eitland

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My sense is this: one side is utterly unhinged, the other seems desperate to outdo them.

I’ve left out which side is which, because I think it works both ways.

I see it the exact other way around:

- everyday bugs, just put a breakpoint

- rare cases: add logging

By definition a rare case probably will rarely show up in my dev environment if it shows up at all, so the only way to find them is to add logging and look at the logs next time someone reports that same bug after the logging was added.

Something tells me your debugger is really hard to use, because otherwise why would you voluntarily choose to add and remove logging instead of just activating the debugger?

> There's not much left to "fix" on mobile phones, and no real important features to add.

I'm happy with my iPhone, but it still has a week or so shorter battery life than even a relatively cheap Nokia phone and with all that available space I know something it could be used for.

Only precedent I can remember right now (and this was before AI) was when Google launched Google Desktop Search and after the usual click through EULA there was a separate screen which started with something like "read this very carefully, this is not the normal yadda yadda" and then went on to explain about indexing our personal files.

I switched to DuckDuckGo about seven years ago, added Marginalia when it became available, and then moved over to Kagi three years back. I made the change because I was utterly fed up with Google trying to be cleverer than me.

Looking back, I’m increasingly glad I became an early adopter - Kagi has proven to be as much of an improvement over Google as Google once was over its older rivals.

> maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).

One of the few things Google+ actually got right (admittedly after a good deal of pressure from the community) was the ability to set up simple one-way pseudonyms. It meant you could talk about business or mental health without it being forever chained to your real name.

Work computer, so I might not be able to do it.

Also, why shouldn’t I be able to choose which language I use in Excel when they’re clearly all available?

Why do software companies these days insist on treating me as though I can’t look after myself?

I actively prefer Libre Office.

Yes, Excel is probably a lot better if you use English setup and advanced functions.

For me,

- not having to use Norwegian for formulas (my work machine has Norwegian setup and Excel insists on using Norwegian formulas)

and

- not having it trying to find something it can misinterpret as a date, preferably some random place in a list of thousands of items

makes it worth it.

I’ve just checked all three, and it appears to be rather more nuanced than you make it out to be.

How long before companies start closing this "loophole"?

And with the cynicism out of the way, what an insightful and refreshing article!

> You’ve read your last free article.

Haven't read a Wired article in months :-|

And thanks to poster for adding archive link.

Crying wolf implies there is no wolf.

Here the wolf is clearly visible.

Have my upvote. I have just learned that targeted ads might be considered direct marketing. I always thought it was limited to things that had my name and address (physical, email or other) on it, excluding online ads unless they were part of a "logged in experience" like upsells inside the product I am currently using.

That said, I read the rest of the recital and I think it is rather clear to the degree that such things can be clear that if you didn't expect it, it isn't legal. Here are some quotes:

- "[...]provided that the interests or the fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject are not overriding, taking into consideration the reasonable expectations of data subjects based on their relationship with the controller."

- "At any rate the existence of a legitimate interest would need careful assessment including whether a data subject can reasonably expect at the time and in the context of the collection of the personal data that processing for that purpose may take place."

I can assure you the even after reading this, if I have clicked "necessary only" (as this discussion started with) it is not my reasonable expectation that any data are stored except those that are strictly necessary for the navigation and the user visible features[1] of the site works.

I'll admit that it seems some people think there is an argument that can me made that online ads can be direct marketing, but I would not risk any of my savings to defend that claim in court and I don't think Facebook or Google want to help you either as they seem to trying their best to prevent people from targeting individuals or at least pretending they do. And if it does, it is still covered by the conditions above.

[1]: and yes, that means user features, so unless you are creating an online ad-collection of some kind, that probably does not mean ads

Please show me where GDPR says this.

I think you'll find that GDPR says the opposite and the only reason this continues to happen is because authorities don't have enough resources to go after every at the same time and also because European authorities have a hard time against US companies.

Not GP and I rarely get into the thousands anymore but I am clearly of the opinion that computers can remember much better than me.

So many of the things I start looking into starts with a search in a single tab and then every link I ctrl-click during the process ends up in a tree underneath it (yes, I use Tree Style Tabs).

This has a few benefits:

- I can easily see things in context

- when I end up on a particularly useful (or useless) page I can easily see what page linked me there

- I can read the root pages and follow links from every one of them without losing track (the root page is usually a kagi search)

- when I am finished I can either export the whole tree as a nested markdown list (yes, there is a nice TST extension that allows me that, and yes, you read that correctly, it is an extension to an extension) or just close it.

At some point Microsoft tried to sell some automatic DRM system based on SharePoint to some company that I worked for.

The sales pitch was that they could upload documents to SharePoint and when people downloaded the documents SharePoint would automatically apply DRM so the documents could only be opened by that person on authorised machines for a specified number of days.

Well, it turned out depending on how you logged in (using the same account, just different login forms) on the SharePoint server it would either give you the files with DRM applied - or the completely unrestricted files.

We got some senior Microsoft consultant working directly for Microsoft to look at it but in the end they were just as confused as us.

If it had just been the last ten passengers who were boarding, or if this was the only hiccup along the way, I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing any of this.

But as I remember it, the misery was systematic—from the moment we started booking to the moment we left the final airport. At every step, Ryanair seemed to go out of their way to make things unpleasant—unless, of course, we paid an extra £15 here, £20 there, and so on—for each passenger, and for every inconvenience it seemed they’d quite clearly engineered.

