Companies can iterate on their products much faster if they're not required to publish all of their functionality as public APIs. Once the APIs have been published, it's much harder for them to be changed.
Doing this also puts them at the mercy of whether or not client applications are willing to support their new functionality. Maybe YouTube wants clients to adopt some feature, but a powerful client application doesn't like that feature and so won't support it.
The protocol/platform lock-in is a problem, but preserving companies' ability to iterate quickly on features is also very important.
The company doesn't need to expose custom APIs on their data. If they implement a chat protocol, they must allow other clients to interface with it.
For the data side, likely any requirements wouldn't go into effect until a dataset is deemed sufficiently large/societally important, and there could be a period of exclusivity similarly to the patent system to encourage innovation. This system works very well for new drug creation, with competitors free to copy the drug for pennies on the dollar after patent expiry, so I very much doubt it would stifle innovation in tech, especially given the lower capital requirements to innovate.
I'm not suggesting at all the government mandates private companies implement a public write api into their own datacenter. I'm suggesting the privately hosted data must be replicatable and thus hostable by competitors. Likely the practical way to do this, technically, is to support a public kafka/persistent eventing system such that anybody can firehose all historical and new data. Ideally with funding help.
Hosting data is cheaper than ever, and continues to deflate in cost. The companies in this line of fire are already quasi-monopoly behemoths, so I don't buy into the cost-prohibitive/stifling innovation perspective.
> The company doesn't need to expose custom APIs on their data. If they implement a chat protocol, they must allow other clients to interface with it.
And how would that work without a way to talk to the company’s chat server, and document the way to do that, and commit to keeping that way of communicating reasonably stable? In other words, an API?
Which implies sort of a commitment to the way that chat protocol works, maybe even before the company knows how that looks like. Modern development methodology, that is, working in sprints and iterating towards a local maximum, doesn’t really go well with an API that’s required to work pretty much stable from day one. So when would the point in time be where you’d be required to open up to other clients?
not really. An API doesn’t necessarily have to be a HTTP interface. A data schema is also an API, if the documents are made available. The endpoints where that data is available is. And you still need heaps of documentation that someone needs to maintain. Not every system has simple to, from, and content fields.
Most of the APIs that do get published or standardized are so large and complex that they form a kind of regulatory capture. Almost nobody but the biggest boys can afford to make them. Add a few laws that increase overhead, and Bob's yer Uncle.
"Public API" doesn't mean you can't change the API, nor does it limit how quickly extensions or new versions can be added to that API. It just means you have to actually inform people of what you're changing and when.
If a client application refuses to implement functionality, that's on them, not the original developer. If I want the new feature, I'll switch.
These days however, new features nowadays are usually things I don't want. Not strictly outright anti-features, but usually completely pointless "Bob needs a bonus[0]" changes that lets a middle manager put something good in their promo packet. The whole reason why people want compatible file formats and third-party clients is specifically so we can dictate to the originator of those formats and protocols how and how fast they can iterate on their products and limit how bad they can deliberately make them to increase profits.
> Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost.
Well, that's what happened with the "Office Open XML" standard, which has been a catastrophe. Microsoft perfectly handled every country to have their ISO standard pass. Even though it was in violation of ISO requirements, which many countries voiced. Those complaints "somehow" disappeared. The fact that at ISO you're not allowed to divulge who is paid by which company might be related. Or maybe not. Either way, IMO, the conclusion is that you can't delegate democratic functions to a non-democratic organization.
But I wholeheartedly agree with you on the principle. Interoperability brings innovation and competition. Not lock-ins/walled gardens. And interoperability requires standards not ""technical specification"" which is the new slang for oligopoly.
There are an astounding number of people who never stop for even a second to consider the nuts and bolts implications of the ideas they want to foist onto society.
Pass regulations that might kill YouTube just to see how it works out. Maybe Google is more robust and cleverer than we expect. Worse case we just lost a bunch of pointless reaction videos and other crap.
They would likely employ advertising, just as YouTube does. Are you saying it's not profitable to run a video hosting service?
