I think this, as with many user interfaces, comes down to the use case.
A rarely used UI needs to be easy to navigate. Remove clutter, place the often used feature front and center and the rarely used features behind multiple navigation steps. The user primarily _navigates_ this UI, they don't _memorize_ it.
A constantly used UI such as an application that a professional uses from 9 to 5 five days a week (An IDE, a Cad Program, a video editing thing) is a completely different beast. The speed of accessing a feature is more important than the discoverability. The user internalizes the UI and the UI needs to aid the user in doing so. Icons in menus means the user eventually doesn't need to read the text label.
Then their content can just go away tbh. This isn't some big ethical dilemma either.
Either find a way to make content that doesn't rely on ads, or stop making content. If the whole ad-funded internet disappeared tomorrow morning, would it really matter?
I don't know what exactly "seed sharing" means (and the article doesn't describe it fully) but merely owning anything communally, or owning property - which includes the right to transfer it - seems like obvious human rights.
What's actually a human right and what isn't will depend on who you ask, but just "Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others." seems to be applicable (UN Charter §17)? It doesn't feel like "random thing I think is important is a human right" at all?
The commercial GMO seed developers require that you buy seed from them every year. You're not allowed to collect the seed and re-plant it next year. Or share it, I guess.
That's in the US, not sure how it plays out around the world.
They just want to lock in the farmers, in an situation where they can't do it technologically. So they're doing it via the law. It's...basically what you'd expect of the world today. Sad, but I suppose they argue that they should have IP rights just like any industry.
And you'd think they'd just boycott on principle, but it puts them at a big disadvantage in many cases, as their yields go down while national harvest goes up, making sale prices lower. So it's not easy to see what to do about it from the farmer's perspective.
You don't even need to go as far as saying someone didn't follow the policy, you can just say you need to review the policies. That way, conveniently enough, nobody is really ever at fault!
We once did this for a massive product with 3 releases per year: took a whole cycle to do zero features, and just fix bugs. Internal customers who usually stepped over themselves to get their latest feature in the program, were accepting it. But we had to announce it early. Otherwise the usual consensus is that customers would rather take 1 feature together with 10 new bugs, than -5 bugs and no new features.
There is no good technical solution here. But the damage could be limited if browsers at least limited entropy somewhat. Stuff like reading back canvas contents should need user approval.
Just make sure it’s sufficiently illegal to keep this info. Find and make big visible examples of fining companies that trade in this info. If a company sells a product that fetches ads based on an ”identifier” their little js snippet computed then just pay them a visit. Fine both them and their customers to the max extent of the gdpr (or equivalent).
My heart really sinks every time someone launches a "new IDE" and it turns out to be VS Code. VSCode can be turned into an IDE for _some_ platforms. But not for others. It remains a text editor with some nice extras (syntax highlighting, navigation) but lacking others (debugger, testing, ...).
What's most astonishing is that I can't seem to find what actual platforms it works for. I don't doubt the LLM's can write code in almost any language and for almost all frameworks, with varying success.
But which languages/platforms/framework will the IDE work for technically, having compilers etc built in? I don't care if an LLM can help me with the code, if I then can't compile it within the same IDE!
Users will overwhelmingly use browsers in vanilla config. The question here will be how browser vendors show this option. If - say - a company that gives away a browser for free but makes money from ads designed this, then they'll hide the option deep in some obscure menu, never remind people it exists, and reset it on every update.
So the devil is in the details. The best option I think isn't a secret setting in a browser, but a standardized consent dialog. Basically the sites communicate to the browser a standardized data format for consent. Then the browser shows that query in a popup that looks the same for every site. That means 1) the sites no longer have a chance to do dark patterns 2) it's less confusing for end users since the UX is always the same 3) it allows users to check a "Automatically reject for all sites". The site should not know whether the user has auto-rejected this, or manually rejected it. There should be no option to automatically consent for all sites (Can't have that). So the only ergonomic choice is to set it to auto reject.
Having this "use this choice (reject) for all sites" is the really important part here. Because it means that ALL users of ALL browsers will quickly see this choice, so in short order a huge chunk of users will have made this permanent rejection choice.
Dialog is already standardized in the current GDPR. There is literally an item there which states that Reject consent option should be the same and equally easily accessible as Accept consent option. So basically all dark pattern sites are already criminals. The problem is zero enforcement of the GDPR.
It's standardized in behavior only, it doesn't prescribe which button is where in the dialog etc. But yea for those that actually follow it, it's not a _big_ problem, but it's still an improvement to get an exactly similar dialog. Especially if you can check the [x] reject everything on every site
Since tracking is not legal without informed consent, either browsers will be mandated to default to no tracking, or to display a choice on first use. Silently defaulting to tracking certainly won’t be an option, given the whole GDPR and e-Privacy framework.
Because it's better to have a really convenient and cheap service that works 99% of the time, than a resilient that is more expensive or more cumbersome to use.
It's like github vs whatever else you can do with git that is truly decentralized. The centralization has such massive benefits that I'm very happy to pay the price of "when it's down I can't work".
A rarely used UI needs to be easy to navigate. Remove clutter, place the often used feature front and center and the rarely used features behind multiple navigation steps. The user primarily _navigates_ this UI, they don't _memorize_ it.
A constantly used UI such as an application that a professional uses from 9 to 5 five days a week (An IDE, a Cad Program, a video editing thing) is a completely different beast. The speed of accessing a feature is more important than the discoverability. The user internalizes the UI and the UI needs to aid the user in doing so. Icons in menus means the user eventually doesn't need to read the text label.
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