I have come across elitist communities like on SO, also regarding C++. I was downvoted and told to intentionally be spreading misinformation by using the word 'struct', because as you should know, in C++ there are only classes... I haven't encountered that kind of vitriol when I asked beginner questions about how loops work, on 4chan out of all places.

But there were also times where I spent hours with people chatting on IRC while learning, where people were forgiving and encouraging.

In both places however, it seemed to be unfathomable for people that someone was trying to learn to program, not because they had to because of school or uni.

If I were to start a new side-project using Haskell today (I probably won't), I would just stick to do-notation and even concrete types (instead of mtl-style or what have you) where possible.

Dutifully replacing every occurrence of (>>) with (>), because it was more modern, suddenly changed the semantics somewhere, due to the fact that (>>) is defined with fixity `infixl 1 >>` and (>) as `infixl 4 >` - i.e. both are left-associated operators, but (*>) binds tighter than (>>) and some of the myriad of other operators you may encounter.

-- [0] - https://github.com/snoyberg/conduit

0 - https://cybernews.com/news/x-twitter-not-working-on-firefox/

Whenever I try this with Google, I can't seem to get it to work though. According to [0], it is not an official search operator anymore.

0 - https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

But even assuming that you are able to follow this advice, I assume (and have personally witnessed) another side-effect. Just as people get accustomed to, and ignore, warnings, they will just as well become accustomed to being able to undo mistakes, and as a consequence become less careful about what they're doing.

One may argue that reserving warnings for only the non-undoable operations will improve their signal-to-noise-ratio and compensate for an overall gain, but whether that is true and worth the additional complexity is not black-and-white.

Being able to either outright block/pin sites, or only lower/raise them in your search results, made a difference for me after a few days of searching.

I do hope the future of search will include being able to use natural language, but also still the more precise '"This" +"That"'.

In any case, more competition is a good thing, the lack of it is what got us into this mess in the first place.

But yeah, the PWA thing seems more plausible, even though I was not aware of any install prompt or similar.

I would need to read up on PWA, and there seems to be a LOT unfortunately.

I showed my mom how she can use 'web.whatsapp.com' to use Whatsapp more easily (in order to share screenshots or links with others).

After logging in, a notification about Whatsapp having been installed from the app store popped up after a few seconds. And indeed, the Desktop app had been installed, without any user interaction whatsoever.

I am not even sure how this was initiated, but I believe DoH being disabled by default probably has to do with it.

Edit: Like a lot of comments have suggested, I most likely remember this wrong. I tried to reproduce this (after "forgetting about" whatsapp.com in Firefox and uninstalling the app) and was unable to. I did encounter three separate "install the app" buttons, all of which however yielded an additional installation prompt from the app store.

Apologies.

FWIW, according to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web... Firefox does not support PWAs without an extension, so that wasn't it either.