cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.

    As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.

    The term “web app” hadn’t been coined yet but, even without AJAX I think in retrospect it’s reasonable to call things like the early versions of Hotmail and RocketMail applications - they were functional replacements for a native application, on the web, even though they did require a new page load for every click (or at least every click that required network interaction).

    At some point, though, I’m pretty sure that some clicks didn’t require server connections, and those didn’t require another page load (at least if js was enabled): this is what “DHTML” originally meant: using JavaScript to modify the DOM client-side, in the era before sans-page-reload network connections were technically possible.

    The term DHTML definitely predates AJAX and the existence of XMLHTTP (later XMLHttpRequest), so it’s also odd that this article writes a lot about the former while not mentioning the latter. (The article actually incorrectly defines DHTML as making possible “websites that could refresh interactive data without the need for a page reload” - that was AJAX, not DHTML.)












  • good disclaimer. also, they aren’t open source, and from the tech background of the founder who self-funded it i doubt that he plans for it to ever be. in fact, among other cringe things on Issam Hijazi’s linkedin i see that he’s even worked for, enough to become an expert in the proprietary technology of, (checks notes) the very same zionist billionaire (paywall bypass) who just bought TikTok 😢

    Also, one their FAQs is “Where does UpScrolled operate its servers and store data? Does it use Big Tech?”… the answer to which includes:

    We do rely on some large-scale cloud providers at this stage — not because it’s our ideal, but because building fully independent infrastructure takes time. We’d rather be transparent about that than claim otherwise. Over time, we plan to reduce reliance on these providers and move toward greater independence.

    … but We do rely on some is as far as their attempt at transparency took them - they aren’t actually saying which cloud providers they’re using or for what. (given the founder’s expertise i’d guess it’s probably AWS and/or Oracle.)











  • no transcoding quality loss

    is jellyfin actually transcoding when people don’t want it to?!

    otherwise, “no transcoding” doesn’t sound like a feature. transcoding is very useful when you actually need it, eg watching something remotely which is stored at a higher bitrate than your network connection can stream. one way to do it with mpv is ffmpegfs, btw.

    (fellow mpv user here; i’ve only used other people’s jellyfin instances… but i’d be very surprised if they’re always unnecessarily transcoding everything they watch.)