Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

My technologically inclined friends will probably not be surprised to know that today I called the 3 largest ISPs in Israel and asked whether they offer IPv6 service on their fiber connection, and 2 of them flat-out said “no” and the third said “only if you use our bundled router”.

They’re so weird that even the explaining the context will cause many listeners to lose patience.

This post was originally written in response to The Linux Experiment’s “Redis ditches FOSS” item, where Nick, the presenter, was critical of the recent Redis license change where they moved from the original BSD license to MongoDB’s SSPL, a change that was portrayed (and I’m paraphrasing a bit) as “the company taking the code the open source volunteers have given them and closing it in order to monetize the volunteers’ work”.

TL;DR – the fact that OSI labels SSPL as “not open source” is nothing more than FUD by the major cloud providers, as the only meaningful difference between that and the GPL is section 13 that makes life harder for cloud providers.

The 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey results are in, and here’s my (likely controversial) take:

Rust developers are the most self-centered, with Go developers close seconds.

Here are screenshots of the very nice “Worked with vs. want to work with” graphics for programming languages, with Rust and Go highlighted:

This – this is the reason:

Unlike other software packages (which includes, I believe, Flatpak) Snap packages will not update if the application is already running. Instead you get this annoying popup “Oh boy, you have 13 days to close your app otherwise nasty things will happen!” Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea in and by itself, except that if you close the application – it doesn’t update. Even the notification doesn’t go away.

Trying to register for the Twitter API (for personal use and mucking around), and this is how the “accepts our terms of service” page looks:

Mind you, the “I accept” and “Submit” buttons still work very well, you just have no idea what you’re signing up for… 🤦

I’ve ranted before about Client-Side Decorations (CSD), here and elsewhere, and here’s another one – mostly as a reminder to myself about how to disable CSD on Google Chrome web application windows.

The gist is – CSDs are horrible – they make your desktop look like a mishmash of different operating systems on the same screen, where it is often not clear how to interact with the application windows. The worst case is of course the MS-Windows XP RTL reflected UI, where you had some windows with normal operation buttons (close, maximize, etc) on the right side of the title bar and some windows were in “RTL” mode, so their buttons were on the left side 🤯.

I’m starting a new thing on this (otherwise quite dead) blog, mostly as a service to myself: “Imported Rants”. Its going to be basically copies (sometimes maybe better edited) of rants I posted as comments in other places (mostly YouTube), that have grown long enough to almost be an article in and of themselves.

Today, in response to Brodie Robertson’s question – Should Linux Users Hate Apple As Much As Microsoft? here’s the rant from my comments:

Well, at least until the entire world uses high DPI screens. Lets see an example:

Pulsing button (video)

This is a “call to action” effect on a button – it pulses slightly to get attention. This has proven to be really effective at improving “conversion” (web term to “getting you to do that thing I want you to do”). But even if you are not a designer at heart its easy to see that the text in the button is pulsing at different speeds and this creates a really jarring effect.

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למי שלא שם לב (בטח כולכם), האקדמיה הישראלית לקולנוע וטלוויזיה¹ חילקה ביום שישי האחרון את פרס האקדמיה לטלוויזיה (שמוגדר באתר האקדמיה כ-“המקבילה הישראלית לפרסי האמי האמריקאים”, אבל בניגוד לפרס אופיר לקולנוע ולפרס האמריקאי המצוין לעיל, אין לו שם).

בטח לא שמעתם על זה, כי טקס חלוקת הפרס ליצירה טלוויזיונית ישראלי מקורית, בו חולקו פרסים לסדרות בהפקת ערוצי טלוויזיה ישראלים, לא שודר באף ערוץ טלוויזיה ישראלי,  אפילו לא אלו שקיבלו את הפרס.

אני ספרתי שלושה דברים מטופשים.

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1. למה את המילה הזאת לא עיברתו? [↩]