YouTube is evidence of that already.
A more straightforward way to accomplish this in areas where content size is large/expensive is to disallow coupling client creation with data hosting, and data vendors would license access to their data to client creators.
Bundling becomes anti-competitive at a certain network size, because there becomes no meaningful way to create a competitor network. The essence of what makes capitalism effective is competition driving costs lower, and in many areas in tech we have very little competition due to large network effects.
Keep in mind Capitalism != Free Market. A fully free market is a form of Capitalism that has no laws, and no impediment to monopoly formation. Competitive Capitalism with minimal laws to encourage competitive where large network effects or monopolies form is far more societally beneficial in the long run.
Decoupling client/data has already been done many times in the past in analogous situations, e.g. when movie producers were not allowed to own the theaters where the movies were played, giving a much more equal footing to smaller content producers.
They're asking who's going to cover YouTube's costs for providing their videos via API. Or is the expectation that if you use a 3rd party client you'll see youtube's ads to cover their costs, and then additional ads from the client?
The government should move fast and break things in these sorts of cases. Especially in this case… video streaming isn’t very important, take action that might destroy their business model and see if we learn anything about how to regulate them in more meaningful markets.
We already have 3rd-party YouTube clients: SmartTube, ReVanced, etc. They work quite well, in fact, much better than YouTube's own client.
They don't need any money to cover their costs; they're FOSS. As for YouTube's costs, they don't show YouTube's ads, so basically Google is covering the cost there, though perhaps not willingly. But Google makes the YT API usable by these apps, and after all this time hasn't done too much to try to shut them down. We'll see how long that lasts, but there seem to be real technical limitations to how much Google can force ads, without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do.
> without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do.
There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. That downgrades the user experience compared to easier to separate ads, but if they can see you watch videos without the normal ads they can always do that.
But the main reason they don't is probably that they can't target such ads very well and it is more expensive to inject in a stream rather than send separate videos, so not sure if it is even worth it for them.
>There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does.
You mean bake the ads into the stream? I don't think that's so easy to do in realtime. Even TV decades ago never did this AFAIK: they played the programming from one source, and then switched over to the commercial from another source (probably videotape) at the correct time.
Anyway, if you're talking about permanently encoding the ad into the video, that really doesn't make sense. The ad probably won't be relevant to many of the viewers. YouTube is global, so if someone from France watches a cat video uploaded by an American and it has ads in English for Applebees restaurant, 1) they probably won't even understand it unless they happen to speak English and 2) there's no Applebees in France. The same thing applies if it's an ad for a restaurant that only exists in, say, California: viewers in New York aren't going to care, and the restaurant doesn't want to pay to advertise to viewers outside their area. Even worse, ads normally run for limited times, so YouTube would have to constantly re-encode videos to change the embedded ads.
Yes, there are many ways to do it, one of which I described above.
You can disallow bundling a video client with the video data provider, thus forcing the data provider to monetize by charging the clients to use the data. The clients make money either via subscriptions or ads, and selling new video data back to the provider.
e.g. Google would have to spin-off or re-org YouTube to split client/data and give same pricing terms to their client branch as to other third party clients
This is a lighter touch/market based solution, which I prefer to being overly prescriptive.
As much as I think big tech sometimes abuses their power and leverage unfair advantages we shouldn’t stifle innovation by requiring everything to be totally open from the get go.
If there’s zero switching costs to go to a competitor then what’s the incentives for companies to spent a lot of money and time building a product? It’d be very risky (especially for small players actually) and they’ll have to do “safe” incremental functionality until they have a larger user base and can afford to invest in R&D because it’s less likely many of their users will leave all at once. It’s the same reason why we have patents for things - to incentivise the investment in R&D. Maybe there could be a threshold for time+revenue+users that trigger the need for openness? Same should be true for social networks and when we can/should set a higher bar for holding them responsible for abuse on their platform I feel.
The problem is open protocols can just as easily be consolidated down to network monopolies at the application layer.
