469 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2021
  2. worrydream.com worrydream.com
    1. Bret Victor: email (9/3/04) Interface matters to me more than anything else, and it always has. I just never realized that. I've spent a lot of time over the years desperately trying to think of a "thing" to change the world. I now know why the search was fruitless -- things don't change the world. People change the world by using things. The focus must be on the "using", not the "thing". Now that I'm looking through the right end of the binoculars, I can see a lot more clearly, and there are projects and possibilities that genuinely interest me deeply.

      Specifically highlighting that the "focus must be on the 'using', not the 'thing'".

      This quote is very reminiscent of John M. Culkin's quote (often misattributed to McLuhan) "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Linus Lee</span> in Towards a research community for better thinking tools | thesephist.com (<time class='dt-published'>12/01/2021 08:23:07</time>)</cite></small>

  3. Nov 2021
    1. This is actively being worked on - for those interested you can follow the progress in https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/10836
    2. After 5 years there's still no fix. This is so annoying. I'm now getting rid of all snap packages and installing deb variants instead. Finally I'll purge snap and if these weird decisions keep on going I'll also move to another distro. Common Canonical. Seriously?
  4. Oct 2021
    1. Disable features that inhibit control and transparency, and add or modify features that promote them (these changes will almost always require manual activation or enabling).
    2. In addition, Google designed Chromium to be easy and intuitive for users, which means they compromise on transparency and control of internal operations.
    1. Ungar, around @1:00:00:

      I try to explain to people that the notion of compiler is broken. Of course I learned this from Smalltalk, but what we want to build is experiences--artificial realities that convince you that your source code is real. It's directly executed. There's no lag between editing and running[...] The environment stresses things in your program, not tools--which is another rant I have. It's this whole idea that we want to put you in an artificial reality--I got that from Randy [Smith]--in which it's easy and natural and low-cognitive-burden to get the computer to do what you want it to do, rather than running language translators that turn weird strings of text into bits the machine can run

    1. user n. When referring to the reader, use "you" instead of "user." For example, "The user must..." is incorrect. Use "You must..." instead. If referring to more than one user, calling the collection "users" is acceptable, such as "Other users may want to access your database."
    1. Postmodernist Theory. This theory was focus on associated with relativism on ideology in the maintenance of economic and political power. It also generally explain which is claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races.

      (file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/A%20Review%20of%20Employment%20Relations%20Theories.pdf)

    1. There is a close relation between the conceptual knowledge on which a narrative relies and the notation that it employs. Domain-specific vocabulary directly names relevant concepts. Shorthand notation replaces frequently used words and lengthy sentences that involve these concepts. For example, Newton's laws of motion are commonly written as F=m⋅a

      This part resonates strongly with Victor's enunciation on "how Writing made thought visible". (Previous video at 10'33") and "Mathematical notation made mathematical structure visible" (11'33'") and how the invention of modern mathematics was not because of a particular idea, but because of the equations notation "user interface" (~12'30")

  5. Sep 2021
    1. I don’t even minify page assets

      Good. Don't. The number of people who think this is a virtue is frightening. The rationale is usually not well-reasoned and whatever values they pretend to hold can almost always be shown to be hollow.

    1. I am being told my Login Keyring Password "no longer matches" my login. I am confused - I provided a password as I was setting this up, and so I don't know what this is about and how I can fix it. Thanks for the help.
  6. Aug 2021
    1. my favourite KDE bug

      aka "my very strong opinion" that something needs to work this way

    2. It's still pretty far away from catching up -- in fact, I think that now, in 2020, it's farther than it was in 2010.

      Let's fucking hope so.

      This article keeps measuring Linux by the classic Desktop measures of success. This article represents l-users. And ignores other forms of users.

    3. The FOSS community has been trying to emulate the best parts of Windows' GUI for about twenty years now.

      oh sure, some Freedesktop elements are trying to out-Desktop the Desktop. but most of the interesting folk are attracted to other ends & playing other games. ion3 or xmonad or other folk are doing very very little to "emulate the best parts of Windows."

