It's interesting how they're so concerned with censorship now. Weren't they the ones who were all up in arms about censoring everyone with right-wing views? But now that the script has flipped, suddenly it's a problem. It's not like we didn't try to warn them that if they force open the floodgates of censorship, then it can happen to them too. Maybe, just maybe, we should all stop trying to control what other people think and say. Mind your fucking business and leave other people alone. I hope this gets resolved. I don't believe that anyone should be censored, whether they agree with my views and beliefs or not.
Let me share with you my brief but very intensive user story of the "M3 web":
1. User visits https://m3.material.io/develop/web.
2. User suffers unsolicited and redundant gooey animation of an "orange-violet blob-like thingamajig" unrelated to the topic. This happens despite user's clearly communicated "prefers-reduced-motion" setting that other sites usually respect.
3. User struggles to find how to stop said thingamajig. After scrolling, they eventually discover some kind of "pause button" tucked away in the bottom left corner of a sidebar. (User has a laptop, so that icon—with no textual hint of its function—sits below their initial viewport.)
4. User clicks the pause emblem and the visual distraction freezes in place.
5. User attempts to identify the first interactive element in the main area (also known as a "link").
6. Moving the cursor over a tile under "Announcements" makes the tile change colour. User deduces it might be clickable. There is no other visual indication that this content is functionally different from the "static" texts surrounding it.
7. The tile reads:
Meet Material Web 1.0Start using lightweight and accessible Material Components in any web framework
This appears to be a heading and subtitle, but in reality consists of two styled <spans> with no space between them (hence the peculiar "1.0Start" fusion). The spans are marked with `class="title"` and `class="description..."` respectively.
8. User boldly clicks that tile.
9. User gets a new browser tab opened.
10. User wonders why there was no visual indication this would happen.
11. User evaluates the content of this unsolicited tab, decorated with "cheering megaphone" emoji. They conclude there is actually no clear path toward "Starting to use lightweight and accessible Material Components" there.
12. User decides to close the tab and return to the original "M3" page.
13. The original "M3" page no longer looks as it did before. It has scrolled back to the frozen orange-violet thingamajig, causing the content with the tile to vanish from the viewport.
14. User decides that they've encountered enough WCAG violations for this month.
15. User closes the tab.
It's also worth stating that the worst part of that proposed amendment [1] isn't even necessarily the VPN ban, it's the next clause, on page 20:
"The “CSAM requirement” is that any relevant device supplied for use in the UK
must have installed tamper-proof system software which is highly effective at
preventing the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming)
and viewing of CSAM using that device."
"Regulations under subsection (1) must enable the Secretary of State, by further
regulations, to expand the definition of ‘relevant devices’ to include other
categories of device which may be used to record, transmit or view CSAM"
"Citation needed" comments are useless. If you disagree, state why. Otherwise, you aren't helping anyone and merely adding confusion about one of the base technologies.
The GTA games (yes, those ones) have pre-recorded radio stations that I found to be perfect for cassettes. You play songs with no way to skip them with funny commentary in between so it feels like one long take (like Pink Floyd’s DSOTM)
I was an intern at Fisher Price when they introduced the Pixter Color. I did QA on some of the games, the Dora one comes to mind. You can imagine the torture playing a level over and over.
The games were developed overseas (India I think?). I would send them bug reports in Mantis and overnight they would send a new build. Sometimes they would even fix the bugs. I would burn the builds on to EEPROMs and verify them the next day. The EEPROMS had a little round window so they could be erased in a UV box before programming.
Fisher Price used a video codec from Actimagine to fit video clips onto the game cartridges. That's how I learned about Virtualdub. I remember editing clips from a show called Winx.
The big competition was the Leapster LeapPad and they were trouncing us.
One fun thing the engineers did periodically was a toy teardown to see how competitors saved on cost. Cost was critical. They told me how Walmart basically dictates toy cost because they controlled the shelf space.
There's really not much else to leak, a lot was already being published. I've prepared a uni exam of ethics in it about chat control and I was so angry and felt so disempowered when writing it
As the years pass, I keep thinking back and realize that Richard Stallman was right all along:
> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I
also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I
send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
