workaround but leads to a poor user experience.

    Firefox, for security reasons, doesn’t allow opening local files for writing. That means, it’s not possible to make a web application that can autosave to your machine after you open a file, meaning you have to download a new version of the file every time you save. You can get around this issue by importing the files in question to the browser’s local storage, or by using cloud storage via an API, but local saving is a feature that people have come to expect and missing it will lead to complaints from the users.

    The missing API is called File System Access API and has been available on Chrome for years. I’ve personally had to write my web apps around this limitation multiple times, since I want to support Firefox. By no means is this a valid reason to exclude Firefox in my opinion, but I can also easily see why a company would want to not bother with user feedback on ctrl+s not working in their web application.