WTF Bites


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Arantor Mobile Safari? That's Different™.



  • @dkf said in WTF Bites:

    @Arantor Mobile Safari? That's Different™.

    il_600x600.4536228706_9uki.jpg



  • @dkf said in WTF Bites:

    @Arantor Mobile Safari? That's Different™.

    Indeed. Safari is the new IE.



  • @Bulb said in WTF Bites:

    @dkf said in WTF Bites:

    @Arantor Mobile Safari? That's Different™.

    Indeed. Safari is the new IE.

    The weird thing is that I’m actually OK with that because it reins in Chrome the tiniest bit. Chrome sets the agenda far, far more than it should, shoving in all sorts of functionality that I personally don’t believe should necessarily be in a web browser (though I get for some users there is a valid use case) but I’ve long thought a lot of Chrome’s effort to “push the web forward” is mostly to push it forward into a Google-first, ideally Google-only, future.

    Safari inconveniences them, and I’ll take that because it’s the only handicap they have.



  • @Arantor said in WTF Bites:

    Safari inconveniences them

    Not so much Safari as the Apple anal-retentive policy that no other HTML rendering engine is permitted on iOS, kindly stand on your head instead.

    But you are right that it does keep them in check.



  • @Bulb said in WTF Bites:

    @Arantor said in WTF Bites:

    Safari inconveniences them

    Not so much Safari as the Apple anal-retentive policy that no other HTML rendering engine is permitted on iOS, kindly stand on your head instead.

    But you are right that it does keep them in check.

    The EU has told Apple to fix that shit. Apple’s compliance is fully malicious but they are doing it. (At the cost of breaking PWAs entirely.)

    Interestingly several folks I know (less technical) take the view that Apple being anal-retentive about it means there’s actually less of a risk to data going where it shouldn’t, and are happy for that situation because they think it makes them safer.

    I think the whole thing is a shitshow and you’re half way to boned either way. (But I join them in being on iOS and not jailbreaking, and not veering off the accepted path. This at least is my choice.)



  • @Arantor said in WTF Bites:

    Interestingly several folks I know (less technical) take the view that Apple being anal-retentive about it means there’s actually less of a risk to data going where it shouldn’t, and are happy for that situation because they think it makes them safer.

    That's how Apple justifies it, so they just bought it line, hook and sinker, like anything from Apple.


  • Java Dev

    @Arantor Another dumb thing is that only iOS will allow third-party web renders. iPadOS will not, which means it will be a PITA to manage your third-party browser as you will need a separate version speciafically for iOS EU to use your own engine.

    Actually, I wonder if Apple saw the writing on the wall and split iOS into two just because of the impending legal situation in EU so they could keep iPads all locked down while iPhones were forced to be more open... "They are running completely different operating systems, honest!"


  • BINNED

    @Atazhaia said in WTF Bites:

    They are running completely different operating systems, honest!

    Fits perfectly with the "iPhone is running OS X" lie. 🍹


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Atazhaia said in WTF Bites:

    Another dumb thing is that only iOS will allow third-party web renders. iPadOS will not, which means it will be a PITA to manage your third-party browser as you will need a separate version speciafically for iOS EU to use your own engine.

    It would've been a PITA even if iPadOS allowed it as you'd still need an EU and non-EU version.


  • BINNED

    e08a9789-0e6d-467d-b0a1-89135b698096-image.png

    I guess the answer on the question 'can it' is no, because it causes an unknown error.



  • @topspin said in WTF Bites:

    @Atazhaia said in WTF Bites:

    They are running completely different operating systems, honest!

    Fits perfectly with the "iPhone is running OS X" lie. 🍹

    Then it is a different operating system to MacOS, no competition issues here, no overlap, all is well, glory to Arstotzka.




  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gern_Blaanston the iPhone 13 from 2021 that was only on sale for 8 months of 2023 sold significantly more in 2023 than any high end Google or Samsung phone? That's... unexpected.

    It's hard for any Samsung phone to stand out in the market because Samsung releases so many devices. If we look at the GSM Arena's database for phones released from 2021–2023, Apple has released 13 phones, while Samsung has 89 different models.