The last time I flew with Ryanair (and hopefully the last time I’ll ever have to), I made sure our hand luggage met their cabin size requirements—I didn’t fancy waiting around for it at the other end anyway.

Only for it to be collected at the gate and put in the hold anyway, meaning we had to wait for it after all. At least they forgot to charge me for the inconvenience, which given the rest of my experience could almost have been considered a mistake from their side.

Then there was the return journey: the boarding pass couldn’t be printed until just a few hours before departure, by which time getting access to a printer was tricky. But, as with all things Ryanair, there was of course an option to pay and make the problem go away. Out of sheer stubbornness, I found a workaround. If I factor in the time spent, it probably cost me more—but by that point, I was so utterly fed up with their relentless upselling that I refused to give them another penny.

And finally, during a layover before the last leg of our journey, we ended up sat in a grounded aircraft in full sun for 2–3 hours, with small children onboard and barely any information before we could leave the plane. While we waited, another passenger collapsed from what I understood to be severe hypoglycaemia, at which point people started calling out for anything sugary.

As far as I remember (this was over a decade ago and I had three young kids with me a few rows back), the person was helped thanks to another passenger who recognised what was going on and acted quickly—not because of any intervention from the crew.

If you can avoid Ryanair, do. I’ve no issue with trading comfort for a lower fare—but Ryanair doesn’t feel like a cheaper flight because they’ve cut costs. It feels like they’ve gone out of their way to invent new ways to make life miserable, just so they can charge you for relief.

From the article:

> Malcolm C. Smith, a control engineering professor at the University of Cambridge, first introduced inerters in a 2002 paper.[1] Smith extended the analogy between electrical and mechanical networks (the mobility analogy). He observed that the analogy was incomplete, since it was missing a mechanical device playing the same role as an electrical capacitor. The analogy makes mass the analog of capacitance, but the capacitor representing a mass always has one terminal connected to ground potential. In a real electrical network, capacitors can be connected between any two arbitrary potentials, they are not limited to ground. Noticing this, Smith set about finding a mechanical device that was a true analog of a capacitor. He found that he could construct such a device using gears and flywheels, one of several possible methods.

Irony over irony I think you can include Telegram here:

- yes not end-to-end encrypted by default

- but I haven't seen any complaints about their end-to-end encryption, except that it isn't enabled by default

- and unlike WhatsApp they publish reproducible builds so we can know the endpoints do what the source code says

In 2017, I met modern frontend. In a few hectic months, I had to learn AngularJS, Gulp, Grunt, and some CSS improvement system (LESS or Sass or something). Then I moved on to Angular and worked with it for a couple of years. For the first time, it actually started to feel worth it. But what a churn in the beginning. Angular 2, 4, 5, 6, and I think up to 9 all dropped while I was still working with it.

Since then, I’ve mostly worked with React, which is blissfully productive and unexciting in the best way possible as long as we prevent people from pulling in CV-padding material like Redux.

Over the past few years, I’ve been hired into places where I’m once again upgrading codebases written in AngularJS (yep, it still exists), Elm, and jQuery. Everything gets rewritten to React, and after that we can hire people right out of school to maintain it (as long as we keep the CV-padding libraries out of it).

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying: even if you’ve been lucky enough to work in a place where people made good technical decisions years ago, and work in a place that treat their devs well enough that someone who still remembers how it works cares to work there —not everyone’s that lucky.

Kagi already behave really nicely, giving a small summary with numbered footnotes that links to where Kagi got its information from.

Which IMO shows that is already possible to do this and and it has been for a while already.

It could go the Piczo route—a website builder aimed at kids and teens, not for polished blogs or ecommerce, but more for one-off, personal and playful friend-to-friend sites.

I haven’t had much chance to use NetBeans in recent years, as every role I’ve taken on has involved Kotlin to some extent. But back when I did use it, it felt like the Toyota Hilux of IDEs—sturdy, no-nonsense, and reliably got the job done. That was a big part of why I loved it.

Unfortunately, I’m a bit concerned it may have gone downhill since. It used to have dedicated full-time staff behind it, but now that it’s been handed over to the Apache Foundation, I suspect the budgets are tighter than they were under Oracle.

NetBeans was my go-to IDE until I started working with Kotlin, which more or less forced me over to IntelliJ. I’ve also tried VSCode on some pure Java/Maven projects since then, and found that it shares some of that same feel—more lightweight and direct, which I’ve always quite liked.

> Now they are stuck with Kotlin being seen as an Android language for the most part

Perhaps it’s different elsewhere, but here in Norway I’ve seen Kotlin used quite extensively in large backend codebases. It also comes up frequently in job postings—employers seem to actively ask for it when hiring.

In my case it is simple: I think IntelliJ is great but I much prefer VSCode and NetBeans.

Why? Two main reasons:

- On the projects I tend to work on, IntelliJ has a habit of breaking its internal configuration a few times a year—not just for me, but for my colleagues as well. When it does, it can take the better part of a day to sort out. Often I end up getting frustrated, deleting anything not under version control, reimporting the project, and end up having to reconfigure all the database connections and other bits manually.

- I also just prefer the more straightforward feel of NetBeans and VSCode. It’s a bit like my old car: less automation, fewer clever electronics. