Yeah it’s called Temu. You’ll get them in your email and SMS inboxes too.

It’s a cool idea and I was using it every day for a while. I love the gemtext format and I even made some “gempub” ebooks for fun. I have a site on flounder.online with some crap on it. Two things brought it all down for me.

The first is the hard TLS requirement. I’ve read all the rationales about this and still don’t see the point. I get the principle behind it but it’s not worth requiring that much infrastructure. It sucks all the fun and accessibility out of it. Which is my other issue.

We all know a platform can’t be TOO accessible without becoming like twitter. But if accessibility is too low you’ll end up with nothing but upper class tech workers moaning about the bougie problems that they created for themselves. The only capsules that had anything decent on them had HTTP proxies. It didn’t feel like a platform worth contributing to for someone like me.

I’ve heard about the Spartan protocol which is similar but has no TLS requirement. I’ve been planning on getting into that but all I’ve done is read about it.

Not just the comments. It used to be page 4 or 5 where the hate/rage content would start appearing in the top posts. But it’s been creeping up, and now even page 1 looks pretty bad sometimes. I bet even Americans are starting to feel alienated if they’re not perpetually angry.

WizTree is like WinDirStat but a lot faster.

That program is essential windows software since the stock windows search utility is basically fake. There’s no way to actually search without it.

Also I found a new good use for it recently. You can sort the entire file list by date and it updates live. So suppose you’re using a program and it saves a file without telling you where. Since it’s Windows and the file system is obfuscated to shit, there’s no way to know where it is. But it will be near the top of the Search Everything file list.

The cheap sugar donuts at grocery stores that scratch my throat just right. Sugar donuts from coffee shops that are higher quality aren’t as good.

I hate when you can sign in with a password but the website does all kinds of weird shit when the fields are selected. Please web designers, don’t have a glow that turns on. Put everything on the page to begin with and don’t have menus and info boxes fly out to mess up the layout. If me or the password manager want to fill the password box first, let that be our choice, you don’t need to erase it for me. And if you want to put a big icon in the corner showing a human silhouette with an arrow pointing at it instead of words, you have to make it clear right away whether it’s the page for registration or login. You know what happens if you don’t? I have to go into my grandma’s personalized hell of alt accounts and emails to figure out which ones go together and which pair she used to register her coupon with. It is not pretty.

I think the reverse of that is the exact perfect behaviour for a timestamp. Otherwise the timestamps are useless in a screenshot or any archive that can’t display the hover text.

This is mostly a thing on touch interfaces. When the UI designers think 100% of the screen needs to do something when touched. Like if an app pops out a form for you to fill out, don’t let your palm touch the margins because there’s a good chance it will close the form and delete everything you put in it. It’s ironic that this is mostly a thing on the platforms where it’s the biggest mistake. But it’s horrible on PC too. I’m not sure what the proper way to refocus is but my habit has always been to click on whitespace because it’s such an easier and therefore faster target than a taskbar. Too bad there are twisted shadow realms where our concept of whitespace doesn’t exist.

For similar reasons I can’t stand those “in-app” browsers either. God forbid you need to reference something in the app while using the in-app browser. Whatever page you were on, whatever you entered, it’s gone with no warning. I avoid these whenever possible but I swear that despite all in-app browsers being “powered by chrome,” the option to open the actual page in the actual browser is obfuscated in a different way every time. I barely use any apps anymore and it’s still never where I expect to find it.

Also in the same genre of frustration, the way Android (idk if iOS is like this too) automatically clears out RAM is really inconvenient sometimes. I have a special emotion that only activates when I go back to an app from another and it reloads, losing everything.

Crap like this makes using a mobile interface feel like handling a live bomb sometimes. We use the term volatile to describe either memory that dissapears when power is lost, or software that’s prone to crashing. But software also has a varying risk of your shit suddenly being lost without anything unintended occurring, and it just feels fragile. I don’t know if we have any language right now to describe exactly what this aspect of software is like, but I love apps and programs where my work always feels safe.

This is one of those things that came out of the gate sucking massively and nothing was ever done to improve it. We might be in our 60s some day still fumbling around trying to copy some text.

I love both the style and soundtrack of that game. Maybe it’s a little too “lowfi” for some people. That’s the only way I can imagine someone not liking it.