Maybe I should try to do more work on the iPad "Pro" (the OLED display is terrific, the Magic keyboard/trackpad aren't bad at all, and it can even work with a 4K external display and USB mouse/keyboard) but it's my go-to device for creative apps (forScore, Korg Gadget, Procreate, ...), comics, and iOS games.
> For the last few years, I’ve been exclusively teaching asynchronous online courses, meaning recorded videos rather than live sessions
This seems like the root issue. In the ChatGPT era, remote student assessments cannot (remotely) be trusted. Since you cannot trust the assessment, it should probably be optional, and not used for credentialing purposes.
I see it as wanting to receive the credential (biology degree) while avoiding what it is supposed to signify (having learned something about biology.) But why would regular companies want graduates in English Literature, or History? Graduates should still be able to read, think critically, and write clearly - and the way you learn to do that is by actually doing the assignments.
Of course a more cynical view is that much of formal education is just teaching compliance (which employers also value), but college usually grants more non-financial freedom than a typical corporate workplace.
In any case, I guess it's good that you can't use ChatGPT to pass driving tests or medical licensing exams. Yet.
This is my biggest gripe with modern browsers. Stop fucking with my keyboard. I want my keyboard to control my agent, not some script. No key seems to be safe. The quick-search key (/) is often overriden by "clever" web devs, but not even in a consistent way. Ctrl-K to go to the browser search box is gone. I use emacs keybindings in text boxes, but those can be randomly overriden by scripts (e.g. Ctrl-B might by overridden to make stuff "bold" etc.).
I want to be able to say "Don't let any script have access to these keyboard keys". But apparently that can't be done even with extensions. I've strongly considered forking Firefox to do this, but I know how much effort that would be to maintain.
How hard would it be to write scripts that expose an interface that the user can bind to keys themselves, if they wish to?
It used to be a de facto standard in many programs. Since almost no mouse had a scroll wheel, you'd use the space bar or the cursor keys. Spacebar was usually faster, I guess some people still do.
Still doing that, also in Thunderbird, to scroll through E-Mails and go to the next one when reaching the end (or pressing "n" or "p" for previous). I even use shift + space to go up again. I thought it was very common. Another alternative, maybe a bit more intuitive is using page up and down buttons.
i love it. my mac doesn't have the home row (don't know if that's how that row of buttons is called) so I use spacebar and shift+spacebar as pgdown and pgup when I am reading
They're called the navigation keys. Fn + Up/Down (arrow keys) is PgUp/PgDn, and Fn + Left/Right is Home/End. But of course, those keys are on completely opposite sides of the keyboard, so Space is more convenient.
It really comes down to JavaScript. The web was fine when sites were static HTML, images, and forms with server-side rendering (allowing for forums and blogs).
Did you use the web back in 1995? It was fun, but it also sucked compared to what we have now. Nothing is ever perfect, but I wouldn’t want to go back.
Geminispace is a very chill place. It’s definitely not a replacement for the web, but if you can handle the compromises, it feels like both the past and the future.
I read epubs, and html pages derived from texinfo and mandoc. When I see websites that just break down when you disable JS (I do it with ublock), I always feel a pang of sadness. Unless you’re Figma, Google doc, or OpenStreetMap…, which rely heavily on local state, JS should only be required for small island of interaction.
People seem to think it was better becausee the technology was simpler. Except the “problem” in question is entirely about popularity, once the internet became pretty much an essential service of the common household it also became the new target for profit-seeking enterprises.
Nothing to do with the technology, everything to do with the people. When you say you want to “go back to the good old days” what you’re actually saying is “I want fewer people to have access to the internet”.
I published my first website in 1995 (and while it wasn’t even a little popular, eventually a spammy gay porn site popped up with the exact same joke name, leading to a pretty odd early “what if you search for your own site” experience).
If you put 2026 media players (with modern bandwidth), on the manually curated small-editorial web of ‘95 it’d be amazing.
