No one should need JS to see the soups when that could be handled perfectly fine with CSS. I wish restaurants would just make their homepage a PDF of the menu.
No one should need an entire PostScript interpreter to see the soup of the day, either. A restaurant menu is text and images. HTML and CSS are perfect for text and images.
I bet that's part of the reason why microcontrollers, embedded programming, and retro computing are all popular hobbies these days. A return to a simpler time, when programs are compiled to a few kilobytes and run as fast as the hardware allows. Graphics? Unicode? Who needs 'em, just a stream of ASCII and integers for me thanks.
I agree with no JS, but why PDF over HTML? Hard-wrapping for letter-sized paper (ok, a PDF doesn't need to be letter-sized, but most menus are approximately that) with crapshoot reflow options for soft-wrapping in certain viewer apps is pretty dicey on a phone, mitigated only slightly by rotating the phone sideways.
The only benefit I can think of is if it leads to more frequent updates by the restaurant, due to limited skillset.
If the restaurant doesn't have anything besides a menu, /index.pdf is fine—no web design required; reuse the menu they're printing anyway.
The trade-off is that they'll have to pinch/zoom if they have a small display. It's a minor inconvenience to make the exact information they want available instantly.
index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers and also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks, so it's a minor inconvenience for some, and straight up unusable for others
> index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers
The horrible Wix sites most restaurants end up using are likely less accessible than a PDF. The Adobe PDF reader can reflow text.
> also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks
The average wysiwyg site builder produces bundles that are an order of magnitude larger than a PDF menu. Also, the PDF is easier to cache correctly and can be easily saved for offline access.
The complexity between the modern web and a pdf is marginal. PDFs do get printed for menus. Editing a PDF and uploading it to the site, integrating prices and syncing between the site, online ordering, PDF menus is just part of the business. There are lots of platforms that help with this such as Slice.
I vastly prefer looking at a PDF menu over an HTML one nearly all the time. PDFs are usually nicely formatted, and I don’t mind zooming and panning to see everything. HTML is frequently terribly formatted, interspersed with ads, slow, etc
In theory, yes, but the parent comment is talking about what they've frequently encountered in practice. Maybe there's reason to expect that having a lot more PDFs of menus might not result in a similar experience, but it doesn't seem obvious to me at least
PDF is an enormous pain in the tits to view on a phone and has significant accessibility issues for people using assistive technologies.
It's not even about blind people. People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology, which frequently makes an absolute horlicks of interpreting PDF. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to move a lot of documentation at work away from PDF and onto just straight HTML.
Plain old HTML, with thin CSS on it to make it not be black-and-white Times New Roman. Kicking it oldschool.
Translating anything that renders on my screen is the same two clicks to open an LLM with the screen contents. I expect that will become an increasingly universal experience as LLM features get shoved into every nook and cranny of tech.
There's been a translate button for years which hooks deep into every nook and cranny of the website's HTML. It works great, it's built in and many restaurants even advertise it for tourists, because it's a zero-effort translation of their existing menu. Plus, it's low-data when you're inside a 1-bar basement restaurant.
Using an LLM to translate the visible part of a PDF on a mobile... seems like the worst possible solution to the problem.
Translating PDFs is more complicated than that because the strcture of a PDF document doesn't lend itself well to this kind of thing.
For example: if there's a dish name with a 2 line description below it and some allergy symbols below that, in HTML you can imagine the document structure that produces that. In PDF terms that might be 4 separate objects and, in particular, the eyes can see the two lines are adjacent so they fit together but the document structure doesn't really represent it taht way, necessarily.
This might also not work with translation because the lines are set for the size of the text they contain. Same for resizing the font.
Put another waay, PDF should be viewed as a typeset and layout format, not a document format.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm describing. It's getting a screenshot of the visible portion of the rendered document, not the document itself with all the tags and nastiness inside. The same feature works with a photo of handwritten text, where obviously no digital document exists. It's not perfect, but usually adequate for menu translation.
No, the comment correctly points out that the "Soup" button (and all of its siblings... the food categories) is inoperable when JavaScript is disabled. You're stuck with "All" instead of nice filtering. There are ways to achieve this without JavaScript.
ah, gotcha. that would be nice, but tbh it seems rather minor? anyone who knows how to disable javascript (an extremely-clear "power user" signal) can probably be expected to know how to search a page too.
It's just peculiar especially since the repo readme [0] specifically says "Minimal JavaScript - Only when truly needed" and yet it's used for this food category filtering, a feature for which JS is certainly not truly needed.
All of my static sites that I've built lately have been done on Netlify. Super easy to hook up to Github and the form handling is a breeze. I've known Mathias going back to when he was personally answering emails and promoting JAMSTACK so you can say I'm a bit biased. lol
Netlify is a great company that I'll always support.
