dpflug

Betteridge’s law suggests no

This became a religious war at my last role.

I think maybe you’re confused. Java drives a significant percentage of Android apps. It absolutely can do modern UI. I can almost guarantee you’ve interacted with a Java program this year that you never considered.

Pascal is more niche, but it can do modern, too.

Java was doing web clients before the web could and still can. I don’t know much about Delphi’s web stuff, but I know they’ve targeted it for years now.

WASM and transpiling blur the lines, too. LVGL can provide beautiful interfaces on the web as well as platforms Electron could never target, and works with any language compatible with the C ABI.

I’m not saying these strategies are without their own warts, but there are other ways to deliver good experiences across platforms with a ~single codebase in a smaller payload. But mostly nobody bothers because they just reach for Electron. It’s this era’s “nobody ever got fired for picking Intel”.

We need more people working with and on alternatives, not just for efficiency but also for the health of the software ecosystem. Google’s browser hegemony is feasting. Complexity has become their moat, preventing a fork from being viable without significant resources. Mozilla is off in a corner consuming itself in desperation.

A US-based company holds a monopoly over the free web and a hell of a lot of our non-web software. So maybe let’s look for ways to avoid feeding the beast, yes? And we can get more efficient software in the process.

It does, and I’m sure everyone will welcome a solution that lets them open things back up for those users without the abusers crippling them. It’s a matter of finding one.

Implying Hell is frontend… yeah, actually, that tracks.

I mean, Object Pascal was doing the “write once, run anywhere” thing decades ago. Java, too. The former, especially, can make very small programs with big features.

This is a stopgap while we try to find a new way to stop the DDOS happening right now. It might even be adapted to do useful work, if need be.

Before that, it was RCS, released in '82.

I used in 7. I don’t know about 10 or 11.

AUR isn’t the Arch package manager. It’s a user-contributed package definition repo.

Gotcha. Less difficulty and more just not matching up with expectations.

No, but the software that implements it also implements ActivityPub, so you can get nomadic identity and also still interact with the rest of the Fediverse.

I just wish Hubzilla wasn’t a UX nightmare.

How is Mastodon harder? (Legit question, not snark)

The cobbler’s sons go barefoot.

Identity was already solved with Zot aka Nomad, which is part of the Fediverse and easier to implement than ATProto.

It’s mostly been ignored because it’s just not that important to people, apparently.

IIRC, yes but it’s called differently. I’ve used that technique to work around nannyware a time or two.

This is why the Annotated Pratchett File make for a good reading companion.

Fun fact! The farmers rely on this effect to supply supplemental meat in the growing season.

It’s literally life or death for the ants, so the solution is obvious. Incorrect weather predictions are now a capital crime.