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The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac

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Re: The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac

#202
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a lot of HN commenters are way too disconnected from the average person This is basically an old-man-and-the-starfish situation for me. > You're making a big assumption that a user will even connect the dots If they do, it’s because their wildly inaccurate mental model happened to guess the right answer. What most will think is “I was just browsing the internet and my computer froze.” Maybe they’ll connect…

You sir, are very aware of how the average computer user thinks!

It’s one of design’s key responsibilities. Developers need a sophisticated mental model of how it works, and how that gets displayed. Designers need a sophisticated mental model of what problems various users are trying to solve, and the best ways to communicate how the software can solve those problems, as well as state, etc. They’re both deep topics, and even as someone with significant professional experience in both design and development, I find it difficult to consider both things at once. Many things that are very important to design could be a serious PITA for developers. Many tools, such as front-end frameworks, that are important time savers in the dev environment are a serious PITA for designers to work around. Many designers don’t understand why seemingly small changes, maybe something that would require hand-rolling a common library component, could triple development time and cause huge maintenance issues. I’d say most developers don’t realize that their understanding of software architecture and construction is nearly useless when designing interfaces, workflows, etc., and that many of the folk ‘best practices’ they’ve learned about design are no more authoritative than any other folk knowledge computer users pick up. They sound like completely nontechnical gamers confidently wielding technical jargon to mis-explain phenomena people experience, and since none of the other gamers in the conversation know any better, it only bolsters their false confidence. Unfortunately, that alone explains why FOSS developers in independent projects repeatedly try and fail to make software that appeals to anybody other than software developers.

Re: The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A user doesn't need to know anything other than "when I go to site XYZ.com my computer freezes. Guess I won't go there again" > I think this point of view is making it a bit too easy. It's been 15 years since this was possible. How many times have you heard of this being an issue? Again, it's self correcting. Site freezes machine, user stops going to site. There's zero incentive to do this and tons of incentive to no…

I think a lot of HN commenters are way too disconnected from the average person. You're making a big assumption that a user will even connect the dots until the same thing happens multiple times, if even then. The average computer user is extremely bad at connecting cause and effect on their computer. Think of how many times you hear "my computer is broken!" when actually it's something like the printer was unplugged…

Yes, a lot of HN commenters are disconnected from reality. The reality is this issue existed for 15 years and there's been no issue. But here, HNers are freaking out like it's the end of the world and WebGL and WebGPU must be banned, even though they have 16 years of evidence to the contrary and zero evidence to back up their made up fears
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