I installed iOS 27 yesterday and first thing went to try new Siri. My settings for Siri responses was set to 'Auto' and it wasn't responding with a voice. So the first chat with a new Siri went like this (tried first example):
Me: - Hey, what's the sunrise time tomorrow?
Siri: - (showing me popup with sunrise info)
Me: - Can you respond with a voice?
Siri: - To whom?
Me: - To me..
Siri: - Here are the contacts I found in your contact list.
Me: - No, I mean can you give me the answer using voice?
Siri: - Here are some results I found on the web...
My 2 cents on this question – it's easier to learn the follower part: you get some basics and then go to social dances events and practice with a good leaders. But to learn the leader part you can't just go to dance events and practice with good followers. It takes more deliberate practice in classes to get the leading part.
I think I caused this (that 1 person is me) and I think its a bug, because;
When I tried to register, I searched for 'Tallinn, Estonia' and there is only one location shows up from autocomplete.
However, the coordinates of that only Tallinn location is not the samame as previous 7 people.
So my guess is that at some point, ,the map/coordinate vendor's coordinates for Tallinn, Estonia have changed recently. And anyone trying to r egistetr for Tallinn will be registered with the new coordinates.
why is this downvoted? for people who aren't in audio codec dev space, parent comment reads exactly as 'Opus 4.8 rewrote the codec and blew out all competitors'
You don’t need to be in the audio codec dev space to have heard of one of the most widespread audio codecs of the last decade (used by YouTube, WhatsApp, SoundCloud and added to WebM in 2013).
The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums.
In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a forum quite a challenging task. I have some forums died purely because it was impossible to update them anymore without blowing up half of the functionality.
It's really not the same, isn't it?... the threading model that was popularized by Discourse is really not appealing at all, it's very impersonal, it almost feels like ti calls for shallow communications where people show up, dump a thread and two comments and never returns...
Discourse threading model fit the with communities where not everything has to be a news and be commented as a news with a quick opinion.
And it works well that's why lots of of big players use it(KDE, Nvidia...) even Microsoft for the Flight simulator forum but it is true that you have to get to know how it works : the go to today timeline button for example, see comment in context etc. Once you are used to it you enjoy it and see how it pushes people to read the whole discussion before answering unlike reddit or here where people may tend to place their focus on threads with lots of comments & ignore others.
Discourse has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices.
Because of a load-bearing CSS attribute, as I understand it.
So, it's hard to consider it a web-standards supportive platform anymore.
Or, at least, it's a web platform with a technical challenge of not being interactive (so users can post and interact) from web standards supporting devices but lacking whatever HTML standards were introduced since as recently as 2021.
I'd call it a technical challenge. Literally the CSS language framework / build process is just not that flexible.
Semantic design development process became separated from semantic HTML serving somewhere along the way.
Maybe that's fine and quite good for 99% of uses. But I see this one as a glaring technical question mark.
Bringing it back to the titular point in the OP, the "crappy forums" do not seem to (cause some users to) suffer from this problem.
> Discourse has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices.
The phones that can't upgrade past iOS 15 are over ten years old. What is the current iOS 15 user base? It's probably more cost-effective for Discourse to gift affected users a compatible device than to keep old code in place.
Yes, Discourse and Flarum have been a breath of fresh air. Something was unsettling with Discourse to me though - it had an opinionated UI, and some design choices that made it feel different from traditional (-BB type) forums. It seems to be a great fit for technical communities, but not for others (taking my own words with a grain of salt here).
It was "the" reason behind 99% of forums shutting down or moving away to Discord. You have to upgrade it from time to time and upgrading is a non-trivial task. Which is why so many forums are stuck in version that is at least 10 years ago before they figure out it can't be upgraded easily.
It was also expensive to run and doesn't really scale. The moment you grew beyond certain users, simply serving the site becomes expensive. And that is ignoring expensive functions like searching. Some site decided to outsource the search to Google.
In the end forums died, free and better solution took over. And it is a sad. All the information in CGtalk would have worth a lot of money now had it been sold as data to AI companies. Now it is gone.
