There was a joke bumper-sticker in the valley back in the day that said "Windows 95 == Macintosh 89". But the critique of this was "Macintosh 95 == Macintosh 89". In the same way, "NeXTStep 89 == MacOS X 2001 == MacOS X 2015 == MacOS X 2025" except that they hadn't steved everyone from the user experience research group in 2001 and there were vestiges of #a11y features left in Yosemite.
Complaining your current version of MacOS X has a worse user experience than it did 10 years ago is like buying a Tesla and then complaining about its resale value.
Once long ago I worked for a small company doing unified messaging as their Security Architect. In that job it meant I was a software engineer with domain experience in implementing cryptographic protocols. I was well prepared for this role due to my experience at RSA Data Security (when RSA was a middleware vendor) and Certicom. If you've used an ATM machine in the US in the last 30 years, you've likely used the modular exponentiator I wrote for POWER/PowerPC.
So here I am at this small company that's running out of runway. I'm meeting with my boss, let's call him Mark (not his real name). We're discussing what features we can add in the next three months before half the company is laid off. At the top of the list is the device-key-regen feature that would allow the user (through an arcane series of difficult-to-accidentally-perform user inputs) to regenerate a key and re-submit it for certification. It required changes to the device code, the security gateway code and to the manual. Mark is adamant we should not do this. It would "distract us from other high-value tasks." I then explain the devices will eventually brick themselves without some way to update, or at least re-certify device keys.
Fast forward a month or two and I get laid off. No one buys the IP, so it's no great loss. Just one more project on the burning pile of money called Silicon Valley.
Seven years later I'm working at a company in Seattle well known for a ebook reader that rhymes with "Bindle." Their first-gen devices have a problem. In three weeks, the certs for the device keys will expire, effectively disallowing them from authenticating themselves to network services. I get called in because I had the words "certificate" and "X.509" on my resume. It turns out the manager of the team who built the device software was my old boss Mark. The one thing he remembered is that allowing devices to update (or at least re-certify) keys requires changes to a lot of different software and there was no down-side to not doing it last time.
It is true... there was no down-side to not adding this functionality last time. The company died before anyone other than a smattering of companies could see our IP, and the few beta-users we recruited stopped using the product before the device key certs expired.
Back at the company in Seattle whose logo is half of a smiley face: after MANY failed updates, they eventually pushed out an update that re-certified the existing keys (i.e. - it submitted the public key to a third-party registration authority, authenticating the message with the device's private key.) Not a perfect solution, but given that they waited until about three days before devices started failing, not the worst in the world.
But there was a three-day window in which the devices needed to be on, notice there was a software update and convinced their users to press the "install update" button. Some large number of first-gen devices were not even turned on during this period. When they were later turned on, there was no way to get them the update that allowed them to connect to online services.
The solution was just to tell customers they would be given a new ebook reader. Given the engineering time invested and the number of new ebook readers shipped out, our team estimated it cost the company between $40M and $60M.
My old boss Mark was promoted.
I think my point is... with the possible exception of a company whose devices prominently feature a fruit-based logo, no large company understands what a key-pair or certificate is and how it relates to operational processes which enhance their products' security or trust. And I like to kvetch.
I mean, it changes nothing on one hand, but it also crosses another line. From a European perspective (my perspective), this has burned all his credibility in Europe outside of fringe groups, there is no ambiguity.
> As a person with a strong track record of criticizing Elon Musk, I feel extremely confident asserting that this was not a Nazi salute. Elon Musk is a friend to the Jews. This is a man with Aspergers exuberantly throwing his heart to the crowd. We don't need to invent outrage.
He braces himself, makes an aggressive facial expression and stiffens his arm (not a thank you loving face), his palm facing down, elbow stiff, fingers locked together (not how one throws their heart), does it a second time, then comments that 'the future of civilization is assured'. Go Google images and look from multiple angles. Of BOTH salutes. Try not to puke at the smiles/cheers in the crowd.
Subtle Elon used the Fraktur font on his MAGA hat. Elon supports the AFD. Elon intentionally does a Nazi salute twice. Elon likes/responds possitively to Nazi's and white supremacists on X. Elon talks about 'declining birth rates and immigration policies' as closely as he can get away with to 'race replacement theory'.
Somehow we are just misunderstanding him. Nah bro. Stop. At some point we have to stop err'ing on the side of 'he's just an accidental unintentional Nazi'. Guess what, still a Nazi.
You are not allowing a broader discussion on this by having it flagged. I asked you how a discussion on ethics and symbolism doesn't fall under "intellectual curiosity" in a other reply. It's difficult to not come to the conclusion that you support Elon Musk and approve of his behavior. Calling it "celebrity trolling" is the cherry on top.
