It was useful and not the wild west as long as a very small group of intelligent and highly motivated individuals moderated it. First and foremost Jeff Atwood used to do a lot of moderation himself - not unlike dang on HN.
When that stopped, the site (and to some degree its growing number of sister sites) continued on its ballistic curve, slowly but continuously descending into the abyss.
My primary take away is that we have not found a way to scale moderation. SO was doomed anyway, LLMs have just sped up that process.
I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.
The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
> For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with more than 2 changes. SNCF shut down there international ticket sales computer system - because it was too old. They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF.
The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required.
"They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF."
I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train)
"The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required."
You can plan that in DB Navigator just fine, but have you ever managed to successfully book such a journey. I admit that my attempts were always in the east-west direction, but I can confidently say that the DB Navigator app bails at the last step of the funnel for these journeys every time, when I can book the same trains via SNCF Connect just fine.
What I love about SNCF connect is that it shows me exactly if a train has free seats and is bookable in the inital step, where DB-Navigator lets me happily compose a whole itinerary only to tell me in the last step before payment one of the trains is booked out. Then I have start the whole process from the beginning, manually steering DB-Navigator to avoid the trains I now know are booked out but DB-Navigator still pretends were available.
I agree that the booking experience of the DB-SNCF cooperation trains sucks from the DB end, but the underlying blame arguably lies with SNCF which insists on compulsory reservations which is against the philosophy of trains in Germany. On the other hand, in my experience DB offers cheaper tickets for these cooperation trains, most of the time.
But these trains are a special case; in other cases DB is clearly far more pleasant.
This is not primarily a problem of the cooperation trains, I have the same situation with trains within Germany. DB-Navigator only tells you if a train is bookable right at the end, right before payment. Before that, it might show "there is high demand", but this is rather useless, especially when you have a school kid and want to book a train a the beginning or end of school holidays, when every train is in high demand. Your only chance with DB-Navigator is to play the whack-a-mole game where you run all the steps repeatedly until the very last step until you find a train you actually can book.
In the SNCF app I have this information right away, that is what makes the difference for me.
So much this. I often use DB navigator to plan trips within france. As soon as you're not going to or from Paris, the sncf offer and app are just terrible. Often, sncf-connect will refuse to offer me TER-only (regional train) trips, because one of the legs can also be done by TGV. Basically impossible to plan this kind of thing with the SNCF apps.
But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station. If you do limit yourself to a single text input as the entry point to the search, I see the intuition. but the result is that they are the only transit search mask I know where I have to first type where I'm going, and then where I'm coming from. I hate it.
It might be more intuitive if this was the first travel app every developed. But I don't personally any other transit UI that uses this pattern, and that makes using the sncf search "the weird one" and not in a good way.
I don't know about apps (only used the HVV app, for holding a ticket), but in terms of websites SNCF (at least the English version, the French one is a bit better) is an absolute mess. There is like 3 different ones for starters, one to find a connection, one to buy the ticket and one to find current status/delays.
bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sites I have encountered).
That said, the biggest problem with rail in Europe atm, is the lack of an integrated ticketing system. Going between places by train is a so much nicer experience than taking the plane, but the ticketing experience is such a mess. As others have pointed out, on SNCF you can't find any international connections any longer (IIRC SJ.se in Sweden still shows connections to Norway and Denmark), on Bahn.de you can find the connections, but can't actually see a price or book a ticket (you are told to go into a station). Train travel in Europe could be a surely awesome otherwise.
One fun experience, arriving in München and trying to buy ticket for the airport train online. The app requires your birthdate. The date selector starts from present and only allows to go back one month at a time. So if you're 40 years old, you would need to click 480 times... We bought paper tickets from a machine . Machines work well compared to other countries though.
I couldn't disagree more. You can say a lot of bad things about Deutsche Bahn, but of all the travel apps I have used, DB Navigator and bahn.de were the best.
SNCF Connect, on the other hand, not only had a terrible UX, but also crashed randomly, forcing me to use third-party apps to buy SNCF tickets.
I can't tell for other countries, but SNCF digital solutions have been a great example of everything you should not do for as long as I can remember. Actually bahn.de used to be a far better interface to consult french train hours than whatever fancy new name SNCF would come every few months or so.
The DB navigator app is actually decent. The one downside is it kicks you out to a website to book many international tickets, but you can still plan and track your journey delays etc. in the app.
