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> generics debacle

Why debacle?


Does it have to be an app? A website would do

Or a PDF with workouts for the next 30 days.

This would have been an easy sell for me, whereas the “AI-picked workouts” on this pitch was an immediate turn off. But there are others who are the opposite of me in this regard.

If you had a PDF, where do you think the list of exercises is coming from?

I would hope from a deterministic algorithm. The parameters are finite and well-understood. I don’t understand what purpose an AI serves here

It is a deterministic algorithm that works based on muscles used in the exercise and aiming to work all main muscle groups. I wrote the keyword AI in some places so that the average person would understand it. I might remove it.

When you put it like that, it sounds much more enticing to me. Don’t remove it on account of comments like mine, especially if you have reason to believe it connects with the average person you’re hoping will use it.

Since the term AI seems to be used synonymously with transformer-based generative stuff, and seems to appear in almost every software-related content these days, that’s just where my mind goes.


It might add a layer of variation just to keep things interesting. There are many exercises that work the same or similar muscle groups, but doing the same thing over and over gets boring.

I’ve tried other AI program generators and honestly they aren’t all that bad. I got one to spit out a program based on what I currently needed to work on at the time and the result was OK.

Unless you’re one of those body building types, AI is probably fine.


Or a YouTube channel like "Upright Health" whose short and effective exercises work fine for me to compensate for too much sitting at the desk. I use them in addition to the workouts at the studio twice a week.

Disclaimer: just a regular viewer of the channel.


I think the reminders might be better off in an app, but everything else should work. What I love about apps is that apart from them being more handy and quicker to open, I don't load my server much. Especially since it's free.

Websites don’t always work well for many, go and work somewhere with no internet….

This is something i wanted with the app. In fact it works well with no internet. The exercise videos not so much because i could not figure out how to store high quality videos in app

> JavaScript is such a simple language

Also JavaScript:


> AirBNB forced hotels to MASSIVELY upgrade.

Any data to back it up, please?


My experiences in travel has been the same. Airbnb competition has been awesome just like Uber has been awesome for taxis in many places.

The narrative is always that "it's worse and making things worse" and gets blamed for everything such as the housing crisis which is insane but it's been an awesome asset to humanity. Not just Airbnb but other similar search lodging offerings.


I'm not a frontend dev, but compared to React boilerplate it looks surprisingly... sane?


Unfortunately looking sane and being a good model are different.

One of Reacts greatest features is you’re just using JS for the logic - loops and conditionals are type checked, autocompleted, and already universally understood.

Template based solutions have existed since forever, but if given the choice I’d never use them.


It's both: having both "sane" syntax and simple mental model is the key.


Good thing is TS is sane syntax. Also the examples were written fairly biased.


The examples are contrived & the comparison to React in the first place isn't in any way like-for-like (the first example is comparing ShadCN, an entirely different library, not just React).

React is a view state management library. Hyper is a DSL for a framework called Nue. They're not like-for-like tech. A better comparison would be something like Svelte which is a similar DSL (used with a framework called SvelteKit).

Fwiw JSX is also a minimal DSL used by React but if this article compared bare Hyper (without Nue) with bare JSX (without React), JSX would come out much much more minimal in the examples.


Ai slop for generating more ai slop!


> WebUSB and its associated political disagreements

What are the political disagreements?


WebUSB is not a web standard. It’s a Blink-only API cooked up by Google and rejected by both Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds. It cannot become a web standard without two independent implementations, and Google have failed to convince anybody outside of Google to implement it. Nevertheless, it pops up on various websites as things Firefox and Safari are “failing” to support.

> This specification was published by the Web Platform Incubator Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track.

https://wicg.github.io/webusb/

> WebKit declined to implement several APIs, including WebUSB, due to concerns over fingerprinting

> We have previously stated privacy concerns, thus the concerns: privacy label. We agree with Mozilla's security concerns raised in their standards position issue, thus the concerns: security label.

https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/68

> Because many USB devices are not designed to handle potentially-malicious interactions over the USB protocols and because those devices can have significant effects on the computer they're connected to, we believe that the security risks of exposing USB devices to the Web are too broad to risk exposing users to them or to explain properly to end users to obtain meaningful informed consent. It also poses risks that sites could use USB device identity or data stored on USB devices as tracking identifiers.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb


[flagged]


Real adults use lynx & curl, so I’m not sure what adults you’re talking about.


You are not losing functionality if it was never implemented in the first place. WebUSB and WebSerial are not standards, so your rage is misdirected. Keep using your security cheese of a browser if you need that feature. Otherwise others (like myself) are okay with having fewer security risks in their browsers.


I don't know the general political disagreements, but I personally don't want WebUSB and think it's a garbage idea.

The browser can already access the USB devices it needs through normal OS interfaces (the keyboard and mouse being the obvious examples). I don't see why any website should need special direct access. The only use-cases seem to be giving access to web programmers who can't be bothered to write a standalone application (not a group I trust) or to provide additional ways to track users (something I don't want).

