I just want to use a robust, secure and decently fast browser that uses a different backend than Chrome to support the open web not ossifying into a single browser spec. I'll pay monthly!
Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(
Unblock Origin is best in class for sure and I use it on my other browsers, but when browsing on Safari I don’t notice any real difference in the number of ads I see compared to Ublock Origin, that is to say I don’t really see any ads on any browser I use.
My point being that the statement that there’s “no good ad blocking on Safari” is just not true. Saying “there’s no Ublock Origin on Safari” is true, but that’s not the same thing as “no good ad blocking”. AdGuard works just fine.
Under its past owner Evidon, their business model was based on selling data to advertisers.
Starting 2018, they showed personalized ads by themselves, through the GhosteryRewards program. I think that has since been terminated, but it would comply with the FAQ you posted (they claimed that personalization was purely on-device).
I don’t know of any current offending practices, but there is no reason to trust or support this enterprise in the presence of better alternatives. uBlock Origin never did any of that, avoids all shadow of conflict of interest, and works better.
With a price like that I’m assuming this product has a shelf life. It would make way more sense to ask a dollar a month. In 13 years they will have made more than that $150, and this model also incentivizes them to keep up development for years and years.
Depends on the scale of your foresight. If you are pursuing growth at all costs then yes, cash now. If you are merely finding work to pay for your life then take the 13 year option and have income in 13 years.
So energy retailers, yep for sure, you can change to another one if the one you're with is bad, and there are new rules on just how easy that has to be.
But how are the distributors being privatised a good thing? I don't get to choose if Cadent serves my gas, or whoever my DNO is re: electricity, or if Thames water serves my water, so they have no motivating reason to give a shit about me. Their goal is aimed directly at a) lobbying regulation down, b) working around regulation as much as they can, to make as much money as they can.
This has resulted in distributors for electricity and gas being the #1 and #2 highest profit businesses in the UK (~40% profit IIRC), with water being at #6.
It's so wild to me that anyone thought this would be successful.
Perhaps this shows my ignorance of business and the stock market works, but water utilities are a service with a fixed set of customers, so there is neither a pressure to be good (because you can't gain customers from your competition so why bother) or a deterrent against being bad (because you have no competition so why bother).
So the only way to make line go up is to do your job worse (to save costs), overcharge customers (to bring more money in) and do random dodgy accounting (to bring even more money in). Was the argument that they would save costs by doing it more efficiently? Why, when they have a captive customer base with no ability to lose or gain customers, would they bother with that!?
I think you understand the situation perfectly. I'm similarly at a loss to explain why anyone thinks it was ever a good idea to privatise, unless you're one of the few directly profiting from the situation.
I guess this was the Trojan horse of brexit. Market it as “let’s get away from EU regulation so we can do good regulation (and racism)”, and actually mean “let get away from EU so we can do bad regulation (and racism)”.
I’m often very critical of EU regulation so I sympathise with the first bit (less so the appalling “no refugees” racism shit). For example, Sweden used to have a public housing system where subsidised public housing wasn’t just for poor people. Then the private landlords took the state to EU court crying about unfair competition etc etc and won, and now public housing has to be run like a company which contributes to higher rents. The same process was repeated for most public services. Some of that was the trend at the time and would probably have happened anyway, but it sucks that it’s enforced from Brussels.
EU does mandate a particular model of economy of its member states, one which relies heavily on market solutions to most problems. Using annoyance with the ongoing crumbles of every public service as an excuse to do more of the same is a stroke of evil genius.
And actually, that's exactly what most of us remainers pointed out was going to happen, because tories can't resist reducing standards of living, working protections, or consumer rights.
Well, finally the Tories are getting voted out. It's all very delayed though.
People knew what they were leaving as it was everyday life with its pluses and minuses. They didn't know what they were getting into instead though, and now we know it's hard to change.
> an individual deems it important to let a whole community know they have made an existantial choice to resign from their place of employment.
Which individual did that to which community? Someone posted on their personal blog that they've changed jobs, and that exists on the internet for a different person to post it to hackernews. What exactly do you want to change here?
This is a bizarre article, and feels like an example of that weird phenomenon where tech people believe they've discovered something new and noteworthy, but in reality they are just so deep into their bubble they are out of touch.
MKBHD is a tech critic / reviewer / nerd, like Ebert was a movie critic / reviewer / nerd, or Kermode is now. A thing got released, and he's talking about it, and his opinion is his value.
> Vassallo is touching on something profound about Brownlee, that I myself understand intimately: what the Internet has made uniquely possible is total loyalty to your customers, and that is threatening.
What? Threatening to what? Your ability to hoodwink people? Is the implication that because we're all in tech we should make sure to say everything's awesome all the time as some form of truth collusion, so that when we end up releasing our shitty product hopefully everyone will say nice things too?
I remember reading the identical points made about millennials when we were coming up, in comparison to genx. It's almost if it's about how old experienced people interpret young inexperienced people, and not a generational marketing buzzword aligned concept.
FWIW the zoomers I work with seem, apart from the fact that they watch tiktok, basically identical to how I remember being new in the field.
