I'm curious how this lines up with US literacy rates. Is the group of people who can't navigate a two page online form the same as the one have reading comprehension skills on a 5th grade level or lower? Or do they at least largely overlap? In my experience they do, but it'd be nice to have confirmation.
I got taught in school to check whether or not the piece of paper we got with the test on it had something on both sides, so you didn't hand in a test that was only half done. I thought that went without saying back in the day, but given that filling out a two page form is a non-trivial task for what should be literate people, I guess it doesn't.
Your intuition is largely correct. For any given level of adaptive problem solver, approximately 55% of those people share the same literacy level (i.e. a Level 1 adaptive problem solver is also a Level 1 for literacy around 55% of the time). 35% have a reading level that's 1 up from their problem solving ability, and around 10% have a literacy level 1 below their problem solving ability.
> Sometimes developers care, but the people in charge don't, and in government environments every change must go through them first.
To be fair, the same thing happens in private companies. How many UI changes have people gone through that didn't actually make anything better and just made everybody relearn everything? We would have been better of scrapping many of those and let people continue to use what's already familiar, but that too would have to involve someone admitting failure, which is a hard thing to do for some people.
I still think it's worth it to provide connections over plain HTTP for this reason. It probably doesn't apply to many people, and you shouldn't allow anything really important to happen over plain HTTP (logins, payment), but normal viewing should still be possible.
Sadly, the internet as a whole seems to disagree. Even the most useful resource on the web one could use over plain HTTP, Wikipedia, only allows connections over HTTPS. I guess it kind of made sense as part of the campaign to push the internet as a whole over to HTTPS, but anyone who's connecting to any website over normal HTTP these days is doing so because they literally can't use HTTPS.
I agree; you should allow non-TLS connections as well as TLS. (At least, access that does not require authentication should not require TLS, but should still allow it if that is what the client wants.)
If you are concerned about accidental login or API keys without TLS, then you can consider supporting mutual TLS, which improves security (and flexibility) in other ways as well. (You do not necessarily, have to require mutual TLS, in case someone prefers to use a username/password login, or 2FA or something else like that instead.) (In the case of login forms, you can have the links to the login forms to always use HTTPS, in order to avoid the problem.)
The push to have everything be served over HTTPS is absolutely insane. Very few things actually need to be served securely. But sadly, browser makers don't give a damn about actual benefits for the users, but rather shove their out of touch ideas about what the Web should be down everyone's throats.
Imagine if you found someone making full fledged applications from word documents. Like, they'd managed to create a "framework" in VBA so they can do all the things word docs can't do out the box. The word documents were running servers, production code etc
You'd think the person was creative but maybe insane.
This is the exact same feeling I get when I see web "apps".
"Why did the bank change the layout? I want the old one back!" - Don't like it? Change bank then. That's what I did.
I get that changing to another bank is a big unknown, but it's probably still worth it to show your displeasure. Plus her bank are morons when it comes to several other things.
The problem with changing banks to search for a ux you like is that it's not easy to see the ux before you've invested in signing up.
My main bank changed their UX not too long ago, and I liked the old one better, but the banks I've signed up for since are even worse. I signed up with them for other reasons though, so I put up with them because it's worth the pain. It does make my main bank look better though --- mobile style on desktop is annoying, but at least I can easily find everything I need... And it's not really their fault there are seven different options on the transfers page (including my favorite: same day transfer vs next day transfers... at one point same day transfers had a fee but they don't anymore so from a user perspective, it's the same thing but you can have it slower if you want...)
Also, signing up for a new bank these days is an exercise in KYC frustration. And then you can't actually transfer your money and use it, because banks responded to the dumbass check fraud that was being promoted on social media by limiting new accounts.
> The problem with changing banks to search for a ux you like is that it's not easy to see the ux before you've invested in signing up.
I agree. Better to deal with the devil you know rather than potentially one you don't.
Thankfully, I switched to a bank with a UI that was known good going by all the chatter I'd heard, but that's not really something you can guarantee to know. And even if you do know, if the rate is drastically worse at that bank than any of the others', then that's kind of moot.
Yeah. We grown being trained to solve those small puzzles that are websites and apps, so we learned _how they are projected_, not how they work.
I mean, we learn that a enroll is normally a flow. Flows have steps. So if you came to the end of the flow and the finish button is gray, you think.
Hum… I'm used to flows. This is a multistep flow. Flows normally need me to fulfill some small checks and won't let me proceed between steps if something is missing. But some won't. Maybe this is one of those? Some flows have warnings in the end, some have next to the thing missing. I don't see any warn in the last screen, so I'll go back every step and check field by field for errors. That'll probably do.
This is the model you have in your mind, of how a website or an app works.