    89 models :wtf_owl:


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @loopback0 said in WTF Bites:

    89 models :wtf_owl:

    Might not even be the whole picture. There are variants between regions and then you would have Exnos and Snapdragon versions. There is heaps of bullshit when buying Samsung. They’ll advertise lastest and greatest snapdragon and advertise on those benchmarks but you probably won’t be able to get that particular phone in the UK unless you pay over the odds to import.

    People bitch about Apple but android can be a rabbit hole of researching variations of n1, 1n and 1cn to make sure you’re buying the right phone.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @DogsB said in WTF Bites:

    @loopback0 said in WTF Bites:

    89 models :wtf_owl:

    Might not even be the whole picture. There are variants between regions and then you would have Exnos and Snapdragon versions. There is heaps of bullshit when buying Samsung. They’ll advertise lastest and greatest snapdragon and advertise on those benchmarks but you probably won’t be able to get that particular phone in the UK unless you pay over the odds to import.

    People bitch about Apple but android can be a rabbit hole of researching variations of n1, 1n and 1cn to make sure you’re buying the right phone.

    Which is, of course, why the peons love Apple, even if the tech writer elites can't figure that out. :half-trolleybus-br:


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @izzion Examining Apple and their cultists is probably worth a couple prizes but after been in their phone ecosystem for a couple years. You can’t do anything interesting with the phone. What you can do with it, it does competently… most of the time. I dropped it numerous times and it still works. I got to expense it so the taxpayer was liable for most of its cost. Its way overpowered for what it can do so I don’t see a need to upgrade so I’ll probably be using it until the battery claps out.

    It's kind of a win for me.

    I’ll never get these numbers but how much of Apple’s business is corporate. If ever released, they’ll probably lose their hipster cred overnight.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @DogsB said in WTF Bites:

    You can’t do anything interesting with the phone.

    It depends on what you mean by "interesting" but most people probably don't care to. Most people probably don't do anything "interesting" with Android phones either.
    They install some apps from the store, change the wallpaper, set a ringtone or put it on silent and get on with their lives.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @loopback0 said in WTF Bites:

    @DogsB said in WTF Bites:

    You can’t do anything interesting with the phone.

    It depends on what you mean by "interesting" but most people probably don't care to. Most people probably don't do anything "interesting" with Android phones either.
    They install some apps from the store, change the wallpaper, set a ringtone or put it on silent and get on with their lives.

    That's fair. And for the most(99.999 probably not an exaggeration) people that’s the main use case. And I hate to concede this… apple does that more easily too. My mother accidentally putting my sister on an iPhone solved more problems in my life.

    But I’m going to complain about my snowflake needs that I’ll spend more time getting working than actually using! :mlp_yay:


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @DogsB said in WTF Bites:

    But I’m going to complain about my snowflake needs that I’ll spend more time getting working than actually using!

    All according to...

    0c29ce2a-6a30-4731-9af3-3e158b0d6fe2-image.png



  • @DogsB Yeah. Any comparison on SKU basis between Apple and non-Apple is going to be sku'd (sorry not sorry). Because Apple only has a very few SKUs per model year, while non-Apple tends to have a lot more. For example, the iPhones sold at Walmart have the same SKU as the ones sold elsewhere, regardless of carrier, etc, while most other manufacturers differentiate heavily between retailers for a lot of those same things--the exact same model/carrier of a Samsung phone might have one SKU per retailer, plus a couple for those sold on the carriers' sites, etc. This is in part so that "best price" guarantees are mostly worthless.


  • BINNED

    @DogsB said in WTF Bites:

    You can’t do anything interesting with the phone. What you can do with it, it does competently… most of the time.

    Yeah, that's because I don't want to do anything :airquotes: interesting :airquotes: with it. If I want to program something, I'll use my computer. And even that, I rarely do anymore outside of work. You may think you need the ability to @Tsaukpaetra your phone, so you can install a keyboard for ants and also have virtual ants running over your screen all the time. But really, you probably don't.

    The only thing that's missing is side-loading apps. We'll see if the EU will make them allow that or if they get away with their malicious compliance.



  • @topspin said in WTF Bites:

    The only thing that's missing is side-loading apps.

    Haven't needed to do that in 13 years of iDevice ownership.

    Note that official options exist for dev purposes.


