Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 28 July 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 28 July 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
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Jeremy Keith on the bullshit "privacy sandbox" in chrome and firefox: https://adactio.com/journal/21285
I like Jeremy because he is an OG, but I think his requirement for proof that targeted advertising "works" before the browsers implement these features is off the mark for me. He's an agency guy, a bit like Andy Budd, so they tend to have these really visceral takes about the state of the web but with this skewed perspective of best interests
Google just announced they're not getting rid of third party cookies after all. They announced this in a wordy blog post with so much spin as to be confusing (as is tradition): https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/
We developed the Privacy Sandbox with the goal of finding innovative solutions that meaningfully improve online privacy while preserving an ad-supported internet that supports a vibrant ecosystem of publishers, connects businesses with customers, and offers all of us free access to a wide range of content.
god, the opening paragraph made my head spin with tech pr copy
could you imagine what web development would be like in a world where browser standards, features, and sandboxes weren’t firmly in the grips of these marketing chucklefucks?
like, I’ve mentioned to coworkers “hey isn’t the browser sandbox kind of bullshit? there’s so many parts of it that don’t do anything for security, but they make things harder for developers and easier for advertisers” and I don’t think a single one knew what I was talking about, because web development as a field has been captured by ad agencies. shit, find me one web development reference that isn’t owned by an ad agency.
and now they’re secure enough in that control that they do this fully mask-off shit, confident they’ll get away with it, cause who’s gonna stop them? bets on Mozilla reversing course on blocking third-party cookies now that google’s gone in this direction
"And now they’re secure enough in that control that they do this fully mask-off shit ..."
That whole DRM-the-web attestation thing Google proposed last year was eye opening. Sure, they had been evil for a while, but the fact that they knew they could start proposing stuff like that at all is just so bleak. In a sane world, that behaviour would instantly result in serious antitrust lawsuits.
There was no technical reason why we couldn’t have web fonts. The reason why we didn’t get web fonts for years and years was because browser makers were concerned about piracy and type foundries.
I was a bit surprised when I learned fonts are CORSd at least party as a sort of primitive DRM so that font companies would buy into the webfont spec (that's how I remember it anyway, it's been awhile since I dug up the relevant mailing list messages)