    1. This is one of the points made in TheMythOfThePaperlessOffice -- that workplaces often shift from more efficient paper-based technologies to less efficient electronic technologies (electronic technologies can be either more or less efficient, of course) because computers symbolize The Future, Progress, and a New Way Of Doing Things. An office on the move, that's what an office that uses cutting-edge technology is. Not an office that is stuck in the past. And the employees are left to cope with the less productive, but shinier, New Way. -- ApoorvaMuralidhara

      New technologies don't always have the user interface to make them better than old methods.

  7. Jul 2021
    1. The world could benefit from a curated set of bookmarklets in the style of Smalltalk ("doIt", "printIt", etc buttons) that you can place in your bookmarks bar (or copy into a bookmarks document and open in it in your browser), where the purpose would be to allow you to:

      1. access a new scratch area (about:blank) for experimentation
      2. make it editable, or make any given element on a page editable
      3. let you evaluate any code written into the scratch space

      scratch.js aims for something something similar, and though laudable it falls short of what I actually crave (and what I imagine would be be most beneficial/appreciated by the public).

    1. While Microsoft is entirely in the right by reminding people of the terms they agreed to, many users are taking issue with the fact that they hadn’t been warned about the limit in the eight years it’s been in place, and many people are now being told they are over the limit after years of being over.
    1. consumer friendly

      Including the "consumer" here is a red herring. We're meant to identify as the consumer and so take from this statement that our rights and best interests have been written into these BigTech-crafted laws.

      But a "consumer" is different from a "citizen," a "person," we the people.

  8. Jun 2021
  9. May 2021
  10. Apr 2021
    1. This project will be great for instruction and portable reproducible science

      This is what I'm aiming for with triplescripts.org. Initially, I'm mostly focused on the reproducibility the build process for software. In principle, it can encompass all kinds of use, and I actually want it to, but for practical reasons I'm trying to go for manageable sized bites instead of very large ones.

    1. (Yes, I realize from a technical, end-user perspective this really doesn't matter.)

      The word "technical" in this sentence doesn't seem to belong or to clarify anything. I think it would be clearer without it.

      But I think I understand what he's saying, which is that technical details don't matter to the end user. They only know/see/care if it works or not.

    1. With Stack Overflow for Teams being a flexible platform, we’ve seen customers use it for a wide variety of use cases: A platform to help onboard new employees A self-serve help center to reduce support tickets Collaboration and documentation to drive innersource initiatives Breaking down silos and driving org wide transformation like cloud migration efforts A direct customer support platform Enable people who are working towards a common goal, whether a startup or a side project, to develop a collective knowledge base
    1. We are continuing an overhaul of our default startup editor in order to provide relevant extension-contributed tips and walkthroughs, intended to make both core VS Code features and extension contributions more approachable to new users.
    1. # +devise_for+ is meant to play nicely with other routes methods. For example, # by calling +devise_for+ inside a namespace, it automatically nests your devise # controllers: # # namespace :publisher do # devise_for :account # end
  11. Mar 2021
    1. Yes I fully understood that this was going to be a cryptic puzzle game and that it required research outside of the game. I expected this to have ARG elements and require abstract thinking. However, I also expected it to be longer than 2 minutes of content. You are given 10 pages to read in-game, they might as well have just been screenshots posted somewhere on the internet. And you have no way to input your solutions in game.
    1. User stories are a great way of designing features, but when you are designing community features on the web it is also useful to have user stories that start “I am an absolute arsehole and I want to…”

      Solid advice.

    1. I would much rather have a "cosine" module than a "trigonometry" module because chances are good I only need a small fraction of the utilities provided by the larger trig module.
    2. Small modules are extremely versatile and easy to compose together in an app with any number of other modules that suit your needs.
    3. Second, I don't agree that there are too many small modules. In fact, I wish every common function existed as its own module. Even the maintainers of utility libraries like Underscore and Lodash have realized the benefits of modularity and allowed you to install individual utilities from their library as separate modules. From where I sit that seems like a smart move. Why should I import the entirety of Underscore just to use one function? Instead I'd rather see more "function suites" where a bunch of utilities are all published separately but under a namespace or some kind of common name prefix to make them easier to find. The way Underscore and Lodash have approached this issue is perfect. It gives consumers of their packages options and flexibility while still letting people like Dave import the whole entire library if that's what they really want to do.
    1. Of course user expectations for titles are the most important thing. You don’t want to sell a tiny game at AAA price, because you won’t sell many copies and you’ll make your gamers feel ripped off.
    1. multi-dimensional erector set that we're going forever

      "A multi-dimensional erector set that will go on forever..."