What an exhausting solution to a made-up problem. This is exactly the kind of functionality JS was made to provide. There's a lot more JS in the PDF.js renderer modern browsers, and if you're not using a modern browser it likely wouldn't render at all. As others have pointed out, you're asking restaurants to throw away mobile traffic, screen readers, anyone not on a mainstream desktop browser to save ~20 lines of code in a programming language you don't like.
You're saying that when the enhancement doesn't work, it's desirable that "it's immediately apparent and the user knows they need to reload the page". That's the opposite of what progressive enhancement people normally argue for.
From a business perspective you can go further: the people who are browsing the internet without JS are people who are going to cost you more to support than they'll ever bring you in revenue. Just like trying to support Linux gamers, excluding them is a net positive.
I wish restaurants would just make a homepage with menu _and_ opening hours.
In my area most restaurants have no website.
If they have a website it's often very hard to find their opening hours.
Under 'contact'? Nope!
At the footer? Nay!
Maybe somewhere hidden in the menu PDF? With luck...
Outside their homepage at google maps? Maybe.
On their Tripadvisor page? Hahaha! Funny! Not.
As an embdded engineer I'm always disappointed at how much processing power and RAM is needed just to display websites with just images and text. The vast majority of them do not need javascript
I block JS, too. And so does about 1-2% of all Web users. JavaScript should NOT be REQUIRED to view a website. It makes web browsing more insecure and less private, makes page load times slower, and wastes energy.
To put that in context, about 6 percent of US homes have no internet access at all. The “I turn off JS” crowd is at least 3x smaller than the crowd with no access at all.
The JS ship sailed years ago. You can turn it off but a bunch of things simply will not work and no amount of insisting that it would not be required will change that.
I’m not saying change is not possible. I’m saying the change you propose is misguided. I do not believe the entire world should abandon JS to accommodate your unusual preferences nor should everyone be obliged to build two versions of their site, one for the masses and one for those with JS turned off.
Yes, JS is overused. But JS also brings significant real value to the web. JS is what has allowed websites to replace desktop apps in many cases.
> Yes, JS is overused. But JS also brings significant real value to the web. JS is what has allowed websites to replace desktop apps in many cases.
Exactly. JS should be used to make apps. A blog is not an app. Your average blog should have 0 lines of JS. Every time I see a blog or a news article who's content doesn't load because I have JS disabled I strongly reconsider whether it's worth my time to read or not.
Did I say abandon? No. I said it should not be required. JavaScript should be supplementary to a page, but not necessary to view it. This was its original intent.
> JS is what has allowed websites to replace desktop apps in many cases.
Horribly at that, with poorer accessibility features, worse latency, abused visual style that doesn't match the host operating system, unusable during times of net outages, etc, etc.
> JavaScript should be supplementary to a page, but not necessary to view it.
I’m curious. Do Google Maps, YouTube, etc even work with JS off?
> This was its original intent.
Original intent is borderline irrelevant. What matters is how it is actually used and what value it brings.
> Horribly at that
I disagree. You say you turn JS off for security but JS has made billions of people more secure by creating a sandbox for these random apps to run in. I can load up a random web app and have high confidence that it can’t muck with my computer. I can’t do the same with random desktop apps.
> You say you turn JS off for security but JS has made billions of people more secure by creating a sandbox for these random apps to run in.
is "every website now expects to run arbitrary code on the client's computer" really a more secure state of affairs? after high profile hardware vulnerabilities exploitable even from within sandboxed js?
from how many unique distributors did the average person run random untrusted apps that required sandboxing before and after this became the normal way to deliver a purely informational website and also basically everything started happening online?
People used to download way more questionable stuff and run it. Remember shareware? Remember Sourceforge? (Remember also how Sourceforge decided to basically inject malware that time?)
I used to help friends and family disinfect their PCs from all the malware they’d unintentionally installed.
> I’m curious. Do Google Maps, YouTube, etc even work with JS off?
I use KDE Marble (OpenStreetMap) and Invidious. They work fine.
> Original intent is borderline irrelevant. What matters is how it is actually used and what value it brings.
And that's why webshit is webshit.
> I can’t do the same with random desktop apps.
I can, and besides the point, why should anyone run random desktop apps? (Rhetorical question, they shouldn't.) I don't run code that I don't trust. And I don't trust code that I can't run for any purpose, read, study, edit, or share. I enforce this by running a totally-free (libre) operating system, booted with a totally-free BIOS, and installing and using totally-free software.
> I use KDE Marble (OpenStreetMap) and Invidious. They work fine.
So no. Some major websites don’t actually work for you.
> And that's why webshit is webshit.
I don’t understand this statement. Webshit is webshit because the platform grew beyond basic html docs? At some point this just feels like hating on change. The web grew beyond static html just like Unix grew beyond terminals.
