Flutterby™! (short)

Work conversation has me thinking about Sidekick, and DESQview, and how Windows was maybe only a foregone conclusion once WfW 3.11 started to actually get a foothold.

Kind of amazing to think that the 4.77MHz 8088 PC architecture was a viable platform and software target for over a decade.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian: @ariadne@treehouse.systems

claude max 20x sounds like some bullshit you would buy at GNC

Way back in August of 1998, in complaining about how The Web Standards Project was destroying the WWW by pushing a visual-first interpretation of HTML:

The people actually putting out content aren't having problems here, it's only the over-steroided graphics designers trying to make up for the lack of any real meaning in their sites.

In the intervening decades(!), we've seen the problem get worse. The standardization of display, and development platform, has made the web a place of megabytes of ad payload for kilobytes of actual content, of hard to close tabs pushing malware on confused users who are just trying to read, of the imposition of accessibility horrors on top of data that should be easy to access.

Anyway, this came up in thinking about this conversation started by leah's tiny pc retirement home @millihertz@oldbytes.space

i'm just going to say this: i remember when Linux could cheerfully run a GUI and a web browser in 64MB RAM. for all people like to say "oh, but web browsers did less then", they had CSS, JavaScript and multimedia capabilities by the turn of the century (the timescale i'm talking about). they also had XSLT, Flash and Java, and they could read email and news, and connect to FTP servers (and i think gopher servers too). so much for "they do so much more now". no, they really don't - they just make a hell of a mountain out of a rather smaller molehill.

Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io

@millihertz A big part of the problem is how much worse websites are. Thanks largely to React, but lots of other factors too. Nothing is a proper document anymore. Everything on the web is an app with gigantic bundle of scripts and extra-high-res image assets for Apple displays. (And without UBO it's also polluted with hundreds of MBs of adtech and tracking shit.)

Tea @TeaTheDeveloper on X/Twitter:

The creator of ChatGPT is named "Altman," as in "alternative to human" and he leads OpenAI, which is completely closed.

His main opponent is the company Anthropic, meaning "human-centered" is led by "Amodei," as in "loves gods".

Then there's "Gemini," meaning "two-faced," from a company that said that it will do no evil.

Via

Interesting: The Next Version of Curling IO. It's a website for curling teams. The fascinating bit is that they're going with SQLite over PostgreSQL.

Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native:

API-wise, native apps lost to web apps a long time ago. Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform. That explains the rise of Electron before LLM times, but it’s also a problem that LLMs solve now: if that was a real barrier to developing native apps, it doesn’t exist anymore.

Via Lobste.rs.

And, yeah. And I hate it. I want a fast lightweight environment. I recently started using Ghostty, and once I got a few termcap issues sorted, I'm kind of amazed that Mac terminal apps sucked so badly that the performance change is noticeable.

I love editing the preferences via the config file.

Cocoa/AppKit is a total fucking disaster, not performant, less deterministic than web.

I would love a fast lightweight cross-platform environment along the lines of, say, early Gtk, but since that ain't gonna happen then why not just start with a base environment that chews up a gigabyte of RAM and works.

Charlene and I just wrote to our assemblymember, Damon Connolly:

We have recently had to deal with CVS's "AI" agent to deal with prescription information. What could have been a 5 minute chat with a human became a 20 minute exercise in frustration. We'd love your work on making sure that companies aren't using "AI agents" to frustrate customers who are locked in to a fixed number of vendors.

It's clear that the only thing "AI" is a solution for is companies that don't want to actually help their customers do anything, and frustrate them until they stop trying to get the services that they were trying to find.

This is particularly impactful on lower income families who are working more than 40 hours a week, trying to raise a family, and *then* need to go through all of the additional hassle and wasted time imposed on them by having to interact with AI.

Don't know what we can do about this, but with all of the downsides of AI, AI induced psychoses, specific interaction patterns meant to engage human addiction, finding some ways to regulate companies imposing AI on us would be very welcome.

MRFF (Military Religious Freedom Foundation> Inundated with Complaints of Gleeful Commanders Telling Troops Iran War is “Part of God’s Divine Plan” to Usher in the Return of Jesus Christ

The Guardian: US troops were told war on Iran was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’, watchdog alleges

Jonathan Larsen on Substack

Edit: From the MeFi thread: Friendly Atheist: Before you share that story about how troops were told the Iran War is for "Armageddon," read this

The narrative is dramatic. The sourcing is thin. And skepticism matters, especially on something this serious.

The Enshittificator (YouTube video)

Via.

A hilarious and spot on attempt to drag you to Breaking Free:

In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide. Together with more than 70 consumer groups and other actors in Europe and the US, we are sending letter to policymakers in the EU/EEA, UK and the US.

Target's new CEO unveils his turnaround plan

Or, he could, you know, actually listen to what your former customers are telling you and decide to embrace them, rather than alienate them.

I'm spending a lot of time today reading up on Model Context Protocol and "best practices" when using MCP (which, gotta say, is different from the MCP acronym I grew up with). Which... this conversation on Metafilter. caviar2d2 opined:

Having developed software for 30 years, if I look back, most of the software being developed in the US today has a negative net impact on society and people.

flabdablet observed that writing code has not been the bottleneck:

Surely all it will take to clean those Augean stables is devising some way to scale today's excretion rate to at least 10x.

on which Sparx riffed:

I love this!

"Observe! I have invented a hose of such intense pressure that it will clean the Augean Stables!"

"Amazing. Those stables are disgusting. Wait - don't you think you should use water?"

"I need all the water to keep this baby cool."

"So what are you using?"

"Just some other stuff I found. The stables are full of it."

Since there's currently an orchestrated push to destroy anonymity on the Internet: Politico: Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn

The warning comes as countries around the world move to bar children from social media, which requires some way of checking users’ ages to decide if they can access online services. In an open letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks.

California Assembly Bill 1043: AB-1043 Age verification signals: software applications and online services. apparently makes it illegal to configure an operating system without confirming the user's age, similarly for Colorado Senate Bill SB 26-051: AGE ATTESTATION ON COMPUTING DEVICES

Taylor Lorenz in The Guardian: The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all, in response to the toot linking to that Alan @metaphase@toot.community asked

@taylorlorenz Who is paying for the lobbyists for this seemingly worldwide campaign for the legislation to install identity surveillance everywhere "for the children"?

And why, even in blue states, are the politicians always so eager to enable tools so easily abused by authoritarian, fascist governments