8 ms·

Subversive Computing

48 points by stargrave 6y ago

easton 6y ago
I wonder if it's worth going all in on RSS and dumping YouTube and reddit's web sites. I experimented with that over the summer (wrote a little code to take in YouTube channels and download their new videos with RSS and yt-dl) but didn't end up using it that much. NetNewsWire on iOS is really nice for text. Does anyone else have experience with this? I usually use Windows so it wouldn't be from a cli most likely.
cafard 6y ago
"because employers like to force their employees into certain ecosystems" In some paradise of the supremely competent users, an employer could leave it to the staff to choose Libre Office, Microsoft Office, Google Apps, who knows, maybe Word Perfect Office from twenty years ago, and to exchange documents in some common format. In the real world, good luck.
- pc86 6y ago
  Unfortunately we're still at this point where someone doesn't know how to do something on a computer and it's their employer's/coworkers' responsibility to teach them. Instead of "I can't figure out how to do this thing for my job, I better figure it out so I don't get canned!" it's "How am I supposed to know how to do $BASIC_THING, I'm not a 'computer person'" Until we start pushing basic search/investigative requirements onto "non-technical" users it's not going to get any better.
- forinti 6y ago
  Actually, my experience is that users get Windows because they argue that it is the only thing they know how to use and they don't really know how to use it beyond the trivial.
- harha 6y ago
  In an ideal world, we'd have one standard of markdown, along with a few simple and fast editor that directly renders it nicely without all the other features. In the real world, it starts with computer classes at my school started out with teaching us how to mail merge so we could get some Microsoft certificate employers allegedly wanted (and this wasn't some trade school for office managers, it was the highest category of school in my country). Nowadays kids apparently have some other proprietary learning programs on iPads and call that digitalization – they should rather be taught to differentiate between the tools and the knowledge they are trying to gain using those (the better students obviously will figure out themselves, though some might be discouraged by diving deeper into technical topics, but the teachers should get better training). And most work places teach you not to think too much, if they hand you Google Docs, it's not really worth the fight to change anything, when there are greater issues like levels, bonuses and the next unnecessary layer of hierarchy being added with every reorg.
ecmascript 6y ago
> try to do as much web browsing as possible in Links2. It's a fast, lean browser with zero support for JavaScript and CSS. The latter means some sites look a bit funky. The former means some sites won't work at all. My usual strategy for sites that won't render without JavaScript is to simply ignore them. If they can't produce something worthwhile without scripting, it's probably not worthwhile at all. Honestly, I have a huge problem with this mentality even if I can agree with most other stuff. There is a lot of features and apps that are very useful that won't work without javascript. C'mon, this is a really bad point. It is not javascript itself that is bad, it's how people misuse it. Why would native apps be any better? People include tracking and alaytics in those as well and it's just even harder to block / know what actually gets monitored since the application is likely not sandboxed. I use many apps that require javascript that is really good and privacy motivated. Apps like, Fastmail.com, DI.FM, podd.app etc. I use adblockers and a pihole to take out the worst offenders and tracking scripts. The solution is not to go back in time and try to convince people to use sites without javascript, that will never work because there is a lot you cannot do without javascript. Drag and drop for example, video conference, photo editing etc etc. There are so many examples of apps that weren't possible before but now is. The web is clearly the best platform to be on since no one company can block you and you can self publish whenever you want. You are in control, not some shitty american company. I have a hard time actually believing that this person never use anything else than that shitty browser. I just don't buy it because the user experience is horrible. Instead, it's better to lead by example. Build apps that challanges the modern overuse of javascript and tracking / analytics. Don't be the old guy that simply complains how everything was better in the past, you couldn't do shit on the web in the past and now 80%-90% of the applications I use on a daily basis is web based.
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  Good websites use graceful degradation. The basic features should keep working, even if more clunky, with JavaScript disabled. Of course I couldn't do photo editing with that concept in a browser, but that's not what I use a browser for anyway. A site that uses drag & drop most probably can implement a pure HTML version that may require a few more clicks but in the end the same action can be achieved. Having this fallback also has the advantage that it helps disabled users and users on poor network connections.
gegtik 6y ago
I would suggest checking out umatrix as a souped up alternative to ublock origin
anta40 6y ago
"To put it as nicely as I can: Instagram has absolutely zero content of any kind of real importance to anyone." I'm a photography enthusiast who usually post my photos on it, and use it regularly as one of visual reference sources. Ditching IG is pretty hard. Hmm...
amelius 6y ago
> I watch Youtube using my own tube script in combination with a media player. So, similar to youtube-dl?
cratermoon 6y ago
"Hacker News This site is full of pompous know-it-alls never missing an opportunity to humblebrag about their superior intellects."
flyinghamster 6y ago
Firefox with uBlock Origin is wonderful. I've found that also adding NoScript is very handy, even though it can sometimes be annoying. In general, anything that requires I play "Javascript Roulette" is unlikely to be worth wasting my time on. In general, the author's approach resembles mine with a few detail differences, and I never got onto Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. in the first place. I'm not completely de-Googled (unrooted Android phone here), but I do keep them at arm's length. Windows 10 is such a non-starter for me that when I bought a new laptop last year, before I even powered it up the first time I yanked out the SSD, replaced it with a bigger one, and then loaded Xubuntu on it.
- wing-_-nuts 6y ago
  I installed noscript for a bit, but I found it better to leave js enabled. If a site really misbehaves I can disable js with ubo. No need for another plugin.
  - laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago
    What you want is to use uMatrix, select the asterisk button next to the domain, disable scripts but allow 1st party scripts. with this little change, you automatically block 99% of trackers (which run from the tracker's domain) and enjoy mostly functional websites. When needed, just open uMatrix, and allow scripts either globally or per domain, to get client side integrations to work. another benefit is to disable iframes globally. uMatrix replace them with a link to the iframe content, which is what you really want 99% of the time you want an iframe (which is otherwise mostly used for ads) * uMatrix is from the same author of UBO. and it is the perfect sweet spot between UBO and noScript, for advanced users.
pikzel 6y ago
"It is, quite literally, a site where millions of people post daily photos of their dinners." If you follow people who post daily photos of their dinners, daily photos of dinners is what you get. That's certainly not how my IG feed looks.
minerjoe 6y ago
Links2 on the framebuffer rocks. Posting from it right here. With the framebuffer, you get images. Hacker news works great.
kodah 6y ago
> This site is full of pompous know-it-alls never missing an opportunity to humblebrag about their superior intellects. (This of course also describes yours truly a bit more than I'd perhaps care to admit.) Aside from that, it's still a decent aggregator for tech news - especially once you learn to identify the shitposts about How To Make It Big Using Venture Capital and How To Monetize Just About Fucking Everything, so that you can avoid them. Fair