I would invert that: when was the last time you tried using a text editor that boasts speed instead of VSCode?
I am forced to use VSCode for extension-based reasons, but have Sublime Text installed as well that I can very occasionally use. The difference each time is staggering, like a slap in the face. Scrolling smoothness, input latency, snappyiness to jump between files, or search workspaces. Each time it's so obvious. It's just so much more pleasant. Like going from being hunched over a tiny laptop screen to sitting in front of an all encompassing ultrawide, or going from an old laptop to a new desktop.
It doesn't mean that VSCode is an unusable pile of garbage, just as a tiny laptop screen isn't unusable. But the difference, at least to me, is undeniable.
I'm often coding on a server with like 10ms round trip latency, so I'm not bothered by the small latency that my editor introduces. I'm using Vim, by the way.
Ever tried the Remote-SSH plugin from Microsoft?
With it I had the exact opposite experience, I'd regularly forget I was working on a remote dev machine!
In this case it's important to note though that this is a necessary side-effect of offering a powerful extension API.
If you – for example – install some badly coded extension that blocks the main thread to parse the open file into an uncached AST on every keystroke before rendering the input, that's the extensions fault.
Take my example with an ounce of saltt as I've never coded a VSCode extension. It is very well possible that the extension API prevents this particular example. I guess normally things like parsing source files have to follow guardrails that prevent this kind of bug, or at least discourage coding this way. And ASTs are exposed by VSCode's core for the natively supported languages.
Still, it's probably safe to assume that there is a lot of badly written code out there that does not pay attention to performance, or follows an "optimize-later" mindset.
Features surely often seem tempting to implement in a slow and unoptimized way, and anyone can contribute to VSCode extensions.
I think the comment you're replying to was blaming slowdowns on the size (in lines of code) of individual files, rather than the total size (in number of files) of the codebase.
I have exactly the same workflow: VSCode when I want a specific extension and Sublime as a fallback.
I think a lot of people don’t notice the difference but I can’t un-notice it.
Huge generated files and whatnot, VSCode just spins but Sublime opens them instantly.
Not to knock VSCode: it’s amazing what they’ve done especially comparing it to other web-stack apps (like what is Slack doing that it’s slower than VSCode with 6 extensions running?!).
Even when things are running smoothly, the just-perceptible delay in switching files or a slight stutter scrolling feels like the digital equivalent of working with a cheap tool.
The cheap ratchet is a little sloppy and occasionally the pawl doesn’t catch but it still does all the same stuff. Yet Snap-On still has customers.
VSCode is blazing fast on my 5 year old personal laptop. VSCode is frustratingly slow on my M2 work laptop full of corporate nannyware.
It’s not VSCode’s fault ;)
JS-based apps happen to interact terribly with nannyware for some reason. I see it every time I run one of our node services, everything just grinds to a halt while the antivirus freaks out about how dare I run a piece of uncompiled code.
Slack and friends have the same problem. Discord actually runs better in a browser than as a standalone app.
This probably needs far more attention than it's given.
A half-wild guess here is that because viruses uses various ways to hide themselves the anti-virus software probably scans W^X codepages on changes, so anything JIT compiled (all modern JS engines) will trigger a lot of spurious scans (kinda like how compiling and writing .exe files can grind turnaround times to a halt).
I'm in almost the same boat. Speed absolutely matters, but you only notice it when you don't have it.
I'm working on a large Dart project and a long time ago someone thought that having the project split up into 100 packages would be a great idea (it's not).
My previous editor was IntelliJ as I am used to its keyboard shortcuts, but it struggled with our setup: constant freezes and even if it didn't freeze, it would take seconds until the suggestions came up (or when I wanted to rename a local variable, smh).
I was so frustrated by it, that I installed helix, it was fast so I'm now learning to use it as my daily driver.
I have now both open, doing my editing on helix, and if I feel like I can go something faster in IntelliJ (which now happens less and less often), I do that little thing in IntelliJ and come back to helix.
Why helix: it's "great by default" and I didn't have much success with setting up and customizing NeoVim (it didn't feel good, the plugin were annoying to learn, and it started to slow down). I'm sure it a skill issue, but helix just works for me, and I can live without plugins for now.
From my experience it's not really an audio bug, it's a bluetooth one. (though reading other people's comments it also happens over USB as well?)
Basically, there are lots of weird race conditions and oddities in how they deal with communicating and syncing volume between the system and the bluetooth device.
This can manifest in your system volume saying one thing and your bluetooth device outputting at a different volume when you first connect, and then you do one volume adjustment and the bluetooth device will "snap" to that volume.
Another way is what the twitter post is about, where when you ramp the volume up or down, with at least some devices this appears to be done per speaker (so per ear), and they can get out of sync. Imagine if the increaseOrDecreaseVolumeBy(speaker: id, amount: int) function was blocking and didn't queue requests. If one speaker takes longer to adjust than another one (wireless communication being what it is), the slower one will drop requests on the ground and get out of sync with the faster one.
Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(