Look at what happened to SMS (Apple's malicious implementation pushing everyone onto propriety networks like WhatsApp). Or email, where Outlook and Gmail have a bulletproof duopoly, leading to decades of stagnation. Outlook still renders emails with the 2006-era Microsoft Word html engine (Gmail is almost as behind on this), hence why email still doesn't support a lot of modern (>10 years old) accessibility features.
Things like ownership over domain names in the email protocol still create monopolies -- since Google owns gmail.com, it's literally like them owning your telephone number/mailbox. If you're like 99.9% of consumers without their own domain name for email, you cannot switch. Gmail owns you.
What changed? It's now trivial to write exporters for Office formats for specific use case. Save a sample of what you want to have exported, and then just template the XML, generate it based on source data and zip it.
Most of the time you don't even need to read the specification.
Compare that with the times of eg. closed binary XLS format.
I've observed that the quality of third-party SDKs for Microsoft office formats improved substantially. The .xls format was notoriously fickle to process or produce from outside of Excel. As of .xlsx, the open source community produced myriad SDKs in various languages, and the ones I have experience with worked quite well. The format becoming less arcane and better documented was important to enable this.
We did get Libre office and Apache OpenOffice due to that? I think they both should become obsolete in an ideal world where folks converse in fluent markdown to achieve everything they want in a document.
No, LibreOffice (and Apache OpenOffice, but Apache OpenOffice is pretty much dead and nobody should use it) are descended from Sun's OpenOffice.org, which is descended from their acquisition of StarOffice. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
Microsoft's "open" standard, "Office Open XML" was created in response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML The standardization process was incredibly irregular (see Wikipedia and LWN from that time period.) I'm sure the naming was not intended to sow confusion at all.
This is... The entire point of a government. Yes, they're flawed, but they're meant to exercise the will of the people, especially in terms of regulating entities that have outsized power vs. an individual citizen (corporations, wealthy magnates, etc).
Perhaps, but you're missing my point. Governments are out of touch with what people need and even if they're trying to help, they'll get things very wrong (for example, those annoying cookie popups we've all had forced upon us).
People know what they want, and will vote with their wallets. As long as options are allowed to exist, you can trust a well informed public to gravitate towards the most optimal solution over time.
> People know what they want, and will vote with their wallets.
Sure, but in this case there's stacked incentives against people being able to vote with their wallets in the first place with ecosystem lock-in. The companies are incentivized to prevent people from being able to easily switch to a competitor, which is exactly why most people don't, and by and large the general populace isn't going to be savvy enough to recognize that's what's happening.
Like you said, the way you combat that is having a "well informed" public, but who's going to be responsible for informing the government? That's the entire point of the US FTC, is representing the interests of US consumers and paying attention to related issues.
> Governments are out of touch with what people need
Yes, governments are going to be slow and conservative w.r.t. what current public opinion is, because organizing large groups and institutions is difficult.
Government has by far and wide the most "outsized power" v. a corporation or wealthy citizen... It does not "exercise the will of the people", it forcefully imposes that of their rulers.
> This ultimately is a function of education, which will get better as technical knowledge becomes more widely and freely available.
Unfortunately, the level of technical knowledge of the population is going down. People do not care or treat tech as a magic. On a higher level of education, Microsoft can rely on a cohort using Windows at school/home/university/work.
> As you say, it's only a matter of time before the walled gardens start to crumble.
Watch what Microsoft and others are doing in the acquisition space. Microsoft is buying into businesses that use their products. What are the chances of those businesses witching away from Microsoft software stack?
People should just use a sufficiently complex, memorized, password for their money/identity, and then a (mental) algorithm that allows deriving unique passwords for other services that are less important.
Only have to memorize 2-3 strings and more secure than a password manager since there's no third party in the loop.
Password Managers are a huge man-in-the-middle and liability in other regards (e.g. you don't have it present on a given device or on hand).
SSO from a single set of credentials is a much better solution. Multi-factor biometrics even better (outside of PII sensitivities)
Normal people don’t usually run password generation algorithms in their heads. When they do, the algorithm sucks. This is why we have password managers in the first place.
