There is a very clear market desire for desktop style apps delivered through browsers.
Users love it. Users hate installers. Users hate updates. Webpages have neither.
Companies love it. Makes subscription access apps easy to sell. Makes it easy to target all platforms and keep costs low.
Seems very flippant to completely dismiss the dominant trend in this industry over the past 20 years as simply wrong.
I agree the technologies are not well suited to this purpose which is why I avoid frontend at all costs. But powerful web apps generate a lot of value for a lot of people, myself included.
Nah. This “dominant trend” exists because companies are always trying to get developers as cheaply as possible, not because pretending web pages are applications actually provides real productivity or usability or even deployment benefits over the long term relative to native applications.
Some of us have been in this industry long enough to see the same promises come around several times in various forms and they’ve always been bullshit. Thats why I don’t participate in it and stick to native development.
I disagree. Most of the "interactivity" is attention-stealing anti-patterns that no sane person actually wants.
News sites with scrolling auto-playing videos, overly-complex SPAs that are slow when you just want to get this specific task done, newsletter subscription modals, the list goes on.
True "webapps" are rarer than we've been lead to believe.
I don't know the difference between the user and system store, but I do know that apps can choose not to trust certs installed by the user and instead only trust their own that they bring with them. Was frustrated to find this when I was trying to MITM an app to see what it was up to on the wire.
Apps used to trust the user store by default, but that changed back in Android 7. Now they only trust the system store by default and need to opt into also loading the user store. So, it's not that they look at the stores and pick one, it's that the user store has effectively been disabled for most apps (browsers usually work, thankfully). Even Firefox for Android will only use the user store if you go through a five step process to open the hidden settings.
Some apps do certificate pinning, which basically only validates certificates against a specific certificate authority and completely defeats any system certificate store.
You can MitM these apps by injecting code to bypass their restrictions. The eBPF methid linked above works, or you can use Frida in root or rootless mode to inject a variety of existing scripts to defeat certificate validation. This is a lot more involved than installing a certificate authority, but it'll work if you want to reverse an app.
> Is there a difference between the products, or is it just the Apache versus commercial license? Ie. will you be able, but not allowed, to view and make changes to the commercial product?
The commercial product extends the open source project to add other capabilities. The source for these extensions is not distributed. (The result is a tool distributed in binary form).
Presumably, the extension binaries plug into the FOSS Apache licensed product using some kind of API and therefore might better be shipped and sold separately. This, for instance works with proprietary httpd Apache Webserver modules (shared objects linked against webserver headers). In that case there would be no reason to use the commercial bundled version as the core would be essentially identical to the FOSS version that's included in (almost) any Linux distro.
If such separation is not possible, the commercial version spells trouble. For one license wise, but on a technical level it's probably a fork. A fork might have its own security flaws and bugs, but will also need to maintain updates and backports from upstream / main branch. The commercial entity is responsible for this, whether they intend to or not.
In theory, this could lead to a better commercial product, but in practice I would recommend sticking with the FOSS version.
The steelman version is something like the following chain of reasoning: (a) gender identity is something that everyone has that is distinct from sex, (b) with enough introspection, everyone can discover their true gender identity, (c) if you don't have a strongly felt gender identity, you need to introspect, (d) if introspection does not yield certainty then this suggests genderfluidity, or even worse that puberty ought be delayed until certainty is achieved.
Or how about: an AMAB child playing with a Barbie doll often is strongly suggestive that he might actually be trans.
Or how about: values like "being on time" or believing that a math problem has one correct answer are inherently white supremacist and racist.
That's not the steel man, that's a straw man where you just flipped the politics of the scenario.
Letting kids feel safe to introspect and question their gender expression is a good thing.
The implication that kids will be _systematically_ forced to delay puberty or undergo a transition they don't want is absurd and not a valid "chain of reasoning". Yes, I'm sure it has happened and could continue in rare instances because a) there are lots of crazy parents; b) it is a new, trending concept and people like fads. But that is really no different than other types of trauma parents and teachers give to kids across the political spectrum. You're going to have to do a lot more work to prove this is something likely to happen on a broad scale.
The fact that gender identity is now something kids are allowed to have means people will interrogate them about it. People may even attempt to coerce them (just like any other beliefs) and kids will likely change their minds over time. The ability to defend their beliefs, resist influence, have role models, receive reliable advice and mentorship, manage their relationships, make serious medical decisions, etc etc is all part of the equation. It's also not that big of a deal or the end of society.
I guess it comes down to how widespread you think the coercion that you mention is. I tend to believe the current rate of non-cis identification is at least an order of magnitude over the "natural" background rate, specifically because of a system of incentives and disincentives which have been set up. Being non-cis grants attention, care, affirmation, and deference from administrators. It is one of the few categories that administrators seem actually willing to go to the mat to protect from vicious bullying. Being cis means being boring, being tacitly oppressive, and not receiving as much attention, affirmation, or defense from administrators and teachers.
I view this all as a negative insofar as it nudges cis kids to identify as non-cis and start edging closer to risks to their mental and physical health as a result.
Maybe in 15 years this will look silly and we'll all know that 10% non-cis is totally normal and all these people will be able to live authentic lives.
But if in 15 years we reach the opposite discovery, my view is that we will have done a lot of damage to individuals and to systems along the way.
More like, learn how to evaluate those decisions and advocate for their own healthcare, which is something everyone needs to learn and practice in the US eventually.