  • BINNED

    @Arantor said in WTF Bites:

    @topspin said in WTF Bites:

    The only thing that's missing is side-loading apps.

    Haven't needed to do that in 13 years of iDevice ownership.

    Note that official options exist for dev purposes.

    "Dev purposes" is not what I had in mind, I'm strictly talking consumer apps. I.e., Apple's completely arbitrary enforcement of what is or isn't allowed according to their App Store rules.
    I haven't strictly needed it, but it's been the topic of discussions in the past.



  • @topspin said in WTF Bites:

    You may think you need the ability to @Tsaukpaetra your phone, so you can install a keyboard for ants and also have virtual ants running over your screen all the time.

    No, I definitely do NOT think I need that.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @topspin said in WTF Bites:

    You may think you need the ability to @Tsaukpaetra your phone, so you can install a keyboard for ants and also have virtual ants running over your screen all the time.

    Actually, the keyboard and pet cat thing are available unrooted as standard apps. But Apple would never let you do either of them (or at least, I'm pretty sure the version of the keyboard for iOS is heavily neutered).


  • Considered Harmful

    @Luhmann said in WTF Bites:

    e08a9789-0e6d-467d-b0a1-89135b698096-image.png

    I guess the answer on the question 'can it' is no, because it causes an unknown error.

    Just an ASCII approximation of "нет".



  • @Arantor said in WTF Bites:

    Note that official options exist for dev purposes.

    The official option is a pain in the arse. Been there, done that. In that project mainly because of arbitrary limitations that don't take companies as big as that customer into account.



  • @loopback0 said in WTF Bites:

    [Samsung has] 89 models :wtf_owl:

    We've just been buying new phone for my wife, because her ~5 years old one never upgraded beyond Android 7 and the two-fucktor authenticator apps she needs for internet banking stopped working as the latest updates now need 8.

    Selecting the required features, limiting to sane price range and eliminating Chinesium, we were left with some Samsung Galaxy A, some Motorola Moto G and maybe some Nokia and some Sony Xperia.

    So I looked who is actually likely to make some software updates—because lack of updates was the main reason to need a new one—and found that basically only Samsung. So that left … A25, A34, A54 and M34 in the list. So I pulled them in comparison and … was hard pressed to find any difference that actually matters.

    Ok, the A25 still has a headphone jack at the cost of not being water resistant, but the A34 and A54 are basically equal. Sure, one is Exynos and the other is Snapdragon, and slightly different cameras, but for a mid-range phone I doubt most users can tell the difference. And of course each of those models comes in two storage sizes and four colors. And the M is some weird variant I don't remember what for. That's 24 different SKUs for effectively the same phone.


  • Java Dev

    @Bulb The downside will be that you have a Samsung, so their shit software and desperate trying to be Apple ethos. On the Android side, the latest Pixels are promising 7 years of updates. If that will pan out I dunno considering Google, but their phones have traditionally been the best supported with major updates in the Android-verse.



  • @Atazhaia said in WTF Bites:

    @Bulb The downside will be that you have a Samsung, so their shit software and desperate trying to be Apple ethos.

    That's why I didn't want it so far. But not getting updates is worse. I hoped at least Sony would do updates, especially since they don't fall for this product line inflation, but from what I could find, they don't do them basically at all.

    On the Android side, the latest Pixels are promising 7 years of updates. If that will pan out I dunno considering Google, but their phones have traditionally been the best supported with major updates in the Android-verse.

    I excluded that because … IIRC because it only has one SIM slot plus an eSIM, but two NanoSIMs was a hard requirement here.


  • BINNED

    @Bulb said in WTF Bites:

    never upgraded beyond Android 7 and the two-fucktor authenticator apps she needs for internet banking stopped working as the latest updates now need 8.

    And their dependency checks are so broken they couldn't just not update the app to a version that's not supported on the OS?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Bulb FWIW, the Samsung build quality is definitely quite a bit beyond that of the Chinese makers. This phone (A52s, so not on your list) is lasting better than my previous ones (from various Chinese sources) especially in the battery department, and definitely continues to receive updates too.

    The main advantage of side-loading is that it lets you skip the BS when deploying systems that include a phone or tablet. No need to persuade some app store to let you deploy, just put the app you wrote on the device and away you go.