The formula can be very simple and is applied to less important services.
Unless you are directly, personally, targeted no hacker will waste the time trying to reverse engineer your algorithm... they'll just go on to brute forcing the next hash in the list.
And most people only have a few services that need to be truly secure anyway, which would use non-derived passwords (if they hack your netflix or spotify, who cares? Call support and get it back)
Password managers have had many exploits/failures over the years. You introduce so many points of failures bringing in a third party.
Your gibberish password with random symbols/characters isn't any more secure than a more memorable one of a similar length.
Theres a very recent comment from the CEO stating something similar... But historically it's seemed they've allowed their customers to take most of the margin.
They should have a lot of leverage being on the most advanced node, but doesn't seem they use it.
Likely a cultural thing, but if somebody has more insight would be curious
Nvidia is getting ~90% margins on their cards, which are manufactured by TSMC. Nobody else can manufacture to the same levels of density/performance/efficiency. TSMC is clearly not capitalizing well on their process advantage.
Apple and Nvidia can switch to other fabs, but performance and competitiveness will be impacted. TSMC seems to be running more like a charity than a business with the amount of margin their customers get on their products (both Apple and Nvidia)
I've flown Southwest a few times out of necessity and it's always been a worse experience for me. I don't like the "hunger games" aspect of seating... I'd rather have the seat pre-selected and relax during boarding. I've also found it to be more expensive generally for the routes I fly.
Everyone has their own preferences, but I wonder is there a tangible advantage to flying Southwest to those that prefer it?
I used to give preference to Southwest for cross-country (US) flights, partly because of availability on particular routes, but over other direct flights because of the boarding experience. For $15-20 (not sure what it is now) I could pay for the automated check-in and be near-guaranteed a seat in the A group that was better, for cheaper, than trying to get an equivalent seat at an airline where they were picked ahead of time.
That makes sense if you prefer to be close to the front/exit for quick deplaning.
I tend to just relax during both boarding/de-boarding since it's only a few minutes difference anyway and the effort/stress of trying to move quickly outweighs the few minutes savings. If the seat is pre-selected, I can simply wait for the line to go away and board last without standing for 10m. It seems to me that most people rush to board first even with pre-selected seating (perhaps optimizing for space in the overhead bins)
If you have a connecting flight with a short layover, is the exception where I want to be right near the exit. So I guess it's more of a preference thing
> is there a tangible advantage to flying Southwest
for those in Dallas, the trip to Lovefield instead of DFW is super convenient. playing "hunger games" as you put it to find a seat vs traveling to the larger airport can be worth it especially if traveling alone.
there's also free checked bags compared to the other lower price carriers.
the biggest negative is you might be flying on a MAX
There are some minor advantages: checked bags are free, and canceling a flight for future credit has long been free on all tickets - once this became common among other airlines, they changed their policy to make the credit never expire to stay ahead of the competition (and allow transferring it to another person for some types of tickets).
It depends on the route obviously but I find Southwest prices to be comparable to other non low cost airlines like Delta, American, etc. The few occasions I got bit by the $200 change fee on the others has made me consider Southwest much more. I refuse to fly the super cheap airlines.
People seem to have an aversion to using medicine to impart QoL benefits.
It's "too easy" to lose weight now.
It's like being upset at the discovery of toothpaste since it enables people to eat simple carbs and still retain their teeth, rather than relying on restraint and stoicism.
Or using insulin to manage diabetes rather than a no carb diet
For example, I got prescribed ketaconazol shampoo for my dandruff. Finally had dandruff free hair for the first time in 20 years of struggling with it.
Then I developed permanent and severe tinnitus and hearing loss - one of the side effects of ketaconazol.
I've lived with a piercing 11.5khz tone for 5 years now. For the first two years I frequently could not sleep, at times the ringing was so bad I was suicidal. In the last 3 years my life has changed thanks to working with red and brown noise, which I blast on speaker to let me sleep
I'll struggle with the hearing loss and tinnitus forever. And the dandruff is back, maybe forever. Today I treat the dandruff and the tinnitus like old friends and part of me, because thinking of them as enemies that have defeated me is too heartbreaking.
