What's Going on with the Web?

6 points by thallavajhula 18 days ago | 9 comments

anenefan 18 days ago |

There's been a lot of unrest as noted in various threads here at HN, more recently [1] where the linked topic offers an insight of preloading a script before it's actually initialised and up and running.

With the average run of the mill site, forums, the problem can be side loading scripts that are doing more than just providing a feature - while many sites eventually time out quickly on a problem script, a few would not ... my solution was to put a lot of POS script sites offering nice (read deep scrape for personal information or refusal of obvious baked BS) features in the deny list, many sites then worked without issue albeit with less features - but a few did not - then they too were added to my deny list.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48438339

orionblastar 18 days ago |

It could be that the apps you are using are spying on you and slowing down your experience. Try these non-spying apps: https://prism-break.org/en/

thallavajhula 18 days ago | |

It'd be really hard for me to change my current social media stack. As it is, I don't use much of it, but if I switch away from these apps, I'm not sure if there are better alternatives to these. Like, for instance, YouTube. I don't think they're an equivalent to it in terms of the content.

orionblastar 14 days ago | | |

Here are the top ten alternatives to YouTube: https://cinema8.com/blog/youtube-alternatives

alexpotato 17 days ago |

This reminds me of a tweet I saw recently:

"With agentic AI, there now no excuse to perform automated testing"

Two reactions:

1. What was the excuse before? That it wasn't worth it?

2. Assuming the statement is true: why does it feel like perceived software quality is going down?

My thought is that only a small fraction of people have cared about quality products. e.g. that's partly why Steve Jobs is lauded as such a visionary: b/c his obsession with quality and building ecosystems where everything fit together well.

aselimov3 18 days ago |

Easy answer is large unmaintainable code bases + “agentic engineering”

thallavajhula 18 days ago | |

IDK with certainty if that's the reason, but I'm sure it's contributing.

aselimov3 18 days ago | | |

I can’t remember where I read or watched this, but the argument was that the main problem with a lot of software is simply code base size. Once your code base is large enough , it can no longer really be understood as a whole which leads to performance issues/bugs/vulnerabilties. I think that’s just an unavoidable part of large software.

Agentic engineering is probably not helping since it tends to accelerate growth of LOC. I also personally think quality is an issue as well but it could be a skill issue on my end idk.