Em Adespoton

Well, as a lot of us are on instances hosted outside the US, a very long time.

Funny; that’s where my mind went too.

TV equivalent of OpenWRT?

He’s already investigated himself and found that Xitter is a bastion of freedom. Same goes for Truth Social.

In reality, coding is something you can learn on your own… or not. Colleges are good for teaching computing science and architectural design, but the good ones will assume you already know how to code. The problem of course, is that when you graduate you are unlikely to find a job as a computer scientist or software architect, and will most likely need to spend 5+ years as a junior programmer first.

Namanyay, I’m sorry to say, sounds like a relative newbie when it comes to software development. The refrain “junior software developers can’t actually code” has been around as long as software development.

I remember when Stack Exchange first popped up, senior developers complained “junior developers don’t actually LEARN anything anymore; they just copy code off of Stack Exchange without understanding what it does!”

And before SE? We were doing the exact same thing in the comp.* newsgroups. And before that? When you started developing something, a senior dev dropped a bunch of books on your desk and said “when you’ve finished reading those, let’s talk.”

The truth is, ever since libraries have been a thing, the majority of developers have just used the libraries without really understanding what goes on inside them. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing — the entire point of abstraction is so that developers can focus on the stuff they need to get done while ignoring the already solved problems.

The issues arise when you place code monkeys in software architecture or senior development positions, and they’ve never had the curiosity to read through the header files for those libraries they use, but instead just let Claude code complete their way to functionality. Because then most style guides with teeth go out the window, as there’s no intention behind the choices made.

And this results in something that really irks (and always has) senior software developers: instead of writing really clean, performant and novel code, those senior devs have to spend all their time doing code reviews and editing and refactoring codebases that nobody else understands.

Same as it ever was.

Essentially, JS is the new Flash….

JavaScript has its place as a lightweight runtime interpreter.

Rust has its place as a secure and modern way to engineer and produce dependable software.

Expensive large screen displays are better.

Smart TVs are privacy invasive billboards that let you watch some TV on their terms.

Could be… it makes sense to reinvent the wheel if the previous inventors won’t share.

The big question though is: why?

CAPTCHA was implemented because machine learning was worse than people at solving the problems, so they could filter out the bots AND train their algorithms.

Today, the bots are often better than the humans, so both reasons for having CAPTCHAS no longer make sense. Even user verification can be easily faked by AI now.

The president isn’t a teenager, and as a sociopath wouldn’t have been representative of teenagers even when he was one.

If that AI companion isn’t on your own hardware, it will likely require a subscription eventually. And running an AI agent yourself isn’t cheap.

Is it really a surge when it goes up and stays there? It’s not like it has ebbed. There’s no reason to engage with it anymore.

Persian Gulf or Gulf of Iran?

Wordblur; I like that one.

That’s odd; my Apple Maps says “Gulf of Mexico” and searching for “Gulf of America” shows 0 results.

Unlike Google Maps/Earth….

I owned Adobe CS 4. CS 5 and 6 had nothing new I needed. When my OS no longer supported CS 4, I purchased Affinity Suite; it still works great with no subscription or cloud hosting.

Back when the iTunes Music Store still existed, I took advantage of their feature to convert my library of audio to digitally mastered DRM-free 256 bit AAC. All my recordings of tapes and LPs replaced by professionally remastered tracks. Since then, I’ve supplemented with tracks purchased directly from the bands I’m interested in, plus some lower value stuff from YouTube.

In fact, the only cloud service I depend on is NextCloud, which I host myself, and which lives behind a VPN.

I run my own JellyFin server with all my DVD rips hosted on it. That’s a large part of my streaming video that I’d want to watch more than once.

Probably not a huge number of people do what I do, but enough to keep people employed who still make products you download once and enjoy forever.

All my podcasts appear to use the AAC spoken audio profile? It’s much smaller and cleaner than MPEG layer 3 audio.

I have a stack of Verbatim blanks I bought years ago just in case they ever stopped being sold; I’ve actually used quite a few to create daisy disks and audio CDs.