Yes, this is how textbook manufactures sell to university. One time codes for online exercises / labs. This happens mostly for intro classes. I have no idea why universities do this, my guess is they are sold on hw problems being randomized so it makes cheating more difficult.
What I don't get is that 20 or so years ago there were professors writing online books meant as no-cost alternatives to the corporate publishing companies which controlled much of the academic market.
“intellectual curiosity of your coworkers demands they base64-parse it.” This is crazy behavior. Creating your own pagination key, assuming it exists, and then putting that in production certainly proves “Hyrum’s law”.
I have a similar story to OP's. I had made a service that provided access to cryptographic keys but did not reveal the key material directly. Instead it had an RPC API for requesting a key "handle" for the key you wanted to use, and API for performing operations like encrypt or sign that took that key handle, performed the operation inside the service and returned the result. The key handle was to be treated as opaque and implemented as a base64-encoded blob containing the key ID and a signature (for tamper-proofing).
One day a coworker working on another project that would use my service contacted me to complain that the keys from my service were malformed. Turned out they had noticed that the return value was base64-encoded so they assumed it was a base64-encoded key, so they wrote code to base64-decode it and load the result into their language's crypto library to perform those operations directly. They figured that the service's API for doing those operations was just there to be convenient for callers that didn't have access to a crypto library.
I don't know that I agree that it's crazy. Any time I see a base64 encoded string, I decode it, because I want to know what's in there and what I'm working with. Don't use b64 if it's something you don't want me to see. Obfuscation isn't even the point of b64, because if it were, their strings would be less instantly recognizable.
The decoded b64 just being an offset integer is like high school level programming. Of course I'm going to send whatever offset I want and assume that's what the API author is allowing me to do. Especially if I'm in the shoes of a frontend engineer, and my Jira ticket says, "design a pagination UI element that allows the user to select a page of results." Now if that Jira ticket was impossible from the API, I'm going to go to my team and ask if the alternative (the "load more" button element) approach is acceptable or if we should butt heads with backend.
Decoding b64 isn't crazy, spending billions of dollars on a super computer to crack RSA encryption on a pagination token to discover that it's just an encrypted offset integer is crazy.
KISS. Teacher, Whiteboard, and a textbook. (Preferable one the student can keep at home and one in the classroom) EdTech resources are amazing for self-study, but should be divorced from the school system. There will be non-profit (Khan Academy) and for-profit options available for students and parents.
Though I am in favor of any suggestion that makes a teacher’s life easier.
However, I do have the controversial opinion that there should be no calculators allowed at all in K-12. So, I have some anti-tech bias.
This article touches slightly on how online sports gambling is ruining sports for non gamblers as well in the “The Product as Currently Offered is Terrible” section. We don’t get interesting stats or in-depth analysis by commentators now. All we get is the odds, over/under, etc. I will see pregame shows where commentators will pick 5 leg parlays (who benefits from this?) Sports as a product is shifting completely to a means of online gambling. I suspect it is because they make more money from a gambler than a viewer.
I agree this is true, but I think it ignores the way commentary went before sports gambling - it was rambling anecdotes, random stats and lots of repetition (and that was the good commentators). Every once in a while you'd get a really entertaining color commentator (I personally love to listen to Jeff van Gundy rant about anything) or a very insightful former player (think Tony Romo calling out the defenses before the ball is snapped), but for the most part sports commentating has always been mediocre because the essence of the job is filling hours of time per game with talking.
I agree that commentary was rambling anecdotes, stats, and repetition, but when I turn on the tennis channel and I see the commentators talking about the “Fan Dual match of the day” and the current match line odds, it makes me think the commentators are no longer for me (non-gambler), but for fan dual customers themselves. I do not have a problem with anyone gambling, but I would like prohibition of sports betting ads for content broadcasters, or at least limit advertisements to commercials only, no more integrating with the broadcast itself. Could you imagine commentators talking about the best F150 deals or any other commonly advertised product every 10 minutes? (Please don’t give advertisers any more ideas)
"but when I turn on the tennis channel and I see the commentators talking about the “Fan Dual match of the day...”
This sort of promo message is almost as old as sports broadcasting itself. Go to a baseball game and everything is "Seventh Inning Stretch brought to you by Tire Plus" and "The Schweigert Sausages Mascot Race" and "Bud Light Fan Cam" and a million other sponsored messages. This is no different really, except it's for a product you find objectionable.