> I don't run code that I don't trust. And I don't trust code that I can't run for any purpose, read, study, edit, or share. I enforce this by running a totally-free (libre) operating system, booted with a totally-free BIOS, and installing and using totally-free software.
If this is the archetype of the person who turns off JS then I would bet the real percentage is way less than 1%.
I don't see how this makes the "JS availability should be the baseline" assumption any more legitimate. We make it possible to function in a society for those 6% of people. Low percentage still works out to a whole lot of people who shouldn't be left out.
I disagree. The world is under no obligation to cater to a tiny minority who self-select into reduced-functionality experiences.
It’s fine for you to turn off JS. It’s also fine for developers to require JS. Software has had minimum system requirements forever. I can’t run Android apps on my Palm Pilot from 2002 either and no one is obligated to make them work for me.
Without saying whether I think that's a good or bad thing, as a practical matter, I 100% agree. Approximately no major websites spend any effort whatsoever supporting non-JS browsers today. They probably put that in the class of text only browsers, or people who override all CSS: "sure, visitors can do that, but if they've altered their browser's behavior then what happens afterward is on them."
And frankly, from an economic POV, I can't blame them. Imagine a company who write a React-based website. (And again, I'm not weighing in on the goodness or badness of that.) Depending on how they implemented it, supporting a non-JS version may literally require a second, parallel version of the site. And for what, to cater to 1-2% of users? "Hey boss, can we triple our budget to serve two versions of the site, kept in lockstep and feature identical so that visitors don't scream at us, to pick up an extra 1% or 2% of users, who by definition are very finicky?" Yeah, that's not happening.
I've launched dozens of websites over the years, all of them using SSR (or HTML templates as we called them back in the day). I've personally never written a JavaScript-native website. I'm not saying the above because I built a career on writing JS or something. And despite that, I completely understand why devs might refuse to support non-JS browsers. It's a lot of extra work, it means they can't use the "modern" (React launched in 2013) tools they're use to, and all without any compelling financial benefit.
The point of the poster you're responding to is that sites are built JS-first for 98-99% of users, and it takes extra work to make them compatible with "JavaScript should NOT be REQUIRED to view a website", and no one is going to bother doing that work for 1-2% of users.
Yeah... or...... maybe they should just build websites the proper way the first time around, returning plain HTML, perhaps with some JS extras. Any user-entered input needs to be validated again on the backend anyway, so client-side JS is often a waste.
This falls apart the moment you need to add rows to a table or show and hide things in response to values selected in a dropdown. Even the lightest JS app centered around a big form is going to become a huge pain in the ass for literally no benefit. In a company of 100 people, that <0.5% of people who disable JS could literally be one guy, or no one at all.
You can use CSS for interactive-esque things like that. Use JS for all I care, just don't make it mandatory. You /could/ refresh the page with new values. You /could/ paginate your flow. You won't, because you'd rather spend 50 hours getting your JS to work right, than 5 hours writing some PHP.
I _could_ also just write API endpoints and handle client-side interaction however I want. If your preferences are incompatible with mine, that's a tradeoff I'm choosing to make. I am doing the work, you see, and I can choose how I want to do it.
You ostensibly run some flavor of Linux. Do you also complain that macOS apps don't run on your machine? It seems to me like a similar argument: somebody has developed an application in some particular way, but your choices have resulted in that application not running on your machine. Your choices are not necessarily _wrong_, but they are of very little consequence to somebody who has developed an application with a particular environment/runtime in mind. Why should they have to make significant architectural changes to their application to support your non-standard choices?
Blocking first party Javascript is a form of lunacy that is so illogical I can only shake my head. Let's say the site runs XSLT in Javascript. Now what? There's nothing that can be done and yet you would ask for further accommodation.
Here is why this is abusive: You can always restrict the subset of the web platform you demand to a subset that is arbitrarily difficult or even impossible to support. No matter how much accommodation is granted, it will be all for naught, because some guy out there goes even further with blocking things and starts blocking CSS. Next thing you know there's a guy who blocks HTML and you're expected to render out your website as a SVG with clickable links.
And the very freedom they got with free software let them change it to suit their fit, which would have been impossible with proprietary or otherwise restricted software.
I charge for copies of free software I wrote, an AGPLv3+ desktop application, and earn about $2k MRR from it. Most people don't care about your choice of license, they just want software that conveniently solves their problem(s). If they want to share it, that's fine. They're giving it to people who wouldn't have bought it anyway. If those grantees ever want an official copy, with updates and support, they come back to me.
You see the same effect mirrored in illicit distribution of copyrighted works. Sharing movies increases box office revenue. Sharing albums increases music sales.
The people who get a copy for no charge weren't going to buy a copy in the first place. When you expose them to the product, some percent go on to become fans, advertising the work, and perhaps giving money to support it.
