Maciej Stachowiak 🇺🇸🇵🇱❤️🇺🇦 @othermaciej@qoto.org

There was a lot of discussion around Safari 15.4 beta supporting Web Push on iOS but a ton of other great highly demanded features are coming.

Just a few highlights:
* RegExp lookbehind assertions
* outline following border-radius
* Declarative Shadow DOM
* WASM SIMD
* OffscreenCanvas (2D only for now)

Check out the beta or a recent STP release. We welcome feedback, including what you’d like to see next.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-notes/safari-16_4-release-notes

@Cameo !!

@Yoav but to be more specific about where I think you’re misreading the OED definition:
1. The use of “agency” in the spec. clause is singular, which contradictions your interpretation that a single org can’t fit the “parties” part of the first clause (either multiple people within one org count; or they are merely writing a dictionary, not a standard, so omitted “one or more”).
2. “spec.” introduces a narrower sense, rather than modifying the first given sense, so “covert” is optional.

@Yoav I would say read the rest of the Wikipedia article and see if that holds up. If “Freemasonry” and “The Catholic Church” (both mentioned as popular subjects of conspiracies) are covert and plural, than so are Apple and Google in the relevant sense.

@Yoav Do you consider that a requirement for something to be a conspiracy theory? That it’s about a nonexistent group? Or that it can’t be about a group that’s an organization? If so, that would be a very idiosyncratic definition of “conspiracy theory” which doesn’t seem to align with Wikipedia, dictionaries, or common usage. Consider that Freemasonry indisputably exists as an organization.

Another valid critique, that’s also akin to conspiratorial thinking, is the theory that can explain anything. If a theory is validated both when X happens and when X doesn’t happen, then the theory has no predictive power and is just a bad theory. Many conspiracy theories have this same property, that they can explain any possible turn of events. But sure, there are other kinds of low quality theories that can explain any outcome.

For example if I said “Yoav isn’t finely parsing what counts a a conspiracy theory out of care for accurate rhetoric; he’s just looking to endorse an anti-Apple hate campaign with plausible deniability”, that would not be a conspiracy theory because it’s just one person, but it would be psychologizing. Even if I claimed this theory also explained other actions like starring a certain post on this very platform.

However, I think the most apt critique is not “conspiracy theory” but “psychologizing”, or “mind reading” — pretending to know the reasons for other people’s actions without direct evidence or even against their stated reasons. Now of course we can’t help speculating, but imagining another’s motivations, and then getting angry about it, crosses the line on both courtesy and honesty.

@Yoav If you consider “a social construct that motivates individual behavior” to be equivalent to “a single actor”, then by your rule, nothing can be called a conspiracy theory. (Every conspiracy theory proponent believes the theory can explain all the relevant actions of its subject, so that part is trivial). That makes it a poor rule, because conspiracy theories exist.

@Cameo would you say the lessons you teach are… Prep School?

@Yoav On the contrary, counting many individual humans as being a "single actor" is the very essence of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists would doubtless say that the Illuminati are a single actor.

@nomster Maybe this points to a difference in emphasis. We’re not specifically looking to persuade devs to build apps with web stuff over any other technology or framework. We want to make sure that, if they do choose to build something web-based, they have the tools to deliver a great user experience, and it’s not too hard to do so. We’d like the same to be true of UIKit, SwiftUI, Flutter, React Native, Xamarin, etc.

@jayphen Seems like a bug to me! We support a related concept of how screen bookmarks (for sites that don’t support running as a standalone web app) but Twitter installs as a real web app.

@nomster I recognize the term has value for some people. The creator apparently intended it to be a marketing buzzword (along the lines of “Web 2.0” perhaps). Which seems similar to your notion of a term for a technology strategy. Still, I think our reasons for choosing to rarely use it hold up. We are mostly talking to users and developers, not CTOs or CIOs.

@mackuba Yeah, it's confusing to users and even to many devs. Some people get mad if we don't use exactly this term, but if that's the cost of clarity, so be it.

We’re not mad at other people using the term and will use it when helpful, but this is why we usually use different terminology depending on context.

Contrast Web Components: this really is a clear and well defined cluster. There’s no debate or fuzziness as to whether specific specs are part of Web Components or not.