Ajay Soni
axiys
| AI Architect & AI Software Engineer
| Building “Glass Box” Agents for FinCrime, Defence & Complex Systems
| C++, Python, LLMs
| Author of “You Are The Navigator
With Windows 9x, I recall the crashes being manageable, but it was advisable to give the system 15 minutes to settle down after rebooting. Windows would start multiple things at once on startup and it was a bit risky to overstress it.
Windows NT 4 seemed OK, but a lot of software didn't run.
By the time of Windows 2000 the tradeoff was much better.
(Allowing a settle down time remained a good idea, in my experience. Even if Windows 2000 and later were very unlikely to actually crash, the response time would still be dogshit until everything had been given time to settle into a steady state. This problem didn't get properly fixed until pervasive use of SSDs - some time between Windows 7 and Windows 8, maybe? - and even then the fix was just that there was no longer any pressing need to actually fix it.)
In 1997-8 I met the first person I knew to have a CD-R burner.
He dual-booted 98 and NT 4. He joked that NT was his 100+ MB CD burning software. He used 98 for almost everything else, but it couldn't keep that steady stream of data going.
Editorialized title! Portrait aspect ratio (or "vertical video", as it's described here - at least I assume that's what the term refers to - like, as if the landscape aspect ratio has no Y axis!) is not obviously mentioned anywhere.
I don't get why the poster thinks NewPipe doesn't support vertical videos (let's not be anal, we know what they mean) if the video is "vertical" then making it fullscreen will fill the phone's screen vertically.
Well, perhaps you know what they mean! Me? I can only read the words and then guess based on the words I read. If it's not clear from my post what guesses I have made based on the words I have read, and which assumptions I have made while making those guesses, then I apologise. I will try to make it easier for the reader next time.
It sounds like you found no reference to portrait aspect ratio videos in the article either.
I assumed it was just a sloppy way to actually say it has an option to filter out shorts. (Because shorts are always portrait, and it's a common wish to want to eliminate shorts.)
Either way, I also knew what they meant, because "vertical video" is not an inscrutable term that leaves any room to guess it's meaning incorrectly. It's entirely scrutable.
You can keep trying to defend the obtuse complaint that all videos have a vertical dimension, but if it were me I think I would not be so eager to advertise that I was this baffled by this.
Yes, we can assume "vertical video" means "shorts". But once we do that, I still don't see anything on the front page or the FAQ or the github page that mentions shorts. The HN title had "without vertical videos" jammed in and that needs clarification. Maybe there's a toggle somewhere to hide shorts? Or maybe it doesn't have a shorts feed but it otherwise has shorts? Or something else? It's not clear.
The point of my post was that the title is editorialized. Am I allowed to say "Did you click the link"? Probably not. But, still, let me suggest that you click the link. Once you've clicked the link, compare the title of the page you find yourself on to the title posted here. Now you've compared them, ask yourself: are they the same? I just did this experiment myself, and the answer was: no. The title of the page at time of my click is this: "NewPipe - a free YouTube client". The title of the HN submission at the time I'm composing this message is this: "NewPipe: YouTube client without vertical videos and algorithmic feed".
We are oft implored, not only by our famous and much-valued dang, but also the other guy (whatever his name is. He does a great job too though), not to editorialize the titles by submitting submissions with titles other than the actual title. How can you tell if the submitted title is other than the actual title? That's easy. You read the one and read the other and compare the two and see if they're different. (Which is another way of restating the previous paragraph.) In this case: they are. (Or at least were at time of writing! Since you'll be reading this in the future.) Hence my complaint.
The vertical video thing? That was just my little joke. OF COURSE I KNOW THAT VERTICAL VIDEO MEANS PORTRAIT VIDEO. And, yes, I have visited youtube.com, and have had a big pile of portrait shorts shit up the feed, same as everybody else. I am not completely... wait, hang on. I am completely stupid. Because I thought it would be so obvious that it was a joke, that nobody would bother to quibble. They'd just chuckle at my attempt to amuse the reader, or roll their eyes at it and ignore it, and then go on to moan at me about some other part of my post. Though, reading my post again, more fool me perhaps. I guess I didn't leave people enough other material to complain about.
Hey tom_, usually they say that explaining a joke makes it worse, but I think you crafted the rare exception!
I did in fact intend to share NewPipe as an antidote to the "en-short-ification" of YouTube after reading a couple of threads earlier today from other Hackers complaining exactly about that. And yes, calling it "vertical video" is a sloppy way of expressing that.
There was also a thread about MinIO not being maintained anymore.
Hard to say without commentary. Maybe the poster here was influenced by multiple threads (I guess that seems likely, if it was just one thread they influenced them, they could have linked it in that thread).
But the link to the post was posted here just now! - which I'm assuming means something.
Both share a theme: the trials and tribulations of running an open source project, I suppose. Some contributions, one way or another, demand more of them than the maintainer might like. How do you deal with this? How do you set the boundaries? And so on.
The app still gets to decide though! Most programs do go full size with an alt+green click, but not all. A column-style Finder window, for example, seems to go taller but no wider.
