That's my stance as well. Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website I prefer the web.
With responsive design becoming mainstream I'm fine with using my browser for 90% of my internet work. In some cases like Google docs it's painful to use the web version so I just use the app.
EDIT: I wish they'd add a console to mobile web browsers though.
Yep. If someone is trying to make you do something, or stop doing something, or buy something, your first question should always be "Why?".
Why would someone try to force me off of my browser (that has ad-blocking and tracker-blocking mitigations) and on to a locked-down app that may want permission to run in the background, display notifications, access my files or camera, etc?
Maybe it really is to "improve my experience"... yeah, right.
Yeah, crippling your website in order to force users to download an app that may be able to access for of a user's data, is a clear sign that there are people you don't want to do business with.
There are several sites I use regularly for which I refuse to install the app. There are a lot more sites that I visit only occasionally because someone links to it, and that site immediately wants me to download the app and refuses to show me the content that was linked to. Fuck off with that.
As a developer, I resent having to go beg for permission for getting my app published. It just rubs me the wrong way to have to play approval roulette with some bored jerk working for Apple or Google. I've had both reject things that were previously alright, then weren't, and then were again.
I default to building web applications. Actually getting people to install your special app is in any case a race to the bottom. Some will, most won't. It's onboarding friction. If you can shave a few steps of your onboarding process, the chance that somebody comes out the other end is simply higher.
As a user, I rarely install apps to begin with and frankly the appeal of "native" is limited to well guarded APIs into jealously magical device capabilities that phones have that most applications don't actually need. I know how the sausage is made and there just isn't that much there.
Same. My app is a PWA. Most users won’t install a PWA and won’t repeatedly navigate to a website so it limits the reach. But the advantage is that I can deploy instantly. I love when someone sends a bug report and I can tell them it’s fixed ten minutes later. Pretty great, compared to “it’ll be fixed in there business days” you get with the iOS app store
> It just rubs me the wrong way to have to play approval roulette with some bored jerk working for Apple or Google. I've had both reject things that were previously alright, then weren't, and then were again.
As someone who worked on this "jerk" position (first as tier 1, (T2 was team lead), later promoted to small team tier 3s to actually judge the ambigous cases and discus enforcing the rules with the store head honcho) before they downsized our team from 200 to 20 people through multiple rounds by automating the system, it was not really up to me to decide whether app will pass or not.
We had to follow strictly the rules, if you would not follow them and someone found through random check you have issues, even if I though many of these rules were stupid and I was frustrated to have to reject app for stupid reasons.
And you are not allowed to reach to the dev outside the system to let them know how to circumvent the system and tell them the reason why their app was rejected. If you try to do this, dev will still reach to the company saying someone told him this, they will investigate it and find out it was you and you are again in trouble for trying to help the dev fight the stupid rules.
100% agree. I'm not a big fan of apps being distributed through stores owned by big corporations.I had faith in Fdroid but sadly it hasn't taken off.
I also think app development requirements are too high. Just to compile your app and run the build process you need a very high end computer. I could never do it with my modest laptop and therefore gravitated towards web programming and more backend work. Thankfully I avoided all the pain of building apps and getting them approved by store owners. But I do have respect for people who have to deal with this bs.
It may sound too opinionated and may hurt some feeling but I don't like android at all. I think it sucks. But I have little choice. So I grin and bear.
> Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website I prefer the web.
Facebook seems to be in this game. Constant notifications to install the app, and as well increasingly degraded experience in the web version (both desktop and mobile).
> I wish they'd add a console to mobile web browsers though.
It's kinda there. You just need to connect with adb and then use chrome://inspect. It's actually a really nice feature and I've used it quite a bit over the past two years.
For iOS Safari there's a few extensions that do the trick, search the app store for “dev tools” and theres quite a few relevant results. Personally I use web inspector and it works as advertised.
often the blocked features are specifically blocked on the mobile web (i.e. on your desktop they won't make you get your phone out to use the app instead), so forcing the webpage to desktop mode helps.
Yeah this is amazing. I'd love to see integration with raylib at some point, if possible that is.
Lua's small footprint is it's one big advantage in addition to its pleasent syntax but with tiny cc (which raylib supports when I last checked a few years ago) you can get a compact c runtime as well.
I haven't worked on a project with either of these frameworks but a couple of years back I was researching into some frameworks and was surprised to learn that I can use raylib on my phone with termux!
Tiny CC doesn't have its own runtime, it uses whatever you specify (falling back to system standard), same as GCC or Clang. For low runtime footprint you are probably better off with one of those two compilers as they generate smaller, more optimised code.
KDE is amazing. For an open-source project the desktop environment looks really slick. Not that any other desktop environments are particularly ugly but KDE can compete with the best commercially developed desktops.
For a moment though I thought that this story was about the launch of a new plasma TV 'big screen' and it got me really excited.
Yes! KDE is the only thing in the Linux world that legitimately looks better than the big competitors. Not always, and not all the time; programs that are really focused on design are still a cut above, but I truly believe that KDE looks (and feels!) better than macOS
I don't understand why there aren't more folks like us shouting it from the rooftops. It's almost bizarre how good it looks.
I’m curious about which distros are working well with Plasma, as I had some trouble with stability in the past. I have the feeling Plasma works better with rolling release.
