Yes. Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but the book form of HGTTG is a mess. You can tell that it was converted from an episodic weekly-gag-based radio show into written form with very little effort to make it into a coherent whole. It's popular because it has brilliant one-liners, but as a book it's not nearly as good as its popularity would suggest.
Adaptations of loosely-connected episodic material to book form is tough even with editing. I did it once and it didn't really work very well. Look at most compilations of newspaper columns too.
You actually see something similar today with web serials.
An author starts a story, writes a few chapters, and then presents it to the Internet. They acquire a following, and keep putting up chapters.
But even if they start with a solid outline and a world building bible and a binder full of character secrets, the story rarely follows a smooth plot arc -- they have new ideas as they write, and some things don't work the way they'd hoped, and maybe they are not sure how to move from point A to B and spend a few weeks putting up chapters where both they and their characters go in circles for a bit.
And then it's finished, the next logical step is to republish it as a book. They could treat the web serial as a first draft, and rewrite it now that they have the whole thing figured out. Throw away some of the meandering, save a few disjointed chapters for short story anthologies, fix some of the character drift that isn't development, drop the plot lines you never finished, and add a bit more foreshadowing to the early chapters for things they didn't figure out until later.
But well, the book's already been published, right? And people liked it well enough? So why write the same book twice, and not just clean up the spelling and grammatical mistakes and publish it as is?
There's a portion of Apple fanbase that believes that Android is just a cheaper and shittier version of an iPhone, and nothing more. Google has been trying their hardest with every version to prove them right, by taking away more and more of the user choice and flexibility that Android had in its favour.
At this rate, I might just end up buying my first ever Apple device for my next phone.
This is pretty common take from security professionals, and I wish they'd also call out the other side of the equation: organizations bundling their "feature" (i.e. enshittification) updates and security updates together. "Always keep your programs updated" is just not feasible advice anymore given that upgrades as just as likely to be downgrades these days. If that were to be realistic advice, we need more pressure on companies to separate out security-related updates and allow people to get updates only on that channel.
In essence, you are agreeing that this is the root cause, you just seem to believe it's unrealistic to fix it.
I actually think it's viable to fix, I am simply not sure if anyone would pay for it — basically, old LTS model from Linux distributions where a set of packages gets 5 or 10 years of guaranteed security updates (backported, maintaining backwards compatibility otherwise).
If one was to start a business of "give me a list of your FLOSS dependencies and I'll backport security fixes for you for X", what's X for you?
That's the other way around (and also SuSE, Ubuntu LTS and even Debian stable): here are the things you can get security backports for vs here are the security backports for things you need.
1) Zoom buttons just for the paper - the article text is often tiny, and zooming in with the browser messes up the page layout and makes the page practically unusable.
OR
2) A simple direct button to download the PDF directly. This would alleviate the zoom problem since I can view it in my local PDF reader with the best settings for me. Having to go to arxiv to download the PDF for every paper would be a nuisance over time though, so a button in the top bar would make the experience a lot better.
For me it always downloads the PDF, because I have disabled the View PDF in browser option (Toggle ON, on Edge: "Always download PDF files"), in browser settings, consider this as a solution.
Edit: The above is applicable to arxiv itself, I got confused, the alphaxiv.org opens the PDF in a framed way with no option to download, indeed.
This looks like it has a lot of features that could get a "normal" person to use Matrix and enjoy it, but the way it's presented and the ProductHunt page and all also make it look like it's just waiting to cross into enshittification territory.
I can see this getting users hooked on to the extra features and switching to some propreitary backend once they have some significant number of users and counting on inertia and UI polish to keep capturing users.
> … getting users hooked on to the extra features and switching to some propreitary backend …
If they do, they’ll have to bridge it to Matrix. The entire point of a Matrix messenger is being able to message Matrix; no matter how slick the GIFs or the local AI-models are—people won’t use a Matrix messenger that can’t message Matrix.
They will if there are sufficient users that communicate only within the app - it's basic Embrace Extend Extinguish. Introduce new features that don't work as well on other Matrix apps, "encourage" users to convince others to switch to this app (Apple has proven that all it takes sometimes is a different colour!), and relegate the Matrix connection to a low priority non-default option over time.
Not your parent commenter but I love Firefox more after discovering that you can't even customize the toolbar buttons in Brave. That's such a basic functionality that I'd taken for granted, until I tried to move out of Firefox for a brief time.