We used to have desktop apps, these SPA JS monstrosities are the result of MS missing the web then MS missing mobile. Instead of a desktop monopoly where ActiveX could pop up (providing better app experiences in many cases than one would think), we have cross-platform electron monstrosities and fat react apps that suck, are slow, and omfgbbq do they break. And suck. And eat up resources. Copy and paste breaks, scrolling breaks, nav gets hijacked, dark mode overridden.
Netflix, Spotify, MS have apps I see breaking on the regular on prime mainstream hardware. My modern gaming windows laptop, extra juicy GPU for all the LLM and local kubernetes admin, chokes on windows rendering. Windows isn’t just regressing, their entire stack is actively rotting, and all behind fancy web buttons.
Old man yelling at cloud, but: geeeez boys, I want to go back.
There are still BBS you can access via telnet (and actual dial up if you really want), after the fifth one asks you for your full name, street address and phone Humber it gets a little old.
You're not wrong but we've never really tried the combination of modern CSS with no JS. It could produce elegant designs that load really fast... or ad-filled slop but declarative.
Yes to the modern CSS. To go as far back as suggested would mean using frames again and table based layouts with 1x1 invisible gifs to use for spacing layouts. Never again!
Oh, the social media was much, much better. People much more open, tracking didn't exist. All the idiots still thought computers were only a thing for nerds and kids.
JavaScript didn’t kill Flash a Java. The web becoming cross platform did.
People started browsing on a plethora of devices from the Dreamcast to PDAs. And then Steve Jobs came a long and doubled down on the shift in accessibility. His stance on Flash was probably the only thing I agreed with him on too.
If you wanted to accomplish anything more substantial than reading static content (like an email client that beeps when you get an important email, or a chat app that shows you new messages as they come in), you needed to install a desktop app. That required you to be on the same OS that the app developer supported (goodbye Linux on the desktop), as well as to trust the dev a lot more.
We seem to have collectively forgotten the trauma of freeware. Operating an installer in the mid 2000s was much like walking through a minefield; one wrong move, and your computer was infected with crapware that kept changing your home page and search engine. It wasn't just shady apps, mainstream software (I definitely remember uTorrent and Skype doing this) was also guilty. Even updates weren't safe.
I use a desktop mail client. I have always used desktop applications. I have never had any desire to use web mail clients. Likewise for office suite applications. A true desktop spreadsheet, word processor, and slide deck are always superior.
The web as an application platform has always been a half-baked, second class, inferior experience for the user. It has always been about developer convenience at the expense of the user. No thank you!
Somehow we have cross platform software today that isn't Electron slop. And shoehorning absolutely everything into what used to be a document oriented application, creating this grotesque mutant abomination we have today, has just moved the minefield. How many RCE's has Chromium had?
Also, up until Windows Vista, Microsoft thought that making every account on their OS root by default was an amazing idea, further exacerbating the problem you describe, which I don't deny existed. Software distribution on Windows is still a shit-show today, but I guess there's too much momentum to move to a Linux-style repository. The Microsoft Store is a piss poor attempt.
This is the price we pay for openness and decentralization.
On one side, we have Apple giving us great APIs but telling us how to use them. On the other, we have W3C being extremely conservative with what they expose, exactly because of things like this.
This is the price we pay for stuffing browsers with tons of imperative APIs that the browser has no choice but to implement to the letter, since analysing how they are actually used runs afoul of Rice's theorem.
I feel like we need a complete black box layer or something, where a website can send requests to the browser to do something, but never gets any kind of reply, as to whether anything actually happened. But that would limit usefulness of it quickly, I guess.
I've been toying with an idea of creating a JS runtime that tries to run all code two times, one which runs all identifying information inside a runtime that has any network API's stubbed, and another that replaces the identifying info with garbage.
Most likely needs manual quirk code overlays for sites, but it's totally a solvable problem.
Yes just rechecked and you are right. I am not a CA native (was just visiting LA) and so happy to see that this is available. I originally thought they just subsidized degrees for only "first degree" seeking students. Maybe I need to move to LA. My local CC is $225 per credit for in state residents.
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