Pointing out that WhatsApp was used to spread misinformation before Brazilian elections under the header “Ethical issues with WhatsApp” seems weird to me.
According to the Guardian article[0] this article uses as a source, WhatsApp has had updates to limit the number of times messages can be forwarded. But there’s obviously a limit to what can be done because the chats are e2e encrypted.
What does the author want from WhatsApp? Reading messages and blocking them if they don’t pass Meta’s moral guidelines is the opposite of want you’d want from your private chats and I don’t see any other way to effectively combat spreading misinformation.
And is there any indication that Signal would prevent situations like this if it gets more widely used?
I would be happy with that. After years of using iOS with the current design it still takes me a few moments before I’ve found the Photos app with its meaningless icon that looks way too much like some other icons.
> This is either not the cost price or relies on people not using their subscription, otherwise you could never recoup R&D costs.
It seems pretty save to assume that the average user will search less than 300 times when 300 is the limit.
It’s of course possible for users to search exactly 300 each month before they stop searching or use an other provider, but my guess is that most people who regularly hit that limit will either stop using Kagi or move to a more expensive plan.
And that €54/$54 is the price when you pay per year, if you pay per month you’re paying more per search (although at least part of that extra money will go towards handling the payments)
But the same can be achieved by using css. Then there's still nothing to install, and it's still something you can change by just opening a text editor. Plus it would be easy to update in the sense your parent poster meant. And with css you're using the right tools to style your website, so you won't have people complaining the website isn't working well on mobile, although you thought it would be.
I'm all for using simple tools and web standards, but this website with its layout build with tables is a terrible example.
Just for fun, I tried opening the tirreno website on the first iPhone now, and it works as it should.
However, it must be clear that no one expects this website to be taken as an example. Back in the day, there was no other solution than using tables and 1px gif spacing, this is just a reminder of how things were at the beginning.
It’s like seeing neon gas advertising and insisting it should be made with a flat screen display. In this case, it’s our way of bringing back neon to the web.
No, brother - a neon tube requires at least a 4kV transformer, she's not so easy going. And in 2025 there are still absolutely valid use cases for CRT oscilloscopes, lamp amplifiers, LPs and Compact Cassettes, if you're old enough to know what those things are. But arithmometers are only useful to have fun under influence, sorry. Don't be a luddite.
A modern web browser, on the other hand, is the closest the humanity ever got to building a tower of Babylon, which is very easy to see by spending a few hours exploring how the Chromium sausage is made. I'm not aware of any worse codebase out there in the wild, and it is definitely not glowing neon.
On yet another hand, there are good news - it is just a matter of time when DOM API will get properly exposed to WASM VM, and on that sunny day all script kiddies, along with nodejs kiddies, along with endless pythonista will finally and traumatically learn the difference between the definitions of "computer programmer" and "software developer".
The day will come, and computer programming will again be art and full of fun.
You always get back to the basics, they say. But the road is long and full of sticks and stones, just like a false sheperd called 1-pixel gif. That's not yet the art of programming, sorry.
And btw I fully support HN for flagging this post. The quality of writing there is as silly as it is obnoxious.
There is nothing about luddism here. We had a choice: to create a standard modern website, as everyone does these days, or to try something slightly different. The team chose a non-standard approach. To an external observer, such as our banker, it looks absolutely normal. However, if some CTO veteran were to delve into the code and encounter HTML tags that they haven't seen in the last 25 years, they might experience some sentimental or ironic feelings, but in any case, no one gets hurt. Luckily, the <bgsound> tag is no longer supported.
What these web page experiments actually prove is that there are people in the industry who either don’t know or have forgotten what a real HTML page without JS/CSS frameworks looks like. For those, it might be beneficial to discover how things were done at the beginning.
Thanks for mentioning the art. This is something that couldn't be done alone, as it requires both a creator and a spectator. From this perspective, feeling that this HTML web page has an influence on a different audience is exactly what modern art (not to be confused with programming art) is about.
P.S. I am not associated with the original post above.
That logical check only makes sense if you assume that the users of Google analytics are people visiting websites. But that’s obviously not the case here Google Analytics is added a website by whoever runs that website, and they very much did enable it.
The 6th image on the page, of a woman lying in a hospital bed, has a speech bubble with garbled ai-generated text inside of it, and the next image has a classic-style walking robot, half submerged into a rug, saying similarly garbled text
I haven’t really used the iPad’s calculator app, but it looks exactly like a larger version of the iPhone app. So I don’t think there are any technical reasons why it took so long for the iPad to get that app.
According to the Guardian article[0] this article uses as a source, WhatsApp has had updates to limit the number of times messages can be forwarded. But there’s obviously a limit to what can be done because the chats are e2e encrypted.
What does the author want from WhatsApp? Reading messages and blocking them if they don’t pass Meta’s moral guidelines is the opposite of want you’d want from your private chats and I don’t see any other way to effectively combat spreading misinformation.
And is there any indication that Signal would prevent situations like this if it gets more widely used?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/30/whatsapp-fake-...