Like how leaded gasoline, CFCs, and ActiveX cannot be uninvented and are still found everywhere? Regulation absolutely can restrict a technically society doesn't want around, as can a move to alternative solutions.

And that doesn't mean it disappears entirely. Avgas is still leaded and CFCs are still being used in specific contexts like Teflon manufacturing. But they're no longer everywhere. ActiveX is pretty much dead, though.

The amount of "what does this regex do?" - "dunno, ChatGPT wrote that for me" I see in code reviews these days doesn't inspire much confidence in either B or C. I don't have direct observational evidence for or against A but at least there's maybe a claim for people who restrict its use to very specific use cases.

Mind you, the people who are pushing to replace everything with LLMs are not the people who spend half a billion bucks on tokens in a month. They're the ones who charge half a billion bucks and the ones who charge them for the hardware. As far as they are concerned, that half a billion dollar bill is a rousing success they'd like to see repeated as often as possible.

Okay, and then there's the useful idiots who vibecode a 50 kLOC basic CRUD application with broken auth in two days and conclude that LLMs can craft arbitrarily complex applications instantly at near-zero cost. And then proceed to shill the stuff every chance they get because these days the internet is all about hyping yourself up and they can pretend that their finely-honed 1337 prompt crafting skillz will make them as god-kings among peasants when vibecoding will inevitably subsume all other forms of development, nay, all forms of creative work entirely!

While remaining cheap, of course, because nobody has ever offered a service for cheap and then made it more expensive.

I think Milli Vanilli considering the gig beneath them is even more delicious.

C'mon. He looks okay for someone in his mid-sixties.

Of course that would mean a lot more if he was in his mid-sixties.

The OS can cache parts of files in RAM to speed up accesses. That cache is called the page cache. If your file is big enough you can fairly reliably access random parts of it and expect the OS to not have cached them no matter how big the page cache is. So each read hits the SSD, allowing you to observe its performance.

You seem fixated on the idea that OPFS is some kind of ramdisk. It isn't. When a website stores a file in OPFS, the browser writes some kind of opaque data structure describing all stored files to disk. That data structure can take whichever shape the browser desires excewpt for just dumping those files in a directory in order to isolate OPFS from the regular filesystem.

You can query the browser for the maximum quota available to you and then just tell it that you want a file that big. Boom, now you own that chunk of the user's SSD.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, that's still of dubious value for fingerprinting but I don't particularly enjoy the thought that random websites can just occupy gigabytes of space on my computer without even asking.

You can absolutely have fancy UI elements that provide additional functionality. Most OSes don't have built-in 3D visualization widgets but that doesn't mean you can't write CAD software for them.

My point is that your custom widgets should make an effort to look and feel as much like native widgets as possible. Any skills the user has in using native widgets should carry over to your custom ones. So your custom text field should look and behave like a native one until the user types two left brackets. When they do, the menu that pops up should be a native menu or one designed to resemble one very closely.

Thanks to web-first development and lazy cross-platform UIs, standards in this regard have deteriorated to near-nothingness. Buttons don't have to look or even behave like anything else on any platform. It's perfectly reasonable to expect the user to relearn the UI for any application. Modern UIs spiritually follow in the footsteps of Bryce 3D rather than any Human Interface Guidelines. And that peeves me.

For all their faults, Apple got Mac users to have very high standards in this regard for quite some time, which led to a bevy of good-looking and approachable applications, at least until post-skeuomorphic macOS took care of the "attractive" part. The consistent UI across vendors was something I really liked back when I was a Mac user.

Yes. That's literally the point. The more things look and behave as expected, the easier they are to use.

Of course these days that gets trumped by the desire to shove the corporate design everywhere.

You didn't hit the page file. This is OPFS, an in-browser filesystem that is sandboxed to each origin (essentially to each website), not directly accessible by the user, and exempt from the security checks that would guard access to the regular filesystem.

Yeah, that sounds to me like it needs a major revision.

What a shame.

They also habitually firebombed cities. Let's be honest, WWII was pretty light on unambiguously good guys. Of course some people did what they felt they had to and some people went for the high score...