are tucked away behind unintuitive context menus

That are well documented and don’t change once you figure out where they are. “UX” is code for “we’ll rearrange everything you need twice a year and force you to constantly re-learn our app because fuck you.”

if you open the app for the first time and immediately think “this looks like it was last updated in 2003”, it’s not a good thing

Why not? To me it’s reassuring because it means the procedures I memorized years ago probably haven’t changed. It’s the same reason people like the command line so much. Office software UI is a solved problem and arguably peaked in 2003 before MS Office started adding all the bullshit, it doesn’t need to be updated every single year.

Boo. It’s one of the last GUI software without user infantilization syndrome. Go use Google Docs if you want your software to coddle you.

I swear if LibreOffice starts talking to me like I’m a child like MS Office does or starts having animations that actively slow me down and spike my CPU usage just to open a menu or something.

Also, I’ve noticed a pretty strong correlation between “modern UX” and instability in office software. I don’t think I’ve ever had LibreOffice crash on me, the last major UX revision of MS Office definitely crashed more often than LibreOffice, and the latest version of MS Office crashes at least once every time I have to use it taking my unsaved work with it even with autosave on. I don’t know what “experience” they’re aiming for but not crashing and causing data loss should probably be prioritized over making it look pretty.

Mostly paraphrased, I don’t remember exactly how it was worded. Also the non-quote responses were made up after the fact for this post, this wasn’t a single conversation in this order:

“You’ll miss out on so many events and social opportunities because you don’t have any ‘real’ social media.”

As an introvert, I don’t care.

“You’re selfish for putting your silly notions of ‘privacy’ over being in the loop with what your friends are doing. One day you’ll realize that being there when your friends post about their life events is more important.”

Said by someone who I never considered my friend in the first place. My actual friends have ways of reaching me other than Facebook or WhatsApp.

“Most people aren’t going to bother figuring out which obsecure ‘privacy oriented’ service you decide to use, they’re just not going to talk to you if you’re not on mainstream apps. Normal people value their time more than they value privacy.”

Please stop talking to me then, so I stop wasting your time.

“This isn’t the 1950s anymore. You need to get with the times and embrace the information age.”

I know how to program, you don’t. I know how the protocols that power the internet work, you think it’s a literal magic cloud. I run my own server at home with hardware I bought, you have to pay for Google Drive every month. I’m the one embracing the information age, you’re just blindly using it.

“Geez, you’re like an Amish person! Don’t you see you’ve fallen into a cult? Just instead of not using electricity you don’t use social media.”

No I’m not. See above, I fully embrace technology. In fact, I embrace it so much I’ve spent most of my life figuring out how it works and only use things I understand and control, and I choose not to use certain conveniences because I know how they work. Also, I’m not an antivaxxer or against modern medicine. I also think raising horses in captivity to be your slave is cruel and barbaric. Finally, I don’t believe in God and don’t try to live my life according to a 2000+ year old book. Privacy isn’t a cult, if anything, your blind faith in trillion dollar tech companies is more like the Amish’s blind faith to their God.

Is opnsense more secure?

Interesting. Thank you for elaborating.

“No longer needed” is probably never going to happen, but IMO needed by fewer companies is inevitable. I see “vibe coding” as an extension to those website builders like Squarespace, definitely not suitable for a large website or a company whose entire business model is software and/or web based services, but good enough that the owner of a small, non-tech company who just happens to need a website or simple app can do it themselves instead of paying someone on Fiverr or something to do it. Unfortunately that means the options for new developers looking for easy experience building jobs that could eventually help them land a better paying position will be even more limited than it is now.

The goal is to debunk verifiable lies fed to you by the West. The post makes no mention of how good or evil they were, only that they definitely did not say these very specific evil things. If it happens to cause you to reconsider your conclusion that these people are evil, a conclusion also fed to you by the same Western propaganda, that’s your business.

Can you elaborate? I’d like to learn what I’m thinking or doing wrong.

Thank you!

Wouldn’t the old firmware still have to respond to and perform the flashing request? For example reading from a USB drive? Is it more likely to overwrite potentially malicious code compared to the reset button or automatic updates from the web admin panel?

This raises an interesting issue: Should house guests expect to be given Wi-Fi access? I’ve personally never even asked for Wi-Fi when I go over to someone else’s house because frankly I don’t trust their network. I don’t know what “smart devices” are port scanning every other device or collecting MAC addresses, I don’t know if they’ve ever updated their router firmware and if it’s been infected by the numerous malware automatically scanning the internet for unpatched routers. Not worth it, I’d rather use mobile data or not access the internet until I go home. Also I don’t want Google or Cloudflare to know who my friends are and where they live by having my browser fingerprint show up on their IP.

LAMBO /s

Since all connections go through the ISP router anyway you won’t really gain that much privacy unless you directly put a VPN on your router.

I’m more concerned about local network traffic to and from my home server, especially over Wi-Fi. Most of it is SSH but there are still some unencrypted HTTP (and proxy) traffic.

was not a medical condition and just a word

It is just a word. It means to delay or the opposite of “advance” and is still used like that in industries like aviation and terms like fire removedant.

But when you use it to call someone stupid, that’s when you’re using it in the context of ablism and as a slur.

Similar to the term for a female dog, which is still used in veterinary medicine and research to mean an actual dog that is female. Though like the R word, the context as a slur is gradually discouraging its use even as its original meaning because people don’t want to risk having it misunderstood.

Piece of shit. Simple and to the point. Shit’s pretty gross and it’s universal human instinct to avoid it. Maybe even shithead if you want a single word.

Asshole. Gender neutral and not tied to ethnicity since we all have one. Maybe even going further and calling someone an asshole related condition like prolapsed rectum or hemorrhoid, things that can happen to anyone, are pretty painful and definitely to be avoided, but AFAIK were never conditions that were heavily marginalized or shamed.

Clown or fool. Clowns/fools are types of characters people played historically (and still do?), IMO it doesn’t imply anything about a person’s actual intelligence or mental state, only their actions. You’re not born a clown or fool, but you can definitely act like one. Also lends itself to a snarky 🤡 emoji I’ve seen some people here use instead of typing out an insult.

Though there could be additional context or history to any of these terms I’m not aware of that push them into one of the -ist categories, IDK I’m not a linguist.

Super interesting. Thanks as always!

Is Erlang special in its architecture or is it more that it’s functional?

One day I’ll learn how to do purely functional, maybe even purely declarative. But I have to train my brain to think of computer programs like that.

Is there a functional and/or declarative language that has memory management features similar to Rust as opposed to a garbage collector?

but literally beating the flagship desktop chips in single-core performance

See, this is what I despise about x86. AFAIK it’s literally RISC on the bare metal but there are hundreds of “instructions” running microcode which is basically just a translation layer. You’re not allowed to write code for the actual RISC implementation because that’s a trade secret or something. So obviously single core performance would be shit because you’re basically running an emulator all the time.

RISC-V can’t come fast enough. Maybe someone will even make a chip that’s RISC-V but with the same instruction/microcode support as x86. So you can run RISC-V code directly or do the microcode thing and pretend you’re on x86. Though that would probably get the shit sued out of them by Intel because god forbid there’s actual innovation that the original creator can’t cash in on.

Doesn’t the Mac have hardware x86 emulation? Or did they remove that because they want everyone to move to ARM?

IIRC it refers to how rural farmers’ necks are often sunburned and red.