      No, unfortunately not forever.

    1. We don’t want to invalidate the input if the user removes all text. They may need a moment to think, but the invalidated state sets off an unnecessary alarm.
  12. Feb 2021
    1. I think one thing would have been a solution to basically everything here: Player created maps. As Im involved in many modding communities, I know for a fact that player created content can be vital in making games last so much longer, and the quality can shoot for the stars, Player created maps would have been fantastic for this game.
    1. The bare bones operation without any Trailblazery is implemented in the trailblazer-operation gem and can be used without our stack.
    2. While Trailblazer offers you abstraction layers for all aspects of Ruby On Rails, it does not missionize you. Wherever you want, you may fall back to the "Rails Way" with fat models, monolithic controllers, global helpers, etc. This is not a bad thing, but allows you to step-wise introduce Trailblazer's encapsulation in your app without having to rewrite it.
    3. Only use what you like.
    4. you can pick which layers you want. Trailblazer doesn't impose technical implementations
    1. Couldn't find on Steam. https://steamdb.info/app/793300/ claims that it is there, but https://store.steampowered.com/app/793300/?curator_clanid=4777282&utm_source=SteamDB just redirects to home page.

      Don't redirect to a different URL, esp. without a message explaining why it did so instead of keeping me on the page that I request. That's just incorrect behavior, and a poor UX. Respond with a 404 if the page doesn't exist.!

      That way (among other things), I could use Wayback Machine extension to see if I can find a cached version there.

      But even that (http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://store.steampowered.com/app/793300) is saying "huh?" so I'm confused.

      Where did it go and why?

      I guess it's no longer available, because this page says:

      section_type    ownersonly
      ReleaseState    unavailable
      

      ... but why?

    1. $ nix-env --switch-profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/my-profile $ nix-env --switch-profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/default These commands switch to the my-profile and default profile, respectively. If the profile doesn’t exist, it will be created automatically.

      learn more about profiles; creating new profiles was new info

    2. Chapter 10. ProfilesProfiles and user environments are Nix’s mechanism for implementing the ability to allow different users to have different configurations, and to do atomic upgrades and rollbacks.
    3. user environment
    4. In Nix, different users can have different “views” on the set of installed applications. That is, there might be lots of applications present on the system (possibly in many different versions), but users can have a specific selection of those active — where “active” just means that it appears in a directory in the user’s PATH. Such a view on the set of installed applications is called a user environment, which is just a directory tree consisting of symlinks to the files of the active applications.
    1. Have you ever been emailed something from a company and tried to reply only to be frustrated with a failed-to-send message response? A no-reply email frustrates your customers.Instead, use a dedicated email to send out your messages and to keep business emails in a central location so you can answer customer concerns quickly and decisively. This level of customer service will help develop your reputation as a company that cares about its customers.
    1. Then recently I was shopping at the John Lewis website, and they brought up the Verified By Visa page in an iframe - wonderful! I'm still looking at the John Lewis site, and all that's happening is I'm being asked for my Verified By Visa password - no problem. Although as a web developer I know that there's no technical difference between that and a plain old redirect-there-redirect-back, the user experience is so much better!
  13. Jan 2021
    1. Free software is a necessary but sometimes insufficient requirement to build domestication immunity. Two more measures include simplicity and open platforms.

      Ideas for preventing user domestication

    2. WhatsApp rose by trapping previously-free beings in their corral and changing their habits to create dependence on masters. Over time, this made it difficult or impossible to return to their previous lifestyle. That process should sound familiar: it’s eerily similar to the domestication of animals. I call this type of vendor lock-in user domestication: the removal of user autonomy to trap users into serving vendors.

      This is a good definition of "user domestication". Such an apt metaphor.

    3. a class of businesses models I call “user domestication”. The domestication of users is high on my list of problems plaguing the human race, and is worth a detailed explanation.

