I closely studied plan 9 many times, I unfortunately can't use it because of accessibility issues but from what I read and heard it feels more like a time capsule from the 90s, which is ironic considering it was meant to be a future path for os research. And even in the 90s there were developments in unix that the labs seemingly completely ignored, like DJB's daemon supervision.
To talk about the article itself, the only reason plan 9 can achieve such a design is because it's developed and used by the same small group of people. If linux is a bazaar and BSDs are cathedrals, then 9front is a monastery's citadel. Another thing that isn't mentioned is that both linux and BSD (and pretty much anything based on posix) has a lot of third party software that would be hard to maintain along with the rest of the system, if the monks even include it to begin with. And that software could include something like jq which a lot of software depends on and would love to just assume it's there.
And really, what more does someone get from something like this over, say, having a more or less formal standard on what a true plan9 system includes and waving it in someone's face when they choose to ignore it? This is pretty much what modern unices do and it works out great in cases when it's actually important. Most people don't care what commit your system is built from as long as it works as their programs expect it to.
I didn't directly mention third party software but when I talk about the various levels of default software the implication is that those with less built in typically rely more heavily on third party software. Even those who do ship a more batteries included base still have to provide mechanisms for using third party software given the ecosystem.
> ... has a lot of third party software that would be hard to maintain along with the rest of the system
This is the point that the article is trying to challenge. I think 9front proves that it's doable.
> Most people don't care what commit your system is built from as long as it works as their programs expect it to.
The former helps the later a lot. Everything is tested with each other and for a lot of functionality there is only one option.
Funny I'm seeing this now, I've finally ade the first tentative steps into making a website, and noticed that pandoc has an --email-obfuscation option and the whole topic was on my mind. I don't remember the last time I received an actual spam email (not counting desparate marketters trying to remind me of that one website I tried ages ago). Funnily enough, the new frontier seems to be what's app and SMS of all things. A month or two back I got a job offer from an indonesian phonenumber from what's app, and then something similar directly to my SMS. I didn't publish my phone number anywhere online, the closest thing to making it public was joining my college's what's app group and giving my phone number to a bank for a student credit card, and honestly I wouldn't put leaking them to some spam agency beyond either.
I'm using voice over on MacOS chromium and I have the same experience as the NVDA user, although if I interact with the "link" I'll eventually find the email. If I wasn't aware of the ofuscation however I probably would just think the webpage was weird, saying "this is an email" but actually giving a mailto: link. In general, if you're doing something special to improve accessibility then odds are you're doing it wrong, and if it's anything web related the odds are at least 90%. Most accessibility issues on the internet are developers trying to be smart by using ARIA labels or such which usually just make it worse. The example I have to deal with most often are manpages on man.openbsd.org. All of their cross references to other manpages say something like "openssl, section 1" instead of "openssl(1)", which is what's displayed on the screen and what the browser's find command sees while searching.
For completeness, I also tried the page with various terminal browsers, specifically lynx, felinks, w3m, and edbrowse. None, and I mean NONE of them could display the svg properly, they couldn't even recognise it as an image.
The biggest thing that makes me wonder about this ad is: "why?". It certainly costed more to make than an average ad, regardless if it was CGI or real, it should be obvious to anybody who has ever itneracted with humans why crushing a bunch of instruments and tools they use would be a bad idea, all to get it mention more often thanks to society's backlash? Apple isn't some newcomer who needs all the attention they can get, every man, woman, child, dog and cat who can afford apple products has heard of them and I doubt hearing about the brand new iPad pro a million times more is going to change their decision to buy it or not. Most of their userbase is people up to their eyes in the apple ecosystem, all they have to do is send a push notification about the newest iProduct, initiate the planned obsolescence procedure, and watch the cash pour in, the rest would just need to see an ad about the amazing new health app or whatever with a suttel subtext of "and if you don't buy this you're a poor low-status chump lol". But again, I don't run a trillion+ dollar tech company so what do I know?
This also reminds me of those 4chan pranks where they tell people that the new software update made the iPhone waterproof or they can charge it by putting it in a microwave. This time they wouldn't even have to make fake ads: "look, apple said new iPad can't be crushed, post a tiktok of yourself stomping your iPad nothing can go wrong!" (disclaimer: the previous text in quotes is in quotes for a reason; don't do that to any of your devices. There's no warranty to the extent permitted by law, etc etc).
