If you're writing in MS Word, LibreOffice, or most word processors, typing a word and then two dashes and then a word, without any spaces, like--this will generate an em dash automatically. I learned how to do it in Freshman English in high school. Though I was also taught to double space after a period.
To revise GP's comment: it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
Sometimes, there's a butler in there who seems absentminded and can only remember things up to a few thousand words. He once stacked all your dishes in the refrigerator and dumped all the food into the sink.
Other times, there's a demon in there who seems hellbent on destroying the innocence of your children and ripping apart your family. He once gave your children snuff films and instructions to build a bomb.
Just don't open the door if you don't like it... Some people are impossible to please.
They’ve added a room to their home. That they let you live in, for free.
I’ll also mention that the room right next to it had all the contents you claim to take issue with.
The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Yes, this is why we routinely fill council homes (or public project housing) with amnesiac butlers to rearrange the residents' possessions, and also with demons for, um, reasons.
Completely reasonable things to do.
How else would we recoup our investment in the hugely expensive, unpredictable butler/demon spawning machines?
>The problem here is that you shouldn’t leave children home alone, not that it has two potentially dangerous rooms. There’s several more such rooms in your house, and you wouldn’t let them cook or use your power tools by themselves either (not until they prove they can be trusted with that anyway).
Depends on age, and the children in question. Also, if I have power tools it's because I chose them. And neither amnesiac butlers nor stochastic demons are necessary to not starve in the way that cooking food is, so the assessments of risk and basic good sense are not comparable.
Until the last few years, most features added to software I use haven't:
...had functionally nondeterminstic, unpredictable results in response to how I use them.
...written in long-form English text with confidence and no guarantee of factual accuracy.
...coaxed children into codependent pseudo-relationships with ML models or encouraged suicide.
AI isn't a new feature; it's a new category. And the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
I use LLMs and diffusion style image generators... Where I understand the model I've chosen, can control it locally, and have enough tacit knowledge to double check the outputs before I go ahead with something. I don't trust Mozilla to ensure any of those things anymore. They've long since burned that credibility.
That makes zero sense. How do you have no difficulty ? Are you going ahead and disabling like the below ? If not, then I am afraid you are hallucinating like an AI and not really "avoiding it" in Firefox. Doing the below also improves performance, memory consumption and battery life.
> the people who don't understand why some of us don't want it everywhere don't understand that distinction, or else are financially motivated to ignore it and gaslight everyone about the categorical boundaries crossed.
This is such a common fallacy that I think it should be given a name. When you believe that the people who disagree with you must either be ignorant or malicious. Leaves no room for honest disagreement or discussion. Maybe the "dumb-or-evil" fallacy?
Perhaps; but I would argue talking to many AI evangelists is a form of selection bias. Which makes the false dichotomy conclusion reasonable given the inputs, but still inaccurate given reality.
True, it's a form of false dichotomy, but I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion. It's also an incredibly common conclusion in politics after people gain a somewhat superficial understanding of both sides. I wonder if it might play a key role in social polarization.
For me the strongest arguments are the ones that can argue the opponent's side as effectively as the opponent, and then show why it's weak. And that feels entirely incompatible with a dumb-or-evil argument.
>I think this specific instance is particularly interesting in that it allows the holder to dehumanise their opponent to an extent, and justify lack of discussion.
That's a wild take and a wild leap. For my own part, I see the failure or refusal to comprehend someone else's preferences, values, or boundaries as itself a profoundly human quality, even if it's a quality I don't love, rather than one which would cause me to see someone as less human.
I will admit that, when there's enough nonsense money being thrown after a vaunted object, sensible discussion can feel pointless. Prudence goes deaf amid the din of hype.
And yes, steelmanning can be highly persuasive, but not when premises are radically different enough between two parties. It's really a more productive tool to improve your model of someone else.
Maybe I’m using the wrong web browsers - mine have always had those problems (except that the pseudo-relationships were with real, horrifically bad people).
Announcement from the dev, in the project GitHub and Patreon:
Friends, it seems that my digital signature has been exposed. This signature protects the app from fake and malicious updates, so there is a risk that someone may try to release counterfeit versions under my name.
To completely eliminate any threats, I’ve decided to stop using the current signature and switch to a new one. Because of this, the app’s identifier will also change. You don’t need to delete the old app (but it will no longer receive updates) — the new one will install as a separate app and will need to be configured again.