It kicks you out to a website if you are lucky (I had this when traveling through Austria), but often it just says: "Sorry, I cannot book this for you.".
In any case you will have to start from scratch, which is in my opinion the worst UX.
It is good that the app allows to research all theoretically possible connections, but I want the info if I can practically book a connection right there in the process and not just at the end. The SNCF-Connect app shows that this is possible, and even possible for Deutsche Bahn trains.
I just used the DB Navigator for extensive travel in Germany without any problems. It doesn't provide quite as much information about how to deal with connections for a delayed train, but that is minor compared to the very transparent function for buying and displaying tickets.
>Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes
I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Exactly, no one wants that, no one needs that, but you should recognize that most people don't want to handle cash money either, nowadays.
Just let me swipe my card or phone and done.
If you insist on privacy we should be able to use a pre-paid card or temporary credit card (like Revolut), but I have not tried that and I doubt it works.
I don't carry a phone around with me at all times. Phones are expensive, wasteful, socially and environmentally harmful, time consuming, and they erode our freedoms.
I’d love to see an in-depth analysis of the overall production costs for paper and ink vs electronic. Tree to processing to ticket vs smartphone, grid, network, software, and so on. I imagine the paper process is exceptionally cheaper but I could very well be wrong.
Sure. And how do you pay? I mean, really. You're forced to create an account, then link a payment method (PayPal and/or Visa/Mastercard may or may not be supported, Apple Pay almost never is). Sometimes you also have to link a mobile phone number or the number is the account identifier.
Paper is fine for the environment. Paper takes an absolutely tiny portion of a tree (and burning the pulp waste tends to result in a net energy surplus from the pulp mill!), whereas the amount of energy to create one computer (even a phone) is massive.
As a tourist I agree, and the Deutschland Ticket App is Region locked, so you are bound to the complexity of the system, which seems unnecessary and way too expensive as opposed to the ticket locals get.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
While DB Navigator does leave something to be desired the sheer width/breadth of the DB booking system makes it my go-to choice for international train travel. They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips - from Sweden to the Netherlands - which I make about every other month. I can get prices directly without having to go through some silly booking agency, I can book tickets, reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want (something which doesn't always work). They did have some problems about a year ago when they moved to the 'new' DB Navigator and the price I was quoted suddenly quadrupled, this turned out to be an omission in the booking system which I submitted a bug report for. They fixed the problem and prices returned to where they should be (about 5% higher than before the change, they used the opportunity to raise prices...).
No, the problem with DB is not to be found in their app or the booking system, those are at least on par and often better than their foreign equivalents. The problem lies in the unreliability of the long distance network, especially the ICE service which often sees long delays due to a lack of personnel, defective equipment, maintenance work, etc. Regional services tend to be more reliable, in part due to the higher frequency which makes it less of a problem if a single train does not run. All in all I can live with the problems and have switched over to rail travel whenever I can in Europe. The advantages - more space, more comfort, no security theatre, the ability to hack away while travelling, usually lower prices, I can take as much luggage as I can carry (which is a lot) - outweigh the disadvantages - longer travel times, need to change trains, delays which compound due to missing connections.
They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours
There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips
That is something we can agree upon.
reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want
SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do all that in the DB app. You can manually select which seats you want or just say the types of seats you want (e.g. compartment or open area, isle or window, table or no table, quiet area or not, family area etc).
> There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do the same on bahn.de or in DB Navigator (which is mostly equivalent to a canned version of the site plus a few extras). Not all trains allow seat selection, sometimes seats are assigned automatically. Other trains - e.g. Dutch Intercity trains - do not offer reservation at all. The Swedish/Danish Öresundståg (a service running mostly in the south and west of Sweden) theoretically allows reservation but this hardy ever works, at least when booking through DB. Do mind that I use DB to book trips crossing several countries using different operators, in this case SJ (Swedish state railway), Öresundståget, DSB (Danish state railway), DB, Eurobahn and NS (Dutch state railway). All in a single booking with a single payment and a single point of contact using a single ticket.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes,
It is for that reason I'd love it. Accessible, universal, sustainable,
resilient technology!
I once got stuck in Nuremberg overnight. The ticket office was open
all night and an official looked up all my options from memory and
timetable books and wrote me a diagram with pen and paper that
perfectly showed me how to get to my destination. I'll never forget
that helpful clerk.