  • @topspin said in WTF Bites:

    @Bulb said in WTF Bites:

    never upgraded beyond Android 7 and the two-fucktor authenticator apps she needs for internet banking stopped working as the latest updates now need 8.

    And their dependency checks are so broken they couldn't just not update the app to a version that's not supported on the OS?

    Dependency checks in Android work just fine. But the banks are making (one already did, the other is announcing it will shortly) changes that mean the older versions no longer work.



  • @dkf said in WTF Bites:

    @Bulb FWIW, the Samsung build quality is definitely quite a bit beyond that of the Chinese makers. This phone (A52s, so not on your list) is lasting better than my previous ones (from various Chinese sources) especially in the battery department, and definitely continues to receive updates too.

    The second number is a generation, and there is about one a year, so A52 would be superseded by the A54 that was on my list (we ended up buying the A34, because I didn't see any feature in the A54 that would warrant the ~15% higher price).

    And yes, Samsung does make decent hardware—except those foldable displays they invented that break all the time, but the A line doesn't have that—and the battery problems they had back on, was it A9?, have since been resolved. We'll just have to disable all the superfluous apps she isn't going to use anyway to make the important things easier to find.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Bulb You can always put a different home screen app on. The full app list will still be cluttered but that isn't the default view in most.


  • Considered Harmful

    @Atazhaia said in WTF Bites:

    @Bulb The downside will be that you have a Samsung, so their shit software and desperate trying to be Apple ethos. On the Android side, the latest Pixels are promising 7 years of updates. If that will pan out I dunno considering Google, but their phones have traditionally been the best supported with major updates in the Android-verse.

    They're also promising IP68ness and as my wife just found out that promise is worth fuckall. Otherwise I'd have been very tempted. The Samsungs I've had were at least durable and with a bit of 3rd party stuff you don't have to see much of their UI.



  • @dkf said in WTF Bites:

    The full app list will still be cluttered but that isn't the default view in most.

    Actually, I meant cleaning up that. Even the pre-installed apps can be disabled and then they won't be in the list (and won't be taking up space by downloading updates).



  • @LaoC said in WTF Bites:

    IP68ness

    The Samsung A34 and A54 are promising IP67ness.



  • @loopback0 said in WTF Bites:

    It's hard for any Samsung phone to stand out in the market because Samsung releases so many devices. If we look at the GSM Arena's database for phones released from 2021–2023, Apple has released 13 phones, while Samsung has 89 different models.

    89 models :wtf_owl:

    I believe it. Between the flagship Galaxy S line (in regular, plus, ultra, FE, and/or whatever other variations they have), yearly iterations of the Z Fold and Z Flip, rugged XCover ones, and a handful of other letters for low- and mid-range models, they've got shitloads of models coming out each year. Those may also be broken down even further by regional differences, depending on how those are counted.



  • @Bulb said in WTF Bites:

    We've just been buying new phone for my wife, because her ~5 years old one never upgraded beyond Android 7 and the two-fucktor authenticator apps she needs for internet banking stopped working as the latest updates now need 8.
    Selecting the required features, limiting to sane price range and eliminating Chinesium, we were left with some Samsung Galaxy A, some Motorola Moto G and maybe some Nokia and some Sony Xperia.

    This is highly dependent on timing and lots of other factors, but you may get lucky and find high end previous year models at a bargain. E.g. a couple years ago Amazon.ca had a screaming good deal on the S10e, a near-flagship that was a couple years old by that point, and probably the last one to have an SD card slot and headphone jack. Mine is currently up to Android 12 so that's probably the end of the line for it, but it's been working great, and all the nice flagship stuff (display, camera, waterproof, premium feel) is IMO better than a more recent cheap phone


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    How to write a web server in 25 lines of code:

    https://youtu.be/7GBlCinu9yg

    Comments section FTW:

    Screenshot_20240222-213823.png

    And sure, you can write a super simplistic web server in 25(ish) lines of code..........as long as you ignore the hundreds or thousands of lines hidden inside of libraries that you pull in to make it work.

    Obfuscation makes coding simpler and easier but makes the industry collectively dumber. I say this as a man who couldn't do what I do without that obfuscation hiding the complex shit that I don't adequately understand from me. I am the emperor that realizes my dick is swinging in the wind.


