> my impression of most of that documentation from that time is that it was incorrectly using .local as a fake TLD

When setting up Active Directory on Windows Server 2003, there was a note in the wizard that explicitly called out .local as a domain suffix that would prevent DNS lookups from hitting the public internet, which many people (myself included) took as an endorsement.

I feel like I remember this in 2008 as well. I could certainly be misremembering.

I briefly considered doing the GPU rental thing, but the added latency and video encoding artifacts annoy me endlessly.

Smoking is expensive, and people carry these in their pockets, and replace them within hours once they run dry.

If there were a deposit scheme of say five bucks a piece, I'd wager you'd see >80% return rates with every purchase.

I generally dislike anime and tend to reflexively roll my eyes when someone suggests I watch it, but I've been complaining about VLC for at least 15 years.

Its main claim to fame is that it "plays everything," and it rose to prominence in the P2P file sharing era. During this time, Windows users often installed so many "codec packs" that DirectShow would eventually just have an aneurysm any time you tried to play something. VLC's media stack ignored DirectShow, and would still play media on systems where it was broken.

We're past that problem, but the solution has stuck around because "installing codecs will break my computer, but installing VLC won't" is the zombie that just won't die.

> people who created retrospectively-cringey email addresses in their youth, but kept them over the years because of inertia

I feel seen in threads like this one.

I’m in the same boat, this just feels like someone born 1996-2000 finally has some decision-making power at Google.

It was terrible from a security POV, but the tooling was superb.

I remember my teenage friends creating things with flash in a way that doesn't happen on the modern web.

Sure, but that's because the media and forums change, not so much a point about tool capability. The equivalent of teenaged geeks hacking on flash games today is influencer wannabes editting trends in CapCut. If anything content production is far more accessible now than in the 90's.

What's crazy is that I can't turn them off for my children.

I complain about it to Google. They ignore it. They couldn't possibly give a shit.

I should probably complain to my congressman. Who also won't do shit even if they actually give a shit.

You could just not let your kids go on YouTube.

There's a long history of people not using it. Most people today don't use it.

I successfully kept my kids off of YouTube until their elementary school gave them Chromebooks. Then they were at least only on YouTube during class.

YouTube has a lot of really positive educational content. I have learned so much from it. For instance, I was able to learn photography from it. Yes it’s still social media in a way, but the benefits can really outweigh the drawbacks with proper use.

Shorts as a whole are incredibly addictive and have a much lower benefit to drawback ratio. Parents should be able to make this cost/benefit decision for their kids. I wish I could turn them off for myself. I settled on only using YouTube on my laptop because shorts don’t have the same appeal in that context.

> What specifically would you do?

All kinds of shit.

I'd make locking the phone while the flashlight is operating require pressing the lock button again to wake the screen with no exceptions, so the screen no longer shines in my eyes reducing the effectiveness of the flashlight, and stay palm input stops opening the camera.

I'd hook screen time management of my children's devices—which I perform on my own device—into FaceID instead of requiring a stupid passcode.

You don't have to go far to find areas where iOS could use some customization. But if it's Apple's code, the most useful adjustments are off limits.

Jailbroken iOS was a fantastic platform for the first 9 major releases or so because it had that kind of stuff in it. Now it's "throw a suggestion in the box on our website and we'll ignore it in the order it was received."

> You know the spied everything you browsed, right?

I remember that this "became news" some time ago, but it's always pretty obvious the moment it loads.

App presenting an SFSafariViewController? "Convenience" that's intended to keep users in the app.

App presenting a WKWebView? Assume it's loaded with spyware scripts.

no no, not in the fb app, in the mobile browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115

TBF it's "only" sites with a meta pixel, and on Android. But in my book this does not matter, it shows their intentions

Ohhh yes I remember that one. Diabolically clever.

I'm sure there's also no user-controlled firewall to stop it on Android either.

> but the number of independently variable backlight zones is still orders of magnitude smaller than the number of pixels

The appearance of a lone mouse cursor on a black screen in the dark is mildly amusing for exactly this reason. You can watch as the ghostly halo of light follows it around the screen as you move the cursor.

I'll upgrade my machine when they put an OLED display in it.