This is true in other fields too. Wheel-chair ramps are used by people with baby strollers. Subtitles work for deaf people, those who can't understand the spoken language, or simple folks in situations where someone is sleeping next to them. Pretty much every accessibility-oriented feature ends up helping out people beyond the original audience.
3. Contextual (eg, holding something with one hand, loud environment)
When people think about accessibility, they often think about 1. But the long-tails for 2 and 3 are huge, and ultimately affect everyone at some point.
And to keep the loop going, stroller-accessible spaces are also walker-accessible spaces and cart-accessible spaces. Worked at a computer store in the early 00s. Our rented retail space had a wheelchair ramp and there were a few elderly regulars who would show up with a desktop PC in the basket of their rolling walkers for repairs. More than once they thanked us for having the ramp because the computer itself was way too heavy for them to carry from the parking lot.
In fact, in a way, basically everyone will use a baby stroller at some point in their life (at least as a passenger).
I personally never noticed this before becoming a parent, but there's a lot of spaces that are "almost" stroller friendly, but for some reason there is a small obstacle that would not be expensive to remove (if accounted for during planning). For example, a few steps that could easily be a ramp, blocks of flats with a lift that is accessible after ascending a few steps, even high shop entrances.
For me it's not a problem, because I can easily carry stroller with a baby inside up, but for most mothers I know this is usually a huge or unsurmountable obstacle.
Not to mention luggage. I find it hard to believe that it’s a coincidence that rolling luggage became common shortly after curb cuts and wheelchair ramps did.
The rolling luggage is primarily useful in the vicinity of airports. Inside airports there were no curbs. And I don't think people are going on long journeys through downtown areas with their luggage. I think you have a better argument asserting that rolling bags were facilitated by cheap polyurethane skate wheels.
There were fewer ramps and more stairs in airports and their parking garages prior to the 90s, due to the ACA.
And people drag luggage around on city streets all the time. Many tourist destinations are pedestrian cities even outside their most central downtown areas. And luggage also needs to be dragged around hotels — and in suburban areas their absurdly large parking lots.
The skate wheels are a plausible argument, though.
While this is often true, sometimes accessibility features can be distracting to those who don't need them so should be implemented in a way that they are optional. For example, closed captions intended those who can't hear at all contain much more than spoken lines and are not appropriate for learning the (spoken) language and even less so when watching something in your native language with a good audio environment. Which is why subtitles are not on by default and you have different tracks for closed captions and regular subtitles.
The outstanding thing about these sanctions is that there's no due process: the accuser is the jury and judge. You don't need to be found guilty, or even charged to be sanction. The impact is deep, and global.
Each of these sanctions is sending a really strong signal to the world: "stop relying on anything US".
That's just American culture no? Americans hate discussions, meetings and deliberations. They want a strong leader telling everyone what to do and then everyone jumps up to do it.
The US technically has a parliament but it's function is largely ceremonial.
It doesn't technically have a parliament, it's a presidential system, not a parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system, it's parliament who appoints the head of state. Their congress does not appoint their President, and the President does not answer to congress.
> Each of these sanctions is sending a really strong signal to the world: "stop relying on anything US".
Funny that this thing happened _only_ after Trump came to power. US has been doing such things from some time but nobody noticed it. Nowadays it is even exporting this.
One of the things that becomes apparent if you look at GDP relative to political upheaval in various countries is that stability matters more than any given political direction for the economy. That's not to say specific policies do not matter, but they matter much less than I wish they did.
I don't know if the upheaval Trump is causing is sufficient in scale that it will be visible in US growth rates.
But the point is that business will adapt to pretty much any regime to various degrees if it is predictable. The US used to be predictable. Now it's increasingly looking unpredictable, and that could potentially become a much bigger problem than any specific policy Trump puts in place.
(For an extreme example, compare China under Mao and under Deng: Both periods saw lots of year on year growth, but under Mao there were cataclysmic resets whenever there were political upheaval before rapid growth eventually resumed and those resets massively harmed the long term growth average; more than Deng's economic reforms, the biggest change was a long period of predictability)
> I don't know if the upheaval Trump is causing is sufficient in scale that it will be visible in US growth rates.
The problem is the lag. It allows for the responsible party to escape ownership of creating the problem. And of course the responsible party’s party will just finger point at the other party and say “they did this to you!!”
A lot of Flatpak's design is a great prototype, but it's somewhat worrying (for the ecosystem in general) that this was taken as a final design and being pushed out in all directions.
Portals are just a terrible design for a security boundary: all interfaces clobbered up into one huge daemon, which also deals with a lot of the internals of Flatpak/Snap. If you want your sandbox to use portals, you can't, because it relies on internals of both of these sandboxing mechanisms. The devs have confirmed they won't implement an API for other sandboxing engines to integrate with them.
