Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

@skunksarebetter You neglected to mention that paying customers can get a test suite that aims for full Modified Condition/Decision Coverage, and that it gets used in avionics.

@Ricardus My personal gripe in that vein is that, as far as I can tell, there exists no recording of the version of the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme used in the end of Star Trek: Insurrection that isn't painfully dynamic range compressed.

Listen and cringe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMsmsQUC2_4

I don't expect it to make me tear up like the "welcome to Jurassic Park" moment in the Jurassic Park theme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJlmYh27MHg), but, as-is, it just leaves me feeling cheated.

@Nacor To be honest, I'm against mass-deletion tools.

...but then I'm an archivist type who tries to make it feasible to save everything he reads to disk and believes that fanfiction sites should back their archives with git so readers can see old revisions.

@lordalveric Relying on a password manager that checks domains (eg. the one built into your browser) is a good first step to protect against this sort of thing.

@hrisskar To be honest, I'm kind of overwhelmed by seeing that ` && youtube-dl`. It's convention for a CLI tool that accepts one path or URL as input to accept any number of them in a single invocation.

Also, single quotes are only needed for a YouTube or Invidious URL if it contains ampersands which the shell would otherwise interpret as the "run in background" version of a semicolon.

Example:

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIANk7zQ05w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwe-pA6TaZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7X6Yeydgyg

@unicornfarts @kev @write_as

Reminds me of the "For the love of God, never do this" proof-of-concept I wrote but never shared where I used history.replaceState to scroll a message in the address bar.

(Among other reasons, when I tested it, it appeared to be causing pathological thrashing in the SQLite database Firefox uses to store history and bookmarks information.)

@alexbuzzbee @zladuric@mastodon.technology They'd probably be worried about disqualifying themselves from Microsoft's patent promise.

http://endsoftpatents.org/2014/11/ms-net/

@ataraxia937@fosstodon.org To be fair, it should still protect you against replay attacks.

@unicornfarts @fatboy

> what kind of self-respecting linux user is going to install f**king Edge on their system?

People who need to test on it and see it as a better alternative to the modern.ie testing VMs.

> there are people out there who prefer PS over bash? Like, seriously?

My understanding is that such people only prefer it in the context of scripting administration of heterogeneous Windows/Linux LAN environments.

@gxtony@fosstodon.org I thought the last usable QuickTime APIs were retired with macOS 10.15. ;P

("Qt" is the proper capitalization for the cross-platform GUI toolkit)

@VikingKong@fosstodon.org @unicornfarts @skunksarebetter Which supports the interpretation that we now think of "data" as an uncountable noun.

It's the same pattern with other uncountable nouns. (eg. "sand pile")

@LittleWytch Should be. :)

For future reference, The Unarchiver can also unpack un-encrypted .sit files and the old open-source 1.10.1 CLI version even got ported to Linux. (It's in the package repositories of Debian-family distros as "unar", for example.)

https://theunarchiver.com/
https://packages.debian.org/buster/unar

...and, because my inner pedant won't shut up about it, Stuffit Expander served an equivalent role to WinZip, but it was not a version of it.

@Absinthe @namark True. There is a *lot* of bad design in the world.

@LittleWytch Wow. Thanks for putting all that effort into it. :)

@namark @Absinthe How is that "all of the above but also one more thing"?

Being able to answer a call one-handed so you don't have to drop everything you're carrying has been a staple of mobile phone use since at least the days when feature phones were the best you could get, and the UI is mapped out such that, if you can do that, you should also be able to snap a photo or take a video.

(To the point where, when you're in the camera app, one of the volume buttons becomes the camera's shutter.)

@namark @Absinthe Use with one hand for things like answering calls when the person can't put down what's in their other hand.

@namark @Absinthe Possibly.

As for your argument, I don't dispute that phones are driven far too little by utility. Just look at fashion's effect on battery life, the removal of the SD card slot, the dying-off of the headphone jack, physical "slider" keyboards, and so on.

There's a reason that, for my mobile computing, I seek out alternative devices like the OpenPandora.

What we seem to disagree on is the *degree* to which this effect is allowed to override the designers' conceptions of how large a phone a given market will accept.

I've been watching smartphones develop for a long time and, to my eyes, the growth in size seems to have tapered off.

I *suppose*, to be fair, the segment of the market with smaller hands could be willing to bear "just beyond ideal, but no further", but it seems like an implausible line to draw in the sand during the period when smaller and larger models coexisted.

@namark @Absinthe Ahh. That explains our point of miscommunication.

I assumed (and still believe) that the idea of a smartphone being "not designed to fit any hands or be usable one handed, or be usable at all, they are designed to be fancy fashion accessories" to the degree you seem to support is outside the range of plausibility.

Beyond that, I'm getting a sense from your writing that the point of divergence between our worldviews is either deep enough, or sufficiently emotionally rooted, that it wouldn't be worth my time to try to change your mind, given the amount of time and energy I'm willing to expend, so I'm just going to tap out and ask that we agree to disagree.

(I don't feel like investing the same kind of energy I'd have to spend to compile a meta-analysis with sufficient rigour to submit it to a scientific journal, and I get the impression that's what it would take to convince either of us to change our minds.)