Read through my past comments from last year to find more info.
Hey, I recognize your username, I bought RCU this year because I wanted to encrypt my reMarkable without losing data. I could have used the cloud or whatever, but I found your software and chose it because it is local-only and FOSS. Also reasonably priced.
Thanks for your work! I have enjoyed RCU and now use it regularly for backups, file transfer, etc. I'm glad to hear that it seems to be sustainable.
The problem is with someone taking your whole software, branding and marketing it as their own and undercutting your service for half the price, not individual using it for personal reasons.
So what? That sounds like competition, which is healthy in a free market.
And it's not a service, it's a copy. Customers are explicitly allowed to resell it, and they have. And I still earn enough cash to continue developing it.
And I have the search engine top hits. And I have thousands of social media comments linking to my website. Copying a business isn't just about copying the product. They have to copy my reputation, too. And my sales channels.
Stop being so afraid. Selling free software is good, and sustainable, and those who think otherwise are extremely naive, ignorant, or with ulterior motives.
Sure, link me to your codebase and I'll give it an active try and lets see what happens.
There's no doubt putting up your source code makes your business much easier to copy. If I spent a year building something sophisticated with the intent of selling it, why would I give someone else, with possibly more resources to market, a free competition? It may have worked out for you, but I think so non nonchalant saying "its not a problem ever" is rather bold.
This is a known problem even in the hardware space, where Chinese companies will copy an existing problem 1:1 and flood the amazon market with 20 different listings.
> So what? That sounds like competition, which is healthy in a free market.
No, it's not. Under capitalism, if Amazon could just take your book and start selling it without paying you a cent then nobody would be incentivized to write books anymore. That's the entire point of copyright.
I don't know what your business is, maybe you really carved out a niche that works for you, but it's not built on top of solid principles. I think you've just been lucky enough not to catch the wrong kind of attention because the more successful you are, the more economical it is for someone to invest resources into stealing your lunch.
If you deal with the typical consumer base then the single most important thing is always going to be the price and that's the one thing you'll never be able to compete on.
> Copying a business isn't just about copying the product.
You're really getting your wires crossed here. This "wisdom" is used to show that you can't win by simply copying someone else's winning idea. A reseller isn't copying your business, they're just reselling your product.
And the entire point of copy/left/ is to make the code a public good, a commodity. Everyone owns the code I write, and everyone is entitled to make a business from it.
If they have better marketing than me, earning a lot more money than me with the verbatim program, that sounds like my software was priced wrong and I should set the price higher. How high -- $50,000/copy? Who knows. If someone wants to make themselves my distributor, they /should/ get paid for that.
That kind of competition -- yes, it is competition -- would inspire /cooperation/. That would give both of us, the distributor and myself, incentive to work together to maximize both of our profits.
Another example is with my program itself. It's a desktop application, a local management client for a tablet that otherwise must use its manufacturer's cloud service. I am directly competing with the manufacturer. When I receive money for my program, $12/year, they loose a customer of their service, -$36/year. BUT -- many, and I mean MANY of my customers told me they would have returned their $500 tablet were it not for my software, after using which, made them keep the hardware. I estimate that my software has saved the manufacturer over $500,000 in returns.
That means: my software has /increased/ the total value of my competitor, and we are /both/ making profit. My software literally expanded their market.
And if a distributor of the verbatim program wants to expand /my/ market, I'm all for that. But I don't think they will, because /they know/ that anyone else can do exactly what they're doing. They need to add something of value. Sometimes, marketing can be value, sure. More value is derived from the program itself -- that's why people buy it in the first place. Not because of its marketing, but because of its function.
And if they improve my program, the function, they MUST release the complete corresponding source code, and they MUST do so granting forwards the same copyleft privileges I gave them. And that means I can, and will, take their improvements and merge them back into my original product. And since I have the first mover advantage, the reputation, the search engine hits, the community engagement, I will probably win.
And if I don't win, the user /does/. They get a better product at a better price. That's the WHOLE POINT of free software, that it's good for the user, not for the developer. It's the kind of software I use myself, so I elect to write it, too. It's the world I want to live in.
You have an obsolete understanding of the world, a misunderstanding of the motivations of free software, and are totally wrong about the dynamics of selling free software.
I understand the motivation of FOSS just fine, majority of my published side projects are AGPL licensed. I'm also glad that you found a niche selling FOSS software and wish you best of luck, I really do, but your comment doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of economic principles.
> If someone wants to make themselves my distributor, they /should/ get paid for that.
I have to admit you're the first person I've ever talked to who would be happy to let others commercially exploit the fruits of their labor without any sort of compensation, while actively trying to make a living from that labor yourself, fascinating!
> That kind of competition -- yes, it is competition -- would inspire /cooperation/. That would give both of us, the distributor and myself, incentive to work together to maximize both of our profits.
