>"Why would you want SMS app with "ads and in app purchases" when so many fully featured ad free with no in app purchases SMS apps exist?"
I have been using it for many years. Long before there were any good other options. There might be better options now, I don't know. I have been happy with Textra, though. Updated regularly, lots of features, and reliable.
>"Everyone has their own message app, and outside US, almost no one uses it for anything other than SMS. For everything else, it's Whatsapp, Telegram, WeChat, Signal, etc."
I have never used Samsung's, although it is on my phone. Or any other manufacturer's (LG, Moto, etc). But I also don't use Google Messages. I use Textra with every phone, regardless of brand. But I also don't use any other messaging except SMS. I just want something that works and does what I want.
If you thought what they could fake in the late 60's was impressive, imagine what they an do now.
It just sucks to see them screw up the illusion with such trivial mistakes. Are you seriously expecting me to believe they'd go with a broken toilet? Or use Outlook?
Or iPhones?
>"How exactly would they serve us the ads?"
With text and static images.
>"For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."
Yeah, I have seen some of that already. Some web developers are just plain evil.
I was hoping at the bottom of the article it would say that Professor Utonium accidentally added Chemical X.
The fines should be proportional to actual damage caused (ie: 100% coverage of any interest on loans, any extra spending the person needed to do in consequence, loss of compound interest, damage to credit rating along with any additional spending this resulted in, and any medical costs that can reasonably be attributed to stress/anxiety). It would be difficult to get an exact figure per person, but a rough estimate of probable actual damage would be sufficient. Add that to the total direct loss - not the money that went through any individual involved, and THEN double that total. This becomes the minimum, not the maximum. You then allow the jury to factor in emotional costs on top of that.
In such cases as this, the statutary upper limit on fines should not apply. SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that laws and the Constitution can have reasonable exceptions and this would seem to qualify.
If a person has died in the meantime, where the death certificate indicates a cause of death that is medically associated with anxiety or depression, each person invovled should also be charged with manslaughter per such case.
>"It can buffer without playing."
True. Anything is better than autoplaying. Although I would prefer delaying buffering as well. I don't care that it might take 2 seconds longer to start a video, later.
No video (or animated image) should ever load/autoplay unless the user interacts with that element, indicating he/she wants to play it. Same with audio.
That is how I have Firefox set up. I can't imagine why anyone would want something different, unless the user wants to whitelist the site (like I do with my video cameras, since I do want those to play automatically).
I mostly run application fullscreen and switch between them. The only exception is when I'm comparing the content of two windows (in which case I tile horizontally or vertically) and file selection (floating).
When an application uses the entire screen without the window decorations needed in a regular window manager, a screen's limited real estate is in fact better used in a tiled window manager.
I have not seen AI code that is *more* efficient than human code, yet. I have seen AI write efficient, compact code when pressed, very, very hard to do so, but only then. Otherwise, in my hands, and those of my developer colleagues, AI produces mostly correct, but inefficient, verbose code.
Could that change? Sure, I suppose. But right now it is not the case, and the value system that is driving auto-generated code (i.e., the training set of extant code), does not put a premium on efficiency.
Tiled windows don't solve a problem. They're just a different workflow. I've used both for decades and neither is inherently faster or better. It's just what you prefer.
At any rate, don't knock it till you try it.
I have lots of older machines with 4GB of RAM running the latest Linux Mint and perform just fine with Cinnamon + Firefox + LibreOffice for casual use and browsing (as long as it is an SSD). The majority of RAM is eaten by whatever web browser you are using and by how much. That is what will usually dictate your RAM requirements under Linux far more than the OS (unless you are gaming or doing something major like video editing).
4GB is a bit lean, and has been, so I do agree 6GB is more realistic. But running MS-Windows 11 with 4GB? Good luck with that!
Web browsers are absolute hogs, and, in part, that's because web sites are absolute hogs. Web sites are now full-blown applications that were written without regard to memory footprint or efficiency. I blame the developers who write their code on lovely, large, powerful machines (because devs should get good tools, I get that), but then don't suffer the pain of running them on perfectly good 8 GB laptops that *were* top-of-the line 10 years ago, but are now on eBay for $100. MS Teams is a perfect example of this. What a steaming pile of crap. My favored laptop is said machine, favored because of the combination of ultra-light weight and eminently portable size, and zoom works just fine on it, but teams is unusable. Slack is OK, if that's nearly the only web site you're visiting. Eight frelling GB to run a glorified chat room.
The thing that gets my goat, however, is that the laptop I used in the late 1990s was about the same form factor as this one, had 64 MB (yes, MB) of main memory, and booted up Linux back then just about as fast. If memory serves, the system took about 2 MB, once up. The CPU clock on that machine was in the 100 MHz range. Even not counting for the massive architectural improvements, my 2010s-era laptop should boot an order of magnitude faster. It does not.
Why? Because a long time ago, it became OK to include vast numbers of libraries because programmers were too lazy to implement something on their own, so you got 4, 5, 6 or more layers of abstraction, as each library recursively calls packages only slightly lower-level to achieve its goals. I fear that with AI coding, it will only get worse.
And don't get me started on the massive performance regression that so-called modern languages represent, even when compiled. Hell in a handbasket? Yes. Because CPU cycles are stupidly cheap now, and we don't have to work hard to eke out every bit of performance, so we don't bother.
Elliptic paraboloids for sale.