People that came to computers, apps and websites later in life didn't learned the puzzles.
I'm curious how many web issues can be solved by having the people responsible for the relevant sites only be allowed to use them on a Windows 11 machine with only 4 GB of RAM using Firefox with the network throttled to 3G speeds.
Assuming the processor isn't horrible, I can still browse plenty of sites with those specs without much issue, and on the sites that do require more, it's very rarely because the sites actually needs it (i.e. I'm not running Windows XP in a VM in the browser or something). It could just be normal HTML and CSS and normal forms, sprinkled with some light JS to help out a bit. But the amount of sites made with that level of care and attention are sadly rare, since the people responsible rarely feel the pain or have the empathy to fix the problem.
> Windows 11 machine with only 4 GB of RAM using Firefox with the network throttled to 3G speeds
And their mobile device should be the cheapest Android phone from a monthly cell provider you've never heard of. This is what the real world is for a lot of people, and a huge number of developers simply don't know or care.
The number of websites that are almost useless on the iPhone SE is getting pretty insane. Many site have a massive header, maybe a footer and a sticky ad. That frequently leaves less than half (~4.5cm) the screen usable.
I don't even think Apple cares about smaller screens anymore, because iOS UI elements also overlaps in some places.
Thankfully, the people who buy those drives for unreasonable prices are usually willing to share their spoils. Only one needs to actually have the hardware for the rest of the world to share the joy.
It's annoying if you have some more obscure blu-ray release that nobody else has ripped, and even more so if you don't know a guy who can do you a favour.
There's a piece of merch that I want to buy that will take weeks to ship to where I live. I currently have nothing that's capable of playing optical disks, so I was looking into buying a drive that can help me out (I'd rather rip the thing and stuff it into my Jellyfin than deal with a dedicated machine hooked up to my TV).
I can take a $120 gamble to just buy a USB BD-drive and hope the disc isn't DRM'ed enough to make it a problem, but I'd rather just be sure and grab a drive that can rip everything. Unfortunately, because we can't have anything nice, scalpers make these drives impossible to obtain.
Just in case you didn't mean to be snarky, I was asking what the custom firmware brings to the device that allows using it to rip blu-ray discs that could not be ripped using the stock firmware.
It's not that the custom firmware brings anything to the device. It just gets rid of the DRM.
Blu-ray is DRMed, so the stock firmware is capable of telling you 'no'. You don't always get direct access to the bits on the disc with the stock firmware (you can write your own discs that aren't protected, but store-bought ROM-discs are (always?) encrypted. The flashed firmware gives you direct access to the bits on the disc no matter what (region codes don't matter, the encryption doesn't matter, since your custom firmware will happily decode the disc and just hand you the files on it).
I see. I expect DRM-encumbered discs to contain encrypted data, but I think this is the first I've heard of an optical drive withholding the encrypted bits from an application.
(And region codes aren't what I think of today as DRM. They've never been much more than silly speed bumps, so I wouldn't expect them to be at the heart of what's going on here.)
I mean, you can get the encrypted bits on the disc, except the key, so those don't really help you anything. If you ask the drive for the key, it'll tell you 'what? no, fuck off'/'that address is invalid', while one with custom firmware will just hand you the key, as it's just normal data, and then you can use that to decrypt the rest of the disc and get what you were really here for.
> I mean, you can get the encrypted bits on the disc, except the key, so those don't really help you anything.
They do, because a key can be obtained externally, such as with a software library made for decrypting the discs.
In any case, thanks; I think I finally understand what's going on here. Based on what you've written, custom firmware is not actually required, but it makes things more convenient (especially for folks without much technical experience).
> Based on what you've written, custom firmware is not actually required
This is correct for normal blu-rays, but not the UHD ones, since they add another layer of encryption. There's some nonsense going on with VUKs and MakeMKV not being able to decrypt all UHD discs, since some are encrypted with keys that aren't easily available (though you can send in a dump of the disc to the devs and they'll often change that fact for that disc).
If you know of a software library that can decrypt any random UHD disc without external keys, then please, do tell, since the MakeMKV people apparently don't know about it.
> [1] Think about all the useless things kids can be good at. Did they have to rationalize why they should learn them?
'It's fun' is a pretty compelling reason for both kids and adults to learn certain things, but you can't just decide what's fun and what isn't. Maths rarely gets to have that reason (and when it does, it applies to people for whom this entire problem isn't relevant).
The way I see it, new books = new information; new games = worse gameplay, worse story, with new graphics => money spent updating GPU/CPU/memory getting very little in return
"why
ohgodwhy"@example.com is a valid email address (although I suspect most providers will reject it).
Try having that make sense without all the prerequisite knowledge the average computer toucher has. "Well you see, [...]"
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