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> some web UIs nowadays are so bad and the app so good that I'm not sure this always holds true.

This is by design to force you install the app. Most of these days, I just treat it as a signal to neither use the app nor the website.


Reddit comes to mind. I have so many issues with their mobile website. The back button has been broken for years, comments will frequently just hang as loading indefinitely (only fixable with a hard refresh), videos will sometimes not be replayable, sometimes if you change the zoom on the page it will just hard refresh, etc.

I'm not sure if it is intentional to push you to the mobile app, but I have to imagine the mobile app doesn't have all these issues.


Thankfully, old.reddit.com as a default option still works.

The kicker is that the text is so small and to make the site usable (and readable) you need to rotate your phone to landscape mode.

This works well enough that I haven't downloaded the reddit mobile app or used their mobile site ever since they killed Apollo.


But i.reddit.com does not. That was the original mobile experience.

And worse: neither would propagate to on-site links. That is, if someone had explicitly linked "www" rather than "old" or "i" at reddit, then regardless of which interface you'd arrived at it from, requiring you to constantly re-specify the actual interface you want. Particularly when not logged in to the site.

I'd begun using Reddit nearly 15 years ago, my last comment is now two years old, and my subs private (and inactive). Site's dead to me.


I'm especially angry that if you go to reddit.com in a mobile browser, it will sometimes fully block you from certain subreddits (not just NSFW ones) and tell you that you can only access it from the app. Meanwhile, you can easily visit the exact same subreddit by typing old.reddit.com/r/whatever. The outright lying bothers me so much. I refuse to be desensitized to lying just because everyone is lying all the time; it's still really wrong, and they really should be ashamed of themselves.

reddit browser behavior got me into using frontends for various sites, such as redlib dot privacyredirect dot com

there are surprisingly many of them for pretty much every social media website.


Their mobile app sucks too. They just killed /r/all recently.

you can launch it from a comment linking to r/All (with a as upper case) iirc. How long that'll still be available, I have no clue, but I like to imagine the devs who work on reddit realise how braindead of a decision removing it is but have to please the shareholders by removing any obvious access of it

I think they took the wrong signal from the people avoiding the default feed since it's filled with days-old posts you've already seen from subs you haven't joined.

you mean like in a way of "defending" the user from using the website and just go right away to the app?:)

Not really, more like "just pick whatever works, both usually suck"

If it's really "by design" then you are saying they have a staff of web developers who are told, "No, no, no... all that quality work you're capable of--don't do it. Here are some JIRA tickets to make the web site shitty and slow and eat the user's battery. Go implement them and make everything worse!"

What kind of sad, self-loathing software developer sits down and says "OK boss, whatever you say, boss, gonna go make it bad now..." I mean, I know to a lot of people, it's just a 9-5 and you do what your boss says, and "pride in your work" is not really a thing anymore, but come on. Who gets even a shred of satisfaction doing this?

I think a better explanation is just incompetence.


It's usually done in such small portions the developers don't know exactly what they're doing. That, or they've become so numb to it to not really care

> I also prefer using various SaaS solutions to handle authentication and user registration rather than rebuilding it all myself with Spring Boot Security.

I'm confused. Spring Security does provide you ways to create your own auth layer. However, you can use your existing identity provider or any external provider (there are starters for many providers).


Modern Java is pretty succinct and expressive and I enjoy working with it. Like any long-lived project, Java has its quirks and baggage but you can let go of that baggage if you want. The ecosystem is evolving nicely with new features and it is quite pleasant to work with these days. I’m looking forward to migrate apps at work to 26.


I’m a very prolific reader who primarily reads ePubs and occasionally printed books (mainly because I’m running out of space to keep books at home). One thing that I’ve noticed in modern prints is the subpar spines. I’ve books from 90s with their spine intact and going through continuous reads vs recent buys that come apart and require a rebinding on just few reads.


Indeed. I’m also quite lost but it caught the eye of an acquaintance. Hopefully, we’ll have a discussion over tea about it.

To me, knitting seems to be such an intimate art where a person pours their skill and heart. When I wrap myself in the sweater that my grandmother knit for me in a city far away from home, I feel her presence and love in the patterns woven in the fabric, wondering what she’d have been thinking while knitting. “I was thinking about the latest mischief of our naughty goats and this boy frolicking along with them.” She’d answer whenever someone asked.

Programming and automating this takes away all that intimacy out of that art but I guess it is inevitable for the “engineering” minds. Maybe there’s a wonder to it just by exploring the possibilities, albeit through machines.


The thing is, early knitting machines were advertised by showing them competing against "mighty fishermen of many years" since it was deemed a necessary activity for fishing communities in winter.

View it as an extension of Jaquard looms and the punch cards used for them being the precursors of modern computers.

c.f., the Native American representations of Intel chip designs:

https://kottke.org/24/09/a-navajo-weaving-of-an-intel-pentiu...


hi, I wrote the post!

one of the things that interests me about knitting machines (+ knit in general) is the intimacy that people develop with them... loads of knitters I know use (and have a very close relationship to) domestic knit machines, which sit somewhere between automated knit and hand knit.

my interest in working with my students to make knit software is not 'less intimiate knit' so much as 'more intimate code' + changing our relationships to the machines we use. loads of stuff is already made through automated knit (like -- your socks!) but the software those machines run is super rigid.

anyway I'm glad it's of interest!


This is quite fascinating...

I understand hand knitting as craft (that can also or exclusively be art).

I also understand some programming as craft (that can also or exclusively be art).

But when you combine the two and add some kind of machinery it is much harder for me to see it as craft and not as production. This has me thinking, I like to think!

The work you do expands my understanding of the world, thanks!



At some level people are already doing this through LLMs. But large orgs are extremely risk averse to do such things. There’s a reason why we have “security audits” and “compliance certifications”. It’s not like organizations are not capable of securing or standardizing their systems, just they do want to point fingers to somebody when legal proceedings happens.


Yes, The Architects books were pretty great but they had very classic soap opera kind of vibe than hardcore science fiction. I did enjoy them nonetheless.


I’d recommend Pixel but they have terrible battery life and they heat up pretty easily. On the other hand, they have support for Graphene OS, long software support and very nice cameras. Samsung and Xiaomi are absolutely worst choices when it comes to software; they are filled to brim with bloatware and worse, blatant spyware. The only way to use them is to immediately install a clean alternative OS, such as LineageOS.


I have had no issues with any of my Pixel phones overheating and I've had many. Maybe you have an issue with a specific app that misbehaved in the background?

I don't think there is any inherent flaw in the design of the pixels that causes them to overheat or drain battery. And the OP is likely to replace the Android OS with Lineage anyway.


Indeed, I stumbled upon it this weekend while searching for something completely unrelated. Thought this was neat stuff to share on HN.


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