Part of the issue is this affects different countries differently, based on residential IP allocations to household ratios. I am currently on CGNAT in Australia split 256 ways, and any site that doesn't support IPv6 can be borderline unusable. I can't imagine what it's like in countries with worse ratios, like India.
It's been in crisis for decades, but it's also getting increasingly worse every year.
I feel this issue has started to slowly become worse and worse as we've been able to build better "preference profiles" based on small amounts of data. I notice it often when watching a single YouTube video in incognito mode, the sidebar is usually full of fairly racist Australian content (I am Australian). This is something I would never normally see, and not something that's likely coming from whatever video I've decided to watch in incognito. It's likely just assuming based on what's a common trend in my location.
If an algorithm knows you well, it's usually pretty okay, but until that point you're being bombarded with lowest common denominator content based on your demographic. Shorts seems to be even worse; mine is mostly science facts and comedy skits, I didn't understand the "brainrot" descriptions until I looked at a few in incognito mode.
I'm not very familiar with men's fashion so I might be wrong. My understanding is that a lot of the time, size is _not_ about how tall most tops are, it's about how much horizontal space it has.
As a 5'10" woman, I do find it oddly convenient a lot of the time as that's seemingly the height of 99% of models, however everyone has different body proportions so it doesn't end up being a super useful metric.
Leg to body ratio can differ greatly, and when buying tops you can really only compare the fit with people who have a similar torso length than you. No clothing site is going to start listing individual measurements of their models like that, so it'll always be a vague guide.
I actually spoke to someone a few years ago who worked in marketing at a US clothing manufacturer (I'm Australian so not sure how well it applies to my own experiences), but apparently many stores are trying to encourage a small portion of returns of online orders because many people end up buying more items in the process.
My personal theory here, is that sites are just trying to let people know that a model is wearing their clothes. It's not to help gauge sizing, it's to let you know that person is _really_ a model. Models are often tall and slender, so they want you to know that tall and slender people look good in their clothes. The effect of "If an attractive model would wear this clothing, you can look like a model by doing it too!"
This feels like what typically happens when new areas of medicine or treatments are discovered. Suddenly everyone wants to use it in unproven areas, and market it to desperate people with a poor prognosis, or poorly understood/treated conditions.
I have POTS, a form of dysautonomia, and have been given some exercises that stimulate the vagus nerve that do appear to assist during acute episodes, but not long term. A handful of conditions will probably be found where it can help, and the rest will end up being placebo or “snake oil salesperson” type behaviour.
I've found this especially a problem with those AI systems trying to add HDR to existing images/videos. The worst instance I've seen, was playing one of the recent Spongebob platformer games, and having his eyes glow like giant suns in the menu screen. I have a TV capable of a fairly high maximum brightness, and it was dimming the rest of the image just to make sure Spongebob's eyes lit up my living room like it was midday
It feels like to some photographers/cinematographers/game designers, HDR is a gimmick to make something look more splashy/eye catching. The article touches on this a bit, with some of the 2000s HDR examples in photography. With the rise of HDR TVs, it feels like that trend is just happening again.
Honestly hearing how different this is for Americans makes me wonder if it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy type situation. Everyone in Australia is already using Meta services, so businesses just go where the customers are and keep putting everything on Meta services. Less about Instagram being a good solution, and more just being good marketing when it’s where your demographic is.
Honestly while this does work for some people, it doesn’t seem to work for everyone. I’ve tried this basically my entire life (am 27), and it’s never improved. If anything it feels like it’s gotten worse with age. I’m not sure if it’s just a different underlying cause, or it only works if you’re under a certain threshold of motion sickness sensitivity.
There are so many games I’ve played in 30-60 minute increments because they’re in my “make me motion sick but not immediately” bucket, and a lifetime of doing that hasn’t done anything to improve it.
To clarify, I was referring to it just respecting the OS's day/night cycle settings. I definitely agree a website shouldn't be trying to do anything fancy like that, I was just saying that websites by default should respect whatever the OS/browser is listing as the preference
Hi, I'm the author of the article, thanks for your comment. I definitely agree I didn't mention as much around VR as I would've liked, mostly as it's an area that I've paid a lot less attention to in recent years. I was an early adopter of it (as a developer), but mostly dropped off when the industry moved away from teleport-style locomotion. I'm honestly really glad that research is actually going into this in the VR/AR space.
The article was primarily focused on non-VR games and the various accessibility settings that can greatly diminish the problem, but are often an afterthought even in games that are praised for pushing accessibility. Eg, the recent Indiana Jones game inspired me to write this article, as it's being heavily praised for pushing accessibility standards in many ways, but lacks accessibility options to disable the head bobbing and weapon sway when moving.
Something I've become fairly aware of are all the little "quirks" in the ways I like to play games that I've developed over the years, that I hadn't realised were actually to reduce motion sickness. I do definitely plan on going back and updating the article to include some of my learnings since writing it. Eg, I always play in windowed 1440p on a 27inch 4K monitor because it then takes up less of my total vision, which I guess is a workaround when having a display that's too large for the sitting distance.
IMO if a website supports both light & dark themes, it should _by default_ switch automatically. If the site wants to allow overriding that, that's fine, but I hate having to constantly go into the settings of sites to switch it to "Use System Default" instead of "Light theme". Especially when sites don't store the data very long, or it's a site like AzureDevOps/Jira/etc which is deployed across multiple instances and therefore has a setting per-instance.
Depending on the device I'm using and where I am, I either let my computer automatically switch based on time of day, or keep it on dark theme. Sites that have manual toggles that don't default to respecting system settings make automatic system-wide dark/light mode an absolute pain.
Something I always find is that when I write about something I'm interested in, I always end up being way more informed about the topic than if I hadn't written about it.
There's something about having to get a point across, that lends itself to diving deeper into a topic. Usually I'll learn a few things while researching and writing an article, and then another few things when people ask me questions about what I've written. And even if no one does end up reading it, it still feels like it helps.
I recently turned an old article into an eBook as a few people had asked me for an offline copy, and found the process of actually doing it fairly interesting and complicated. I couldn't find many retrospective posts about actually self-publishing something like this, especially not from the perspective of a developer wanting to just publish something they've already written, so I wrote about it in case anyone finds it interesting or wants to give it a go themselves.
I'm honestly really excited for this to be more widely adopted to the point it can be used without polyfills. While the API is a little verbose for my liking, it's extremely capable.
Being able to replace all the various date and time libraries with something browser-native is a massive win for bundle sizes, as even the most lightweight ones are going to start creeping up there once you're dealing with localisation on top of it.
hMod was made and developed by hey0, who dropped the project after a while and a new group took over, mostly comprised of hMod plugin developers. That group gave up on hMod pretty quickly and went on to make Bukkit/CraftBukkit instead as it didn’t fit the needs of the community
It's been in crisis for decades, but it's also getting increasingly worse every year.