  • Considered Harmful

    @hungrier said in WTF Bites:

    This is highly dependent on timing and lots of other factors, but you may get lucky and find high end previous year models at a bargain. E.g. a couple years ago Amazon.ca had a screaming good deal on the S10e, a near-flagship that was a couple years old by that point, and probably the last one to have an SD card slot and headphone jack. Mine is currently up to Android 12 so that's probably the end of the line for it, but it's been working great, and all the nice flagship stuff (display, camera, waterproof, premium feel) is IMO better than a more recent cheap phone

    +1 That's exactly the one I got. It's also one of the few that go against the trend to ever bigger screens. I neither fancy having to carry a handbag for my phone nor having it stick out like a sore $BODY_PART when I'm sitting down and it's in my pocket.



  • @Polygeekery Was expecting a JS-slinging npm monkey with a million packages and a roll of duck tape, got a Rust dude actually showing moderately close-to-metal code.

    For 2024, he's using relatively low level stuff. Those are mostly raw sockets pushing TCP data directly. Measuring stuff by LOC is dumb, but in this case I wouldn't call him out for using massive libraries. Rust's stdlib wraps some of the BS you'd have to do with raw sockets, but not too much. He shows and deals with raw HTTP - not at any depth, but still.

    Wasn't expecting to be "defending" the person in the video, but in this case, no, I wouldn't say he's pulling in that much library code. (Do you call the kernel that deals with the underlying sockets, IO and drivers a library? I guess one might, but I'm 99.99% sure that @vincei4252 never has touched code like this.)


  • 🚽 Regular

    @cvi Please don't make me think again of the simile @Polygeekery used.



  • @cvi said in WTF Bites:

    Was expecting a JS-slinging npm monkey with a million packages and a roll of duck tape, got a Rust dude actually showing moderately close-to-metal code.

    I had pretty much the same reaction. As far as I can see, he doesn't use anything outside of the Rust standard library. The most domain-specific library code he uses is the TcpListener, which is a generic networking primitive and not specific to HTTP servers. Calling him out for using that seems a bit unfair.


  • BINNED

    @Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:

    I am the emperor that realizes my dick is swinging in the wind.

    27a778bf-5452-46c9-97eb-9f0554792343-grafik.png

    That's not an apostrophe!


  • Java Dev

    @cvi said in WTF Bites:

    @Polygeekery Was expecting a JS-slinging npm monkey with a million packages and a roll of duck tape, got a Rust dude actually showing moderately close-to-metal code.

    For 2024, he's using relatively low level stuff. Those are mostly raw sockets pushing TCP data directly. Measuring stuff by LOC is dumb, but in this case I wouldn't call him out for using massive libraries. Rust's stdlib wraps some of the BS you'd have to do with raw sockets, but not too much. He shows and deals with raw HTTP - not at any depth, but still.

    Wasn't expecting to be "defending" the person in the video, but in this case, no, I wouldn't say he's pulling in that much library code. (Do you call the kernel that deals with the underlying sockets, IO and drivers a library? I guess one might, but I'm 99.99% sure that @vincei4252 never has touched code like this.)

    On linux, a forking daemon on a TCP or unix domain socket is pretty straightforward, and HTTP (or a minimal subset of it) isn't that hard to parse. I'd still say 25 lines of raw C would be small, but not excessively so, even when sticking to the standard library.

    Now I'm off to watch the video.


  • Java Dev

    @PleegWat Right, because it didn't onebox I didn't know beforehand that it was computerphile. Those are generally legit; the interviewees are usually professors at the university of Manchester.

    He didn't even bother with the forking bit. Which makes sense when you think of it, modern browsers don't dilly-dally sending their requests. The level of HTTP support is about what I'd expect at that code size.



  • @PleegWat said in WTF Bites:

    He didn't even bother with the forking bit.

    Because you are not supposed to do that. You never really had to do that, the launch script could do it instead, but now there is usually an actual service orchestrator watching over the service, forking in the service just makes both parts more complicated. The orchestrator already launches the service not attached to a terminal, doesn't wait for it, and if the service keeps running in the main process, it is easier for the orchestrator to notice when it failed or to send it a signal to reload when appropriate.


Log in to reply