Plasma is the desktop-mode interface for the Steam Deck SteamOS, which is the only way I use it. I'm usually a Gnome person, as I'm one of the people Gnome just "clicks" for, despite all its issues, but I've been really enjoying using the Steam Deck as a mini computer and Plasma has been quite stable and solid for that. Did some minor customizing, and no issues at all so far!
I've been running two distros with Plasma: Bazzite OS and CachyOS. Both very different, and stellar with Plasma.
I use CachyOS in my ThinkPad and in my Framework Desktop, for work. A stellar OS, has great defaults, is very fast and prioritizes KDE although you can do other WMs too if you're adventurous.
Yeah, Gnome consolidates feature changes into major releases every six months, so it aligns well with fixed release distros like Ubuntu and Fedora that have release cycles that are aligned with Gnome's.
KDE drops a new point release with new features ~ every four months, and has a more flexible release schedule, so it is just to just get the changes when they are released.
I'm currently running KDE on NixOS unstable which is great, but if I weren't doing that I'd still be on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
> KDE is amazing. For an open-source project the desktop environment looks really slick.
That is clearly an understatement. For me, it is the best desktop environment out there.
I don't want to say that it is perfect (there have been many versions over the years which clearly were not (e.g. KDE 4.0)), but none of the other desktop environments (including Windows and MacOS) have a similar feature set:
- mainstream UX principles like Windows
- beautiful as MacOS
- customizable and extendable like no other
I have to work with MacOS every day, and it is just painful to see how much better KDE is when it is not available...
I think you have a point. It could be difficult to justify the cost of carbon capture based on sequestration alone. One of the reasons I think this might still work is that captured carbon can be used to create platform chemicals (various hydrocarbons) using the fischer tropsch process. Electrofuels are using direct air capture to generate fossil replacements.
Only requirement is energy and there too it isn't all that expensive to pull air in from the atmosphere or to seperate CO2 from adsorbent via low grade heat (70-100c)
So far into the future this method could allow us to continue produce critical hydrocarbon materials (used everywhere from plastics to pharamaceuticals) without having to depend upon concentrated and contested oil supplies.
More than energy efficiency its volumetric efficiency that's the issue. At the moment (to the best of my knowledge) kg of capturing materials capture tens of grams of CO2. Pulling it from air is not that energy intensive but finding materials that can actually filter out CO2 from that air is difficult. If breakthroughs are made in this area it will have industrial applications. Then it won't be just sequestering.
Of course the easier solution is to plant more trees and grasses but they grow very slowly and require valuable land. Still this approach is feasible in some uncultivable lands. Crops like cottongrass[1] can grow even in tundra climate and can be valuable source of both technically imp carbon via cellulose and a means to capture CO2. We don't have to make a choice. We can do both simultaneously.
I wonder what the economics could look like for using this with remote solar for production instead of considering it for global removal/sequestration. If you build a solar farm in a desert and use this to pull raw materials from the air to create something actually worth money, what levels of efficiency do you need to make that profitable? How close is something like that in reality?
Giant miscanthus can grow on land that's not viable for farming food (other than grazing grasses), has a lot of properties that ready it for becoming charcoal (high tonnage per acre, self drying, minimal inputs needed). Without a price for carbon, it's hard to make it work, though.
I find it a bit funny. Robert Stirling invented the Stirling engine because steam engines were dangerous (at that time) and could explode.
Malone(and others apparently) took Stirling engines and filled it with compressed water as a working fluid with some decent efficiency!
The advantage, based on what I could gather from limited info available, was that these liquid engines could be run at lower temp differential making them great for low grade heat recovery.
A few years ago I took his course on thermoelectricity and really liked his way of teaching. The videos were short and to the point and yet gave me all that I needed to know about the topic.
Rousseau was famous for saying that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. He advocated for self rule and formulation of laws by the people. Yet after 100s of years of democracy (thousands really) the corrupting influence of social norms has not really been remedied.
Inequalities still exist,corruption still happens and social institutions that were once liberating become oppressive over time.
His ideal of self governance has not been realised as most nation states have adopted a representative democracy. People don't really make the rules. They just handover the power to someone else who makes them on their behalf.
It's certainly right that Franklin believed in practicing virtue. He famously kept a log of his good and bad actions.
Yet there is another great philosopher that has had tremendous impact on American society whom the author has not mentioned. Emerson believed in transcending societal definition of virtue and vice and follow one's own inclinations. His ideas of self reliance resonated with American people and brought about a change in their thinking when they started to believe in themselves rather than looking to Europe for intellectual guidance.
I find it difficult to accept either Franklin's or Rousseau's view as they were more politically motivated—Rousseau wanted his social contract,Franklin worshiped Socrates but when it came to governence he kicked him aside to chose democracy,an idea that was popular at the time due to thinkers like Locke.
Emerson gave people true agency over their lives and inspired them to think critically and not sheepishly believe a thing to be good or bad. He was more revolutionary than Franklin (Self reliance was released around the time of civil war) and gave people courage to question institutional authority and he eventually became more impactful than Rousseau's collectivism.
With responsive design becoming mainstream I'm fine with using my browser for 90% of my internet work. In some cases like Google docs it's painful to use the web version so I just use the app.
EDIT: I wish they'd add a console to mobile web browsers though.
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