48 points by stargrave 6y ago

I wonder if it's worth going all in on RSS and dumping YouTube and reddit's web sites. I experimented with that over the summer (wrote a little code to take in YouTube channels and download their new videos with RSS and yt-dl) but didn't end up using it that much. NetNewsWire on iOS is really nice for text. Does anyone else have experience with this? I usually use Windows so it wouldn't be from a cli most likely.

cafard 6y ago

"because employers like to force their employees into certain ecosystems" In some paradise of the supremely competent users, an employer could leave it to the staff to choose Libre Office, Microsoft Office, Google Apps, who knows, maybe Word Perfect Office from twenty years ago, and to exchange documents in some common format. In the real world, good luck.

pc86 6y ago
Unfortunately we're still at this point where someone doesn't know how to do something on a computer and it's their employer's/coworkers' responsibility to teach them. Instead of "I can't figure out how to do this thing for my job, I better figure it out so I don't get canned!" it's "How am I supposed to know how to do $BASIC_THING, I'm not a 'computer person'" Until we start pushing basic search/investigative requirements onto "non-technical" users it's not going to get any better.
forinti 6y ago
Actually, my experience is that users get Windows because they argue that it is the only thing they know how to use and they don't really know how to use it beyond the trivial.
harha 6y ago
In an ideal world, we'd have one standard of markdown, along with a few simple and fast editor that directly renders it nicely without all the other features. In the real world, it starts with computer classes at my school started out with teaching us how to mail merge so we could get some Microsoft certificate employers allegedly wanted (and this wasn't some trade school for office managers, it was the highest category of school in my country). Nowadays kids apparently have some other proprietary learning programs on iPads and call that digitalization – they should rather be taught to differentiate between the tools and the knowledge they are trying to gain using those (the better students obviously will figure out themselves, though some might be discouraged by diving deeper into technical topics, but the teachers should get better training). And most work places teach you not to think too much, if they hand you Google Docs, it's not really worth the fight to change anything, when there are greater issues like levels, bonuses and the next unnecessary layer of hierarchy being added with every reorg.