I loved Zellij, it was the first time a terminal multiplexer felt like it added significant value without significant work from me.
The only problem is that projects dealing with network stuff require aging just the way wines do. Networks are unreliable and can get into a thousand different states that are a combination of local connection issues, remote issues, input problems, etc etc. I found (when I tried it a year or two ago) that Zellij could handle a decent amount of such weird states, but not all of them. There was noticeably more "stuck" states it could get into.
It was a pleasure to use in every other way, and maybe this has become much less of a problem in the intervening time. I'm pretty sure that Zellij is going to be my one true term mux for the future, just not sure that future has started yet.
I've used tmux for ages and would go back if zellij ceased to exist, but I found zellij so much more discoverable. Want to do something new? Chances are there's a menu for it.
A higher level summary: A lot of institutional knowledge has been embedded into the C code over the years, sometimes in subtle ways, and a naive port to Rust can introduce security vulnerabilities if some of these subtleties get overlooked.
Not a single person I know who uses Telegram cares about or thinks of it as e2ee. Whether "techie" or "non-techie" (whatever the definition of that is). People use it because it has a nice interface, was one of the first to have good "sticker" message support (yes, a lot of people care about that kind of stuff), and of course because of the good old network effect.
It's only on HN I ever see people set up Telegram as some supposed uber-secure private app for Tor users and then demolish that strawman gleefully.
Do you read other news sites that mention Telegram or is this an N=1 situation?
Today, on the same topic, another tech site which generally gets a lot of things right (but whoever is responsible for writing about Telegram, or maybe their internal KB, is consistently wrong and doesn't care about feedback) wrote that it is an encrypted chats service: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/225750/ceo-en-oprichter-telegram... ("versleutelde-chatdienst" means that for those fact checking at home)
> Do you read other news sites that mention Telegram
The average person I know that uses Telegram ("non-techie" as GP comment put it) certainly doesn't. People join telegram because it has a group they want to join, or via word-of-mouth of a friend recommending it. Normal people don't read tech news, and if they do they don't give it much weight.
Maybe that sucks, maybe they'd be better off somehow if they did, but the reality is that most people live in a different universe from those of us who care about e2ee security or read tech news with interest.
You could also ask about whether they think it's private. And if they say yes, ask them what it means. Does it mean only sender and intended recipients can read the message, or is it fine if the service has someone check the content. Would they agree on the notion "it's OK my nudes I send to my SO are up for grabs for anyone who hacks Telegram's servers", or do they think should Telegram plug this gaping hole.
Also, people tend to state they have nothing to hide, when they feel they have nothing to fight with. But I can't count the number of times I've seen a stranger next to me on a bus cover their chat the second I sit next to them. Me, a complete random person with no interest in their life is a threat to them.
You may try sitting near a completely open-space developer and watch what they are doing, and see the 10x performance drop on average, while there was zero privacy on screen at all times. It helps to realize that people not always behave logically (we have lots of group instincts legacy) and it doesn’t always work as a proper argument.
So they take theatrics over logical evaluation of the situation. Cool. Tell them Durov could have locked himself out of their data and spared himself the trip to behind bars.
Durov is in jail because he is not doing moderation of public chat channels, as far as has been shared. It has exactly nothing to do with encryption or privacy, in both directions (that is, it doesn't in the slightest prove that Telegram doesn't share private data with various states; and E2EE of private chats would not have done one iota to keep him out of jail).
You probably don't use Telegram channels much. There are some drug and prostitution related channels you can search for but they disappear rather quickly or are totally empty.
Christo Grozev shared screenshots of a few CSAM channels yesterday, but if you search for them, they do not seem to exist.
Telegram clearly does less pre-moderation than Facebook, but they are smaller and have less computing and they do not seem to rely on the masses of Nigerian moderators that work for 5$/day as Facebook does.
For the past few weeks I've been using Telegram to create my own cool sticker and when talking with people in whatsapp (eughh) I find myself having trouble finding the words my telegram stickers would mean
Telegram is mostly used by people in the US for drug deals and chatting with people in Eastern Europe, so it's very common to believe it's a secure messenger.
Yes. Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but the book form of HGTTG is a mess. You can tell that it was converted from an episodic weekly-gag-based radio show into written form with very little effort to make it into a coherent whole. It's popular because it has brilliant one-liners, but as a book it's not nearly as good as its popularity would suggest.
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