      This portends to be an interesting concept: user domestication

    1. Group Rules from the Admins1NO POSTING LINKS INSIDE OF POST - FOR ANY REASONWe've seen way too many groups become a glorified classified ad & members don't like that. We don't want the quality of our group negatively impacted because of endless links everywhere. NO LINKS2NO POST FROM FAN PAGES / ARTICLES / VIDEO LINKSOur mission is to cultivate the highest quality content inside the group. If we allowed videos, fan page shares, & outside websites, our group would turn into spam fest. Original written content only3NO SELF PROMOTION, RECRUITING, OR DM SPAMMINGMembers love our group because it's SAFE. We are very strict on banning members who blatantly self promote their product or services in the group OR secretly private message members to recruit them.4NO POSTING OR UPLOADING VIDEOS OF ANY KINDTo protect the quality of our group & prevent members from being solicited products & services - we don't allow any videos because we can't monitor what's being said word for word. Written post only.

      Wow, that's strict.

    1. There's a lot of advice online showing how to get rid of snap. (e.g.: https://cialu.net/how-to-disable-and-remove-completely-snaps-in-ubuntu-linux/ worked for me) so the only result (so far, a few months later) is that Chromium has lost a user, and having upgraded Ubuntu since the original Warty, if snap becomes obligatory I'll have to take a look at Mint, or Devuan.
    1. We talked, for example, about how stores and governments were adding new rules and social distancing guidelines, often communicated through purely visual means, like stickers on the floor and printed signs. Mr. Johnston acknowledged that it was a tough new time for businesses, but shared that he faces new types of exclusion as a result.

      this just makes me wonder how society in general will cope with this. Companies nay be more sensitive to all these challenges COVID has pushed in fast forward mode.

      This is not only about designers being in the front seat of the business development plan, is about we as users setting-up these expectations!

    1. While the very same software might be in a PPA and a snap, the fact that the snap is shown in Ubuntu Software is the point I’m making. Many people use that to install software. So making software appear there is beneficial for developers - their software is found, and beneficial for users - they discover new software.
    2. In addition, PPAs are awful for software discovery. Average users have no idea what a PPA is, nor how to configure or install software from it. Part of the point of snap is to make software discovery easier. We can put new software in the “Editor’s Picks” in Ubuntu Software then people will discover and install it. Having software in a random PPA somewhere online is only usable by experts. Normal users have no visibility to it.
    3. The benefits for developers do reflect on benefits for users, with more software delivered faster and more securely.
    4. But now Chromium is no more available as deb, so what to expect ?
    5. We must think of the users more than the technique itself

      Good example/application/sub-case of "user-centric".

    1. The download attribute can accept an optional value, allowing the author to create a custom, human-friendly name for the downloaded file.
    2. Now they have what they need to make an informed decision, with a little intentional ambiguity to temper expectations.
    3. For larger files, the wait time can be especially problematic. A standard download is an all-or-nothing affair—interruptions can corrupt them and render them useless. Worse, it can waste valuable data on a metered data plan, an unfortunately all-too-relevant concern.
  14. Dec 2020
    1. It took faaaaaaaaaaaaar too long to signup at this site to reply to you. This site rejected the real address I use for amazon, username.place@cocaine.ninja so I created an email address that I'll never check again just to signup here. I have zero tolerance for spam.
    2. no post edit, eh?Fine.
  15. Nov 2020
    1. Include the ability to dismiss or decline the promotion. Remember the user's preference if they do this and only re-prompt if there's a change in the user's relationship with your content such as if they signed in or completed a purchase.
    2. Keep promotions outside of the flow of your user journeys. For example, in a PWA login page, put the call to action below the login form and submit button. Disruptive use of promotional patterns reduces the usability of your PWA and negatively impacts your engagement metrics.
    1. rickrolling

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

      While Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," has existed since the 1980s, it was user-generated-content spawned from 4chan that linked the song to the bait-and-switch practice of surprising unsuspecting internet users with it after being promised something else (Dewey, 2014).

      Works Cited:

      Official Rick Astley. (2009). Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Video) [Video]. YouTube.

      Dewey, C. (2014). Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/

    2. where some of the internet’s worst scandals have been fomented

      While 4chan has developed a mostly negative public perception for itself, with the Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey even calling it "the Internet's own bogeyman," it also has brought attention to User-Generated-Content as beloved as Rickrolling and Chocolate Rain (Dewey, 2014). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA

      Works Cited:

      Dewey, C. (2014). Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/

      TayZonday. (2007). "Chocolate Rain" Original Song by Tay Zonday [Video]. YouTube.

