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2 yr. ago

  • Sidebery has tab groups and natively supports containers, which is perfect for your use-case. Might as well be TST 2.0.

  • The very first version of Tree Style Tabs was published in... hmm...

    2007

    The shameful part is the fact that Edge-Chromium added a native tree style tabs feature over three years ago, and has been eating Firefox's lunch. Vivaldi has had native vertical tabs for eight years! Mozilla's leadership is asleep at the wheel.

  • since most languages are written horizontally and i like ux to reflect this structure. such things are subjective though

    You might be misunderstanding what we mean by vertical tabs - we aren't literally turning the tabs sideways and putting them on the side of the browser. We're placing the tabs, still horizontal, into a stacked, scrollable list on the side of the browser. The superiority of this display method for tabs on widescreen displays is not subjective, and here's why:

    1. Tab titles are not typically very long, but there tend to be a lot of them. This data is far more readable and accessible as a bulleted list than a long paragraph.
    2. Beyond about ten to fifteen tabs, tabs displayed at the top, side by side, must either shrink and obscure the title, go off-screen and be invisible without scrolling, or stack in multiple rows across the top. A vertical tab setup can easily display 30-40 of them in a vertical list, all with the maximum visible amount of their titles which helps distinguish them from one another.
    3. Modern desktop screens are wider than they are high, but webpage content scrolls vertically, often leaving a lot of empty space on the sides.
    4. Eyestrain is reduced and readability improves when the width of the reading area is reduced. This is why text on the web almost never fills the full width of a widescreen display, why most books are taller than they are wide, and why newsprint articles have many narrow columns rather than filling the entire page.
    5. Given points 3 and 4, tabs at the top of the browser window on a widescreen display leave slightly less room for the actual page contents, while tabs displayed in a vertical list on one side only cut into the white space that exists on the sides of the content, while keeping the titles readable and causing less eyestrain.
    6. With one change, a list can become an outline with sections and headers, following your own train of thought as you branch out and expand on each idea. In the same way, tabs displayed as a list can be very easily displayed with a tree structure, allowing tabs to be grouped, collapsed, and generally organized in ways that are impossible for traditional-style top-tabs.

    This is why Tree Style Tabs exists, though I prefer Sidebery these days, being more customizable and performant than TST. There's no way I can ever go back to top-tabs.

  • Trucks and trains serve different purposes. If you want to get a mountain of stuff from the shipyard to distribution centers, trains are a great way to do that. If you want to get stuff from the distribution center to individual stores within a 200-mile radius, now you're talking trucks, and a lot of their destinations will be much closer than 200 miles, meaning even plug-in hybrid trucks would often be able to make trips without using any fuel.

  • Edison Motors has already proven hybrid retrofit trucks can be inexpensive, less complicated, and far more fuel-efficient than traditional diesel trucks while burning cleaner and offering a huge amount of all-speed torque to the wheels and even more energy efficiency from regenerative braking, so truckers really don't have a leg to stand on here if they're against moving the industry forward. If any of the naysayers actually used a hybrid truck and saw the relatively low cost to retrofit compared to a new truck, and the lower total cost of ownership, they wouldn't want to go back.

  • I'd really recommend something like Fedora before trying to touch Arch. Arch is pretty much only one step removed from Gentoo, the difference being you don't compile everything from source, but installing it is still a process of building the entire OS from the ground up. There is no GUI installer, you're going to be in a terminal window punching in dozens of commands while the installation guide is up on your phone or a nearby computer. There is no real standard pathway to "a setup that works fine for most people". The wiki is very noncommittal in many areas to the point of inflicting decision paralysis and wasting a lot of your time if you try to approach it as a Linux newbie, as well as throwing so many links at you that it can be hard to tell which links mean "you need to click this and follow the instructions" or "here's background information on this thing we just told you to do that you only need to know if you're curious".

    When I tried to install Arch, following the directions as precisely as I could understand them, I couldn't get networking to function when booted into the OS, it only worked when I was running the USB installation environment. The default pacstrap you're given doesn't include the same networking packages as the installation environment, so any newbie just trying to follow the guide is expected to chase down nests of links and hyper-detailed wiki pages to figure out which networking packages they need, try to get them installed, figure out how they're supposed to be configured, and in my case, still fail to connect to the internet. Also not included by default are the packages that download manuals for all the commands you'll be learning to use, or a text editor which you need to edit config files, and editing config files is the only way to configure most of the system when you're in a terminal. I hit so many stumbling blocks and started over so many times it felt like a hazing. Gave up after a full day of trying to figure out the networking problem and having no new ideas the next day.

