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Why our website looks like an operating system

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Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#501

Post by Twey »

badsectoracula wrote: post #489
Twey wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing stopping a window manager from supporting docking windows to each other, or the more common option in tiling window managers of having nested tiling groups so you can arrange your editor windows however you like and manipulate them together. Metisse [1] takes it even further, letting you slice a ‘palette’ out of one window and put it in another. In practice I, like you and I suspect a lot of other peo…

There is a lot of stuff that window managers could in theory do (e.g. something i'd like Window Maker to be able to do is "combining" windows so that the title bar becomes a tab bar that contains multiple windows in the same screen space region) but in practice never end up doing for whatever reasons (i could in theory spend the time to implement such a feature in Window Maker but it is very low in my priorities for…

Sure, I buy that window managers are, on the whole, not capable of the things that people want them to be capable of. My gripe is more that, instead of improving existing window managers to do those things or building a new one with the features people clearly need, developers choose to build their own special-purpose window manager with the features their app benefits from the most and then embed it into their app so those features can't be used with other apps. It reflects, IMHO, a culture of siloing technological developments to the (financial) benefit of their developers and the detriment of users.

XMonad supports tabbed groups, by the way, as (apparently) do i3wm, Sway, and Hyprland.

> Well, in the example of image editors i mentioned, these windows are views to the underlying image documents - and being able to move and resize those views arbitrarily, together with a caption about the document they're about, is very useful.

Sure, it is. That is also exactly the set of features of a window manager :)

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#502

Post by jauntywundrkind »

iiyama wrote: post #422
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've fallen out of using it, but for a while I was using dtach to do similar without the virtual terminal multiplexing. Much much more direct. I'd just run a vim session. If I needed terminals, they were in my vim! Even wrote a short shell-script to automate creating or re-attaching to a project specific vim session. https://github.com/jauntywunderkind/dtachment Haven't looked into it, but I'm love a deeper nvim + at…

It might be quite similar window/tab managing functionality, but for me it's the same thing that made me choose tmux over screen: it comes with a nice status bar as default and hotkeys are somehow easier to memorize.

My dtach+nvim uses nvim as terminal multiplexer & "status bar", which is pretty ok! Dtach only serves as a very very dumb pass through (where-as tmux really is a persistent virtual terminal that clients can read-out from).

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#504

Post by hnbad »

xp84 wrote: post #456
hnbad wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under German law, the BGB ( Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch , German civil law book defining most private laws) provides very specific and concrete provisions for liabilities and duties in most business transactions and commercial exchanges of goods and services and even employment. It's not necessary to agree to formal contractual obligations in writing for most service agreements unless you want to add additional obligatio…

> there's no honest reason to require a consent form to let you read an article. Respectfully, this is untrue. The article is there because of the ads that pay the bills. Without ads there is no article and no site. Without consent, under these laws, the ads can only be useless ads that no advertiser wants to pay for, which means they either can't sell the ad space at all, or have to sell it for $0.0001 CPM hoping th…

> Without consent, under these laws, the ads can only be useless ads that no advertiser wants to pay for, which means they either can't sell the ad space at all, or have to sell it for $0.0001 CPM hoping that like, Coca Cola will want to just remind the readers that Coke exists and not care too much if anyone even clicks it.

When behavioral targeted advertising was new, it vastly outperformed previous ad networks which used a spray-and-pray approach and paid by impressions. In the years (decades?) since, the payouts for behavioral targeted advertising have dropped significantly. "Untargeted" ads on the other hand have mostly vanished simply because the ad networks that used them have moved on to behavioral ads where they had to compete with mass data harvesters like Alphabet and Meta, mostly unsuccessfully.

Behavioral targeted advertising also doesn't live up to its promise for consumers. Nowadays most actual ads people get are either trying to sell products they already purchased or outright fraud - the rest is the same generic drivel that you would expect without targeted advertising. The reduction in tracking surface from sites that don't require these ads to operate (e.g. sites that previously fed into networks like Google's via unrelated services that can now no longer be legally used for that purpose and require opt-in) also means the targeting will become increasingly worse.

The GDPR does allow for making behavioral ads conditional to accessing content, by the way. But it requires providing the user with the option to instead pay for the content. The problem a lot of companies like Meta run into is that it also requires the price to be proportionate to the lost advertising revenue - Meta is infamous for having priced its "ad-free" tier orders of magnitude higher than their actual value of an individual user.

That said, what is killing this kind of site isn't users deciding not to give away their data but services like Google scraping their content and pre-empting user traffic to their websites entirely - first via news feeds and search summaries and now via "AI enhanced search". The ad-driven business model is dying and has been dying for a long time, the GDPR just puts limits on what can replace it. Google wasn't paying sites because it wanted to sell ads, Google was paying sites because it needed access to their users' data.

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