Medical interventions for adolescents is always going to be controversial and no simple heuristic will solve it. Hopefully if kids are more comfortable expressing their identity and not comforming to traditional stereotypes then medical treatments will feel less necessary.
It's less rare than you might think, here are some statistics from US insurance claims, which is a lower bound as the wealthier may choose to pay privately:
Those numbers are still "rare" and don't tell us that kids are being coerced.
My assumption for now is that the increase is due to latent demand and wider awareness & acceptance. We need to see the steady state after a decade or so.
Several of my high school classmates (from the mid-2000s) started transitioning as soon as they could skip town and decide their own life. And it was clear they had known and wanted it for a long time prior.
Wow, that's a completely ridiculous strawman. My kids go to one of the most liberal school districts in the nation, and never once have they been told they need to "introspect their gender identity," let alone the absolutely absurd notion that "if they're not certain, they're genderfluid and/or need puberty blockers."
Literally the only thing along those lines that is taught is to respect other people's gender identity. This has been no harder for them to grasp than "Gay people exist and that's ok" was for my generation.
If you really believe that school districts out there are pushing puberty blockers, then your YouTube algorithm is probably feeding you a heck of a lot of crap.
Just to be clear: are you saying the argument is bad because these things are never taught, or are you saying that these things are good to teach actually?
That is a fair ask. To be honest, I am unwilling to devote to this discussion the time which would be required to research examples.
I will concede that if these things never happened, I personally would find the infohazard argument non-compelling, though others may have their own feared infohazards.
On the flip side, if hypothetically these were common ideas animating public school curricula and/or teacher behavior, would you consider that sufficient justification for homeschooling as being discussed here?
When it comes to public policy, I don't find myself particularly animated by hypotheticals. I think we have more than enough on our plate if we just pay attention to things that are actually happening in the large.
Would you please explain the math example? I was in school until last year (Germany tho) but I don't get it (the 4chan argument about percentages and races?)
The steelman argument for the subjectivity of math would be something like: the process of choosing how to represent/model a real world situation in mathematical terms may influence what conclusions can or will be reached under that model, because biased assumptions can sneak their way into the model.
To be clear, this is good knowledge and should be taught.
However, it is not an effective attack on the coherence of natural number arithmetic. We have to get students to a certain level of objective operational competence before they are ready to think about the subjectivity of mathematical modeling.
> “People don’t buy Swiss watches to tell the time,” he said. “Apple probably sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry but does that matter if they’ve grown during that period?”
Exactly. That diamonds are expensive is almost the entire point. If it becomes possible to buy artificial diamond rings for like $50, the tradition will disappear entirely. People will find some other signaling act.
There's bias even in that wording though. They're not "artificial" diamonds. They're real diamonds, grown in a lab instead of in the ground.
Agreed with your broader point though. IIRC there's an economics term for this—goods that don't follow the standard supply/demand price curve, but where increasing price actually increases demand over some range. Ah, "Veblen" goods, apparently.
Potentially a fair point vis a vis the environment, but it’s not really true of people as far as DeBeers is concerned. I know people that work for them in Botswana and I hear nothing but good things about them as an employer. On the environment, Kimberlites are pretty small and the environmental impact of primary diamond mining isn’t really that great in the grand scheme of things. Take this with a pinch of salt from a guy on the internet sharing some anecdata etc etc.
I think airlines actually face a lot of liability around the transport of unaccompanied minors--what if they lost the kid? The few times I traveled unaccompanied as a minor, the flight attendants were always checking in on me, knew my itinerary, etc. My parents had to come to the gate and the airlines would not release me to anyone else nor let me wander off.
From that perspective, they face huge downside if they fail to convey a minor to the contracted final destination and then the minor goes missing. A minor who announces the intention to wander away not according to plan sets off alarm bells in someone who has this perspective.
I think I default more to guess culture? I certainly don't ask for help much--almost never--but I think that might be because I'm very independent. My personal problem with ask culture is when the relationship becomes very asymmetrical. Some ask culture people that I know will freely make requests all the time. In their minds, I assume, they'll get me back when I ask for it. The problem is that I don't ask for help, so instead I will help them out a dozen times in a row, my frustration building all the time, my opinion of them tending toward "freeloader".
My relationships that work well have a very strong unstated premise of turn-taking. If my friend paid for lunch last time, of course I'm getting it this time, and vice-versa--to me that's just obvious. If I stay at someone's house while traveling, it goes without saying that I will host them at my house (or return the favor in some other way of equivalent value) before imposing on them again.
Can you please describe a kind of engagement with Asian culture or products that you will not dismiss as orientalism? I fear that everything will fit neatly into Asian hate or orientalism in your taxonomy.
Americans love Asian cars. Tons of Hondas, Toyotas, Hyundais, Kias, etc. Also while some weeby anime fans may be orientalist, not all are, and love for Gangnam style was genuine. It was a great song and people loved it for that, not because traded on Asian stereotypes. The American geopolitical strategy in the Pacific rests heavily on a very deep trust of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, among other partners.
Actually studying their culture through their classical literature, philosophy and history instead of just a goofy song or some cartoons which were created by the "Good ones" (i.e., client states).
okay, that's just an idiosyncratic requirement. i don't ask that anyone do that for any of the cultures i'm from, nor does anybody that i know. hell, i haven't even read my own culture's classic literature!
