> Probably because many are purists. It is like how anything about improving Electron devolves into "you shouldn't use Electron."
The Electron debate isn't about details purism, the Electron debate is about the foundation being a pile of steaming dung.
Electron is fine for prototyping, don't get me wrong. It's an easy and fast way to ship an application, cross-platform, with minimal effort and use (almost) all features a native app can, without things like CORS, permission popups, browser extensions or god knows what else getting in your way.
But it should always be a prototype and eventually be shifted to native applications because in the end, unlike Internet Explorer in its heyday which you could trivially embed as ActiveX and it wouldn't lead to resource gobbling, if you now have ten apps consuming 1GB RAM each just for the Electron base to run, now the user runs out of memory because it's like PHP - nothing is shared.
Or these devs & users can migrate to a PWA. Which will have vastly less overhead. Because it is shared, because each of those 10 apps you mention would be (or could be, if they have ok data architecture) tiny.
PWAs have the problem that for every interaction with the "real world" they need browser approval. While that is for a good reason, it also messes with the expectations of the user, and some stuff such as unrestricted access to the file system isn't available to web apps at all.
Each person seems to have their own bugbear about Electron but I really doubt improving Electron to have shared instances a la WebView2 would make the much of a dent in the hate for it here.
Well, we have to balance that with advertising funding a ton of things that we otherwise value but would rather not pay for. Transit, free wifi, little leagues, etc.
The reason it pays for that is through redistribution though, right? If they weren't receiving a monetary benefit from advertising, they wouldn't run them, and the monetary benefit needs to be larger than the cost to fund those things, otherwise it wouldn't be cost-efficient to run it.
By definition it shows an issue where we have a process that tricks human minds into thinking they aren't paying for something, when as a collective, we pay more for a worse service than we would have if it existed in a alternate framework.
Advertising either does or doesn't cause an increase in spending on whatever is advertised.
If it does increase spending on things being advertised, the absence leaves us with more money for all those other things that are currently ad-supported.
If it doesn't, it's a scam.
If those things supported by ads would be literally unaffordable by the consumers if not for those ads, because the consumers are so poor they have no money to spend, the fork is still true; it's just that if those ads work then they push those already-poor consumers into debt for things they'd otherwise not buy because they couldn't afford, making them even poorer.
I've never even used free wifi that was ad supported, and I'm not aware of a situation where this is common.
Ad revenue is nowhere near enough to build the facilities necessary to play baseball, so little leagues are getting funding in a lot of other ways which could fill in the gaps if ad revenue were removed.
The simple fact is that we have lots of examples of ads being removed and economies puttering along just fine.
Very good guess: it was actually exactly that. Carvana shopping for a used car.
He clicked on something and got charged the downpayment of the car to his CC. He got his money back, but I'll never not be surprised by what some older people can manage to do online left to their own devices.
To you and I, it seems impossible. For Larry, it's just Saturday.
It does not seem impossible to anyone who has watched someone use a computer for a few minutes... A bright green button from google pay saying "click here to secure your interest in this car" is easily mistaken to mean "save to my interested list" rather than "place a deposit on this".
It's sad, but you need to browse almost any site assuming the company is an adversary. I register my domains through two decent registrars but I recently needed to help a client through using GoDaddy and NetSol. The up-sells and cajoling were relentless, vile and eye-opening.
To be fair, Amazon one click purchases got me once. The principle that no one button should cause a "dangerous" action (i.e. one where you can't escape or undo it easily, and especially with money and data) is sometimes violated when the action is only "dangerous" to the user and beneficial to the provider.
Usually the result of clicking such a "dangerous" button is the user gives the provider money or data. It's not common that the provider makes it easy to one-click-no-confirm a process that gives the user money or the provider's data.
Eh, the lesson from us-east-1 outage is that you should cling to the big ones instead. You get the convenience + nobody gets mad at you over the failure.
Everything will have periods of unreliability. The only solution is to be multi-everything (multi-provider for most things), but the costs for that are quite high and hard to see the value in that.
yes, but if you are going to provide assurances like SLAs, you need to be aware of your own allow for them. if you're customers require working with known problem areas, you should add a clause exempting those areas when they are the cause.
> That's a bit like the 'nobody was fired for choosing Oracle' argument, but it does make sense.
The reaction to AWS US-East-1 going down demonstrates this. As so many others were in the same boat, companies got a pass on their infrastructure failing. Everyone was understanding.
Anecdotally, I find internal monologues often nonsense.
I once asked it about why a rabbit on my lawn liked to stay in the same spot.
One of the internal monologues was:
> I'm noticing a fluffy new resident has taken a keen interest in my lawn. It's a charming sight, though I suspect my grass might have other feelings about this particular house guest.
It obviously can’t see the rabbit on my lawn. Nor can it be charmed by it.
It’s just doing exactly what it’s designed to do. Generate text that’s consistent with its prompts.
People often seem to get confused by all the anthropomorphizing that’s done about these models. The text it outputs that’s called “thinking” is not thinking, it’s text that’s output in response to system prompts, just like any other text generated by a model.
That text can help the model reach a better result because it becomes part of the prompt, giving it more to go on, essentially.
In that sense, it’s a bit like a human thinking aloud, but crucially it’s not based on the model’s “experience” as your example shows, it’s based on what the model statistically predicts a human might say under those circumstances.
So so all of the hate is just due to some dropped calls? Realistically it isn't even that bad (likely more like 2% failure rate). For me, I use Teams but it isn't like I am in the application all day. If it were 10X better I wouldn't care very much - like MS word vs Google docs or whatever. I care a lot about text editors on the other hand.
The hate comes, deservedly I might add, from a lot more than just dropped calls. Terrible UI. Horrendous performance. Bloated apps. Confusing UX. Completely broken integration with the desktop/browser.
When I click on something in Teams it shows up in (I'd say) < 300ms most times. I'm sure it could be much faster if done better. However, is that what you mean by "horrendous" or are you seeing 30s freezes or something like that?
Using Teams on Safari on a maxed out M2 Pro machine proves to be a ridiculously slow affair. Moving between sections takes ~1s, ending a call makes the sound crack for a few seconds in the most broken and awful way (while locking the UI in place for the duration), it refuses to understand what the browser’s back button is for, there are plenty of slow downs when using the chat... Surprisingly enough, though, the video part seems to work just fine, everything else, however, is a headache-inducing experience.
And I refuse to switch browsers just to use this disgrace of an app. If it’s supposed to work on the web it should not care which browser I’m accessing it from, otherwise a native app (read: not webview-based) should be made available.
Many would consider this a bare minimum rather than something worthy of praise.
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