Thank you for your understanding and attention to security.[1][2]
---------------
There aren't any new apk releases on GitHub yet. However, concerningly, the SmartTube website (which I won't link directly) still offers undated "Stable" and "Beta" downloads.
It sucks to deal with security breaches as an indie or solo dev, but I'll be waiting for a more detailed postmortem before assessing whether to install a future release... Hopefully one that details new security procedures to guard both the dev's key and the production build environment.
Factory resetting my Shield as a precaution, but nothing sensitive was really on there, and Android's security model did exactly what it was supposed to and limited the damage. When using a third party app like this, it's prudent to use it signed out or else with a purpose specific Google/YouTube account which is connected to nothing else critical.
> To completely eliminate any threats, I’ve decided to stop using the current signature and switch to a new one. Because of this, the app’s identifier will also change. You don’t need to delete the old app (but it will no longer receive updates)
I'm curious if this is the best idea? Like, if you don't read all the GitHub releases thoroughly or miss the HN material, and instead you just auto-install updates, you downloaded a malware-infested version which will be on your device until you learn otherwise?
At this point, Play Protect will remove the apks with the old signature because the developer marked the old signature as compromised. The developer acted correctly and responsibly in doing so, and seems to be working out establishing a new setup now, including a new signing key.
For those using sketchy devices without Play Protect and also installing random apks without an understanding of security or Android's trust-on-first-use model, there's not much anyone can do.
I installed 30.56 from the git link on my Shield. It did not overwrite the old one, as it has the old signature. I manually uninstalled 30.48. I did not use the backup/restore option in either as I didnt want to dirty any data in the new app.
This assumes the information is clear and consistent enough across time and distance for arbitrage to happen. Pricing in-app, per customer, changing per day would introduce too much unpredictability for most customers to attempt arbitrage. If people in a group all check their apps, and the person with the best prices orders for everyone, it could work in the context of a shared meal.
But imagine trying to sort out X number of people who each want a different basket of items from, say, the Walmart app. Each of those items fluctuating daily in price for each customer independently makes arbitrage almost prohibitively difficult to coordinate.
The best case scenario is something like Steam sales, where a wishlist function notifies you when items you've "watched" are on sale. There are third parties like, for example, Deku Deals that track this pricing data across time for console games.
But Amazon is already trying to banish external AI agents from any access to its data. And what does a price history graph even mean if prices are specific to each customer and stochastically varied each day to induce impulse purchases?
what stops anyone from creating a third party order book that allows people to submit bids and offers on price discriminated items? It can match buyers and sellers just like a stock exchange.
The vendors who want you to just buy things in their app will treat any such exchange adversarially, and will ultimately always have the upper hand.
They can respond with litigation, as Amazon already is against third-party LLM agents accessing their marketplace. They can respond by banning accounts for violating the terms of service, making examples out of those who profit the most. They can watch the external marketplaces and cancel (undelivered/unfulfilled) sales they believe are linked to arbitrage.
All they need to do is make it inconvenient enough to discourage 80-90% of customers from participating in arbitrage.
But they are doing this all for what? Won't the market average out to the same unit price at the end of the day even if they can successfully create discriminatory spreads?
Think more in terms of behavioral psychology rather than idealized market dynamics which require rational actors and easily accessible information. Each corporation wants to optimize their customers' behavior for efficient extraction of wealth.
They want each customer effectively siloed in an ephemeral, eternal now: whatever the phone screen presents in this moment, and little else. The consumer may have a few scattered memories for context when presented with a potential purchase, but ideally isn't tracking prices or doing much research. The goal is to create those circumstances and (within them) reduce friction spending money as close as possible to zero.
Do that to as many customers as you can. Subvert their software and turn their own computers against them to achieve it. Instill learned helplessness and stimulus-response leading to purchase. Unit price and revenue will sort themselves out once you have a bunch of addled addicts staring at your shiny products in a digital environment you design and control.
That's the game. And that's why these companies will oppose arbitrage with all they can bring to bear, and fight with the brutal jealousy of gangs defending turf.
I think "balkanized" is a better way to describe communities and users online. As in sorted and separated into non-overlapping algorithmic cul-de-sacs which mostly do not interact with each other and which are (often) hostile when members of one algorithmically isolated community happen upon members of another.
