What are great tech websites these days?
OSnews is the only one I regularly read these days, but I’m hoping and assuming there are more. So what are people reading?
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Torb
@torb@hachyderm.io
mastodon 4.7.3Front-end developer and UI designer.
Interested in the tech, web, programming, design, creative coding, music listening, photography and gaming among other things.
Humanist. Bi. Trans non-binary.
Married to @drillerdr@social.vivaldi.net.
From Norway
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36 Posts
Joined October 30, 2024
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@prism@infosec.exchange @scottjenson@social.coop It’s fine for software to have different goals and audiences? Sometimes you maybe really like a certain way of doing things, so you make a tool that works just like that. Very few people will use it, but there’s a place for things like that.
But yeah, for things that’s intended to be mainstream and help a lot of people, it’s strange approach for sure.
A few years ago when I began using both Mastodon and Bluesky I honestly expected Mastodon to be the one with the most problems, but that very much turned out not to be the case I guess.
I mean, the scale *is* larger, but the team behind Bluesky have a bunch of people who made Twitter scale, so if anyone could pull that of you'd think it's them.
We've gone from “don't cite Wikipedia it's unreliable source” to “we can trust what this LLM chatbot says about this” in half a decade.
I don't get it.
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@rocky1138 @misty Not finding stuff on Discogs is so disheartening when it happens. It’s like… gee, is this even attainable? (Only seeing for sale at absurd prices also.. oof).
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@ansuz@gts.cryptography.dog Cool project. So happy to see peope having fun with coding (esp. these days).
I’m doing something similar ish by creating a bespoke static site generator in Swift by hand. It’s a lot of fun, lot’s of opportunities to make it juust the way you want and make interesting technical choices (and since it’s a personal bespoke project they can be very subjective!).
So making a bespoke static site generator in a language you like or are curious about can also be a fun kind of project.
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@slava@mathstodon.xyz Yeah! Visual Basic 5 was my introduction to programming at 9 years old. I got just a smidge of guidance from my dad and I was off to the races. Incrdibly gentle and acessible introduction to programming.
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@tante@tldr.nettime.org Shouldn’t really be a hot take?
Most software is pretty close to being deterministic, while LLMs defining feature (and what makes it ‘work well’ regardless of you think it actually does) is literally randomness. So, I reckon everyone would agree with that take, even the LLM boosters?
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@sushee While I _personally_ don't like PHP… but like from an objective perspective it's just *not* that different from all the scripting languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc… who seem to be be fairly respected.
I'm also confused by how people can think it's lesser. Around 40% of all websites is built with a PHP-based system and one of the biggest social networks was built on it. It can clearly be used to create things.
Personally I think it's cool if someone make stuff and if PHP is one of those tools, cool!
(My dislike is of PHP is mainly based on my mild dislike of scripting languages in general, specifically: I find lack of static typing in languages very awkward to work with personally.)
My first impression of iOS26 is that I now have *less* focus on my content because the UI literally shines and bounces a lot and is way more busy looking.
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@chipotle@mstdn.social @marcoarment@mastodon.social A Microsoft employee answered several years ag on Reddit that it was basically bussiness beaurocratic reasons for bedrock not being on macOS.
For what it’s worth: if you use a custom java server, the GeyserMC plugins works fairly well with making the server also support Bedrock.
@atpfm@mastodon.social In episode 685 John talks about in an #askatp section how going to a two-year cycle for macOS wouldn’t solve the problem as it’s a scheduling issue.
But what about thr OS running on a tick-tock style release cycle where every other year it’s new features or polish and bug fixing?
This would also double as making every other OS release an spiritual LTS style release for those of us who want something reliable.
A lot of what I love so much about mac hardware is the polish and reliability. It’d be nice to see that in software too.
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@a_lex_ander @Crell @sushee I mean, my main point here was that even if my premise was true you would still *have to* recognize that it’s not worse than many other popular and relatively respected languages.
Additionally I also wanted to make the point that you can dislike something and still respect it.
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@a_lex_ander I was kinda aware that PHP had gradual typing (as with all scripting languages), so it doesn’t change it *that much* for me. I really like fairly strong and strict type systems. Of course those come with their own tradeoffs (my Swift compile times are at times slow and my the compiler error messages not always the easiest to understand). I suppose I’m willing to pay that particular price.
EDIT: Did not take it as an attack at all! It’s hard to keep detailed track of all tech communities and it was fun to learn more! :)
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@nileane @stroughtonsmith Software is really interesting in that in some ways you can't just throw money at it and automatically get good results. It's… kinda like an art form?
Apple isn't the first incredibly rich company that struggles with software, and they won't be the last.
On the other hand: this is probably true of many other fields. Like say, designing SoCs, which they went from not being able to do at all, to being one of the best in the world.
So the same ought to be possible with software. But merely throwing resources at it will probably not (alone) be enough.
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@aardrian Condolences.