On Elon Musk:
- By most measures one of the richest and most influential persons in the world
- Owner of X
- OG member of the PayPal mafia
- Spent millions on Trump's election
- Official member of the new administration
- Makes two (not one) Nazi salutes on public television
But no, discussing what this means or implies does not satisfy one's intellectual curiosity.
It always feels like the mods are against you and secretly on the side you don't like. The other side feels the same way when we make a call in your direction. This is a well-established pattern. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
In this case the call is clear because the inputs to the discussion are provocative, inflammatory, and intense; and there's almost no information. Discussion will break down along partisan lines. Nobody will come to any new conclusion or persuade anyone. They'll just say things they would have said before, only more strongly. That's the kind of dynamic we hope to avoid on HN.
That said, I have to call out 'almost no information'. There are videos and photos from multiple angles of Elon making this salute, very intentionally, in a very specific way, stylistically matched both times. Seems like a heck of a lot of information is being ignored and too much graciousness is being given that would not be in any other situation. Elon has endorsed extremely right wing German nationalist party, has come as close as humanly possible to publically aligning with 'white replacement theory' as possible, interacts with nazis/white nationalists on Twitter. Be honest, you wouldn't give two recorded on video seig heil passes to anyone else as 'almost no information'. Dude. Come on. Look at the multiple angles. Confusion on this is forced confusion because people don't want to admit the reality.
I wonder how much of Ferris' latency is related to net speed and rendering speed / computational horsepower of their local machine. I've seen several different evaluation regimes which try to objectively measure web-site "responsiveness" independent of net and rendering speed. Maybe the OP could use one of them to show how different sites were using techniques that unduly reduce the perceived performance of their site.
Think about what happens if you're on a site that loads hundreds of images and has keep-alive explicitly turned off. Or if you're doing a TLS handshake across a high latency network (TLS, for all it's benefits, requires at least one back-and-forth to setup the secure transport before sending "content.") Or you have a weird / inefficient dynamic loading process. Each of these will cause perceived latency, but have different solutions.
I tend to agree with the OP, it certainly seems like sites I use on a regular basis are laggy, but we may need a more objective evaluation framework than "ugh. the web is slow." And who knows, maybe most of the problem could be solved by getting the OP a better ISP and a faster machine.
This rant doesn't have any specifics, but... I've got 1G fiber again, and tons of web pages are still slow as heck.
1-2 seconds to load for most users is not hard to hit if you care, and if most of your users aren't on 2g across the world from your hosting. At least for pages you're likely to enter the site on.
The rant points to pagespeed, which is a good start. If you serve your html in 200ms or less (measured on your server), have a reasonable implementation of TLS 1.2 or 1.3 and address the easy fixes on pagespeed, you'll probably have a faster than average site.
Sure, but think about the past thirty years of web browser
development. Every time software developers make a faster browser
with cool new features, content developers make content that uses
all that new capability. It's sort of the content equivalent of
Wirth's Law (software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware
is becoming faster.)
Developers almost always have reasonably beefy hardware setups
(because the software they use requires plenty of memory or
compute resources.) Does the OP's observation imply there's a
wider range of hardware out there? Maybe people constructing the
pages they're complaining about assume everyone will be on a
kick-ass machine with the best GPU money can buy and on a
low-latency / high-bandwidth network. Maybe it's an observation
that too many web developers don't consider consumers with more
mundane circumstances.
Also... I use Lynx and EWW a lot. The web seems pretty zippy when
you're ignoring the images and javascript. But yeah, that's not a
general solution, too many sites require javascript to function.
It's not JS that's the problem per se, it's what JS is being loaded and very often that's a metric ton of marketing crap i.e. stuff for retargeting, tracking and many other modern horrors.
And half the problem is not that there is one bit of software doing tracking, it's that there are fourteen different package that different people added at some point, all doing similar things.
Yep, that too. Many people made measurements over the last 10-ish years and the ratio between content and marketing stuff is something like 250:1 at least. On some websites it was 10x that.
meh. i always thought the real reason for the ban was EVERYONE in the states who has had to deal with ByteDance walks away from the experience thinking they've been dicked. Or at least everyone I've talked with. In my own experience, we signed a deal with US/TikTok and started spending money on things to uphold our part of the bargain. Then ByteDance steps in and says "no. we're canceling this contract," and we point out, "uh... hey bevis... we just spent money on your behalf," and their response is "sucks to be you." The case has been in California courts for about 5 years. We may get our money back before TikTok/US goes out of business.
I came across this one and it really spoke to me. I'm often thinking about how to optimize my career, project or code-base. But I am reminded that "play" is an important aspect of human development and understanding. The older I get, the more I "play" with things from my childhood: Lisp, 6502 processors, model rockets, etc. And I always find something new in the play and in work after play. It's as if unstructured play jiggles my brain-stem sufficiently that I can see new (sometimes better) ways to approach old problems.
Complaining your current version of MacOS X has a worse user experience than it did 10 years ago is like buying a Tesla and then complaining about its resale value.