Technology

I mean, even CIA recommends the use of an adblocker for personal cybersecurity. And one or two other US agencies too.

On top of three letter agencies, basically every cybersecurity expert that publishes a "basic tweaks" article recommends uBlock Origin.

What’s your preferred adblocker?

It really depends on the site for me.

What I really hate is a table that's multiple scrolls long where the header row doesn't follow.

IMO the header should stay at the top as part of the page. I know where it is, I'll scroll up to it if I need to.

Like you, I find a header appearing and hiding quite difficult in specific circumstances.

I feel your pain. The really good ones plan for this, some pop up immediately when you scroll up and that sucks. The proper thing to do (imo) is to wait for the user to scroll 80% of the viewport back up, only then letting it begin to slide in, and have it slide in at a rate 1/2 of the page scroll. I do like having it easily available, but it should feel like it's trying to stay out of the way.

The iOS browser has always supported “tap the top of the viewport to scroll all the way up,” which largely allows for what you say: just leave the nav way up there. Last time I looked was years ago, and Android Chrome didn’t did this. Does it now?

I have this usercss:

[data-testid="header"],
[data-mobile-fixed="1"],
[data-remove-fixed="0"] {
  position: absolute !important;
  width: 100%;
}
main { padding-top: 2rem !important; }

Works well enough on most sites. And on those it doesn't, you can easily exclude.

Can likely be expanded, but adding just header broke more than it fixed.

At the same time, it needs to be comfortably thin.

It is mostly because the bar is measured in time to display content (forgot the name of the metric)

So the huge about of bullshit gets hidden by fast internet and asynchronous jobs.

Ironically somehow AI is making disabling JS better nowadays, because text/markdown is becoming normalized, so receiving a pure text version of a page is a thing again.

How did this get normalized?

The average user doesn't know or understand technical details, and don't believe they have any power to change anything

Also capitalism means a small number of assholes make most of the decisions for reasons that benefit them

Just like the bad old days, when entire sites were made in Flash and Linux users were shafted. Ridiculous.

It makes me glad for having been born when I was. I am a younger Millennial, so I wasn't online for the early internet, but I am old enough that when I read this blog post, it reminds me that I have seen firsthand that it wasn't always this bad — even if, like you, I was surprised to realise how bad things have gotten. I feel like a frog boiling in water that started cool, but gradually became hotter^[1]

I feel sorry for Zoomers and younger, who have grown up only knowing the walked gardens of big tech. It invokes an odd sense of ethical duty in me; many of them believe they hate tech in all its forms, because all they know is the toxic cycle of dark patterns and a culture that expects them to be always contactable, making it hard to disengage. However, there's an entire world that they don't know that beyond the walled garden. I wish I could show them what I have seen, but you can't easily convey the magic of a memory — after all, the internet that shaped me no longer exists.

So I guess the challenge ahead of me is trying to figure out how I can work with them to co-create a vision of a better internet. We can't put all the enshittification and spambots back in Pandora's box, but maybe we can build something new if people like us can use our memories to distribute hope to where it's needed.

🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌

I prefer http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ because it doesn’t think it knows better than I do what width I want my window to be.

From Website Carbon:

Nice! Less than 0.01g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page.

Holy shit! That web site lives up to its name! I want to redesign my site to be that fast and elegant.

It's not all that impressive if you're familiar with microcontrollers. Running a webstack doesn't require much compute power.

I want to know if it can run Doom.

Thank you for this, it makes for a nicer reading experience than their own website! Is the code open source by any chance?

They seem to be for goatcounter, an "Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data." and cloudflare insights.

The entire blog post is still just 750kB in total.