It's true that partisan politics provides only coarse choices. That's true of America's bipartisan system as well as multiparty parliamentary systems. But the parties are still dynamic coalitions that can change dramatically over time. Just look at the difference between the 1950s Democrats vs the 2000s Democrats, or the 2015 Republicans vs the 2020 Republicans.
The coarse options that are available at election time can be massively influenced in the years leading up to the election.
It's basically the same, except smarter about command history and auto-completion by default. I'm sure you could get Bash to act the same way with a bit of prodding.
That "perfectly capable mechanism" is one-off JS glue code, which is so cumbersome that approximately nobody actually uses it even though it's been an option for at least 6 years. It would be silly to mistake that for a satisfactory solution.
From my (outsider) perspective, I think the main roadblock atm is standardizing the component model, which would open the door to WIT translations for all the web APIs, which would then allow browsers to implement support for those worlds into browser engines directly, perhaps with some JS pollyfill during the transition. Some people really don't like how slowly component model standardization has progressed, hence all the various glue solutions, but the component model is basically just the best glue solution and it's important to get it right for all the various languages and environments they want to support.
I wonder if this is a symptom of a broader shift away from cathedral-style "owned" software toward bazaar-style free software, perhaps due to the ascendant SaaS model sucking investment away from traditionally shipped product teams, or if Apple is just sleepwalking down the slope of mediocrity.
What you are describing is a symptom of a system already in the process of breaking. The "OG Hacker Mentality" is a thing of the past, corporations are run by executives looking at money, maybe at shareholders but never at users. Most companies have internal processes with complexity comparable to government processes and outsourcing/using a SaaS for everything is just what managers do to get a short term win and thereby a promotion. UI/UX design on the other hand has to be done by a small group, with a very thought out concept and lots of freedom and no financial pressure. However, executives see UI/UX developers as glorified icon-generators. They are already talking about doing UI/UX design with AI. Tell me, when has an AI ever cared for usability?
A UI/UX Dev has two choices in 2026:
1. Try to execute their own vision and get shot down into burnout by management
2. Just make everything look shiny and modern, create demos that look great and get promoted
I'm sure you could argue endlessly about which factors are more important to more people, but overall employment does appear to be reverting to its longer-term trends after pandemic disruptions, and these kinds of corrections have historically impacted junior positions much more than senior positions.
This is the attitude that permits world wars. In the aftermath of WW2, a lot of people genuinely believed in the power of international law to prevent WW3. Now, it seems like a ton of people think that's just BS, and the fact that so many people think that is what makes it BS. If a strong majority of people actually believed in international law, it would be "real".
> Everybody that is cheering this on has a significant gap in their education.
Macron, President of the French Republic, for reference, says:
"The Venezuelan people are today liberated from the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro and cannot but celebrate it.
By seizing power and trampling on fundamental freedoms, Nicolás Maduro has committed a grave affront against the dignity of his own people.
The transition that is now opening must be peaceful, democratic, and respectful of the will of the Venezuelan people. We hope that President Edmundo González Urrutia, elected in 2024, can ensure this transition as soon as possible."
> > If a strong majority of people actually believed in international law, it would be "real".
International law has always been BS, what works is fear of retribution by the offended party or retribution from the observers thinking they might be next and getting together to enact preventive measures
If international law had any effect people would believe in it. You're mixing cause/effect. This situation has been going on for years and the lack of response by international organizations makes people lose all confidence in them.
"International law" are voluntary agreements but countries remain sovereign. The only way to force something is to have bigger guns and/or more economic power than the other countries and, as it happens, the US are #1 on both.
Edit: The best protection we have against WWIII is not "international law", it's that the big guys can instantly nuke each others.
I don't think you're wrong, but it's one of those facts that's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, like "the bank is failing" (which, if people think is true, quickly becomes true) or "money has value".
The US is a superpower of course, but world wars are multilateral, and US alliances are not what they were just a year ago.
The Australian law, as written, is not good. It names 10 specific platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc) that must comply with the law. That means any social network that is not explicitly named can still happily serve children.
Is Chrome's PWA support on Android a massive glow to Android Play Store's bottom line?