Yeah forum software was not designed for a web as adversarial as it became in the 2010s. Pretty much every forum I used to haunt ended its day being hacked, pumped for credentials, and with a nuked database. Even before that, the spam management was like a full time job for the mods.
What allowed Reddit and the like to survive and supplant the forums was they had the economies of scale to deal with the bullshit.
Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?
It would be pretty easy as forum software is relatively simple. If I were to do this, I would build it on Elixir/Phoenix so it's actually performant, not the React bloatware flavor of the month. Also, it would be interesting to spin this up as a FAAS (Forum as a Service) like Shopify, but for forums. The whole thing is managed and customers can spin up a forum with a custom domain and look/feel without worrying about the infrastructure. Maybe this exists already? I haven't looked into this space in many years.
It's almost like a ToDo app. We write them in every conceivable language just to kick the tires.
I just started a project with Phoenix/Elixir and I'm really excited about the concurrency and distributed nature of Erlang. I might have to try out making a forum, just for fun.
I think that way back when, there were SO MANY variants of the theme because the core parts of the software were pretty easy to get going. A lot of developers, new to the scene, would make a discussion forum. The devil's in the details, though, making sure things are secure, scalable, moderator tools are on point, etc.
Nowadays, a LLM could probably generate a new, functional forum software system in an hour, since their training have probably ingested a ton of variants of the same software.
Sure. People post them all the time. Most are HN clones. All of them die with a whimper after the initial HN juice is gone.
The problem isn't technical, the problem is that social media and Reddit already do what people wanted forums to do, and did it better in many ways (albeit at the cost of centralization and homogeneity.) There is just no niche in the web ecosystem for old-school forums anymore, other than appeal to nostalgia.
In the sense that typesetting and text is the rabbit hole that is 90% of UI effort. Native UI frameworks don't bother fixing the real hard problems, they focus on "widgets" instead.
(Not that the web stack is a good solution to this, but at least they're making an effort and they understand the difficult issues.)
> Native UI frameworks don't bother fixing the real hard problems
I'm genuinely curious what do you mean by that.
My beef with web stack was exactly this - typesetting engine from 80s has been never designed for modern UI/UX needs, and it cannot adequately provide those. Whenever I interact with web apps, I experience so many glitches, weird interaction issues (especially if there is a zoom/selection/scrool involved), that I don't even pay attention to them anymore - it's a norm. It's a norm on web to 'just refresh page' (which is equivalent to 'restart native app') - we do it all the time, because absolute majority of web apps is just crap that requires extremely advanced team of web developers to make it a 'baseline' native-like experience level of quality.
I mean if we wanted a good UI/UX framework we'd have to start from typesetting, not add it later as an afterthought to our button and text area widgets.
> if we wanted a good UI/UX framework we'd have to start from typesetting
I think UI framework begins with a model of how composition, layout, rendering, input/focus and state works. Typesetting subsystem should be built on top of that.
And that's exactly the problem with this kind of post-rationalization of HTML legacy - it's a wonderful mechanism for what it was created for, but decades of attempts to add and repurpose all those missing foundational blocks for app development leads to the twenty layers of hacks on top of hacks.
One is that it solves all problems once instead of various times in various levels of quality on various types of systems. Windows, GTK, Qt, FLTK, [100 others].. not to mention most "native UI framework" delegate to the underlying OS so they don't "solve" anything.
Electron is not a novel approach or "technology" of achieving cross-platform UI. It's literally a Chromium browser plus a Node.js runtime, using web-stack to impersonate desktop application. None of these tools have been designed to solve UI pain points.
Closest thing to what you're describing is Flutter, which is a UI framework designed from ground up for modern UI app needs, without delegating much to OS level.
This. It's nuts how the whole industry accepts that typesetting engine from 80s with bunch of hacks on top is currently dominating cross-platform UI development.
As someone who passionately and ardiently hates prolifiration of this set of _hacks on top of hacks_ called CSS (and CSS/JS/HTML aka Web-stack), I must say this is good and valid use case for CSS. :)
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