Not saying you can't have your apps, but systems that lose touch with
reality and human involvement are part of the emerging problem.
For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian
and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious
discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and
allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper
ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses
and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine
used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket.
Simply genius.
> For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.
I think you're giving a little too much credit. In the nearby Czech Republic we had a system where there'd be eight (or perhaps 10?) places for a hole. Your ticket would get marked with a combination specific to the vehicle.
They'd periodically change which vehicle has what holes. With 8 holes, 256 tickets would be enough to give you a valid ticket for any vehicle. With 10 holes, 1024 tickets. I think some people carried around all the tickets to be able to ride for free. Others kept tickets with small number of holes for later reuse in a vehicle which had a superset of those. Good times!
I find it very hard to believe the Hungarians has something smarter than that, but would love to be proven wrong!
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible
It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.
I couldn't pay for my ubahn with a credit card on the bahn, and the app required me to use some kind of a paypal derivative. I did not pay.
Regardless of whether it is digitized or not, regional trains suck. To pay on the train, I think I was forced to use cash.
Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email. Or was it snail mail? I didn't attempt it, I just saw that my train was delayed for hours with no explanation for what can I do about it, realized I'm missing my connection and then booked a plane ticket and got home faster than if I had traveled by rail without any delays. 10/10, will fly whenever possible from now on.
Pay before. That's how the transport systems generally work in Germany. In many trains you need to have a ticket BEFORE entering the train and also BEFORE entering the platform in the train station.
> Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email.
> The DB app? Definitely was not an option for the people who did that.
Yeah, it's in the app.
> Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.
That's how it works. Typical here for local trains: there are no barriers in train and bus stations. One can just enter the train and bus without any ticket check. But you have to make sure that you have a ticket. The local trains have no installation to buy a ticket anymore. Typically one would buy them online or have a subscription ticket. How does the system make sure that people pay and don't game the system? There are random checks.
If you want a ticket, buy it before entering a train. Train stations have either ticket systems or a ticket office. But most people by now do it online either per website or app.
For long-distance trains I would always book in advance (it's often also cheaper) and book a seat, too.
Yes, that is why, instead of using a payment network, they choose to use an app, which still needs one to transact within the financial system and lets the government adjacent company run arbitrary code on one’s phone.
Yeah, cool, I understand, it is how it is done. I am not arguing that, and I already conceded that.
Why are you bringing the same argument back up again?
Have you considered that people who travel through your country will not install another app on their phone? I do not need another quarter of a gigabyte app to pay for something that could've been paid for via VISA or Mastercard. Oh wait, I did install the app. And it asked me to use a paypal account. I do not carry my papyal credentials with me.
I have never gotten on long distance trains and expected to pay on them, not what I am arguing about.
And when I mean that the app was not an option, I mean that in our case, we couldn't use the app to submit a return. I was not the one submitting those forms, I was too lazy. The people who did told me the app did not work for their case. Given that you've told me 2x that "you can just do it in the app", what else can I say besides the fact that when tried, it did not work? Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
> Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
The DB App has this option, now. That's all. If this information does not help you, there are other readers here, too.
> All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
You can buy with credit cards (and a few other options) using the usual payment terminals. Again, you usually have to pay outside of the train. The terminals are at the train station.
The DB app is absolute hot garbage. God forbid you don't have internet or it randomally updates logging you out. All of his previous arguments are valid.
If you don't pay before, and the train doesn't have a ticket machine on it (most don't, but some e.g. trams in Berlin do) you are riding illegally. That's how it works in Germany.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
SNCF, SNCB and EuroStar let me manage my tickets digitally in my digital wallet. That is super convenient if you have more complicated itineraries because you have all the tickets handy in a single app, when you need them.
With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
You can forget about that anywhere in Germany. It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
> With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
They also have an extensive web-based ticket shop.
You don't need to print PDF tickets. One can also show a PDF ticket on an electronic device, without printing it. I used the DB ticket PDFs for several years, without printing it. Nowadays a load the long-distance train tickets onto the phone and have it in the DB app, I have also a PDF version via mail.
> For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
I have that here also in my city. The reality: most people have a subscription, that's the by far dominant model. Simpler and less tracking needed.