    1. The Web needs to be accessible to everyone who wants to participate, who wants to share their knowledge with the world, who is not satisfied with the status quo and ready to change culture and society. Yet instead, we are currently building a Web of superficial distractions that is becoming less and less accessible to future generations.

      i am dead cold afraid that the web that is coming seems like it will not support extensions. the bookmarklet is dead, extensions are only on desktop. websec has won, sites are secure, and alas, secured against the almighty user who we all agreed we served.

      what sites do- now that's also been, frankly, not great.

  16. Oct 2020
    1. We know children don’t get sick just during office hours. At our evening and weekend Urgent Care Clinic in Bellevue, your child’s minor illness or injury will be treated by our team of pediatric experts
    1. Issue grooming: There appears to be a variety of different failure modes and user error/misconfiguration scenarios (all largely historic) described here.
    1. To silence circular dependencies warnings for let's say moment library use: // rollup.config.js import path from 'path' const onwarn = warning => { // Silence circular dependency warning for moment package if ( warning.code === 'CIRCULAR_DEPENDENCY' && !warning.importer.indexOf(path.normalize('node_modules/moment/src/lib/')) ) { return } console.warn(`(!) ${warning.message}`) }
    1. Identify your user agents When deploying software that makes requests to other sites, you should set a custom User-Agent header to identify the software and provide a means to contact its maintainers. Many of the automated requests we receive have generic user-agent headers such as Java/1.6.0 or Python-urllib/2.1 which provide no information on the actual software responsible for making the requests.
  17. Sep 2020
    1. In '07, safety implied an unacceptable performance hit on slow single-core devices with 128MiB of RAM.

      In 2007, safety implied an unacceptable performance hit for hosting extensions, on devices with one core and 128MiB ram. In 2020, the lack of extensions is the ultimate app-ification of the web, the reduction of the web into a useless, powerless medium where users have no control.

    1. In my opinion, because Webpack was one of the first bundlers, is heavily packed with features, and has to support swathes of legacy code and legacy module systems, it can make configuring Webpack cumbersome and challenging to use. Over the years, I’ve written package managers, compilers, and bundlers, and I still find configuring Webpack to be messy and unintuitive.
    1. What I believe should happen is the Svelte compiler should, when a promise is passed to onMount, realise that a promise has been passed, and await the result of the function to be used as the onDestroy function. i.e, it should behave the exact same way for an async function as it does for a non-async function (if this is possible)
    1. Over the last year, we have gained a better understanding of the performance and correctness characteristics of the various rendering technologies available on the web, and have been experimenting with a second approach that uses CanvasKit. CanvasKit brings Skia to the web using WebAssembly and WebGL, enabling a hardware-accelerated drawing surface that improves our ability to render complex and intensive graphics efficiently.

      you are setting dynamite to hypertext & turning the web into a webassembly powered VNC viewer. this is an awful thing for users, for the web in general. please desist. please i beg you stop.

      the web is not for pushing pixels into people's faces. the web is a system of interlinking hypertext, a place where structured information can be viewed/enhanced by users, navigators, & extensions.

    1. WebAssembly is pretty great, but should web applications just be rendered to a canvas, and every application brings its own graphics toolkit? Do we really want anti-aliasing differences between web applications? Applications-in-containers is a thing - look at Qubes - but it’s not really something that users should want.

      Flutter seems intent on turning applications into mini-VNC sessions into webassembly, with CanvasKit work proceeding full steam ahead. can you please for the love of god NOT, Flutter? abomination.

      the web is more than a means to pump pixels at people's faces; it is a system of structured information, that users, their navigators, & extensions have rights & capabilities to traverse.

    2. The idea of a web browser being something we can comprehend, of a web page being something that more people can make, feels exciting to me.

      my personal hope is that we can build a more sensible coherent web, that exudes the machines inside of it, by better harkening towards custom elements ("webcomponents"). move the page from being a bunch of machines in javascript, to a bunch of machines in hypertext.

      and then build pages that start to expose & let the user play with the dom. start to build experiences that bridge the gap into the machine/page.

      and keep going. keep going. build wilder web experiences. build more machines. and keep building battlesuits for the user, out of more componenets, out of more web, to let them wrestle & tangle with & manipulate & experiment & hack on & see & observe & learn about the truthful, honest, direct hypertext that we all navigate.