I don't even trust Google and Mozilla enough to give them access, much less any random stranger who's setup a website.

Not everything needs to be accessible from the web. I don't know where the line is, but for me USB access is across the line.


> I don't see why any website should need special direct access.

And this also holds back things like better security from USB security keys.

You have to access the key in exactly the way that is implemented ... even if that implementation sucks or has bugs or has security failures.

Everybody hates Electron .. but then want to hamstring the browsers. Well, people still want do do the thing they want even if you don't let them. They will find a way around .. and currently that way around is Electron.


I believe USB security keys are covered under a different API.

But even then, you can use this argument against it. When this type of USB access is allowed, it gives phishing attacks even more power. Now, you’ll click prompts for authentication and little did you know that malicious actors and read/write the entire USB drive!


The politics of exposing users to security issues VS giving the web more capabilities.

A fight which is usually won by people who just want features now. Security flaws tend to look hypothetical until people actually exploit them in the wild.


If history teaches us anything, it's the fact that we will come full circle, the browser will become the os at some point. People with money want it to happen and they have resources to make us think that we want it too. Might as well enjoy the ride


Fingerprinting, basically, and whether browsers should gain any more capabilities at this point which just deepens the dependency on Chrome further and further.


While fingerprinting is a concern with many web extensions, the bigger problem here is the security risks inherent in exposing on the open internet a bunch of USB devices that were not designed with adversarial inputs in mind...


I think you're right. Weren't there even remote DMA/CPU-level attacks over OHCI/USB?


I think that ship sailed many years ago.

As I user who cares deeply about privacy and has almost everything enabled -- "strict" anti tracking protection on the browser, uBlock origin, DNS level filtering etc -- I discovered that any the fingerprint for my Firefox is pretty much unique on the entire Internet.

One thing that astonished me was that the number of hardware cores of my CPU is easily accessible from JavaScript. I have an AMD machine with 8 cores and 16 threads. Somehow it is on the high end of machines that access the Internet, and only a small fraction of users have a 8 core CPU. Combined with just a few other parameters, especially IP address, it is easy to uniquely identify this computer.

Just one additional channel of information from WebUSB barely matters at all.


About fingerprinting - was the WebUSB made poorly? I believe the device information can be strictly restricted and given only on user consent. E.g. by default browser sees only plugged-in status of certain device categories.


You don't see anything without user consent.


It works like that or you think it should work like that?

If browser gets zero information, it drastically reduces UX. It even does not know to suggest permission popups without being misleading in the end.


I don't think, I wrote enough code with those APIs.

You call `navigator.usb.requestDevice({filters})`. It returns a promise and browser displays a window with device list according to the given filter. User chooses device or presses "cancel". The promise resolves with single device or rejects with error. You can't fingerprint anything without user interaction. Also there's block list which does not allow to connect to keyboard, mouse, so typical user does not even have any USB devices to choose from.


probably that your browser can access the hardware. which i also do not want.


should a browser have api-s allowing websites to access directly the file system and usb devices which might be insecure and help in fingerprinting or it should not. a.k.a chrome against all the ants.


It already does though. It's the type=upload box we've had for decades. Think of it as how smartphones let you give access to only a specific file or see a subset of files. The "UI" is just using a system control. You can also drag and drop files into the browser too. This is all available to javascript.


> It already does though.

It doesn't. Websites don't have access to your file system.

> It's the type=upload box we've had for decades.

It isn't. That isn't giving the access to your file system to a website. That is simply providing a file to a website. The website doesn't even get the real path to the file but a C:\fakepath\filename.

> You can also drag and drop files into the browser too. This is all available to javascript.

Again, that is not giving access to your filesystem to a website. That is giving a file to a website.


I do agree partially but I don't see a difference in practice Using your definition every app on Android and Apple doesn't have access to your filesystem either.

Just like you have to select which image from your camera roll that Facebook is allowed to see / access. It gets that one image, and only that image, on purpose. It doesn't get to have a free for all through your files.


In this case, Safari also doesn't implement the API, and that's far from an ant. Plenty of cases where something is effectively everywhere but in Firefox, but this time Apple also decided against it.


Safari is an ant standing on the shoulders of a giant apple.


HN is cool, the startup factory - meh


Wait, wasn't insomnia supposed to be an open source alternative to postman?


Yeah, but they went the cloud-first enshittification route like a year and a half ago.

https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/6577

I still use Insomnium, a (dead) fork of Insomnia that removed all the telemetry on a version of Insomnia just before this nonsense occurred.


Then Bruno positioned itself as the fix for the enshittification, and then did it itself.


> taking a static language and adding dynamic typing (e.g.`auto` in C#)

Assuming you meant C++ - no, auto is not a even a tiny bit dynamic. It's still fully static typing, but with type inference.

The compiler will still prevent you from calling a method which doesn't exist.


Ah yes, my mistake. `auto` is C++. I was thinking of `dynamic` and `var` in C#.


Unfortunately, while `dynamic` is used for dynamic typing in C#, `var` is just type inferenfe like `auto` in C++.


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