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Now, when you click a link in GitHub, the current page doesnt change. I want to look at the linked issue on its own page. That doesn’t occur anymore.

The page i wanted to go to pops up in a small overlay on the right hand side. The body text and content that I wanted to view is in a new, weird location, with the old page still behind it in the normal spot. It’s very unintuitive.

Thankfully either the behavior has reverted or I’m no longer in the A/B test. I can’t get the popup to happen anymore for me. (edit, nvm, behavior varies depending on repo or something? it acts completely differently on different pages, sometimes links are normal and sometimes they open in a popup. extremely annoying)


I don’t think carriers have the ability to install apps on iOS. I’ve always thought it’s weird that they can do that on android.

They absolutely do. Some countries mandate some apps that cannot be removed. While Apple doesn't allow carriers to install mandatory bloatware apps, it allows country-specific "national security" apps and background processes that don't have app icons. It's been this way almost forever in pretty much every country that just about every mobile device, it's just Apple has been a bit better for users.

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-russia-iphone-apps-law/

https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/03/after-apple-refusal-indian-go...


Those articles don't seem to support what you're saying? Russia's apps aren't preinstalled, they're just offered as suggestions, and India never got their app installed. I certainly don't see anything that mentions background processes in either article either.

What? Sounds like a US thing?

Regarding the telegram app I’d check iOS settings->apps->telegram->search and make sure “show app in search” is checked

You can intentionally hide apps from search. If you did this, it’s not very obvious that its hidden from search unless you dig for the setting. Similarly, “hidden” apps refuse to show up in search results anywhere, even in settings.


Thank you for this, I have wondered for more than a year why Google Maps would not show up when I searched for it.

Thank you. I wonder how that happened as I was not aware such a feature existed.

I've been running my own private forgejo instance for a while now. I host all my own private side projects and stuff there. Its a much more pleasant experience than github, if only because it has higher than 90% uptime. The UI is mostly identical otherwise.

The number of consistent issues i've had with anything github-related lately is crazy. Even just browsing their site is difficult sometimes with slow loads that often just hang entirely.


I think most browsers have patched this out? i didnt do super concrete tests, but at least on my machine their demo is failing to fingerprint me across private browsing/incognito sessions as they claim. Tested in firefox and edge.

Not sure about Chromium-based browsers, but the author of this paper on the technique:

https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/ndss2021_1...

Says that Firefox has a bug that prevents favicons from being loaded from cache, which inadvertently protects against this technique. They filed a bug report on it in 2020 but nothing has happened with it yet: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1618257


Firefox's "Resist fingerprinting" does this. It sets timezone to UTC, standardizes the fonts, standardizes a whole bunch of other fingerprinting data, etc. It also has a "letterboxing" option to round screensize down to the nearest 100px and stuff too. Tor uses all of those settings by default, though they are also in standard firefox in about:config.

When i use Resist Fingerprinting my main issue is the timezone being set to UTC. most of the other stuff it does never causes issues. I guess sometimes sites need to read the canvas, but theres a permission box that allows that when needed. I wish there was a similar permission box for timezone.

The only other drawback to the "resist fingerprinting" option is you will encounter cloudflares' captcha checkbox everywhere and all of the time :(


I've always wondered to what extent these culling techniques still work with raytracing? A reflective surface can bring a bunch of otherwise-offscreen things into the scene. Its what makes screen-space reflections look so bad sometimes, they can't reflect whats not on-screen.

I'm remember a Tiny Glade talk where they explained that they did reflections by first doing a screen-space pass, and then a ray-tracing pass for all the pixels that didn't get a "hit" in screen space (as in, the reflection needed to show something offscreen in that pixel).

This and with reflection you have tiny different representation of your world. RTX has TLAS and BLAS for ray traversing, your own tracing can be based on own BVH acceleration structure and SDF form of the world. So you right, you can't properly cull the world but you can have optimized version by having 1. Nice acceleration structure (hardware TLAS BLAS or software BVH/Octree (iirc octree cache-unfriendly)) 2. Simple material form representation to sample 3. Short rays 4. Initial simplified rays result like screen space reflection 5. Half screen (less rays) and temporal accumulation (even more less rays!)

I try to disable a lot of web tracking stuff, so I kinda understand if advertisers have trouble targeting me. But the information they should be able to use to target me just isn't getting used at all. Are other people getting well-targeted ads? because in my experience, ad companies suck at it.

I constantly receive ads on Youtube in languages I don't speak. I can kinda make out whats happening in some of the ads, I know a bit of Spanish for instance. But the ads entirely in Turkish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc, are completely lost on me. I often cannot even tell what the product is that they are advertising. My google account has language preferences set, my browser has them set, my device has them set. Google should *know* what languages I can speak. I'm not on a VPN, I'm pretty sure google knows my exact location. None of these languages are spoken particularly frequently in my area, I don't understand how I'm getting advertisements in these languages.

I used to have targeted advertisements turned off on youtube. I changed this several months ago, because the ads were literally 100% scams, deepfakes, and illegal products. I just got sick of it. I've intentionally turned on targeted ads, as it lets you have some control over the advertisements. Now I finally no longer get as many ads for pornography and illegal drugs, but its still mostly scams, and I still constantly receive ads that are completely and wildly outside of my demographic. Languages I can't speak, political ads for companies and politicians hundreds of miles away. I am shocked when i rarely receive an ad for a local restaurant or business, because it happens so incredibly rarely. When it happens, I wonder, did they actually target me to show me the local business? or was it luck? I'm convinced its the latter.


> Now I finally no longer get as many ads for pornography and illegal drugs

Always fun when the ads have less rigorous content policy enforcement than the actual videos.

I occasionally use non-adblocked youtube, and I think the ads were mostly Audible/Jet2 holidays? I don't think I've ever seen a local business ad on there, presumably because making a video ad in the first place is expensive.

The places for local businesses seem to be Facebook and Instagram.


They are rare but I have seen ads for local businesses in a 100,000 person market.

Given how much you can spend on text or banner ads I don't think the cost of producing a video ad is prohibitive these days, particularly when it can be a voiceover + graphics + text, it's not like you have to hire 15 union members to do it the way they do in L.A. Even back in the late 1990s it was a well kept secret that ads on local cable were a good deal compared to newspapers and radio.


how well does the battery hold up after that long?

Mine is only like 2-3 years old and I charge it so rarely. I can read several entire books on a charge easily. It lasts months. I imagine even if the battery degraded significantly it would be quite usable.


I replaced the battery in mine. Unlike big tech, I believe in repairing old devices. Something Amazon have not considered is how many of these old devices are used as companion devices for other high end kindle owners. I have a scribe and old paperwhite and use them interchangably, with cloud sync of reading position etc, which won't be possible after 20 may.

My paper white is about 7/8 years old, and is still holding up fine though the battery is noticeably degraded - charging it approximately once a week now.

I was also having a play with a demo model of the latest one in a store and the page turn speed is much much better, which is tempting me to upgrade though I'd prefer to run the current one into the ground first.


I have to charge once a month or once 15 days I didn't keep track tbh. And I read like crazy. I finished 22 books on the kindle this year so far.

Its a Lithium battery so unless you let it drain to single digits every time, it'll last a LOONG time


This is absolutely what it is. The easiest way to strip drm from a kindle book was through this app. You download the file, strip the drm, done. I think newer versions of the app made it harder? But old versions were still supported.

The more locked down kindle mobile apps and kindle e-readers make it more difficult, but stripping the drm will always be possible.


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