    1. Mais il ne songe pas aux causes

      C’est ce que font les interfaces dites «user-friendly»: elles nous dispensent de penser, elles nous font oublier de penser.

      La transparence de la technologie, sa présence normalisée, voire imperceptible dans la vie quotidienne est aussi une bonne chose – c’est la tâche du design de faire bénéficier une technologie de pointe au plus grand nombre.

      Seulement, le numérique dissimule des enjeux de vie privée que nous ne pouvons percevoir directement par les sens: les enjeux sont invisibilisés, et les technologies «user-friendly» étendent leur pouvoir abusent du fait que les mécanismes échappent à notre perception, à notre entendement.

  18. Aug 2020
    1. So when we ask users to answer questions that deal with the future, we have to keep in mind the context in which they’re answering. They can tell us about a feature they think will make their lives better, but user val-idation will always be necessary to make sure that past user’s beliefs about future user are accurate.

    Tags

    Annotators

  19. Jul 2020
    1. In fact, developers often tend to forget a simple, almost elementary fact: if users want to close the application or leave a site, they will — doesn’t matter which obstacles are placed on their path to the exit-button. The more obstacles there are the more negative the user experience will be.
    2. As designers, it is our decision to provide users with a clear, unambiguous choice, but we have no right to decide for users which choice they make.
    3. Any deviations from this convention result in a more design-oriented and less user-oriented design.
    4. Users also don’t like to deal with dozens of opened tabs and some visitors tend to become quickly angry with the disabled back button. Furthermore, some visitors may not even realize that a new window was opened and hit the back-button mercilessly — without any result. That’s not user-friendly, and that’s not a good user experience we, web designers, strive for.
    1. Matamala-Gomez. M., Brivio E., Chirico. A., Malighetti. C., Realdon. O., Serino. S., Dakanalis. A., Corno. G., Polli. N., Cacciatore. C., Riva. Giuseppe., Mantovani. F (2020) User Experience and usability of a new virtual reality set-up to treat eating disorders: a pilot study. PsyArXiv Preprints. Retrieved from: https://psyarxiv.com/b38ym/

  20. Jun 2020
    1. Zoom didn't do this to comply with local law.

      They did this because they don't want to lose customers in China.

      This is just capitalistic greed.

      Shutting down activists over a dictatorship is wrong, and it is actually as simple as that.

    1. The EARN IT act turns Section 230 protection into a hypocritical bargaining chip. At a high level, what the bill proposes is a system where companies have to earn Section 230 protection by following a set of designed-by-committee “best practices” that are extraordinarily unlikely to allow end-to-end encryption. Anyone who doesn’t comply with these recommendations will lose their Section 230 protection.
    2. Broadly speaking, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects online platforms in the United States from legal liability for the behavior of their users. In the absence of this protection, many of the apps and services that are critical to the way the internet functions today may have never been created in the first place – or they couldn’t have been created in America.
    1. A year’s worth of cajoling back and forth has ultimately resulted in the EARN-IT bill wending its way through the U.S. system, a bill that, if passed, would see messaging services become legally responsible for the content on their platforms. While not mandating backdoors, per se, without some form of probes into message content, the argument runs that the punitive risks become unsurvivable.
    2. there’s a bill tiptoeing through the U.S. Congress that could inflict the backdoor virus that law enforcement agencies have been trying to inflict on encryption for years... The choice for tech companies comes down to weakening their own encryption and endangering the privacy and security of all their users, or foregoing protections and potentially facing liability in a wave of lawsuits.
    1. Once the platforms introduce backdoors, those arguing against such a move say, bad guys will inevitably steal the keys. Lawmakers have been clever. No mention of backdoors at all in the proposed legislation or the need to break encryption. If you transmit illegal or dangerous content, they argue, you will be held responsible. You decide how to do that. Clearly there are no options to some form of backdoor.
    1. Despite its opposition, EARN-IT is the clearest threat yet to end-to-end encryption, given this clever twist in pushing the onus onto the platforms to avoid transmitting illegal content, rather than mandating a lawful interception approach.
    2. Tiring of the privacy and safety debate, those behind EARN-IT have proposed making the platforms responsible for the content they transmit, encrypted or not. This would mean, as explained by Sophos, that tech companies “either weaken their own encryption and endanger the privacy and security of all their users, or forego protections and potentially face liability in a wave of lawsuits.”
    1. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has notable safe-harbor provisions which protect Internet service providers from the consequences of their users' actions. (Similarly, the EU directive on electronic commerce provides a similar provision of "mere conduit" which, while not exactly the same, serves much the same function as the DMCA safe harbor in this instance.)
  21. May 2020
    1. Don’t go to code academy, go to design academy. Be advocates of the user & consumer. It’s not about learning how to code, it’s about translating real-world needs to technological specifications in just ways that give end users agency and equity in design, development and delivery. Be a champion of user-centric design. Learn how to steward data and offer your help.

