1:42 into this, and “above the fold” – while defined correctly within the scope of newspaper layout – somehow ignores the ear ads that have been showing up for decades. Hell, I was involved in redesigns where the big question was “OK, but how do we fit more ads in there?”

This is in fact how one gets from a good design decision to offending readers with an unfulfilled promise, and this ain’t coding.

In the early aughts, there was a fad for taking up newshole just inside the paper to … tell readers what was in the paper. No one is buying something off the rack to open it to A2 to figure out what the refers are, but some metros were doing it, and midsize dailies tended to be lemmings 20 years ago.

I went several rounds with editors, folks from advertising and even higher-ups at The Washington Post (for unusual reasons) crafting what Page 2 would consist of. Upper half of the page was pretty much set in stone, with 4-col art that somehow needed to be demoted to A2 because we rarely went bigger than 3 cols out front (you try fitting nine stories plus at least three pieces of art, refers, index, blacklines [obit names], weather and anything else out front on a 44" web down from full broadsheet).

The bottom half was another story. Early on, it was decided that we’d have most of the bottom half of the page be a story we called (I shit you not) “A Closer Look” (I did it first, Seth). The idea was we had about 30" to play with and could run a wire story that was interesting but not A1 worthy … not exactly a feature, just news that wasn’t paper-of-record news. This concept would reappear out front downpage at a later paper, where it was called “Editor’s Choice.”

Once ads was done with that voodoo they do so well in terms of selling positions, we had on a good day 10" for A Closer Look, leading to it being internally referred to as A Cursory Glance. To the point that within two weeks, even the managing ed would ask in the budget meeting what we had for A Cursory Glance that evening as the guy who insisted on keeping the overline as “A Closer Look,” as that’s what he sold the publisher on.

I’m morbidly curious to continue watching and will from here, but Google didn’t invent shitty ad placement that insulted their audience anymoreso than Apple invented flat, rounded rectangles; print was there around 9/11 (and before, if one considers the precursor to “native advertising,” “sponsored content” – that editorial-looking stuff in the wrong typeface saying that, for example, you could only buy these exclusive silver coins during a half-hour window based on ZIP Code).

This is the logical continuation of unregulated late-stage capitalism. Pretending it’s about tech is certainly a framing choice, but it isn’t the right one.

Are those small oranges currently in season?

I don’t know that it’s influential so much as formulaic. It’s been working for them for decades. And without it, we’d never have gotten Schweddy Balls, and that’s a worse timeline.

For real fun, submit your resume (that shit’s already all over online; Google can have it) and listen to NPR hosts take 7 minutes to describe your career arc.

Only a true visionary could have foreseen YouTube in 1982!

I’m sorry, but this whole “it’s unfair to deny kids the use of personal technology in class” is darkly hilarious to me. I did, in fact, try coding on my TI-85 in English class because I was bored, and it was immediately taken. Why is a phone more acceptable?

It wouldn’t have been taken if left in my backpack, so any “well, what about an emergency?” arguments are disingenuous. Put your phone on silent; refrain from using it. This is not phone time. In an emergency, parents calling the school was effective with primitive '90s technology. Surely, they can still do that now.

Excuse me; I need to go yell at a cloud.

I picked up a 4K Fire Stick a few years back, connected it to my Wi-Fi and then watched the network activity from the router with little surprise. Tech companies sell ad-delivery devices with a nominal end-user benefit.

Once NUCs became powerful and affordable enough to use as a dedicated HTPC/server, anything with a proprietary OS made no sense, even taking portability into consideration. This is just the latest example of why.

Sounds like an SBC …

Having played this game in the past, the solution I found was getting an N95/N100 box and then using KDE Connect to use my phone as a remote. Bonus: all available desktop extensions to shape your experience.

There may be an ARM “takeover” of x86 at some point, but that day is very much not today unless you believe the PC market consists solely of Macs.

The hydrogen issue seems to continue being storage. Even if you have all the green electricity you want for electrolysis, the product cannot just go in a tank at anywhere near sea-level pressure and temperature.

I think we’re trying to make different points. I’m not in manufacturing but get that lab to product for batteries is glacial; what I was pointing out was the way the story is written – all strengths, zero drawbacks – would leave a credulous reader with that conclusion.

Oh, I’m not saying switch production until there’s maturity, but if that’s the starting point with sodium-ion, clearly the research is better suited there.

If they can already double the energy density of LiFePO4 in the lab and a 25kWh prototype is already in use and rated for 250km, while getting rid of cobalt and removing all the explosive hazards with a cathode base material one-tenth the price that can be made on existing lines, why is research into lithium ion even continuing for this application?

Either the story is connecting lots of dots that actually have yet to be drawn, or Big Lithium is up to shenanigans.

So, IBM walks into a Nazi bar, and after six drinks, slurrs to the bartender, “What’s with all the swastikas?”

The delicious irony here is that U.S. corporations want the government out of regulating worker rights and company obligations, and having actually encountered that, Tesla said, “no, we don’t like how that turned out, either.”

This result honestly sounds like their best-case outcome. I don’t like much of what Google does, but I’m certain a lot of discussion went into what would be viewed as a “win” on this call, and my guess is “some number of people stop using ad-blocking software” actually beats out “some people are converted to subscribers” (an effect not measured here and somewhat necessary to get any context for one data point) by virtue of Google being an advertising company.

Regardless, they’re targeting only low-hanging fruit: people who use ad blockers to block ads. Sounds tautological, but this excludes anyone concerned about privacy. Nobody using an ad blocker in concert with other add-ons is going to be converted here. And I sort of wonder whether media coverage from when the crackdown started inflated ad-block installs among people who’d never used one, thus making this win less substantial on a longer timeline.

That worked last round but not this time, unfortunately. I’m kicking the tires on LibRedirect currently.

I’m on FF. Forgot that detail. Also forgot I can edit the title. Which I have done, so the message above this made sense at the time it was written (for anyone who came in late).

This looks promising. Just the fact that it autopings the list of servers on demand solves much of my Invidious frustration.

I switched in May on my main rig precisely because of OneDrive nags after shopping distros for a couple months on my HTPC. The Surface had been dual-boot from the get go, as I bought it for a bootcamp, but I’d not used it for over a year because of other available computers. Without a functioning AC outlet at home (inverter install is awaiting solar install), the Surface is the only viable option, and I thought I’d be back on my desktop within a month … two months ago.

Windows is more of a telemetry platform than an OS at this point, and Proton’s evolution means my Steam library functions just as well on KDE Neon. I have a few legacy Win-only apps, but my expectations about use frequency from years ago no longer matched actual usage by the time I was willing to revisit my assumptions in spring.

And I’m glad I did, as Plasma is fucking amazing in terms of customizability compared to “you will have your taskbar at the bottom of the screen, and you will like it.”

I moved away from a desktop client for several years because of Thunderbird staying stuck in the 2010s, but the redesign brought me back into the fold. It’s certainly overkill for scanning through subject lines, but compared to having five tabs open …