> It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
Larger cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, ... are central for large traffic regions. For example the traffic region here in Hamburg serves roughly 3.7 million people.
> That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
We now have a Germany-wide affordable subscription-based ticket for local®ional public transport. That's my understanding of public transport gone digital, nation-wide. The basics were operational after only a few months of planning.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
I did a more complicated trip with multiple legs. Booked via SNCF, bc DB-Navigator would not let me book some of the border crossing legs, I tried. The only leg that
required a paper ticket was in Germany. In 2023, not last century.
I agree with the part about complicated tariffs/tickets but not much else. Although not sure how many countries make it simple, the only one I am aware of is Switzerland which conveniently solves the problem by making everything expensive.
I use the app and bahn.de and things are generally pretty easy and just work. I haven't used paper in a while, recently once because my phone battery ran out, but that's it. Finding connections, adjusting options like transfer time, where you want to transfer, buying tickets, checking in through the app, getting notifications about changing trains, and even recently some things I never did like getting an invoice for my employer are all a breeze. It fails rarely and is in general slick. Recently I bought tickets through Hungarian railways and this was a pain in the ass.
The one annoyance I have is buying regional tickets, where you have to buy them one at a time which can be a hassle if you travel with e.g. three people and you want to buy tickets for all of them.
This raises an interesting question: should email addresses be private?
GDPR is clear on this and there have been significant fines for revealing email addresses against the will of their owners (e.g. using cc instead of bcc). Not saying this is the ultimate wisdom, just a data point to consider.
By itself or linked to other data?
Afaik PII is usually a set of linked data. As in common name and surname are not PII. Together with age, they can be.
At least the somewhat free interpretation of field boundaries is nothing new. The physicist Rutherford ("All science is either Physics or stamp collecting")[1]
won the Chemistry Nobel Prize.
Influence and consideration of the Zeitgeist is also nothing new. Einstein got his prize for the discovery of the Photoelectric Effect and not Relativity.
[1] I know that some people have interpreted this quote in favor of the other sciences but I think that is far fetched.
It is coming, PC Clones only happened due to IBM not being able to legally prevent it taking off.
It is no accident that the laptops as desktop replacement are just as vertically integrated, most people not using laptops have NUCs and game consoles, and custom built PC towers are seldom seen outside hardcore PC gamers.
Working with all major systems I have to say I don't have the feeling that the commercial OS is getting any better. If anything they are getting worse.
What is getting better are the likes of KDE. Where a good decade ago running Linux still was a pain where it didn't work, nowadays it mostly just works, the System UIs are more usable, more customizable and in many cases better than any of the commercial OS for a while now (and yes, that includes MacOS).
And that's one of the strongest criticisms of Stallman's Free Software. Instead of providing alternatives, they are just against them.
Of course they tried to provide alternatives, but they are still stuck 30 years behind, they haven't gotten to phones yet. During Covid they had issues getting videoconferences to work.
AT&T did that in first place, without the impediment to sell Bell Labs research and the Lions book, UNIX would never had been available for free to start with.
FSF's position is restrictive in the sense that it limits the choices you have. On non-mobile, while a lot of people agree with FSF's point of view, in practice they have to make exceptions.
(There's the urban legend that you're always breaking some law even when you try your best not to; probably you're also always running some opaque firmware blob even when you try your best not to).
I don't see mobile users making any compromise like this, unless a gigantic scandal happens.
Models are biased, but it is a bias we control through the selection of training data. The act of inference reflects this bias but is free from arbitrary rule otherwise.
I think this is a big step forward compared to policing by moody humans[1]. LLMs are a knife, let's use them for good instead of demonizing them.
> but it is a bias we control through the selection of training data
I don't find this to be very satisfying. It implies that the "bias of the model" is something we can quantify, understand, and control for during training. I'm sure you can come up with canned pat answers about coarse grained biases that have a lot of social valiance, but how do you know the model is weighted towards or against subtle word choices in millions of different scenarios.
People seem to have enough trouble understanding the nuances of texts that are coming from another cultural perspective or form merely 20 years ago. Its a common enough experience to see young people cringing in response to the popular media of 30 years ago, because cultural expectations change, words shift in meaning, the "biases" of society move. LLMs are trained on a mountain of old books, media, internet forms, twitter and facebook posts, etc. How could you ever get a handle on just the "biases" of the training data from the contemporary internet sources, let alone trying to pick apart the backed in cultural assumptions of a bunch of books spanning decades?