      The importance of learning to design, and interpreting/translating real-world needs.

    1. allows you to deploy "'strict-dynamic' in a backwards compatible way, without requiring user-agent sniffing
    1. A "tag" is a snippet of code that allows digital marketing teams to collect data, set cookies or integrate third-party content like social media widgets into a site.

      This is a bad re-purposing of the word "tag", which already has specific meanings in computing.

      Why do we need a new word for this? Why not just call it a "script" or "code snippet"?

    1. It’s worth saying though that while the law may give you up to 30 days to honor these requests, most subscribers won’t. It is therefore prudent to honor opt-out requests promptly or risk being marked as spam and compromising the total legitimacy of your associated address.
    1. What I don't like is how they've killed so many useful extensions without any sane method of overriding their decisions.
    2. I know, you don't trust Mozilla but do you also not trust the developer? I absolutely do! That is the whole point of this discussion. Mozilla doesn't trust S3.Translator or jeremiahlee but I do. They blocked page-translator for pedantic reasons. Which is why I want the option to override their decision to specifically install few extensions that I'm okay with.
  22. Apr 2020
    1. There will be those within organisations that won't be too keen on the approaches above due to the friction it presents to some users.
    2. This is one possible path to take in that you simply reject the registration and ask the user to create another password. Per NIST's guidance though, do explain why the password has been rejected:
    3. I suggest being very clear that there has not been a security incident on the site they're logging into and that the password was exposed via a totally unrelated site

      (also the above image)

    1. By rendering important parts of the application with the real data on the server-side, an isomorphic application can show a meaningful initial page. On the other hand, client rendering application can’t show any meaningful information until it fetches all external data it needs. In the meantime, the only thing a user will see is a loading indicator.
    1. One of the drawbacks of waiting until someone signs in again to check their password is that a user may simply stay signed in for a long time without signing out. I suppose that could be an argument in favor of limiting the maximum duration of a session or remember-me token, but as far as user experience, I always find it annoying when I was signed in and a website arbitrarily signs me out without telling me why.
    1. There is a fundamental difference between these two kinds of content: the user comments are stored in our databases, which means their Markdown syntax can be normalized (e.g. by adding or removing whitespace, fixing the indentation, or inserting missing Markdown specifiers until they render properly). The Markdown documents stored in Git repositories, however, cannot be touched at all, as their contents are hashed as part of Git’s storage model.
    1. Each request to the API must be accompanied by a user agent request header. Typically this should be the name of the app consuming the service.
    1. Did you expect the temp directory to get printed? In the last example, we saw the directories ./temp and ./C/temp got printed, but not now. This is the effect of the -print option. By default, the find command prints all the files matching the criteria. However, once the -print option is specified, it will print files only on explicit print instructions. In this find command, -print is associated in the other side of the OR condition, and hence nothing will get printed from the 1st part of the condition.
    1. One mistake that we made when creating the import/export experience for Blogger was relying on one HTTP transaction for an import or an export. HTTP connections become fragile when the size of the data that you're transferring becomes large. Any interruption in that connection voids the action and can lead to incomplete exports or missing data upon import. These are extremely frustrating scenarios for users and, unfortunately, much more prevalent for power users with lots of blog data.
    2. The point is that users should be in control of their data, which means they need an easy way of accessing it. Providing an API or the ability to download 5,000 photos one at a time doesn't exactly make it easy for your average user to move data in or out of a product.
    1. Thousands of enterprises around the world have done exhaustive security reviews of our user, network, and data center layers and confidently selected Zoom for complete deployment. 