I don't buy this line, that Safari is intentionally hobbled to prop up the App Store. What's iOS missing for PWA's to be a viable money-maker for companies? Surely there so much money on the line that we would see companies using them. What does Match.com's portfolio of dating apps need to be viable as websites instead?
In reality, when you actually pay attention to Apple's software engineering practices you realise how incredibly cheap and stingy they are. All the apps are so under funded and under developed. Bugs are introduced all over their native platforms all the time and never fixed.
> Is Chrome's PWA support on Android a massive glow to Android Play Store's bottom line?
Probably, but Android allows side-loading. iOS does not.
> What's iOS missing for PWA's to be a viable money-maker for companies?
Brace yourself.
1. Notifications are hobbled. This is HUGE. Silent pushes, rich notifications, NSE, reliable badge counts, and reliable delivery. This is made worse by:
2. Hobbled background priority. PWAs are aggressively suspended and killed. No long running processes. No guarantee of process execution. IndexedDB and in-memory state may be wiped at any time.
3. PWAs can’t access most system frameworks. Bluetooth (CoreBluetooth). NFC (Core NFC). Background location tracking. HealthKit. HomeKit. CallKit / VoIP. Siri Shortcuts / App Intents. AirDrop. Apple Pay (full API). CarPlay. System share extensions.
4. No access to native rendering pipelines. Performance is severely limited.
5. PWAs have unstable, purgeable memory. No persistent file storage.
6. Limited UX and lifecycle control. No termination callbacks. No suspend notifications. Reloaded arbitrarily. Back/forward gestures conflict with browser.
7. No access to native UI components like FaceID, native text fields, drag and drop across apps, context menus, and haptic feedback.
Apple has done everything they possibly can to ensure PWAs are broken on iOS.
It's not just that, Apple also gets $20+ billion per year in AdSense revenue from Google for being the default search engine in Safari. A change of even 10% marketshare would cost them billions, and this money is pure profit.
The more likely explanation is that when every app can bundle their own browser engine, we will not see a competition explosion. Instead, Electron apps will come to mobile, with every app shipping its own browser stack.
You can’t tell me Gecko, which has already failed on desktop, will suddenly be popular on mobile. You can easily tell me every app shipping their own Chromium would be very popular with developers.
Firefox is really good now on android. It's my go to browser now for everything. It just needed full addon support but when that was finally there it was great.
This is true, however I think an App Store rule that to ship a browser engine, you have to be a browser, defined as having a browser that is maintained on MacOS, Linux, and/or Windows and which can be made the default browser on those platforms. Or even simpler, it has to present web browsing to the user as the primary function and not secondary to accessing content/shopping/gaming.
Seems either approach would rule out your Slack, Amazon app, etc. from shipping their own outdated 900MB Chromiums but allow Chrome, Firefox, K-Meleon, whatever.
Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows?
No.
Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology. The pitch to non-technical users is terrible. Just like passkeys, which has also been terrible.
> "Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows? No."
Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.
To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA
I run PWABuilder.com as well, and I can tell you that many, many PWAs get published to the Google Play Store, including some very popular ones.
>Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows?
No.
Obviously. When a major Gatekeeper systematically holds it back to prevent it from challenging its taxation funnel, then it has no chance of competing and will thus not be chosen on competing platforms either, which will prevent its adoption and any investment in it.
>Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology.
PWA is not an "intrinsically confusing technology" and making such an absurd statement without proper elaboration reeks of pure bias.
It’s not that confusing. To a user it could be the same as an app, just one you can be prompted to “install” instantly without a download and without wasting space on your device.
If Apple weren’t incentivized to block PWA use, they’d allow them to be “installed” with the same type of little top banner that prompts you to get/open an App Store app. Instead they relegate it to some obscure buried option inside the Safari Share menu.
Technically you can even write your own webview, but you can't make it the default, nor will it be able to JIT-compile JS, since that requires an entitlement that Apple never grants. Having no JIT is murder on both performance and battery life.
Everything that's inconvenient for your preferred narrative can just be dismissed as conspiratorial thinking, makes the world so much easier - doesnt it? I've compiled some of the evidences that makes clear how one of the Gatekeepers (Apple) has a tremendous conflict of interest, which manifested itself in systematic sabotaging of PWAs over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534316
The coarse options that are available at election time can be massively influenced in the years leading up to the election.
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