It (usually) does not, at least not for websites. Reading the screen would require a lot of computing power and be prone to mistakes, especially with unusual fonts and noisy backgrounds.

Instead, screen readers read a website‘s HTML source code which also gives the developer the chance to annotate how certain elements should be read. Accessibility on the web has been a huge topic for years and serving obfuscated HTML that only works for seeing users goes against everything we have been fighting for.

Yeah, because fuck accessibility, right?

So in other words he spends weeks to write extra tests so that the agent can save him days of coding.

The answer is obvious: the pyramids are the tips of half-buried D8s.

Most movies are mixed for a theater surround sound system. Remixing them for tv speakers is usually not worth the effort. Dialogue usually sits on the center channel while effects and music are spread across left, right and surround channels. A tv with stereo speakers can‘t do much except mix all of that together and that makes it hard to hear the quieter parts.

If you watch a lot of movies, I recommend a soundbar or even better a 5.1 system. It’s expensive but it mostly solves those mixing problems.

In that case, I was talking about phone books.

ELI5 means Explain Like I’m 5 [ys/o]

Damn, now I’m seriously thinking about making an “Explain Like I’m 5 [Goblins in a Trench Coat]” community over on ttrpg.network.

Edit: !eli5goblins@ttrpg.network

It’s like the contacts app in your smartphone where you keep the phone numbers of people so you don’t have to remember them. The main difference is that a phone book has lots and lots of people so you can look up numbers for people you have never met. We used to get updated versions as printed books every year or so. These days, they still exist as apps or websites.

Yes. That’s why DNS has a TTL (time to live) in seconds in every response which specifies how long you should remember it before you ask again. The 256 seconds in my example are the real TTL that I got when asking for lemmy.world.

I’m with you on the increasing complexity of code. That goes along with what I said about enterprise and global scale.

But loss of knowledge? Really? DNS is not some arcane knowledge limited to an inner circle who was there when it was invented. You can literally read RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 and know everything you need to build a basic working DNS server or client. The concepts are literally taught in every university course about networking because they are that important.

And your point is? Yes, everything on a PC is a list of numbers. That alone doesn’t make an IP address (four 8-bit numbers / one 32-bit number) inherently more meaningful than the ASCII representation of a domain name (eleven 8-bit numbers in the case of “lemmy.world”). The mapping between a letter and its ASCII code is literally one of the most basic things a computer does.

The advantage comes from IP addresses having a fixed length, from IPv4 addresses being relatively short overall (IPv6 is 16 bytes which is about the same as many domains) and from prefixes being used for routing so you don’t need a directory of every single IP address at every router (roughly analogous to country and area codes in phone numbers). None of that is relevant for understanding DNS and none of it means that computers don’t “understand” text.

Edit to fully illustrate my point: IP addresses could just as well be strings like “de/hetzner/falkenstein12/rack42/server23”. That would work. It would take up a lot of memory and be much slower than what we have but it would absolutely be possible to build a version of the internet that uses that instead of opaque numbers. And it would still need DNS on top because nobody wants to remember (or even know) where a website’s server is physically located.

That’s why I didn’t end it with the first sentence and instead dedicated a whole paragraph to what you do with it: you know a name and want to know the corresponding phone number / IP address.

DNS itself isn’t that complex. We can ask for multiple things (A, AAAA, MX, NS, TXT, …) and servers form a hierarchy so not everyone has to directly talk to the server that has authority over a domain. Maybe add DNSSEC if you feel fancy. That’s about it.

The complexity comes from actually running these things at an enterprise or even global scale. Giving out different replies depending on who asks so everyone can contact a server that’s geographically close to them. Load balancing between multiple nameservers. Aggressive caching. Failovers. Rights management. The reasons why DNS is the culprit for so many outages are a) the complexity we have layered on top of a relatively simple protocol and b) a lot of other stuff relies on DNS so problems spread super fast.

That’s not true though. Your computer understands “lemmy.world” just as much or as little as “104.26.9.209”. If it couldn’t handle a string of letters, it couldn’t ask a nameserver for the corresponding IP address either.

Explaining why we need IP addresses would include the ISO/OSI layer model, fixed size DEST fields in IP packet headers, subnets, routing techniques, BGP and a lot more.

I could explain all that but it would take hours even when talking to someone who has a rough understanding of network technology and probably days when talking to a (virtual) 5-year-old. In the end it boils down to “Using numbers is more efficient” not to “Using names is impossible” and that must suffice for an ELI5.

I don’t think pointing to a Wikipedia article without further explanation is in the spirit of ELI5.

DNS is like a phone book for the internet.

Computers on the internet have IP addresses which are numbers like 104.26.9.209. Nobody really wants to remember dozens or even hundreds of those so we also give them names like lemmy.world which are a lot easier to remember. DNS is a service that you can ask “Hey, what’s the IP address for lemmy.world?” and you get a reply like “You can reach lemmy.world under 104.26.9.209, 104.26.8.209 and 172.67.71.35. You may remember those for 256 seconds. After that, better ask me again in case they have moved.”

In reality, it’s a tiny bit more complex. For example, you can ask for different kinds of information, not just IP addresses and DNS servers talk to each other to efficiently distribute changes across the internet.

Many years ago I read the D book and really liked many aspects of the language. What kept me from using it was the ecosystem. They had three compilers and two different standard libraries, none of which were fully compatible with each other which led to a whole bunch of weird problems. These days it’s probably better. Maybe I should give it another chance.

I‘m personally not a fan of politics questions but yes, that would fit.

Next time, please try a community that fits your question like !linux4noobs@programming.dev or !linuxquestions@lemmy.zip

I can see how Explain Like I’m Five might seem right but it’s usually meant for broader questions like “ELI5: why is the sky blue?” or “ELI5: can you explain that thing that is currently going on in the world?”, not your homework.

Yeah, I know. I usually try to give new accounts the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they don’t know where and how to ask things in a way that actually helps them…

But making a second account, and posting the same question in the same incorrect community again… that’s just too much for me.