The ad's aren't for gambling itself, they're advertising a specific gambling platform. An advertisement for Absolut Vodka isn't strictly an ad for alcoholism, it just also happens to contain that message.
Well said. For me, watching anything regarding the NFL in the past ~8 years is borderline intolerable. The godawful commercials with loud as shit volume, every broadcast "segment" needing a fucking ad spot, the sappy 20 minute stories about the running back's 2nd cousin's wife's childhood babysitter going through an oh-so-hard time with cancer that was only made to get more women to watch, the political grandstanding...I can't take it. I've barely watched any games this year.
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If you’re not familiar with the podcast, we read and discuss a new software engineering book each week. When we can, we interview the authors, like we just did with Brian.
Does anyone else miss simple gray GUIs? There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing. I would love to have an editor theme for it (IntelliJ / vs code / terminal.app).
Aren't we at a pretty good place with that stuff, though? It's rare to see the abominations that used to roam, especially in the Flash era. Web designers generally follow mostly the same principles and design language. Windows is the only place where it's still a bit wild west.
Going past windows 7 the trend moving from graphical/textured UI chrome to minimalist/hidden elements, scrollbars has been one of the big 'casualties' for me. When it's just a solid gray there's very little to distinguish it from the content, and it doesn't help readability if the bar is meant to show what proportion of the whole document you're viewing. As much as some people hated it, going back further to winxp where they had color in the UI made contrast better again (and you could customize the theme in the win3.x/9x windows), or third party themes if you were prepared to lightly mess with OS files.
It's kind of hard to tell how real your problems are without knowing which environment you are talking about, but it would be helpful to know where you have encountered these problems. I haven't seen them in any of the apps or OSes I regularly use (Windows, macOS).
On both Windows and macOS, windows are clearly delimited by drop shadows. You have to go out of your way as a malicious app developer to explicitly disable that.
I haven't interacted with a scrollbar in decades. Its purpose in 2024 is a visual cue.
It's the minimize/maximize/close buttons. Inactive windows draw them ever so slightly in gray compared to active windows drawing them in black. Calculator has them in black.
As for Powershell/Terminal, assuming the screenshot wasn't timed deliberately, there is no caret which implies it's not the active window.
The new windows GUI framework used for the windows on the screen seems to be worse in this regard, as normal windows get their titles greyed out which is quite obvious and is a more natural place to look at than the control buttons
>On both Windows and macOS, windows are clearly delimited by drop shadows.
I disable window shadows with extreme prejudice because I find them visually painful. They obscure something I should be able to see without meaningfully highlighting what I want to see, which instinctively strains my eyes.
What the sincere hell was the problem with a simple, thick window border?
>Its purpose in 2024 is a visual cue.
Yes. They are practically non-existent in most environments.
I don't think so. One example: on Windows, vscode changed the behavior of scroll bars -- something that has been a standard since the mid-80s. They changed the paging behavior and removed the end buttons. Unbelievable.
End buttons on scroll bars are a remnant from when scrolling was new. macOS has done away with them entirely. It's been decades since I interacted with one, so no, I don't miss them at all.
So, I'm not denying that the situation on Windows is inconsistent when you factor in UIs that Microsoft is trying desperately to update, but the design language around scrolling in modern UIs just doesn't seem to be a real problem (outside of accessibility, obviously, which needs special attention regardless).
> design language around scrolling in modern UIs just doesn't seem to be a real problem (outside of accessibility, obviously, which needs special attention regardless)
This is another difference between the mentality today vs. the mentality back then. Accessibility should not need "special" attention. It should be baked into the product. Enough users lack the ability to comfortably drag while clicking, that you don't want to first release a product that doesn't work for them, and then later fix it as a bug. You need to consider Accessibility from day one, during the early design. Just like you need to consider security vulnerabilities and user privacy from day one. They're not things that get tacked on at the end.
But this example isn't even about considering Accessibility holistically. The devs just flat out -removed- the scroll end caps from the product! This wasn't an oversight or some UX over-eager designer accidentally going overboard. They deliberately went out of their way to remove a standard control.
I don't know about Windows 11, but on Windows 10 end buttons remain standard. Do you also think that diverging from consistency with the host platform is acceptable?
I use Edge as my browser, but I think Chrome is the same: The scrollbar is hidden while I'm not scrolling. There's an option to always show the scrollbar, but it's still this tiny little sliver that doesn't match the system scrollbar.
