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This rules

The snow falling in front of the text here really drives the point home


Hard to justify snow falling in front of the text on a blog post about how a redesign isn’t helpful design.


I had to open the dev tools and pause the code in the debugger before I could tolerate reading the whole article.


On mobile there’s a snowflake toggle button in the top left corner. I only noticed this after reading the whole article in reader mode and wondering why my iPhone was on fire…


There's a toggle button at the top of the page


The irony did not lost on me that an article about superfluous visual elements is overlayed by an unnecessary distraction. But maybe the point is to not be 100% utilitarian but to weave in a "warm" feeling of the season. It did give me that a fuzzy feeling for the first few second. Then I was bored; then annoyed. Which pretty much follow my feeling of using Tahoe: Cool -> Meh -> Uggg!


Ads are speech. Replace all mention of "ads" in your post with "speech I don't like" and see how it reads.


No, ads are not the same thing as free speech at all. "Free speech" is the right to say anything to anyone *who is willing to listen*. You don't have a right to come into my home and tell me your ideas about immigration policy - though you do have a right to talk about immigration policy in other places!

The government has to guarantee that there are places for people to say things. But the government does not have to guarantee that there are places for people to say things *in my own home*. And similarly, I think most public spaces should be free from ads and other 'attention pollution'. If a company wants to write about their own product, that's fine, but they must do so in a place where other people are free to seek them out, as opposed to doing so in a way that forces the writing upon others without consent.


Also porn is related to free speech.

There is no need to be a puritan against any form of pornography to expect consensus against having most addictive/eye-catching porn ostensibly displayed everywhere in the public sphere. And it’s perfectly clear that it’s actually possible to be simultaneously fine with people watching all the porn they want in their private sphere if they are warned willing adults.


If you change words in a text then the meaning changes. Even if all ads are speech (I don't think they are, but I don't need to argue that), not all speech is advertisement. You can say your piece in one of many other forms that doesn't hijack my attention.


I didn't say that all speech is ads, I said that ads are speech.


?? I know you didn’t. I don’t think my post is hard to understand. The point of freedom of speech is the free expression of ideas and opinions. You can do that in many ways. You could write a book. You could email the editor of a news website. You could write a song. In my ideal society, though, you would not be allowed to put it on a massive billboard that everyone has to look at all the time. I don’t think this curtails anyone’s freedom of speech.


Time, place, and manner restrictions already exist on speech. I'm not an anti-ad absolutist, but it would be perfectly fine by me, and most people not financially incentivized otherwise, to place time, place, and manner restrictions on ads. I'd love a blanket ban on billboards, for example.


There needs to be a distinction between "free speech" and "bought speech".


The term free speech is misleading. It is really freedom of speech. I.e. someone who says something doesn't have to be afraid of prosecution because of what they said.

It isn't the speech that is being protected it is the person who says it.

Using the term "free speech" creates those weird scenarios where now we have someone argue that the US Constitution mandates ads to be everywhere.


> Ads are speech.

Companies should have more limited speech than individuals. Nerfing the concept of “corporate personhood” will be a key part of fixing our problems IMHO.


Underaged porn is speech. Replace all mention of “underaged porn” in your post with “speech I don’t like” and see how it reads.


Certainly you can see the difference between that and advertising.


Dov Charney couldn't.


Nope. Something only a person benefiting from such cancer that ad business is would say that (and there are tons of those here on HN lets be honest, better half of faangs has ad-paid ultra high salaries and bonuses).

Ultimately its just another manipulation to part you with your money in other ways than you intended, nothing more and nothing less.


Ads are speech until they are intrusive, until they track you across websites, until they violate your privacy.

It's one thing to have a block of HTML dedicated to ads, and another to have YOUR shit running on my machine WITHOUT my consent.


It is with your consent.

You continue to visit these websites.

If you don’t want their code running on your machine, simply don’t send a GET request.


If I buy a book, I'm not required to read any part of it. I'm allowed to control what I read.


You’re allowed to use an adblocker.


You might be safe as long as the ad is on a website but stupid laws that shouldn't exist like the DMCA can make it illegal to block ads when you have to circumvent a technological measure in order to block those ads. Blocking ads and the steps needed to block them might also violate some product's EULA which could result in civil judgements against you.


> DMCA can make it illegal to block ads when you have to circumvent a technological measure in order to block those ads. Blocking ads and the steps needed to block them might also violate some product's EULA which could result in civil judgements against you.

Your issue there is with the government. No disagreement from me in this regard :)


The problem of course isn't the fact that government and laws exist. Most of us are happy that we have government and laws. The alternative is very ugly and doesn't lend itself to progress or prosperity.

The problem is that our government was allowed to be bribed/corrupted by corporate interests to pass bad laws designed to protect their profits and enforce control by taking freedom from consumers. The true villain here isn't government, government was just the tool they leveraged against us.