If you really want to call that "competition" it's unfair competition, more specifically free riding. You make the software, they sell it for cheaper and keep all the money, that's the premise of my concern because your license allows it. They don't really have an incentive to work with you because their goal is rapid exploitation of their victims.
> When I receive money for my program, $12/year, they loose a customer of their service, -$36/year.
Categorical error. You didn't make that money by exploiting their labor, you made that money by making a better product with your own labor. That is real competition unlike the scenario we're discussing.
> That means: my software has /increased/ the total value of my competitor, and we are /both/ making profit. My software literally expanded their market.
Sure, the OEM makes the tablet and you make the software which is an obvious symbiotic relationship. It's also a categorical error because it's not comparable to the scenario we're talking about.
> But I don't think they will, because /they know/ that anyone else can do exactly what they're doing.
Why would they care? It's not like they're investing any real effort into it. They just need to make a few sales to offset the ~30min cost of setting up a cron job and creating a listing.
> And if they improve my program
They won't, that's not the type of actor I'm concerned about.
> And if I don't win, the user /does/. They get a better product at a better price. That's the WHOLE POINT of free software, that it's good for the user, not for the developer.
That's a really weird take on the free-riding problem. Yes the user wins for a few months before you go out of business - that is generally bad for users because it means the end of support.
> You have an obsolete understanding of the world
Yes, clearly. This is the first time I've read about a story like yours and I've read a dozen stories about high profile projects being forced to relicense from AGPL to BSL/SSPL or another non-free license, stories of people having their projects cloned and having their lunch stolen overnight.
People would rather watch ads than spend $1 to remove them, they'll visit a small business to get extensive advice and then buy from Amazon because it's 10% cheaper, they'll buy a terrible quality $2 gadget from Temu over a locally manufactured, high quality gadget for $10, but you want me to believe that given the choice, most people wouldn't take a "75% off" deal in a heartbeat...
> I have to admit you're the first person I've ever talked to who would be happy to let others commercially exploit the fruits of their labor without any sort of compensation, while actively trying to make a living from that labor yourself, fascinating!
What's fascinating is that you just described every employee, ever. At this point, I'm giving up on you. Consumers are price sensitive? Please, they buy Funko Pops and Frappachinos by the millions. It's not about cost, it's about convenience and authenticity. People will pay for convenience, for software that does what they want, from its official source.
It's cheap to sling bullshit like yours and costly to refute it. It's costlier to build a cash-positive business selling copies of free software, in the face of that code, and binary builds, being available -- by others, for no cost -- in various package mangers and popular source repositories.
You're just wrong, dude. You don't know what you're talking about. I'm tired, and done, arguing with you.
FAIR has always been like this since the 80s. I don't really expect these media watchdogs to be "neutral" though; it's enough that they only call out bias against their favored positions. If there are enough such orgs across the spectrum then they serve their purpose.
"Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly."
it always makes me sad when i see this. you are not reaching your target audience. fyi this seems to be a cloudflare thing. i see it everywhere. The World Wide Web seems to be going down a dark path. perhaps i do need to update my browser, but why should that matter for just reading a news site. it's like someone wants you to not have access unless you buy a new macbook(or maybe a chromebook). maybe i should just install Chrome already? i just feel like this Big Tech has crossed the line with their customers a long time ago at this point.
btw, fair.org looks interesting. i never heard of them before. Thanks!
does it similarly make you sad if your operating system tells you to update for new security patches or indicators?
the sheer volume of browser exploits - including in-the-wild exploited zero-click zero days - is frankly insane. intentionally leaving yourself unprotected is a bad choice that should be shoved back in your face, often.
> i see it everywhere.
i see it nowhere. update your software! and don't use chrome.
Browse the web with Tor via an up-to-date Firefox. You will run into this page over and over again. Speaking from experience, don't feel like looking it up on CF's docs.
edit: Just ran into the same page on Chromium 141.0.7390.122 without Tor or a VPN, but with NoScript, JShelter, and uBlock extensions enabled. It looks like JShelter + NoScript can trigger it.
This is the page you get:
> Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly.
and software monoculture is widely considered a security threat, and so by pushing software monoculture, you yourself are pushing to weaken internet security. GP should potentially be applauded (if he's not using for example IE6)
i’m genuinely fascinated by your thought process here.
how did we go from “update your software; don’t use chrome” to “you are pushing software monoculture and weakening internet security”?
as for “they were not informing him of an insecurity”, this seems to be deliberately obtuse. virtually every major browser includes (and references in their release notes!) fixes for vulnerabilities in stable version updates.
