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Comment Modern websites (Score 4, Interesting) 71

There seems to be a trend for "modern" websites to be made up of unsearchable, undiscoverable collections of pieces of text with no formatting besides a huge sans-serif font and extremely wide margins. There's no paragraphs and little headings. Most of what you see is generated text, and you struggle to find actual content because navigation elements, such as menus, are rare and have no visual hint about their nature or function. Often, they're generated as well (e.g. "things you might need", "in the spotlight", "featured"). Icons and colors aren't used, and pictures are just meaningless stock images that you have to scroll away.

Usually there's a huge title header that takes up two-thirds of the vertical length of your viewport, and there's no way to enumerate the content of the site, because all you get are vague links ("your municipality", "services for you", "house and environment"). In the end you have to use Google to search for anything, which can land you to an old, unindexed page that is no longer the current one for whatever you were looking for. This is especially true because another thing with modern websites is that URLs tend to be meaningless or short-lived, because sites are either "single page" or served by a CMS that changes every six months.

Finally, the concept of vertical scrolling is broken by useless, unusable tricks such as endless scroll or, for front pages, something fancier that makes the site look like a children's pop-up book (all of this coming from the same people who in the 90s told us that <blink> was a crime against humanity).

Maybe it's because of the "mobile-first" design of modern websites, but I don't think so, because typically the mobile version of said sites is even less functional, with everything that can't be easily implemented as a scrollable sequence of short text sentences being painful to use or just missing.

Comment Tech companies are nightmarish (Score 1) 74

AI is certainly a problematic technology, but what really is nightmarish is that such technology is the latest and most powerful lever in the hands of gargantuan tech companies that are devoid of any moral considerations and wield more power than any person or organization in the history of humanity has ever had.

Comment Yay (Score 4, Insightful) 114

Even more red tape and gatekeepers who get a say in who can communicate over the Internet and how hard it has to be. I remember when it was Microsoft who wanted to make internet protocols more complicated in order to get a competitive edge over the open source community; back then when their plans were exposed there was outrage. Nowadays Google and Apple basically are the internet, and they don't need to work in the shadows to subvert the protocols, because whatever it is that they decide for the day is automatically the "living standard".

Comment Re:Did they copy? (Score 0) 121

A copy is a copy, I don't think you can argue that a certain kind of copy doesn't count for technical reasons.
Check the case of the Internet Archive, IIRC some time ago they lost a lawsuit over digital lending even though they had gone to great lengths to ensure that, at any given time, only a copy of the book that they were lending existed inside the memory of their servers. The judge wasn't convinced.

Copyright law gives an author a monopoly over his or her work. You can only copy that work either with the author's permission OR for a reason that qualifies as "fair use". I'm convinced that creating derivative works that compete commercially with those of the original author cannot qualify as fair use. Then again, IANAL.

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