ecmascript 6y ago

> try to do as much web browsing as possible in Links2. It's a fast, lean browser with zero support for JavaScript and CSS. The latter means some sites look a bit funky. The former means some sites won't work at all. My usual strategy for sites that won't render without JavaScript is to simply ignore them. If they can't produce something worthwhile without scripting, it's probably not worthwhile at all. Honestly, I have a huge problem with this mentality even if I can agree with most other stuff. There is a lot of features and apps that are very useful that won't work without javascript. C'mon, this is a really bad point. It is not javascript itself that is bad, it's how people misuse it. Why would native apps be any better? People include tracking and alaytics in those as well and it's just even harder to block / know what actually gets monitored since the application is likely not sandboxed. I use many apps that require javascript that is really good and privacy motivated. Apps like, Fastmail.com, DI.FM, podd.app etc. I use adblockers and a pihole to take out the worst offenders and tracking scripts. The solution is not to go back in time and try to convince people to use sites without javascript, that will never work because there is a lot you cannot do without javascript. Drag and drop for example, video conference, photo editing etc etc. There are so many examples of apps that weren't possible before but now is. The web is clearly the best platform to be on since no one company can block you and you can self publish whenever you want. You are in control, not some shitty american company. I have a hard time actually believing that this person never use anything else than that shitty browser. I just don't buy it because the user experience is horrible. Instead, it's better to lead by example. Build apps that challanges the modern overuse of javascript and tracking / analytics. Don't be the old guy that simply complains how everything was better in the past, you couldn't do shit on the web in the past and now 80%-90% of the applications I use on a daily basis is web based.

TonyTrapp 6y ago
Good websites use graceful degradation. The basic features should keep working, even if more clunky, with JavaScript disabled. Of course I couldn't do photo editing with that concept in a browser, but that's not what I use a browser for anyway. A site that uses drag & drop most probably can implement a pure HTML version that may require a few more clicks but in the end the same action can be achieved. Having this fallback also has the advantage that it helps disabled users and users on poor network connections.

gegtik 6y ago

I would suggest checking out umatrix as a souped up alternative to ublock origin

anta40 6y ago

"To put it as nicely as I can: Instagram has absolutely zero content of any kind of real importance to anyone." I'm a photography enthusiast who usually post my photos on it, and use it regularly as one of visual reference sources. Ditching IG is pretty hard. Hmm...

amelius 6y ago

> I watch Youtube using my own tube script in combination with a media player. So, similar to youtube-dl?

cratermoon 6y ago

"Hacker News This site is full of pompous know-it-alls never missing an opportunity to humblebrag about their superior intellects."

flyinghamster 6y ago

Firefox with uBlock Origin is wonderful. I've found that also adding NoScript is very handy, even though it can sometimes be annoying. In general, anything that requires I play "Javascript Roulette" is unlikely to be worth wasting my time on. In general, the author's approach resembles mine with a few detail differences, and I never got onto Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. in the first place. I'm not completely de-Googled (unrooted Android phone here), but I do keep them at arm's length. Windows 10 is such a non-starter for me that when I bought a new laptop last year, before I even powered it up the first time I yanked out the SSD, replaced it with a bigger one, and then loaded Xubuntu on it.

wing-_-nuts 6y ago
I installed noscript for a bit, but I found it better to leave js enabled. If a site really misbehaves I can disable js with ubo. No need for another plugin.
- laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago
  What you want is to use uMatrix, select the asterisk button next to the domain, disable scripts but allow 1st party scripts. with this little change, you automatically block 99% of trackers (which run from the tracker's domain) and enjoy mostly functional websites. When needed, just open uMatrix, and allow scripts either globally or per domain, to get client side integrations to work. another benefit is to disable iframes globally. uMatrix replace them with a link to the iframe content, which is what you really want 99% of the time you want an iframe (which is otherwise mostly used for ads) * uMatrix is from the same author of UBO. and it is the perfect sweet spot between UBO and noScript, for advanced users.

pikzel 6y ago

"It is, quite literally, a site where millions of people post daily photos of their dinners." If you follow people who post daily photos of their dinners, daily photos of dinners is what you get. That's certainly not how my IG feed looks.

minerjoe 6y ago

Links2 on the framebuffer rocks. Posting from it right here. With the framebuffer, you get images. Hacker news works great.

kodah 6y ago

> This site is full of pompous know-it-alls never missing an opportunity to humblebrag about their superior intellects. (This of course also describes yours truly a bit more than I'd perhaps care to admit.) Aside from that, it's still a decent aggregator for tech news - especially once you learn to identify the shitposts about How To Make It Big Using Venture Capital and How To Monetize Just About Fucking Everything, so that you can avoid them. Fair