It's made a lot of sense in general if you think about the business models around open source products. An extensive test suite gives you the ability to engineer changes effectively and efficiently, meaning that you can also add additional value on top of released versions better than everyone else.
I've occasionally spent time doing and even fighting for latency optimisations that supposedly don't matter in the great scheme of things, but that resulted in customers leaving positive feedback about how the product is noticeably more responsive and/or feels more polished than the competition in those specific areas. It can definitely make a difference.
It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.
The themed UIs of that era were very superficial -- if they applied to serious software at all, they were just a cosmetic layer on top of an otherwise well-engineered interface, and could be easily disabled. Most people I knew, for example, disabled the theming engine that shipped with Windows XP. Most applications that supported UI skinning still had a default or fallback UI that adhered well enough to modern conventions.
Not so much anymore. The abandonment of any coherent organizing principle to UI layout in favor of pure aesthetics has been a massive regression. Reasonably complex software often doesn't even include menu bars anymore, for example.
> As an aside, I know tons of experienced "Senior" developers who just suck at their jobs. The problem is they have tons of experience in delivering terrible products based on terrible code and architectural decisions.
It's a classic tragedy of engineering; you can actually ship with almost anything, and just successfully delivering a product reinforces a feeling that your choices were good, no matter how arbitrary they were in practice.
People can get really confident that what they're doing is tried and true, while it's simply the only approach they've had for all of their career.
Apple have always preferred preserving letter forms over hinting, so Macs are therefore also "blurry" on lower DPI displays. The reason they aren't these days is because the DPI is higher.
Usually when people complain about this, the comparison is to Windows, which prefers strong hinting, i.e. snapping the font shapes to within (sub)pixel boundaries.
There also used to be patent encumbrance issues around subpixel rendering, making Linux font rendering on TFTs overall worse by default, but as of 2019 those have expired. Some distributions had already enabled those features anyway.
With any reasonable resolution screen (1080p or more), you can have both good preservation of letter forms and a non-blurry image, simply by applying a sharpening filter after antialiasing. Some image downsampling methods, such as Lanczos filtering, effectively do this for you. The tradeoff is one can detect some very fine 'ringing' artifacts around the sharpened transitions, but these don't impact readability in any way.
I guess in the same sense that every functional aircraft is. Taking everything apart and putting it back together, replacing worn out parts, is considered normal maintenance.
After breaking my Google Assistant with a custom ROM, I unintentionally found out that yes, there is a setting for the default assistant app in the settings. I don't know if any actual alternatives exist, but you can definitely change the default settings. My issue was that Google Assistant didn't realise that it was set as the default, and my attempts to launch it just brought up a prompt to configure it as the default assistant.
The Pixel launcher is deeply integrated with Google, so that doesn't support switching search providers I think. You can install any other launcher you want if you dislike searching through Google from the home screen.
The expert opinions that I've seen so far have indicated that geoengineering at any scale that we're realistically able to produce on a short notice is unlikely to have a sufficient effect on climate change. Essentially it's a pipe dream at best, and a way to create additional (localised) disasters at worst.
If the only proper argument for doing it is that "the left" is against it and "the right" is for it, that seems comparatively weak.
That sounds like a critique far more applicable to non-experts arguing that there's no need for any kind of modification to our consumption patterns or energy use, because if "the left" really cared about the environment they'd just set off our nukes or radically change the composition of our oceans instead
It would be strange, if this were truly an emergency, for people who believed it to be an emergency of the highest degree...
To whine and screech "that's too dangerous, don't do that" when other people were proposing solutions. These are the same people who are touted as the experts, mind you. This means that when journalists and talking heads and other jackasses say "but the experts don't even think those things will work", they are talking about the same people who claim that there is an emergency in the first place.
They aren't interested in potential solutions. It's just an attempt to wrestle political power away from those who currently have it and implement economy-murdering policy because they're mad poor people eat meat.
