Learn more about Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

How to prevent autoplay on mobile

Look at framer.com on desktop: the promo video autoplays. Look at it on mobile: it embeds as an ordinary YouTube video, with a manual play button. The behavior is different because video autoplay on mobile is much more annoying: video takes a big bite into your mobile data usage.

How does framer.com achieve this? By switching on whether the user-agent suggests that the device is a mobile. Here’s some equivalent code:

function isMobile() {
    return /Android|webOS|iPhone|iPad|iPod|BlackBerry|IEMobile|Opera Mini/i.test(navigator.userAgent);
}

What can computers do? What are the limits of mathematics? And just how busy can a busy beaver be? This year, I’m writing Busy Beavers, a unique interactive book on computability theory. You and I will take a practical and modern approach to answering these questions — or at least learning why some questions are unanswerable!

It’s only $19, and you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

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