There was a period I can recall, maybe 2010 to 2020 most prominently, when a subset of HN readers strongly preferred the mobile Wikipedia site, even on desktop, and would always use ".m" linking to Wikipedia articles in comments threads. This also seemed to happen in reddit threads during that decade.
I sort of remember some of the older MediaWiki desktop themes looking worse than the mobile theme, but it was never enough for me personally to try always using the mobile site at the time. I do still strongly prefer old.reddit.com... For as long as that portal continues to exist.
> There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them...
Seconded, except I don't trust most add-ons and don't want to have to trust them.
I want an easy way to launch a disposable browser session in any browser, totally isolated, with add-ons chosen (and downloaded) at launch time, and then erased of with the rest of the session when its last open page is closed.
I think Firefox focus does that on android, I'm sure there's a way to get the same result on a desktop with some flags and pointing to a config file (or a read only profile folder maybe?)
AFAIK Firefox Focus doesn't have extensions at all:( Although yes, it effectively has only private/incognito sessions that are erased when you close the app.
I can happily recommend that option from experience. I've used Walmart's "Onn" Google/Android TV boxes on both 1080p and 4K televisions. They work, and with Projectivity as the launcher you can pretty much rid yourself of any and all advertising placements. If you want to be super thorough, use adb to remove the default launcher once Projectivity is installed and set to default.
I now use an NVIDIA Shield in basically the same way. Projectivity Launcher set to default and advert-buttons on the remote control overridden in software. Jellyfin & SmartTube as primary apps for streaming. VLC & FCast Receiver for random video thrown around the network. LocalSend to easily sideload apps (sadly ending within a few years). Moonlight for game streaming from my PC (via gigabit ethernet). HDHomeRun app as a backup for any Jellyfin failures with live OTA TV streaming. Other apps from Google Play only as absolutely necessary (Google Play TV apps include a number of popular VPNs, along with tailscale).
It's honestly better than my experience with Apple TV 4K. And if Google continues to close down and wall off AOSP, there's already at least one community build of Lineage OS with Android TV for the Raspberry Pi.
GNOME 3+ developers put themselves in the inevitable (and unenviable) position of defending every decision to death because they limited the user's ability to make many, many decisions that were possible in previous versions.
There's nothing wrong with an opinionated desktop environment or even an opinionated Linux distribution. But, prior to GNOME 3, the project was highly configurable. Now it is not.
When people start up new highly opinionated projects (e.g. crunchbang, Omarchy), the feedback is generally more positive because those who try it and stick with it are the ones who like the project's opinions. The people who don't like those opinions just stop using it. There isn't a large, established base of longstanding users who are invested in workflows, features, and options.
Ideally you'd want to add selectable options for users in a way that's sustainable long-term and not just panic-adding things all over the place because of user demands. That's how you get the Handbrake situation that OP article is complaining about.
Gnome 3 was a big update and adding options, which does happen, is not free. There were changes from Gnome 2 and 3 and adding some options "back" from Gnome 2 is really asking for that feature to be rewritten from scratch (not all the time, but a lot of the time).
That the Gnome team has different priorities from other DEs, one of them being "keep the design consistent and sustainable," is completely valid and preferred by many users like myself.
> That the Gnome team has different priorities from other DEs, one of them being "keep the design consistent and sustainable," is completely valid and preferred by many users like myself.
A new design metaphor can be "completely valid" and simultaneously an aggravating rug pull if it is pitched as a new numbered version of an existing program---especially an existing desktop environment that many people use daily---rather than as a new program.
> Gnome 3 was a big update and adding options, which does happen, is not free. There were changes from Gnome 2 and 3 and adding some options "back" from Gnome 2 is really asking for that feature to be rewritten from scratch (not all the time, but a lot of the time).
If the "next version" of a software project is really a near-total rewrite, such that many-to-most features from the previous version must be rewritten from scratch, then you should start a new project and pick a new name if you do not want your current users comparing the new version to the previous version. Whether or not those users appreciate the cost of feature rewrites to the developers' satisfaction, they already have working software with a long list of features and a version number one lower.
KDE had a similar problem moving from 3.5 to 4 (also a major rewrite), but the initial wave of complaints had more to do with instability and heavy resource use because they didn't abandon the desktop metaphor entirely. They also explicitly had a roadmap of building back in many of 3.5's features as time went on, which made it a less radical transition.