It's supposed to be our job to insist that our government work for the interests of "we the people" and we failed. The solution now is to get rid of corrupt politicians and the bad laws they passed and replace them with good ones that preserve our freedoms and don't put corporate interest ahead of the people's.

Sadly, our entire political system has been carefully refined over centuries to make it harder and harder to keep our government accountable to the people but hopefully it's not too late to change that situation within the democratic framework we've created.


If the rule you followed lead you to this, of what use was the rule?

“We just need to do it right this time and surely it’ll work!”

Maybe the whole idea of restricting adults from engaging in consensual transactions isn’t the greatest?


The founding fathers knew that the system wasn't perfect and would need to be modified as things changed and flaws were discovered. Making it work by "doing it right this time" was the point. That's not a sign of a bad system, it's a good thing!

Of course, nothing about government itself prevents adults from engaging in consensual transactions, and only a tiny percentage of laws do. Sometimes those laws are stupid and sometimes they are good to have. The original plan (and I still think it was a good one) was that we would have the ability to remove the bad laws and add good ones as needed. That process mostly even works, but with corruption and bribery in our government going unchecked it usually just works for a small few and the rest of us get shafted as a result.


That is a very weak argument. I don't have any way to decline seeing the ads before I do. I can't disable tracking by disabling js because, like a parasite, tracking software has uses what is necessary technology for websites to function.


Sounds like to you the use of the internet is worth the risk of being tracked.


I assume you forgot the /s.

Otherwise this is a very weak argument. Using the Internet is approximately mandatory in our current society. "Don't use the Internet" is not useful advice.


Sounds like the risk of seeing an advertisement is probably worth the benefit of using the internet then.


It's not an "either/or", as you seem to keep implying.


Yeah it is

Infrastructure and content isn’t free. Either you pay for it by watching ads or you don’t get it at all.


You can pay with money.


You’re welcome to!


Ads are not speech. Money is not speech. The map is not the territory.


Not all speech should be allowed.

> But who decides what is legal then?

Laws and judges.


That's the case currently! What I said is why those laws and judges don't ban advertising!


... written and appointed, respectively, by the worst politicians you can imagine.


Ah yes, a great point. We must protect the freedom to heap shit on other humans


So the US government can't punish you for speaking, and they can't punish someone else for speaking on your behalf. They can, however, punish you for speaking in exchange for money, speaking words you don't believe (advertising, lying). They can punish you for trying to brainwash people (the difference between advertising and propaganda is who is speaking and what they get from it, and why). They can punish you for forcing others to listen to your words (my neighbor playing music at night). They can punish you for making unfair deals. Most of this is not usually applied to private speech, but the right to free speech does not prevent it. You cannot be punished for attempting to speak in general, however there are absolutely limits.


I've been talking about making a site like this for years! It is easily the number two criteria I have when looking for hotels after location.


An enormous bummer of a fact is that Majel Barrett, who was the voice of the computer on Star Trek (along with a number of other roles), did phonetic voice recordings specifically to reproduce her voice, yet nobody has used those recordings to do so. I'd love to see her on this list.


You mean Lwaxana Troi, Daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Riix, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed?


No, they meant Nurse Chapel.


Or Lady Morella, the psychic third wife of Centauri Emperor Turhan.


There's plenty of open source tools out there that you can use to do this. Why wait for someone else to make something that you're passionate about?


It doesn't. There's some minor evidence, but it's very quickly reversed.


I think there's an actual Roborock integration for HA. I forget if it's official or on HACS, but I've used it and it worked well at the time. It requires cloud, which obviously isn't ideal, but better than nothing IMO.


It's integrated into HA now as a core component, and it's not cloud it's a local (polling) integration. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/roborock/


But according to the FAQ, the vacuums still dont work when they are offline, as they will turn reset their wifi until they are online again.

> When the vacuum is disconnected from the internet, it will attempt to disconnect itself from Wi-Fi and reconnect itself until it can reach the Roborock servers.


Yeah, that’s exactly what happens if I don’t add an exception for it to my iot vlan - it keeps reconnecting to WiFi. Scheduled cleaning doesn’t work without internet either..

I guess I’m not buying the next vacuum until I’m 100% sure it works offline and supports Matter or something..


Personally, Im currently looking at the switchbot vacuums.

They recently started working with Home Assistant with their "Works with" program.

Not 100% sure what the status of each robot is though.


Yep it's an important distinction -- the vacuum itself depends on the cloud, but the integration in Home Assistant does not.


This happened to me too. I eliminated it in text responses, but eventually figured out that there's a system prompt in voice mode that says to do this (more or less) regardless of any instructions you give to the contrary. Attempting to override it will just make it increasingly awkward and obvious.


I went from using voice mode near-exclusively for brainstorming and planning out projects to giving up on voice altogether because of this very thing.


Same here, I even have a fun mini game in my head where I try to make the selection box beginning line directly up with the end on the row below.


I love you


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