1. Conveys the idea that the ipad has all these creative / cultural digital services on it
2. Conveys the idea that it's thinner than ever
3. Seeing stuff get destroyed by a hydraulic press is attention grabbing, and gets you to look at the TV during that commercial break.
I get why they did it, it's striking. They just didn't understand just how massive the freakout in the creative arts industry is right now over technology companies, and why it would cause a backlash.
On #1, people were very well aware of it already. All this ad does is making them reconsider the company's intent and see it as an enemy trying to destroy the services, instead of a friend making them easier to get.
On #2, it doesn't do that very well. For a start, the press never smashes the tablet itself.
This commercial is very well done with the purpose of making people revolt. Every element is perfect. I wonder if there was some miscommunication and the authors expected the scenes to be used in a different way.
They don't usually count as TUIs, but there are some great CLI programs, even for interactive use. Perhaps the classic example beyond the usual is the MH mail handling system, which is still maintained as nmh [0]. Instead of a single monolith like thunderbird, mutt, or mailx, it consists of multiple commands that list mails, show them, let you compose new ones, etc, and keeps all intermediate state on the filesystem which makes it very easy to back up or do anything with using the usual file management commands. Mblaze [1] is a more modern implementation of a similar concept that uses amildirs, and it's how I interact with my emails these days.
There are also programs that function more similar to "monoliths" but still act like a shell or repl as far as accepting commands and executing them. Clifm [2] is one example, it's the only file manager I seriously tried using before giving up and returning to ls and friends. If you have vi or any of its discendents odds are you can run them in "ex" mode where you use them similar to the good old ed. Speaking of ed, edbrowse [3] is a browser with an ed-like interface that can also read mail (and no I'm not making it up. An interesting thing about it (well, at least one of them) is that one can define "functions" which are pretty similar to functions in sh. For example, this is a function to search something on searx:
While this can certainly be done in a conventional browser using userscripts or such, I'd argue that this sort of function is easier to write because most of it is something you were doing already, and now you're just putting it in a shorthand, where in a userscript you'd probably have to use a lot of getElementById()s to do it, which besides being more verbose is very different to how you think about the problem.
I'm quite surprised to find this on HN, synthesizers like espeak and eloquence (ibm TTS) have fallen out of favor these days. I'm a blind person who uses espeak on all my devices except my macbook, where unfortunately I can't install the speech synthesizer because it apparently only supports MacOS 13 (installing the library itself works fine though).
Most times I try to use modern "natural-sounding" voices they take a while to initialize, and when you speed them at a certain point the words mix together into meaningless noise, while at the same rate eloquence and espeak would handle just great, well, for me at least.
I was thinking about this a few days back while I was trying out piper-tts [0] how supposedly "more advanced" synthesizers powered by AI use up more ram and cpu and disk space to deliver a voice which doesn't sound much better than something like RH voice and gets things like inflection wrong. And that's the english voice, the voice for my language (serbian) makes espeak sound human and according to piper-tts it's "medium".
Funny story about synthesizers taking a while to initialize, there's a local IT company here that specializes in speech synthesis and their voices take so long to load they had to say "<company> Mary is initializing..." whenever you start your screen reader or such. Was annoying but in a fun way. Their newer Serbian voices also have this "feature" where they try to pronounce some english words it comes upon properly. It also has another "feature" where it tries to pronounce words right that were spelled without accent marks or such, and like with most of these kinds of "features" they combine badly and hilariously. For example if you asked them to pronounce "topic" it would pronounce it as "topich, which was fun while browsing forums or such.
To talk about the article itself, the only reason plan 9 can achieve such a design is because it's developed and used by the same small group of people. If linux is a bazaar and BSDs are cathedrals, then 9front is a monastery's citadel. Another thing that isn't mentioned is that both linux and BSD (and pretty much anything based on posix) has a lot of third party software that would be hard to maintain along with the rest of the system, if the monks even include it to begin with. And that software could include something like jq which a lot of software depends on and would love to just assume it's there.
And really, what more does someone get from something like this over, say, having a more or less formal standard on what a true plan9 system includes and waving it in someone's face when they choose to ignore it? This is pretty much what modern unices do and it works out great in cases when it's actually important. Most people don't care what commit your system is built from as long as it works as their programs expect it to.