It's all ancient history at this point, at least on software timescales. But the Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 transition is up there with Python 2.7 to Python 3 as an example of how not to manage or implement a major change to a widely used piece of software.
The funniest thing to me is I used to think of Gnome 3 as a effort toward Apple-esque design which wasn't as well put together as MacOS... But now, even though Gnome today is still not up to the consistency of 2011 MacOS, it is more consistent than 2025 MacOS because Apple has been driving drunk on desktop software design for a decade and a half.
> The funniest thing to me is I used to think of Gnome 3 as a effort toward Apple-esque design which wasn't as well put together as MacOS... But now, even though Gnome today is still not up to the consistency of 2011 MacOS, it is more consistent than 2025 MacOS because Apple has been driving drunk on desktop software design for a decade and a half.
I guess I agree? I never used OS X and actively avoid MacOS post-2013 partly because of the layers of inconsistency each new version introduced (when I used a Macbook, there were about 4 different "overview of current running apps + method to launch new apps" interfaces, accessed from one hotkey, two separate mousepad gestures, and a button in the UI, respectively.)
To my tastes these days Gnome Shell and associated GTK3/4 apps (see Gnome Circle), plus Flathub, are easily the most consistent and pleasant desktop app experience around. YMMV of course. (I'm the type who has never felt the need to mess with Gnome Tweaks, extensions, etc., if that helps.)
I don't run it (yet), but Fedora Silverblue is the future (for consumers running desktop Linux). I believe this in my heart.
> To my tastes these days Gnome Shell and associated GTK3/4 apps (see Gnome Circle), plus Flathub, are easily the most consistent and pleasant desktop app experience around.
I generally agree with this, with respect to the apps. There are a few dead simple Gnome apps I've found are great to use, but it's just as easy to use them from another desktop environment. I'm inevitably going to have both Gnome and KDE libraries installed, even if I'm using neither desktop environment, and the sheer amount of storage and memory on modern machines makes that just fine. So I don't look at those apps as a selling point of Gnome per se. But you're absolutely right: Gnome's sleek, tiny little applications are often very well designed and useful. It's more the desktop environment around them that irks me every time I try it.
> I don't run it (yet), but Fedora Silverblue is the future (for consumers running desktop Linux). I believe this in my heart.
I also agree here about atomic distros. They're the future. I'm running Kinoite on most of my machines now and am loving how stable and out-of-the-way it is. The size of the frequent updates was a bit shocking at first, but I have gigabit Internet now so...
Gnome developers also have a habit of telling users (and other developers who try to integrate with their DE) who ask for those missing features that they're "holding it wrong" etc. Quite often this is justified along the lines of, "we did a UX study and you don't really need to do X so we made it do Y instead!"
After dealing with this kind of stuff for 14 years, it shouldn't be surprising that you don't have a lot of folk left who are willing to extend good faith to Gnome devs.
I recently came across a particular GUI quirk in a Linux distro, which went against my experience with similar UIs in Windows, Mac and Chrome. There were existing bug reports for it, attributing the cause to upstream. Upstream project said they were following the GNOME guidelines.
Eventually, I found the bug report that was filed against the guideline itself. The person who wrote that part of the guideline had responded that he made the decision based on a poll (presumably of people in the mailing list), and that no-one really had a strong opinion on it. He asserted that it was no big deal, and refused to reconsider the guideline.
Now, I think it is perfectly OK to make the wrong decision when it comes to something outside your expertise. If you are a backend software expert, it is OK for you to do the wrong thing when it comes to the UI for a project you are supporting for free. But when someone who does know that field makes a reasoned suggestion, you should not really be doubling down.
A UI/UX designer in this situation is not exactly going to be prepared fork and maintain a whole stack over this. It just means that the experience will be worse for users.
> The latter means side loading is still viable for apps from known developers. This way anyone who is known who may create malware and will not be free from prosecution
Important corrections:
This way anyone who is known to create malware or any software which interferes with Google's current or potential future revenue, strategic interests, and unpredictable whims will not be free from prosecution in the case of distributing malware, nor from digital exile and unpersoning in the case of causing inconvenience to Google.
To revise GP's comment: it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
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