These weigh loss meds also have stories of life altering side effects. I think it's important to understand that the desire to avoid these effects is valid. I sincerely hope you don't need to experience a disabling or life threatening side effect from a seemingly innocuous drug. But every new drug you take carries are risk that it will irrevocably alter your life. It's worth having compassion for those reluctant to take meds, and acknowledge that there are risks that you are discounting.
With risky conditions like obesity, it's easy to judge people and assume the obesity rush is greater than taking some meds. But that fails to truly connect with the utter terror of trying to fix one body system, only to cause utterly permanent damage to some other system. It's one of the scariest things I've faced.
It's important to realize that is what we're asking others to face when we take meds side effects for granted. And it's human to acknowledge and support those for whom the risk feels too great.
Wow. I believe I took ketaconazol orally to treat my tinea versicolor. Have had tinnitus, but never connected the two. BTW, there is a new treatment for tinnitus, which may help. It’s an electric device that provides feedback on your tongue. I was quoted $3800, but opted against it. Mine isn’t that bad.
Its not the same. Because the science hasn't been proven for any length of time on a significant population where as all of the examples you gave have.
They're certainly the leading player in terms of cutting edge capabilities, but there are plenty of companies working on fabs. It wasn't long ago that Intel used to have the leading fab and simply got complacent/slow opening the door for TSMC to surpass them.
In the macro sense there seems to be more widespread awareness and money going towards fab competition than ever before. I suspect we'll trend closer to performance parity between competitors in the coming years.
Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though.
I recently moved to Linux from MacOS, but probably will have to go back to Apple on the m4 for local LLM capabilities (high RAM specs much cheaper than commercial GPUs). Too bad Asahi is still missing some pretty critical capabilities (microphone, USB-C monitor connection etc)
Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though.
If this artificial advantage allows Apple to slack off in their other areas of competitive advantage, then this is bad for the consumer, overall. This creates an environment of cynicism, where there's even degraded incentive to try and beat Apple with a better product.
If Apple slacks off in any way, some other company can step in with innovation and consumers benefit by increased choice and innovation. We shouldn't worry when a company slacks off except when its moats are illegal. If Apple's business power were properly regulated, they'd be forced to compete more of the time and when they didn't they'd face more consumer friendly Apple unfriendly results. Fix the antitrust enforcement and we'll fix the problem.
It's still expensive, but far cheaper than brand name with similar efficacy. Competition from these programs will likely drive costs much lower over the next few years.
Semaglutide is still under patent in the US till at least Dec 2031 (say Wpedia).
Blockbuster drugs still under patent usually don't have alternative avenues of supply that are significantly cheaper than the main avenue. I wonder what law or regulation allows this alternative avenue to persist.
I've got a little under 200 tabs open right now in my main browser -- split into ~15 different groups with a plugin. I treat each as a little workspace for a project or subject I'm interested in and flip back and forth as needed. Keeping them open (although not necessarily loaded) is useful for preserving context (e.g. back button history, accounts logged in in the proper container, tabs arranged next to each other in a particular way for spatial memory, etc.) so that jumping back into something later is easy.
Open-new-tab is faster than finding your old tab (… is there one still open?) for enough things that they stack up fast. Add a dose of “I’ll come back to this after the current distraction…” (you don’t) and “I’m not sure the current distraction is actually over, better leave those open” and it quickly becomes a self-reinforcing problem. Eventually you just mass-bookmark all few hundred of ‘em and close them all (that’s what I do anyway)
I’ve tried tab groups in safari, which seemed like the perfect feature for me, but I always forget to switch before opening new, unrelated tabs.
Bookmark-all-and-close works pretty well since I’ve literally never gone back and looked at the bookmarks in the 15ish years I’ve been using the approach. Groups would solve a different problem (task-specific tabs get mixed together) but add enough friction that I simply don’t use them.
