We’re nearing the end of the season, so as usual, there won’t be much new this and the coming weeks.

A quick disclaimer regarding Backerkit: They have redesigned their website again, which of course broke the crawler. I will try to get it working again as soon as possible, but until then, there won’t be any Backerkit projects included in the lists.

It still looks a bit quirky in Kbin sadly (especially on mobile where it gets very squished), but at least it should work in Lemmy now.

So it seems like the table formatting bug as finally been fixed in Kbin. In other words, the inline lists are back!

This is however not something I think we, as consumers, should necessarily celebrate. This also means that we are very likely nearing the end of the “free” web that we are used to.

No, I’m not saying that selling out one’s personal integrity is preferable, but if it turns out that advertisement as a business model effectively isn’t sustainable, we will just have to accept the reality that we will more and more commonly have to actually pay to access content and services on the web.

They are probably reusing a component that happens to sort its entries alphabetically, since that is most commonly the expected behaviour. If the form is configured in a CMS, whoever built it might not even know it’s happening and has entered the data properly, but it gets resorted in the presentation layer. It’s also not impossible that the behaviour of the component has changed at some point and this particular case didn’t have test coverage or wasn’t actually part of the specification.

Repeat after me: ChatGPT is a language model not a digital librarian.

Filing a patent means little to nothing for a company like Apple regarding future consumer products. All it likely means is that a patent engineer managed to throw something together outside existing prior art that they could file. Maybe they will do something with it, maybe they won’t. If they do, they will have a patent portfolio that will hopefully give them some legal protection from patent trolls and competitors that will attempt to block them.

So first they alienate the people who are working for them for free and then they go ahead and alienate the people who are giving them money for free.

So they have a bunch of users that have been freely paying them money for virtual coins that you can literally only use to display a few pixels of a gif next to a comment.

Their absolute genius move towards profitability is then to forcibly stop making these people give them free money and also erase those virtual coins that they spent money on with absolutely no compensation whatsoever. Not even a shitty award or literally anything at all.

It’s funny, I’m not sure if I should actually be impressed that they are not engaging in any marketing dark pattern whatsoever; they are just straight up alienating the people who were until now been practically giving them money for doing nothing.