I am using Sequoia and the windows are definitely rounded! Though the radius is pretty small (the curved region is about a quarter of the mouse cursor area), so the fact you can drag it from outside the window doesn't look ridiculous.
Here's a tip: any time you've got before/after screen grabs, don't do this thing where you've got to drag a line to switch between the two, don't have a fade, don't have a sliding transition, or anything like that. Just have it display one, then have a single button that you click to have it immediately display the other. Then when you click the button again, it goes back to displaying the first one again. Click, click, click - and your eyes do all the work for you.
Also: I can't work out which image is which. Taking the first image as an example: we've got MATERIAL-STYLE on the left, and LIFTKIT on the right. But what's the left? Does this mean that when you drag the line to the right, revealing the left image, you're looking at MATERIAL-STYLE? Or does this mean you see MATERIAL-STYLE when you drag the line to the left?
(This might seem like pointless quibbling, but this thing bills itself as the The UI Framework for Perfectionists.)
Hey Tom, I'm the creator. They're actually even worse than what you're describing. On touchscreens, the handle slides up and down as you try to move it left or right. Horrible, isn't it? One of these days, I'll get around to fixing it. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is that, to be perfectly honest, you're the first one to give this feedback. So I appreciate it!
If you got rid of the slider entirely and just had it flick between the two images instantly, the entire handle business would become irrelevant, and you'd never need to think about it again!
I admit I don't do web stuff, so perhaps this is hard to do. But I think it's the ideal. Before/after comparisons are very easy to assess if you can flick between the two cases and let your eyes show you the differences. The value of having an image that's part one and part the other (and two completely separate parts!) seems a bit questionable.
(My line of work means I'm unlikely to end up a customer, so you don't have to pay attention to my opinions.)
The flipping-between is a great hack -- as you said your eyes (really, brain) just do the work for you.
I learnt about it in Japan where proof-readers and editors would (or do) quickly lift a top page up and down to spot mistakes with kanji (pictographs). And sure enough, even from a page of dense script the dissonance of the error really does pop out at you.
I likewise tucked that little trick into my belt -- it comes in useful anytime you're trying to manually spot a pattern across complex data. This technique has the same "vibe" as FFTs to me: it's just neat feeling like you're getting computation from the universe for free.
Solar PV in a similar category: free electrons if you can arrange the magic rocks just right :)
If you put two proofs side by side, you can view from the right distance then uncross or cross your eyes like a stereogram till they converge, which makes differences shimmer.
And once you have the hang of this technique, congratulations! You can now enjoy those 3D "Magic Eye" images that stumped a significant portion of the population back in the 90s :)
I use ScreenFloat[0] in a similar way to catch differences between GUI settings, like the cPanel PHP extensions selector, which has tons of checkboxes. Position a screenshot of settings for site A over the settings for site B, adjust the transparency, and any differences will jump out.
I'd like to imagine I know which of each example were better designed, but the handle going to the side opposite from the label was making me second guess. Move handle away from the label to reveal is how I took it, so hope that's what you intended.
OTOH, I'm on touch screen (iPad/iOS26/WebKit) and it didn't go up and down, it went side to side.
As other feedback, the dumpster fire and deprecation warnings in the docs make me want to try this. I find builder-to-builder candor refreshingly helpful, treating your doc reader like an actual partner instead of like a euphemism. Appreciate your same candor throughout these comments.
Chainlift > Agency Services > Team menu option seems inert.
I always found this UI pattern a bit odd, because there just aren't that many situations where you want to compare the left side of image A and the right side of image B.
I see it a lot in photography, to show before/after processing - but what you want to be able to quickly compare are the same part of an image with and without the processing applied.
One of the photography tools I make is a LUT viewer/converter - and while I didn't have the slider at first, I guess it's standard enough at this point that people asked for it and I added it.
But I made two additions to it that make it more useful IMO:
- have labels on the left/right top corners, so it's immediately clear which version of the image you're looking at
- click and hold on the image to preview the full unprocessed version; release to revert to the view. That makes it easy to quickly compare the two versions of the same spot of a photo. (similar to what you suggest, but non-latching)
I've been wondering that myself. The descriptions seem to indicate that fully dragged to the left is liftkit, but my first assumption was that would be fully dragged to the right.
it's bad UX.
There's a little tiny arrow on the line's grab indicator showing which "side" you should look at. You can barely see it. Below there's the two labels floated to either side...
I agree, the x-axis labels are not helpful! Thankfully, the first example is “buttons with corrected icon spacing”, and the image on the right looks much better than the one on the left (a bigger difference in quality than in the other two examples), which is visible when the slider is on the left.
Suggestion to devs: put the label “material-style” in the lower left of its image and “liftkit” in the lower right of its image, and cover them appropriately as the slider moves, and then it'll be clear which framework the current image (or portion of it) belongs to.
If you were going to do this for the slider approach you can arrange the labels to the `block-start` and `block-end` of the image and support non-RTL scripts/languages natively.
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