It takes a while to build the habit, but I personally have a 'general' group that serves for my regular browsing. If I find I've got a whole bunch of tabs for a topic I'm working on, I create a new group from them. I clear out the general group regularly.
I don't understand "tab hoarders" but I also don't understand why Mac users pollute their desktop with a thousand icons either. I guess some people like clean workspaces, and some don't mind clutter.
It happens on Macs I’m sure, but the picture in my head of someone doing this to the extreme is definitely a Windows user.
[edit] for my part, as a Mac user, I couldn’t tell you whether my desktop’s full of icons (probably not?) nor what my background image is (… the default? Which I’m guessing is probably a mountain or a wave or something?) because I see my desktop so rarely, and never pay any attention to it.
I get it, but 100% of Mac users I've helped in my 25 years of professional computing had messy desktops. That's dozens (maybe close to 100) of Mac users. Not scientific, not conclusive, but it's exactly 100% with no exceptions. This includes fellow IT professionals and college acquaintances. The most recent experience being two days ago, where I assisted a Mac user in changing email settings. It's also very common for these Mac users to not understand file/folder structure. I often guide them to download a file/app, and once downloaded they generally have no idea where it went unless its... on their desktop! Same for "open" applications. For PC user's I'd say it's in the 10-20% range, low enough to be unremarkable.
Something sounds a bit off if your IT professionals don’t understand files and folders. In any case, my anecdata in an organisation of over 1000 windows computers and about 400 macs is the windows device owners are generally the ones with icons strewn about the place and displays plugged in set to mirror ‘because it gives them more space’ but I tend to find this is because the windows users are the ‘business’ users whereas the macs are the developers.
Windows users have had screens full of icons since at least the 3.x days... and you can easily search google images for tons of Windows 98/XP screenshots from the early 2000s of desktops completely filled to the brim with shortcuts and such.
> when you can easily get back to that page in less than a second in most cases?
How? Tabs preserve the navigation history too. Bookmarks don’t. Searching for it doesn’t work when you don’t remember which website it was. Following links from search results and links from those pages (from the search results) to get somewhere that seems like it could help…that’s just one of the ways tabs get accumulated.
My work machine usually has 5 to 7 workspaces open at a time each with 2 or 3 browser windows that each have anywhere from 3 to a dozen tabs open.
I visit every single tab multiple times a day and closing them out makes no sense. I need multiple windows for Jira, dev environment, testing, production, misc corporate intranet sites, servicenow, etc.
All of them have information updating live continuously. Why would I close them?
It's not even 100 tabs, but it's definitely a lot.
Because often you can’t easily get back “in less than a second” as a tab is the culmination of a large stack of combined thought+browsing.
I keep it open because I can more conveniently context-switch back to it when I need to, rather than attempt to retract my steps from a search query all over again.
An open tab is state in suspension - it’s sleep mode. A bookmark is hibernation.
He doesn't care, and he won't change his ways. And that's perfectly okay!
I'm assuming you are someone who closes tabs sometimes. I am too. What you have to accept is that we are the weird ones. A browser is a tool and just opening new tabs for everything is the easiest way to use it. There is very little downside, because there is no need to ever touch an old tab if you can just open a new one. There is no limit on how many you can have open other than what your machine can handle, and even if the browser crashes, nothing is really lost, because you just... open a new tab.
Just accept it. It's hard, seeing a million tabs open really bugs me too, but you're not going to change anyone's mind on the subject.
Some tabs I just want to keep open indefinitely, so I'd like an option for that (maybe automatically, based on a self-defined list of domain names). But with some kind of archiving or reading list and a fully user-configurable deadline, that might work. (I'd put it the time limit at two weeks initially since I really don't mind having a few hundred tabs open, it's only after that that it starts to trouble me a bit and I lose oversight.)
To me tabs are like a queue of things I plan to review or consume. Does a link look interesting? Open it in a new tab, then I'll look at after I finish with the current one.
Saving 100s of tabs isn't going to work either, unless you can remember the name of the window and then tediously look through the list of open tabs. In that case, just search through your history instead of having the tabs.
