I understand, I just felt you were stating things as if they’re objectively true. Maybe I missed something. Have a good rest of your day.

So you’re saying all of this as though “on the surface” is all I’ve ever considered and have never tried to do what you claim to be the only acceptable way to do things. It is only your opinion that dynamic UI elements aren’t worth it. They particularly help with forms. Conditional data in forms aren’t something I just made up, it’s a legit use case. Again I’ve tried your way and I lasted less than a day. Very poor experience.

I hear you on qubes.

RE: js, you’re talking about the web as if it should only ever be what it was first conceived of: documents. In reality now it’s used for full on software applications. It’s not just used for animations and polish (and the shitty things you mention specifically), it’s also used for dynamically updating the UI. A world you speak of would mean much worse order forms, paperwork for doctors, etc. I mean you do you, but you can’t just not acknowledge that dynamic updates of a UI are better than filling out a long form then getting back “invalid data, you selected this and entered that, start over”. It’s literally useful.

The tracking concerns are mostly mitigated by vpns, ad blockers, and private browser features. I understand there are many flaws and issues I’m glossing over, but for the most part, the average person can just use those things, then opt to close the tab of a horrible website like you’re describing.

tldr; you may prefer static documents, but modern society is built on forms and other types of vital apps, which would inevitably be worse without javascript.

I will give qubes-whonix a shot, you have convinced me!

There are certain functionalities that cannot be done without JavaScript. In my perfect world either no one would abuse JavaScript with ads and other shitty design choices, or at least I’d have an easier time with toggling it off/on. For now I’m leaving JavaScript on because it’s simply far too inconvenient otherwise. Browsers are pretty good about preventing actual harm if you have UBO installed though.

Out of curiosity, what harm are you concerned about JavaScript doing with an ad blocker and while loading sites within a container? That seems extreme to me.

Okay I just did some cursory research and it doesn’t sound simple. Is it just installing qubes-whonix and creating a template (I’m guessing a yaml config or similar)?

As far as sites with JavaScript being “broken”, that one puzzles me. I have tried turning off JavaScript in the past and probably 70% of websites became fully non functional. That shouldn’t be the case, but it often is, and my impression has been that this has gotten worse, not better. I’m a web developer and no one talks about progressive enhancement anymore and frankly my coworkers have mostly thought it’s silly to even try to support users who turn off JavaScript.

Those last two panels are so far past the inconvenience I’d ever be willing to put up with. I’m not sure how it could ever be worth it.

You just made me chortle and almost choke on my snack lol

Yes, when something is forced on a person, that tends to lead to resentment. Meanwhile if a person freely chooses something, they may wonder if they chose properly.

I’m so silly. I saw this and thought, oh cool a teeny tiny surprising win. Guess I should only be happy with the destruction of all LLMs.

Yeah they said they did here too (after multiple years of there being a “penalty”). Although watching drivers you’d never know it. What seems to happen is people rack up tickets and never pay them and only ever get any penalty if they get pulled over for something else. And traffic enforcement here is abysmal so most of it is effectively almost not enforced. So enraging.

And I’m only partially guessing about people not paying tickets. I’m basing it on using this smartphone app that used to exist which allowed you to report bad drivers. It had access to the state database and would tell you how many unpaid tickets a license plate had associated with it. I reported one person for blocking a bike lane and they had 89 unpaid tickets. I reported several dozens more and it was common to see over 10 unpaid. All of this gives me a very gross feeling overall tbh. Drivers are the worst.

Same as the new healthcare plan. Just another two weeks.

In practice, it’d be doubtful you’re ever penalized. I’ve seen it so much here (not Boston). I’ve seen some crazy shit and there never seemed to be the slightest will to enforce cars keeping out of the bike lane, other than sometimes the design of the bike lane itself.

My system used to always be a music folder full of album subfolders named like artistName - year - albumName. I did so much manual work to make that happen and then Spotify came along. I mostly neglected my collection for a decade, only adding to it occasionally. When Spotify aligned themselves with Nazis I cancelled my subscription and started about hosting my own collection with Plex for streaming. I had let my organization system go to shit and now I’ve got a mess.

I’m currently working on a script that will identify naming convention issues and eventually spit out a list of commands for renaming/moving folders. I also want the script to identify metadata issues, dupes, and missing tracks. I know there are a lot of tools that do a lot of this already, but I don’t like any of them I’ve found so far. I especially don’t like the idea of an opinionated tool redoing my library by making destructive writes, thousands of files/folders at a time, without me approving changes first. A lot of them work that way.

I think this community exists precisely because we have experience with AI.

Haha sure I guess. I think before package managers people used a hodge podge of manual systems to manage dependencies and it sucked. Your way sounds even worse tbh

It’s “irony” to post something in a related community which supports the general thesis of said community…?

I saw an article yesterday about reading being at record lows, especially reading for pleasure. Less than 50% of Americans said they read a book of any kind in 2025 iirc.

If AI were banned I’d just go back to not being pressured into using something that is a mixed bag in terms of usefulness. Yesterday I used an LLM to try to clean up some tech debt in a codebase. The result is so many code changes that it feels like I should vet what strategies it employed and then once confirmed they are good strategies, make the changes myself in a cleaner and more surgical way. Which wouldn’t use a fuckton of electricity like the LLM did. The way the LLM did things edited over 100 files and added tons of comments that won’t matter 3 weeks from now. Reviewing all that feels like more work than if I did it myself. I guess I could just blindly trust it if I was an idiot. In the end it may have taught me a couple of things but it’s unclear if this is worth it.

So then you know why I said it.

Is this homophobic Chick-fil-A?