      This doesn't really account for the fact that Zoom have committed some atrociously heinous acts, such as (and not limited to):

  23. Mar 2020
    1. It won't let me go beyond this page. I'm sure I've answered the CAPTCHA correctly at least some of the 10+ times I've tried. What's going on?

      I can't even access their static website to find contact information for how to contact them about this problem!

    1. Robots are currently suffering extreme discrimination due to a few false assumptions, mainly that they’re distinctly separate actors from humans. My point of view is that robots and humans often need to behave in the same way, so it’s a fruitless and pointless endeavour to try distinguishing them.
    1. For years, the most used solution was to add an ugly captcha to the form, with some hard to read letters, numbers etc on an image. The user had to type these in an input field. The spambots have a hard time reading these images: problem solved!But this solution is not very user-friendly: it’s ugly, and annoys users so much you might lose conversions.
    1. Don’t go to code academy, go to design academy. Be advocates of the user & consumer. It’s not about learning how to code, it’s about translating real-world needs to technological specifications in just ways that give end users agency and equity in design, development and delivery. Be a champion of user-centric design. Learn how to steward data and offer your help.
  24. Feb 2020
    1. To add insult to injury I learn that when Cloudflare automatically detects an anomaly with your domain they permanently delete all DNS records. Mine won't be difficult to restore, but I'm not sure why this is necessary. Surely it would be possible for Cloudflare to mark a domain as disabled without irrevocably deleting it? Combined with the hacky audit log, I'm left with the opinion that for some reason Cloudflare decided to completely half-ass the part of their system that is responsible for deleting everything that matters to a user.

      ...and this is why some companies should not grow to become too big for the good of their customers.

    1. Do Browse like a user wouldTake natural pauses that users would take to consume page contentFocus on the most common use cases, rather than all the possible use casesTake note of pages where forms/logins occur, you will likely need to complete some scripting there
  25. Jan 2020
  26. Dec 2019
    1. TUI

      I assume this means text-based UI?? First time I've seen this term.

  27. plaintext-productivity.net plaintext-productivity.net
    1. Avoiding complicated outlining or mind-mapping software saves a bunch of mouse clicks or dreaming up complicated visualizations (it helps if you are a linear thinker).

      Hmm. I'm not sure I agree with this thought/sentiment (though it's hard to tell since it's an incomplete sentence). I think visualizations and mind-mapping software might be an even better way to go, in terms of efficiency of editing (since they are specialized for the task), enjoyment of use, etc.

      The main thing text files have going for them is flexibility, portability, client-neutrality, the ability to get started right now without researching and evaluating a zillion competing GUI app alternatives.

    1. An ssh public key in a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file can have a command="" option which forces a particular command to be executed when the key is used to authenticate an ssh connection. This is a security control that mitigates against private key compromise. This is great when you only need to execute a single command. But if you need to perform multiple tasks, you would normally need to create and install a separate key pair for each command, or just not bother making use of forced commands and allow the key to be used to execute any command.
    1. echo "from="${MYIP%% *}",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty,command="rsync ${SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND#* }" $(ssh-keygen -yf ~/.ssh/rsync_rsa)" | ssh targetserver "cat - >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys" Note that the ‘command=’ restriction (http://larstobi.blogspot.ch/2011/01/restrict-ssh-access-to-one-command-but.html) will not apply if ‘/etc/sshd_config’ has already a ‘ForceCommand’ directive.
    1. Might be a little too low-level (even with GUIs) for some teams of users. GPG and Git both require some setup and experience in these tools, or the willingness to learn. Porting a GPG key from machine to machine is not trivial.
  28. Nov 2019
  29. Oct 2019
  30. Sep 2019
  31. Aug 2019
    1. "But in moving towards flat design we are losing much of the wisdom that was embedded in the old 3D style of UI, for example: a user must be able to glance at a screen and know what is an interactive element (e.g., a button or link) and what is not (e.g., a label or motto); a user must be able to tell at a glance what an interactive element does (does it initiate a process, link to another page, download a document, etc.?); the UI should be explorable, discoverable and self-explanatory. But many apps and websites, in the interest of a clean, spartan visual appearance, leave important UI controls hidden until the mouse hovers over just the right area or the app is in just the right state. This leaves the user in the dark, often frustrated and disempowered."