    Fedora (KDE Plasma/Wayland) worked really well out of the box with a proper GUI installer, I just had to do little configuration stuff like adding additional flatpak sources or learning how the console package manager works (dnf), and also to ignore any instruction that ever tells you to run dnf autoremove. Simple stuff like installing a web browser and basic apps was about as quick to set up as on Windows. The most trouble I actually had was with Discord - it would be freshly installed, briefly work, then on the next launch say that an update is available and demand I manually update it, with options to download an Ubuntu/Debian installer or a tar.gz (aka "figure it out yourself") which never seemed to take. I ended up looking for alternatives that weren't just using it in my regular web browser and discovering WebCord, which I've been very pleased with from a privacy perspective.

  • Windows 11 won't install if it can't find a TPM chip, so disabling it means you won't get stealth-upgraded to 11 when you're least expecting it.

  • These are the actions of a failing hegemon desperate to maintain its former position. If our rulers "leaders" were smart, they'd be going all-in on education and industrial policy, to build up our own capabilities rather than trying to tear down that of our neighbors. They've chosen once again the strategy of a bully, which seems to be all they understand. It will fail to stop China from advancing, it will fail to stop the nation's decline, and it will make them less likely to treat us kindly in the future.

    We know from game theory that "nice" strategies which forgive some of the time are more prosperous in the long run to all parties. Where would mankind be right now technologically if the US had chosen after WWII to help everyone build and rebuild, and share their prosperity with others on a continuing basis, instead of greedily subjugating every developing nation, human rights be damned? I can only hope that someday a leader with real power might finally understand this. Most of life is not a zero-sum game, so there's no sense treating it like one.

  • They're more than fine with it, the Bits N' Bricks podcast (part of LEGO Gaming) actually had Baraklava (the Manic Miners dev) on for an episode about the history of Rock Raiders which included a section on remakes, including Manic Miners, so they outright drew attention to it. Very cool people over there at the LEGO Group.

  • Not cars per se, but with a few tools and a kit, you can convert a bicycle into a pretty great pedal-assist e-bike from the comfort of your own garage, cost-competitively with pre-built e-bikes, especially if you already own the bike you're converting. Everyone has their own preference for the ideal bicycle, and there are plenty of DIY e-bike build guides on the web, so that might as well be open source.

  • With a set of mods natively supported by the game through mod.io, you can get as many as 8 people in a spacerig (lobby) without the game crashing, and in theory up to 16 if they join after the drop pod has landed. I'd recommend the following set of mods if you go that route:

    Downside of this method is you have to log into mod.io through your Steam account, and I'd personally be too paranoid to do that at an internet cafe, but it would get y'all down to 1-2 parallel games. In addition, if you turn up swarm sizes, the game basically becomes Starship Troopers: Space Dwarf Edition.

  • The fact they killed Omegle over pretty much exactly this but it's apparently fine when Snapchat does it makes me angry. The only difference is one of them has billionaire investors to please.

  • Ctrl-f: genocide
    Phrase not found

    It's frustrating that so many who even talk about this are apparently too chickenshit to say what it actually is. Israel is openly committing Genocide. History will not be kind to Benjamin Netanyahu or the IDF.

  • Probably a local credit union, provided it's FDIC insured and has decent terms of membership. Most credit unions aren't in the business of spying on the people that own them, their purpose is just to manage their clients' money and facilitate spending.

  • I think most would consider democracy to be the single issue to vote on. When one candidate has repeatedly said he'd be a dictator "for one day, and then stop" and actively argues in court that the position he's running for is immune to the rule of law, I'm voting in whatever way is most likely to result in his defeat. As much as I complain about the candidates and the shitty voting system, I cannot compromise on the right to vote.

  • My understanding is that Biden is trying to be the angel on Israel's shoulder because if he condemns them publicly then he loses the political capital to influence them at all. It's a kind of good cop/bad cop routine on an international scale.

  • We keep saying that blocking ads is a security feature, and it keeps being true.

  • Adding to sleepyTonia's comment, many flash games have been preserved through Flashpoint Archive, which is like an epic DRM-free Steam client for flash games (as well as other web game technologies, like the shockwave player). However, Flashpoint uses old flash player binaries that, as stated, may one day stop working as hardware and operating systems evolve. If that happens, it'll be great to have a replacement interpreter ready to go that can be compiled to run on newer tech.