>how did we go from “update your software; don’t use chrome” to “you are pushing software monoculture and weakening internet security”?
given the audience here, i think it's more likely that OP/GP is running an up to date browser that is of an alternate architecture that has not "mainstreamed" all of google and hollywood's ad and drm friendly CSS HTML
How do you believe their reporting differs from reality? They're writing about rising authoritarianism and those who submit to it, which is a fact of the world happening today. They use the term "toady" in its literal definition. FAIR has anti-bias and counter-spin, aka "a bias towards reality."
I've never seen Manhattan Institute, Hudson Institute, or Cato Institute using the term Toady even if technically correct. It is a term almost exclusively used by the left, typically more anti-authoritarian. Maybe you have some libertarian types using it as well.
> It is a term almost exclusively used by the left
What a strange claim.
If you search the sites you cite, all of them have at least one use of "toady" or "toadies" (which only gets a few hits on fair.org as well). Meanwhile go check the national review and they seem to love the word. Maybe recheck your priors.
Why would right-wing leaning think tanks be complaining about right wing authoritarianism they’re in favor of? You’d expect them to trot out this verbiage if a populist left wing politician with authoritarian vibes came to power.
It's not quite that simple, or at least not yet. For example the Cato Institute still seems inclined pretty much towards the rule of law and against autocracy. Perhaps "Yarvin-ists" are in power, but they don't control every voice on the right.
I recall seeing the statement "Profanity is the attempt of a weak mind to express itself forcefully." Well, these childish insults and put-downs seem to me to be the same. They may sense that they don't have the intellectual horsepower to have a serious discussion about the issue, so they just insult.
Alternatively, they're not trying to have a serious conversation about the issue. They're talking to their own in-group, not to the other side, not even to those who are neutral or undecided. Instead, they're just telling their own in-group how right they are and how stupid the others are. They aren't trying to engage at all; they've given up on that. This is a deeply non-serious response - if the situation is as bad as you claim it is, why are you not trying to persuade at least the neutrals? Why are you instead doing things that make you look childish to everyone except your in-group?
I agree with everything you said, but it doesn't seem to resonate with the masses based on voting patterns here.
They don't need to have a serious conversation to succeed. Their supporters visit their site, get their dopamine hit from being told their viewpoint is correct, and they feel empowered to lash out at any dissent so the cycle continues.
They're the equivalent of a left-wing Fox News, but get very angry when that is pointed out.
Is this an argument for sophistry or propaganda? Everyone having biases doesn't preclude people from rightly pointing out bad things in the world, like creeping authoritarianism and the undermining of democracies, anymore than it did in the lead up to WW2.
Really we're all just interested in what your line for calling a person a fascist is, and what you would call the folks who did this?
"When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents not expressly released by official press handlers, free press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the directive as an assault on the First Amendment.
The impact of this rule cannot be understated—any reporter agreeing to such terms is essentially a deputized public relations lackey."
If you can't write with basic clarity because that makes your progressive, you might want to investigate your own bias.
Yeah, my line for calling someone fascist is not “restricting reporters access to the Pentagon”. It cheapens the word and all that it represents.
There is a wide gulf between writing with basic clarity and injecting opinions like “so and so is a toady”. I would love to see media outlets attempt to describe just the facts with as little opinion as possible. FAIR clearly does not meet that bar.
It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. But this is not that. This is, “you don’t have unfettered access to personnel and facilities.” Fascism would be “if you print that we will arrest you and maybe shut your operation down.” And maybe a paramilitary squad of goons will fire bomb your offices in the meantime. This will read as snark, but I swear it is not: read about the truly fascist regimes of history. The difference is night and day.
We've all read about them. The key lesson in every one of those stories is this: don't wait for the entire building to burn down before you pull a fire alarm.
They weren't revoked from unfettered access to the Pentagon. They were revoked from all access to the Pentagon. It's hard to be a democratic society when the institutions that make democracy possible are hindered wherever possible.
Fascism is an ideology, an approach towards government. Banning reporters from the Pentagon and the White House can be both legal and fascistic.
>So it gives the appearance of “opinionated news is good, so long as the opinions are correct.”
All news is opinionated news and some opinions are objectively better than others. For example, the simple act of choosing which story to cover is an opinionated choice and if a news outlet decided to cover a random high school teacher the same way they cover the POTUS, that would be an objectively incorrect editorial opinion.
Your understanding of the word objective differs markedly from my own.
I don’t disagree with the general spirit of what you mean. But I would love to see news outlets, and so called watch dogs, pursue the unobtainable dream of objectivity and neutrality over all others. Calling people toadies and democratically elected administrations “fascists” falls far, far short of that dream.
Some people are of the opinion that the world is flat, I would say it's objectively round. That is the context in which I'm using that word. I'm not using it to describe 100% consensus, because there will always be someone who disagrees with something.
News without opinion is objectively impossible because the act of reporting the news is inherently governed by an opinion on what is worthy to report. Pretending otherwise is just pulling the wool over your own eyes.
