thehatfox @ thehatfox @lemmy.world

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469

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626

Joined

2 yr. ago

Firefox supports a new “Copy Link Without Site Tracking” feature in the context menu which ensures that copied links no longer contain tracking information.

This will be handy, so many sites add tracking tokens to URLs now. I see the YouTube tokens a lot on links shared on Lemmy.

There are multiple dedicated ESP32 flashing programs available for most operating systems, there should be no reason to use any web browser to flash a microcontroller.

The fact this even needs to be said says a lot about modern web browsers, and software development in general.

User agents are not unfortunately not the only way to identify a browser, there are other ways to fingerprint a platform.

The AS/400 platform is still alive and actively maintained by IBM so I’m told, although I think it goes under the Power Systems and IBM i brands now. I know several business still using them, with development teams still coding with RPG etc. Apparently there is also reasonable ecosystem of middleware to interface with more modern systems, and some sort of *nix compatibility layer to run more modern software on the platform.

I’ve never touched one myself, but they are keeping a few greybeards I know in steady work.

macOS offers a lot of stability, it's reliable, predictable, boring even. It works out of the box and stays that way, it survives upgrades, and rarely crashes.

The release cycle is steady, and changes are generally gradual and incremental. Mac users don't usually have to worry about a new release breaking their system or their workflow because a developer wants to reinvent the wheel or a UI designer wants to make their mark. The only big shifts have been processor transitions.

The Mac ecosystem also allows users to have a foot in both the proprietary and open source ecosystems on a single platform. Being able to run, say, web development environments and Adobe CS for example, can be a lot easier than farting around with Wine or WSL.

Granted, there's plenty of downsides to the Mac as well, but the platform definitely has merits.

Both HFS Plus and APFS can have case sensitivity enabled, it's optional.

Enabling it has had a tendency to break third party Mac software though. Adobe used to be a particularly bad offender there.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were still a few production Itanium systems in server rooms somewhere, running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can't be migrated to anything else. There are other more arcane systems still being limped along in businesses around the world, for some frighteningly critical applications in some case.

Itanium support being dropped probably has a handful of admins panicking, but in the eyes of the kernel developers it's a case of "put up or shut up".

There's been huge expansion of fibre networks in my area of the UK, but I haven't seen any new poles put up, apart from newly built housing estates maybe. All the fibre I've seen has been run using existing poles and conduits.

It seems there are shenanigans afoot in Hull. Most the telecoms network in the UK was formed into a single network decades ago, now privatised as Openreach. Except in Hull, which kept an independent network, which was also eventually privatised as KCOM. Openreach allow any other fibre provider to use existing cable infrastructure like poles and underground ducts, but according to this news article KCOM are not being so cooperative. So new fibre providers are having to install their own poles, often right next to existing ones. Planning rules have also been changed recently which means poles can be installed with minimal planning permissions needed.

Not only is it evil, it's also dangerously incompetent. None of the "let the bodies pile high" brigade seem to ever considered what the actual consequences on society would have been if the streets really had started to fill with body bags.

The panic was bad enough as it was, imagine how things could have spiralled if there was no control over the pandemic at all.

Outsourcing has been around much longer than the recent trend for home working, but the remote outsourcing apocalypse has still yet to appear. Whenever it's attempted it turns out outsourcing many kinds of jobs is a lot harder than it seems.

With the way the housing market has gone in a lot of desirable countryside areas, you probably couldn't be paid enough to buy a house out there.

There are plenty of people living with disabilities who are willing and able to work from home, the problem is the lack of employers willing to accommodate them. Plenty of people without disabilities would benefit from that too.

But making meaningful reforms to improve our society isn't very Tory, so better just call disabled people lazy instead.

"Stop calling my website pro-Nazi" says man constantly saying pro-Nazi things on said website.

There is a lot of protectionism at the heart of the EU. They are quite happy to heavily regulate Big Tech when it’s not based in their own market. Unfortunately they don’t have quite the same passion for nurturing the European tech industry as much as stifling the foreign ones.

They are it purely fighting these fights for the greater good, or they wouldn’t also be pushing things like the recent browser certificate debacle.

It’s odd watching this from Europe, where cross platform third party messaging platforms are ubiquitous. Nobody seems to care about blue or green bubbles because they are all using WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger or one of the many others.

Reminds of the days of old instant messaging, where different regions, or social groups even, would favour MSN Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, AOL Messenger etc.

So will Apple be rolling their own backend RCS infrastructure for this? It seems unlikely they would want to depend on Google for that.

From what I remember there was a “work experience” placement scheme during the coalition years, that had claimants doing 2-4 weeks unpaid in mostly retail work. The pitch was that would give a defence, or job offer from the business giving the placement.

In reality the participating businesses just used it as a revolving pool of free labour.

It’s incredible we can create treatments like this at all. CRISPR and other new gene editing technologies will unlock medical advancements previously unthinkable.

Unfortunately the current UK government do not want to give up on the unlawful policy, and so may attempt to change the laws instead.

Which could entail the UK withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) amongst other moves.

Sunak appears to be still pushing ahead, and has claimed there will be more negotiations with Rwanda to try make the policy work. He has also said:

If it becomes clear that our domestic legal frameworks or international conventions are still frustrating the plans at that point, I am prepared to change our laws and revisit those international relationships.

So it looks the ECHR is also now in Sunak's crosshairs.