Not everyone's memory works the same way, and not everyone's organizational skills are the same. Whereas (it sounds like) you remember a task you're trying to do, and then go do it, and make a new tab and go do the task, for others, coming across the tab itself serves as the reminder about the task, and a call to action to do it. I'll open a tab that I need to do X, forget about X/procrastinate about X, open a tab for Y, and then Z, and then through going to a random tab, get to the tab about X, get reminded about doing X, and then go do it.
Sure It can. For example, If I'm looking for a certain stackoverflow post about a project I'm working on, I know it's be on the window with the other resources for that project, and I can remember that it's roughly on the middle right portion of that group of tabs. That narrows it down to <10 tabs to quickly check.
If I use my browser history, I'm going to have to re-filter out all of the webpages I deemed inadequate. If the tab was left open, I know it was at least somewhat useful.
Firefox switch to tab, my friend. You open a new tab, start typing the title of the page or the address of the site and it shows up in autocomplete with a switch to tab indicator and when selected it moves you to that tab instead of opening a copy.
Isn't that a good use case for the bookmark function?
To answer the actual question: I don't. Either I read it immediately or will never get back to it. There is always enough fresh content. I don't need another backlog.
And let's be honest, if you have a backlog of 7400 pages, neither do you.
At 7400, that backlog of articles is clearly aspirational, but there's some place where I do want to read about a topic, but only when I'm in the right mood, and I'm not in the mood to read about that topic right now, usually at the start of the day I'm in a more productive mood and by the end I'm not, and so there are different topics to read about at different times of day.
My bookmark list is huge and basically acts as (part of) a knowledge base. Conversely, open tabs are something of a hybrid between a "read this later" and to-do list.
I'm sure there are many other styles of organizing tasks/knowledge, and I would be a bit careful about discrediting what apparently works for other people.
There's borderline cases of working against UI paradigms like using the trash as a folder to store important documents, but I'd argue that this one isn't one of them.
I go to the same set of pages all the time, and the browser has it in the search history. So usually only have to type a few characters to navigate to it.
Do people often seek out obscure pages without entering from a more common context?
Entering pages from a common but changing context is in fact the main way to get more open tabs. I often scan the main page of HN or my newspaper and right-click the titles that look interesting to open them in the background, then go through those tabs at my leisure, while those pages may drop off those main pages in the meantime (it's a kind of FOMO really). Some of those will then stay open while I get sidetracked doing actually important things. Those pages are usually ephemeric and not meant as a reference, so not good bookmark candidates.
Maybe this could be a clue as to what's happening: What if other people have different use cases and needs?
Even between work and personal browsing I use my browsers quite differently. At work, tabs are more of a to-do list (things I need to review/sign off etc.); for personal, tabs are a largely a reading list.
I'd never just remember all things people want me to take a look at and type them in the search history, so tabs solve that nicely for me.
Way too much overhead for many of the things I use tabs for.
Frequently, the time it takes me to action whatever I have a tab open for takes as long as adding it to, reloading it from, and marking it off of a to-do list.
the primary difference between bookmarks and tabs is that bookmarks are static and tabs are dynamic. the best example is tracking a webcomic. the tab will stay open on the page where i stopped reading. it then allows me to go back and resume reading. when i follow links to the next pages, then the tab will be updated.
if i were to use a bookmark, then every time i'd advance a few pages in the comic, i'd have to delete the old bookmark and create a new one.
it is quite ironic that a browser feature called bookmark does not actually function like a physical bookmark for printed books.
No need to run even, you can stay in Zone 2 via walking. Incline on a treadmill makes required speeds quite low (2-3mph for most people).
I prefer it since it's at a pace where you can easily use your phone/browse the web at the same time.
Walking is also far more practical given that you walk 99% of the time in modern society. Might as well train for the thing you actually functionally do
Client applications should compete on their individual merits, not coast on protocol lock-in.
Would WhatsApp or YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? (PII etc notwithstanding)
Protocols compete on the merits of the protocol, clients compete on the merits of the client.
I think this will be the reality/obvious a few decades down the line.