Yeah, yeah, true objectivity is objectively impossible. We know.
The thing is, this isn't binary. There's a sliding scale between "totally objective" and "totally biased". When you eliminate the (unattainable) standard of "total objectivity", then reporters and news organizations move more toward biased. And the difference matters. You used to be able to get news that at least tried to be unbiased, that wasn't openly pushing a narrative. That made it possible to form a more accurate (though not totally accurate) view of what was actually going on.
>You used to be able to get news that at least tried to be unbiased, that wasn't openly pushing a narrative. That made it possible to form a more accurate (though not totally accurate) view of what was actually going on.
Part of the problem with this line of thought it that a lot of bias is not intentional. There was never a moment in history in which you could pick up a newspaper with nothing but completely unbiased facts inside. Even today, most news sources aren't intentionally misleading even if they might be biased. Recognizing these inherent and subtle biases are required in order to know "what was actually going on".
There was this thing called "yellow journalism". It was very much not trying to be unbiased.
Most US 20th century journalism tried to be better than that. And, by trying, they were better than yellow journalism. Yes, there was still bias. But the difference between, say, 20% bias and 80% bias made a real difference.
So maybe today we're at 40% bias instead of 80% bias. It's still worse than it was, and the difference still matters. (And, by the way, one of the ways it matters is in peoples' trust of the media. We don't need people who are obviously trying to manipulate us; we already have enough of those.)
Except, the news calling, for example, Bush Jr a "War criminal" is exactly objective.
His Casus Belli was false, and he knew that. We invaded sovereign countries illegally.
Would you read news that openly called him a war criminal? Reality gets extreme all the time. If you police the language more than the reality, you are just making the problem worse. You are forcing people to pretend reality isn't so bad just so you do not have to fix reality.
Guess what? Reality is bad right now. We are bombing boats off the coast of south America and posturing like we are going to war with them and bailing out Argentina because of political rhetoric and affiliations and corruption, and we wasted over $150 billion harassing brown people and sending American citizens to foreign prisons and maybe catching a few people who overstayed their visas or walked over our border.
And yet you tone police the people trying to inform you of that.
Was GW Bush convicted of any war crimes? If not, then he isn't a war criminal.
You can argue that he should be, and I probably would agree with you, but an organization supposedly dedicated to unearthing biases in the media should not inject their opinions into their own reporting.
I would say that an organization that needs to be highly objective should not call him one.
They can certainly point out that he was the leader of a group that was systematically killing millions of people with physical or cultural attributes he deemed undesirable and people will reach the same obvious conclusion about him.
> They can certainly point out that he was the leader of a group that was systematically killing millions of people with physical or cultural attributes he deemed undesirable and people will reach the same obvious conclusion about him.
Because of thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a difference between stating a generally accepted fact that has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is round) and something that is not and is therefore considered an opinion.
>Because of thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
Then why can't you accept the "thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants" of him committing war crimes?
>I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a difference between stating a generally accepted fact that has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is round) and something that is not and is therefore considered an opinion.
I think war crimes are bad. There is no "fact" involved in that statement, it is purely a value judgment and therefore an opinion. Yet I think it is inarguably a better opinion than believing that war crimes are good. Would you disagree?
Because the definition of a war criminal is something who was convicted of a war crime, not being accused of committing them or observed doing something that could be considered one.
You can't fact check opinions, no matter how morally superior they are to another one, so I don't know what your point is there.
Which are verified to meet a specific standard through a conviction in this case, which is the exact opposite of the scenario that generated the quote above.
Is an accused murderer still considered a murderer if they are not convicted of the crime?
This idea that something can't be confirmed as true unless a court says it is bizarre and totally antithetical to the idea of journalism. Journalists are not court stenographers.
Sometimes it is entirely reasonable to call someone a murderer even if they lack a conviction. I have no problem saying John Wilkes Booth murdered Lincoln. I have no problem saying Hitler committed war crimes. These are simply facts of history and your policing of language is implicitly arguing against those facts. So I'm going to ask you directly and I won't reply if you don't directly answer this question, do you believe that Hitler committed war crimes?
Or they could just say Hitler committed war crimes but killed himself before he could be put on trail. Because that's what he did. It's not an opinion.
He ordered the actions of a number of people who were convicted of war crimes. He himself was never tried because he was already dead. Still, in that case, I think we can say that yes, he was.
Fair has its own issues - or did last I checked which was a while ago.
They used to claim reporters were biased towards the right. That used to be a left-wing claim, but it’s no longer credible. Something like 90% of reporters are left-wing.
Maybe they’ve reformed, and aren’t in the business of providing partisan talking points anymore.
They're so far left that nearly everyone seems right wing to them.
