Yep, I’m certainly not claiming that Windows is better at it these days… (Possibly unpopular opinion: Windows usability peaked with WinXP.)

Thanks! I uninstalled it and things appear to work normally.

There are days where I think that desktop Linux usability has gotten so good, it has come such a long way since I started using it in the late 90s, and that now it’s really good. And then there are days like today, where I just install some system updates, reboot, and suddenly I’m greeted with:

Note: I have absolutely no idea what “Fcitx” even is. Or why and how it’s launched, or whether I’m actually using it or not. Or what this notification is trying to tell me exactly, and whether it is desirable for me to “improve the experience” with it. Or how the latest updates caused this. It appears that it has something to do with keyboard input, I guess. I assume that I could find out more by crawling the web. But honestly, I’m just too fucking exhausted to even bother figuring it out. I don’t even want to know how much lifetime I’ve already spent chasing Linux problems like that.

I like to use -- in plain text too! LaTeX user high five…?

Although I read somewhere recently that some people consider usage of em-dashes as a sign of AI-generated text. Oh well.

Don’t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.

Oh why would they. They will just rewrite it from scratch in a weekend, right? And reading the original code would only pollute the mind with historic knowledge, and that stands in the way of disruptive innovation.

(btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)

So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it’s now “not too bad for throwaway weekend projects”. Wow, great. Let’s fire all the programmers already!

Apart from whatever the fuck that process is, it is not engineering.

And to think that people hated on Visual Basic once… in comparison to this stuff, it was the most solid of solid foundations.

Not clicking those HN links, decided years ago already that site should not be part of my life anymore at all. The few times I have deviated from that rule since, I regretted it.

As for the more general topic, I feel so bad for all trans people with everything that is unfolding. It’s horrible. But be assured that there are many peope in this world who are on your side on this. Wish I could say something more useful, but I’m at a loss of words.

Okay thanks for the heads-up, I will give it a try. The “Note to the reader” it starts with is already pretty wild… (unless that’s just part of the fiction. Edit: I assume it’s part of the fiction)

Edit: okay… a few pages in, I don’t think I can do this… not my thing.

You have my sympathy! Is the worst part that you have to review the slop or its general presence at all?

Asking because at my workplace it will be allowed soon, and some coworkers are unfortunately looking forward to it, and I’m horrified, especially by the thought of having to do code review then…

That is indeed troubling, casts a shadow on Project Gutenberg’s judgement. Now I wonder how long until Wikipedia falls too :( Gosh, I miss being excited about new tech. Now new tech is just making things worse.

About that book, so it is more “good bad” instead of “bad bad”? Maybe I’ll take a look, some light/weird reading might be better than doomscrolling (and these days there’s so much doom to scroll).

I have to keep reminding myself that this is the technology that they all claim will soon do all our work, our arts, our science, everything.

Rituals can be good, but yeah, agile standup meetings are not the good kind. Luckily I don’t have them daily… several times a week is already draining enough. If they were daily, I would just burn out. And the standups are IMO not even the worst part of agile…

At the risk of coming over as an enormous weirdo, but most of my warm fuzzy childhood memories about books are with non-fiction technical books. There were some fiction books too, but nothing that stands out nearly as much back then…

I’ll never forget the Commodore 64 user manual. Don’t know if that counts as a book, but at least it was bound like one. It’s unimaginable for a computer manual today, but it contained a whole BASIC programming course, which was my first encounter with the whole topic of programming. Building on that, another book that got deeper into Basic and C64 computer internals. That latter one is the most wonderful written computer book I’ve ever had. It’s not specifically targeted at children, but written in a way that a child can understand it… not sure that genre of book exists anymore. Apart from that, hobby electronics books. Many of them, even more than computer stuff.

Oh and then there was that one book about music making on the Commodore Amiga, music was my other big fascination besides technology stuff. One unforgettable moment was when I read the part where it explained how to use copy/paste in the music software I was using. I had no clue about copy/paste in general at that point. Almost all the software was in English, and I didn’t speak English as a child, so I figured out how to use programs with a lot of trial and error and occasionally looking up individual words in a dictionary. But cut/copy/paste, I couldn’t figure out what those menu options were for. So when I read about it in the book, it was like “omg omg omg” and I tried it out, and I was so happy because now it was so much less tedious to have repeating things like drum patterns. Still remember that moment of joy, I literally thanked the book :')

As for fiction books, the most memorable is LotR, but that was much later, as a young adult. A pretty standard pick, I know…

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The best solution right now may be “buy a Macbook and learn MacOS”, which is so depressing.

Depends on whether you include “my personal data is sent to the manufacturer of the computer against my wishes” in your threat model… Apple does many good things for security, and I wish PC hardware makers would take security-related things even just nearly as seriously as them. But I can’t trust Apple anymore either.

(Explanation: the whole iCloud syncing stuff is such a buggy mess. I don’t want it, I don’t need it, so I want it off. But I guess Apple just doesn’t test enough how well it works when you turn it off, maybe they can’t imagine someone not wanting it. The problem is, iCloud sync settings don’t stay off. Settings randomly turn themselves back on, e.g. during OS updates, and upload data before you even notice it. I’m not claiming that’s intentional, I assume it’s just bugs. But I’ve observed such bugs again and again in the past 9 years, and I’ve had enough. Still have a Macbook around, but I use it very rarely these days, only when I need some piece of software on MacOS that has no suitable Linux equivalent.)

While a PC+Linux setup can avoid the specific issue of “don’t randomly upload my data somewhere”, the setup of it all can be a mess, as you say. And then security is still limited by buggy hardware and BIOS/firmware that is frequently full of security holes. The state of computers is depressing indeed (in so many ways, security just being one of them)…

Is it too early to hope that this is the beginning of the end of the bubble?

Also, does someone know why broadcom was also hit so hard? Is it because they make various networking-related chips used in datacenter infrastructure?

And people believe this … why?

Maybe people believe that all the AI stuff is just magic [insert sparkle emoji], and that can terminate further thought…

Edit: heh, turns out there’s science about that notion

screaming about “theft!” and “hacking!!”

Sounds plausible. Or maybe they will go with a don’t use it, because privacy! take. Funny thing is, I actually agree people shouldn’t give them their data. But they shouldn’t give it to OpenAI either…

Wow, that’s awesome!

I often think about the many devices I own with closed firmware in them, and the many amazing things these devices could be used for if they were more open and documented. Consider the amazing things people accomplish on old 80s/90s home computers and games consoles, often going way beyond what was thought possible with it at the time… the same could be done with so many other devices. Of course, people already do such hacking - like this example in the blog post. But the barrier for that would be so much lower if it didn’t require elaborate reverse engineering (how do people find the time and energy for that…). I have a little collection of 90s synth modules, I would love to modify their firmware, if it was available.

Sometimes I wish there was a law that forced companies to open up datasheets/internal documentation/etc. for a product when they stop making it… But yeah, can’t have that, of course.

I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.

Wow, what a fractal of cursed meaning. I don’t even understand what it really means, but it feels like understanding it any further would cause considerable psychic damage.