The whole system also deeply intermixes the package manager and sandboxing engine — to the point where you can't use the sandboxing engine with your favourite package manager, and you can't use the package manager without the sandboxing engine.
It seems that the mentality is: all other distributions are irrelevant, all other sandboxing engines are unsupported.
And then desktop applications start having first-class integration with Flatpak, and start having issues everywhere else.
You already need to set up Flatpak's daemons for using some features in Firefox (like screen sharing, where the native interfaces aren't supported), and it seems that the plan is to do the same for other features.
In the beginning, Flatpak was seen as savior for the Linux desktop ecosystem by making more applications available for more distributions, possibly packaged by the upstream maintainer, but they didn't realize that Flatpak resp. Flathub are actually just another distro with its own builds, repository, package manager, package format and community.
On the security side it was also seen as the only way forward, but it's just opt-in sandboxing. That's still possible to achieve without flatpak by using the underlying sandboxing tool (bubblewrap), but not as user friendly as using the flatpak provided defaults.
This is true. I wrote a sandbox for applications shipped on an immutable distro last month and it uses all the same portals just fine but no ostree/flatpak whatsoever.
You also can have separate portals implemented with different processes if you, you know, use d-bus properly.
> The whole system also deeply intermixes the package manager and sandboxing engine — to the point where you can't use the sandboxing engine with your favourite package manager, and you can't use the package manager without the sandboxing engine.
You can use a pretty big portion of the sandbox separately, because it's just bubblewrap.
Permissions being granted implicitly is awful for security.
During installation they're _mentioned_ but the you can't pick which permissions to grant. If the developer requested it, its granted by default.
There are third party tools to tinker with permissions, but even those tools follow a "implicit grant first, revoke later" model, mostly because of how Flatpak implicitly grants permissions.
It's explicit in the sense that you choose to grant those permissions, but I get what you mean. Android apps also used to be more like that but nowadays you can have more control when to grant access to what. Flatpak apps can also explicitly request access through portals, but many apps probably haven't put the effort to properly use the sandboxing features and instead try to request excessive permissions beforehand.
And, of note, online payments across EU countries is most often done with American payment methods. Most Chinese companies only take US-based payment methods.
Such a sanction really narrows down where they can buy online — it's not just the US that becomes off-limits.
One of my main reasons for writing notes is that I learn while writing: the act of dumping information into textual format lets me re-think though all of it. Sometimes I pause and realise that I need to better understand something in order to put it into words. To explain a certain amount, I need to understand a wee bit more than that.
Having an AI write notes would only produce text, but the actual notes are mostly a side effect — an important one, but not the most important one in note taking.
I think hard about related notes, and peek at them when linking, sometimes finding interesting one-off connections. This makes me think further and sometimes expand the topics. Automated linking would not make me think, it wouldn't make me learn. It would just produce yet another pile of information that's already available online anyway.
I'd recommend flashing the cloth with open source firmware first. Otherwise it might check a signature in the glass, find that it's non-Apple, and become scratchy.
The example you're giving is for an application that operates on files. In that case, naming the menu "Files" obviously makes sense.
But the obvious example of what op is talking about is Pidgin, an instant messenger. The first menu is called "Conversations". It has actions for operating on conversations. The application can't open files, or save files. At least not in the same sense as Notepad, Paint, Audacity, etc.
The calendar example is from the article, their suggestion is "Event"! But also, yeah that's a weak choice for me to pull from.
I guess my point is "File" is just consistent, not that it accurately represents the way the application functions. A lot of UX conversations come down to the naive-user experience, but truth be told, you're only a naive user for a short amount of time. Maybe a week into using macOS for example, I think you'll just mentally map "File" to that list of actions I have in my comment, and you're golden.
Yeah maybe conceptually it's weird that "New Tab" in safari is a File action... but also that's where every application puts its "New Thing" actions. If I want the application to give me a blank slate, I will look for File > New *. "File" is just a word.
If every application had it's own place for those actions that were named for the noun they act on, sure, the naive user touching a desktop OS for the first time is going to breeze through tasks a tiny bit faster, at the expense of the location/name/grouping of menu items now requiring relearning on an app-by-app basis.
There's an alternate history where the file menu is actually labled "Do" or something, and I would make the same argument. "I know what's in the Do menu."
I agree with you about naive-user experience, and world-weary users. Nobody is a naive user in 2026. My oldest kid is 25. He learned to read so he could understand other players and NPCs in RuneScape. He's never been a naive user.
Agree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits.
I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.