It's a persistent problem for people on the fringes of the political spectrum. I guess if they were aware of this, they probably wouldn't be on the fringe in the first place.
Is possible, and easy if one accelerates at 1 G for half the trip, then decelerates at 1 G for half the trip. Conventional nuclear fission AND fusion rocket engines, like NERVA, already exist and are flight-certified. 1 light year could be traveled in 2 pilot years.
And the FCC just so happened to approve the spectrum of frequencies that human bodies absorb, turning each Wi-Fi hotspot into surveillance spotlight, and each handheld device into a unique beacon. With everything we know about NSA's influence in other government agencies (like NIST), I think it's entirely reasonable to ask, "why 2.4 GHz?" But I've not seen anyone ask that question here. I'd also wonder whether NRO has satellite capability to measure Wi-Fi signals (and interference from human bodies) from orbit.
2.4GHz was used for microwave ovens and thus the spectrum was reserved for their interference. Or rather, the spectrum was made free for low power uses because Serious Business couldn’t be done on those frequencies due to the microwave ovens.
While that provides a plausible origin story, it doesn't stand to reason why the 2.4 GHz carrier frequency has been sustained for so long. For toy or prototype purposes, sure, the FCC could say "put them next to the microwave ovens." But Wi-Fi is, at this point, a critical national security utility, or even as you put it yourself, "serious business."
I'm not a radio engineer, but it doesn't take that many brain cells to beg the question: for a handheld/laptop device, why choose a carrier wave frequency absorbed by the body holding it, and by the metallic electronics sitting beside it? Logically, that's one of the most energy-inefficient frequencies one could choose, and a terrible design choice for personal wireless communication technology. I think a good engineer would want to conserve power and not be blocked by the very body holding it.
However, as the future unfolded, we now have nearly every household with a bright radiant point light casting human-shaped shadows, trivially reconstructed, to detect not only the body's silhouette but it's heartbeat and respiration, too.
And with everything we know, with leaks going back decades about the abuses of government power, surveilling their own citizenry, recording, analyzing, and manipulating the population in subtle ways, resulting in the financial benefactor of a handful of billionaires and the power benefactor of media-savvy pawns, why are these basic technological choices not being questioned more?
(mastax, I'm replying to you because you're top reply, but felt it important to continue my original point.)
> While that provides a plausible origin story, it doesn't stand to reason why the 2.4 GHz carrier frequency has been sustained for so long. For toy or prototype purposes, sure, the FCC could say "put them next to the microwave ovens." But Wi-Fi is, at this point, a critical national security utility, or even as you put it yourself, "serious business."
Yes, but it started out as a little experiment using the scraps of free spectrum available while wireless carriers were paying billions for spectrum licenses. As WiFi has gotten more and more critical, the FCC and industry have worked to overcome many different technical and regulatory challenges to make more and more spectrum available to WiFi notably the 5GHz, 6GHz, 45GHz, and 60GHz bands. The FCC has a financial incentive to not make more unlicensed spectrum available (when they could charge license fees for it instead) and under your theory they'd have national security incentives to keep everything on 2.4GHz as well. Yet they keep making more and more spectrum available unlicensed to WiFi anyway because it's just that important now.
> Logically, that's one of the most energy-inefficient frequencies one could choose, and a terrible design choice for personal wireless communication technology.
That is just not true. 2.4GHz works great for WiFi, that's why it's still being used. It penetrates walls pretty well while still being able to handle a decent data rate. Furthermore, all radio frequencies are absorbed by the body, and 2.4 GHz does not have any special higher absorption rate from what I can see. The actual resonance is at about 80MHz: http://niremf.ifac.cnr.it/docs/HANDBOOK/chp3-3-1.htm#336
I don't find it hard to believe that the government has an interest in using radios for through wall imaging/surveillance purposes but the idea that that had some influence on the decision to use 2.4GHz radio for wifi in 2025 doesn't fit the evidence. Additionally, they'd need to have receivers spread around to be able to capture this surveillance data so they could also spread transmitters around at whatever frequency suits their fancy. They don't need to use WiFi for that.
TL;DR because the FCC regulates available frequency bands, and 900MHz, 2.4GHz, and 5GHz were the ones that were 1) the right combination of high enough to be fast and low enough to be energy efficient and easy to generate, and 2) actually available for use at the time.
I don't know, I find HN is one place were we can actually engage real humans conversation on these type of tech related questions. Human dialog is often something that can results in more interesting discovery. Don't think you can get that with agenatic RL question answers feed back loop between models.
It's not a particularly interesting set of questions, though. If you looked up the features of zfs you would find what it has the ext4 doesn't. There's hundreds of articles, written by humans, on it. There's nothing that someone is going to helpfully put in an HN reply to these questions that you couldn't find faster by literally copy and pasting them into google, ignoring the AI summary.