Months ago lost a loved one to it as well. Takes way too many people, far too young. 💔
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@heydon Not sure what the context of this is, but I believe kids (along with parents) deserve to go about tin the world.
But they are *kids*, so yeah, they'll be noisy. I'm quite sensitive to noise, but at the end of the day, I want to live in a world where kids aren't barred from being in public places (along with their parents).
There is a movement to bar kids from more and more spaces and I find it a worrying one.
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@nileane Everybody's different in what they user their launcher for, so that's fine!
Best of luck with your app though! Having more focused apps is a good thing in my book!
Do anyone have examples of indie web / web revival / etc style guides?
I'm making my own and I find seeing what others are doing makes it easier to know what choices I want to make for my own! (Also, it's just nice to see indie web things!)
Examples
https://chenhuijing.com/styleguide on website of @huijing@tech.lgbt, based on this https://www.bryanbraun.com/styleguide/ )
https://gregorlove.com/style-guide/ by gRegorLove
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@Natasha_Jay Fuck I wish this was ready and available a few years ago. There's som that… should still be here. 💔
Happy to see progress here though. Hopefully it will lead to fewer people leaving us way too soon!
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@jensimmons@front-end.social Get a *good* grip on accessibility. Always felt bad about not knowing enough, but the more I learn the bigger and more daunting it seems.
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@CleatusFetus@mstdn.social It has different bugs than thr Java edition. A pick your poision type situation, and I personally strongly prefer Bedeock for a variety of reasons.
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@panic@social.panic.com Haven't gotten time/energy to properly look at this yet, but I AM LOVING the direction this is going.
I looked at Helix (the terminal editor) for a while (before I realized terminal editors are not for me), and one of the things I loved was it sort-of just had built-in support for pretty much any LSP under the sun by-default if it found it on your system. To me it seems like you're moving in a similar direction.
This makes so much sense! I tried to set up a Gleam-extension (never published) and I basically *only* set up the LSP and the syntax-stuff. It was simple enough that I thought in some ways it shouldn't have been an extension in the first place.
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@misty Not to encluragw like competition for thr CD… but do ypu recommend the music? Should I try to buy a digital copy?
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@nileane Are there plans to support the spell command of Alfred?
Loving the concept of a simple focused launcher. I'd love to change, but that one is too important for me to make the jump.
And yeah, I realize the irony of asking for a feature for a focused simple product. Ultimately it's your app to do with as you want, and I regardless wish you the best of luck with it!
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@The_Whore_of_Blahbylon @jochenwolters Being homophobic is not inherently religious, and it’s pretty uninformed to think it is. Moreover, it helps homophobes that are trying to use religion for homophobic ends more than it fights religion.
And with christianity specifically: the theological case for homophobia is ultimately kinda weak. The bible doesn’t really much to say about homosexuality. Which should’t be surprising, the category of gay as we understand it today didn’t exist when the texts of the bible was written, so they literally did not have the conceptual language to meaningfully talk about it.
I’m not religious myself, and I am queer, but bashing of religion doesn’t really help anyone here. 🤷🏼
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@veronica @forteller Yeah. I think bible and religon-scholar Dan McClellan’s point that these people* aren’t actually interested in understanding the Bible on it’s own terms and instead use it to impose their own agenda on to it.
- Specifically those who assume the Bible is univocal. To be clear Dan doesn’t think it’s wrong in religions to have the ‘needs’ of the religious group dictate how you interpret, he just thinks people should be more honest that is what they’re doing (and stop using the Bible as an excuse for bigotry).
Is it only me or has Sketch become a lot more tedious to use for quick layout sketching? For example, previously if you hit tidy it would try to see what alignment you “meant” with your selection, but now it seems to only care about the alignment settings of your container.
This is a big negative for me, because one of the big advantages of Sketch was how I could play with layout ideas *extremely* quickly, but if Sketch requires more handholding it's just not that fast anymore.
Very frustrating change.
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@MacBalance@mstdn.games @panic@social.panic.com It seems less buggy so far to me.
Btw: a *huge* feature for me would be to fully support autolinking to filepaths *including lines and colums*, i.e.
/Users/torb/MyProject/Sources/MyProject.swift:18:5:
A looot of dev tools are oriented around terminal stuff that spit out these kinds of messages in the case of errors, and importantly: you can easily make tools like these yourself for your own use (my bespoke site generator generates these to point to things like malformed markdown).
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@brainblasted I'm in the middle of re-writing my site in a (bespoke) static site generator in Swift and my storage of publication time is human readable string ala ”13. September 2025”, and I just had to implement a custom date type to parse it within Swift's decodable framework.
That said, I wouldn't do this in like production code (and I wouldn't really use Swift of all things for this purpose anyway). 😅
Do anyone know of a Mastodon client for Apple platforms with rock solid syncing? I use Ivory, and it's… okay I guess, but flakey enough that I frequently end up out of sync. It especially seems to struggle with if leave one running on my Mac while I'm not there and then come back after having used it on iOS (and is in a different position).