Someone at Google, and someone else at Microsoft, probably think this is good UX. I beg to differ.
I sure do. Modern OS UIs might be visually rich and feature-packed, but this definitely came at the cost of clarity and efficiency. Because I do a lot of writing, I keep an old thinkpad and an old PowerBook running NT 4 and Mac OS 9 respectively. There's just something about those grays and the straightforward, no-nonsense UIs that allows me to work without distractions. I can't say the same thing about my macbook and all of its colorful superfluous features. Of course, since those OSes are ancient, it's more difficult to access the internet which also helps quite a lot with me being more focused on my work.
> There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing.
That's interesting. For me, it's green or amber terminals - perhaps it's like music where the genre of your teens defines the best music for the rest of your life. Were you a teenager in the Win3.1 era?
in the old days you had to pack your 17inch screen into your car, drive to your friends house, plan to game Doom or Quake, but in the end you were configuring network drivers etc. the whole weekend instead of playing: including features like countless reboots and reinstalls because something was crashed during "optimizing" the memory configuration for whatever driver<->game combo.
and if you set a wrong/not supported screen resolution in NT4, you had to set off power to reboot the computer because resolution back-switching was not available back then.
REAL computing also in the sense that a 500kb wordfile could crash your machine, if it loaded at all - because it took 1 min to load the bytestream from disk :)
While I appreciate the flashbacks you just gave me, I don't think the enshittifaction of GUI:s is orthogonal to the evolution in not having to deal with hardware issues any more.
well, then we may have a different interpretation of "REAL computing" :-D LOL
but i agree:
that we do not have these hardware issues anymore was huge driver in getting mass adoption of home computing & internet and the ecosystem as a whole - i remember 1994 when i needed a graphic driver update for some niche SVGA card, i had to go to the store, give them 4 x 3.5inch disks, wait one week and then i could get the disks back :-D
today, the normal DAU is able to buy a super powerful computer in a discount store and have it running with some games 1h later.
I find the whole textbook market a scam for college students. How are colleges forcing students to buy the newest textbooks on subjects that have been around since the 1700s. There is no need for an intro calculus book printed in the 21st century.
Calculus has changed a lot since 1700. Newton and Leibniz didn't have formal definitions of limits (or alternatively, something like non-standard analysis) readily available.
In terms of content, probably not much has changed in at least the last 50 years, though. Typesetting has definitely improved (old maths texts from before TeX are a bit hard to read), but I'll agree that a text from, say, the 90s is probably just as adequate as one printed today.
GP started with the premise "we don't need one printed in the 21st century".
A more generous reading of that argument might be "we don't need one authored in the 21st century", not that textbooks would never need reprinting and last forever through two dozen owners
I'd have a problem believing that too, because I see that my oldest child's math textbook (for the last year before starting university) is better than my own was. Not very much, but enough to give me the impression that the textbook authors are paying attention to how their work is used and improving it (maybe by <0.1%) in each edition.
D'oh! Thanks. I had indeed interpreted the person they were replying to as talking about authorship rather than printing …despite them saying “printed”
No, one comment up. "No need for a calculus textbook printed after y2k" or words like that. I guess that's 23 years of use if you're pedantic enough, not 24.
A textbook that's gone through five students will have encountered someone like you and also someone like me.
I have been super happy downloading the free adguard dns profile on my iphone and blocking ads across the entire spectrum. Makes reading on internet so much better. Here is the link if anyone is wondering.
I will check it out. I like Firefox Focus because in addition to built in blocking, it restricts me to one tab. Remarkably, that has never been a problem.
I think it is obvious that staying stationary all day (standing vs. sitting) will be bad for cardiovascular health. I also don't think anyone believed standing would suddenly make working for 8+ hours a day in front of a computer screen healthy.
However, with a standing desk and split keyboard (apple trackpad in the middle), I personally feel I can work with some semblance of decent posture. When I work sitting down, especially for long periods of time, my posture degrades (tech neck, etc.) When standing up with a split keyboard, at least my posture is linear and my shoulders are back. From the study, apparently the improved posture benefits do not carry over to cardiovascular health benefits, but I would guess it is still beneficial. Very rarely in the office do I see people sitting with good posture (It is possible, but takes more conscience effort), but I will often see people standing with good "upright" posture.
tldr: Article mentions nothing about posture improvements. That is what I always thought improved the most moving from sitting to standing desks.