When I said, we control the bias I meant we can control for it when we try to make a model as unbiased as possible. I think we can do that well even if the result will never be completely unbiased.
When it comes to giving a model a deliberate bias I agree with you.
> Models are biased, but it is a bias we control through the selection of training data.
But what if controlling bias is impossible because the very format of the data demands its emergence?
I always thought both structuralism and poststructuralism were the worst types of in(s/n)ane navel gazing. I think I even wrote on a course feedback section in a final many, many years ago that these topics were massive wastes of my time. (We didn't have "evals" as such, but some faculty would elicit feedback on a separate sheet of paper you could leave with the final exam.)
Observation: the more time I spend just letting the algorithms converge under a huge variety of treatments, the more convinced I become that the most basic structures of our language cast a spell on human understanding of the world, and that the interactions between the primitives of our language and human meaning-making is FAR more deterministic than we would like. Especially in terms of how they direct certain emergent phenomena in human groups.
Implication: maybe it's reasonable to hypothesize that bias isn't "in the data". Maybe bias emerges, nearly deterministically, from the underlying grammatical structure of the data, at least in certain semantic contexts. Maybe certain utterances, and the persuasive power of those utterances, correspond to a sort of default hard-wired path for a majority subset of the population. A co-occurrence of certain neural pathways and certain grammar/semantics that eventually must arise in a given language and socially situated use of that language.
FWIW: I have almost no social science training, the training I did get was received by me with extreme skepticism, and this sounds bunk to me even as I type it. So, for me, this hypothesis would have sounded stupid -- or at least inane/pointless -- before 2019. But I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the languages we've converged on encode certain types of group preferene/bias at an extremely fundamental level.
...either that, or I'm far FAR worse at filtering/generating data than I give myself credit for. But in at least a few cases I have literally reviewed every token within a certain delta of influencing the models behavior on an input sequence and see the same results.
"Introspection — the ability to ask questions about your program during compilation"
Having lived in a Java bubble for some time compile-time introspection sounded like an oxymoron to me when I first heard it. Now I realize, there are worlds where introspection is understood to be at compile-time with such matter-of-factness, that it's not even worth mentioning.
Yes, this is a good point. In a C++ context, RTTI already exists, and so for the intended audience, they would already understand that this is about compile time reflection. But sometimes when things hit a broader audience, there’s opportunity for misunderstanding.
Avoid any CLI tool that uses escape sequences for 8bit or 24bit colours by default.
How difficult is this in practice?
(Julia's article mentions this idea too without going deeper into the struggles)
A related topic is: Do terminal color schemes only concern themselves with the 16 base colors or do they also meddle with the RGB and greyscale parts. I mean you could also adapt the 8bit and 16bit colors to your readability requirements.
There is no 16bit. You cannot alter the 24bit (at least not on your average terminal emulator).
Same is true for 8bit. Most terminal emulators tend not to support altering those colours either.
In practice, the only application I use that I've had to configure the colours for was tmux. But I tend to forget about tmux because its one of those applications that needs a lot of a configuration from the outset anyway (in my opinion at least).
There might be other "must have" tools that set the background colours too. I've either not needed them personally, or have completely forgotten about them
> The answer seems to be “there’s no standard, terminal emulators just choose colours and it’s not very consistent”.
It does seem like half this article is correctly answered by "there is a standard (VGA), but some terminals (and in particular, the Solarized colorschemes) trample all over it and break everything."
Like, there are indeed a lot of buggy terminals, but Solarized will ONLY ever make things worse, since all correct programs assume something close to VGA.
> For example keywords are almost universally somewhere in the red blue area, never green.
This isn’t true. Blue’s probably most common these days, but black, orange, brown, yellow, green… they’re all pretty common, probably similarly common to red. In Pygments, the default theme even uses bold green for keywords.
> For comments it's the opposite, most often greenish or grey.
OK, this one’s more true. Other colours are sometimes used, but greens and greys are far and away the most common.
When that stopped, the site (and to some degree its growing number of sister sites) continued on its ballistic curve, slowly but continuously descending into the abyss.
My primary take away is that we have not found a way to scale moderation. SO was doomed anyway, LLMs have just sped up that process.
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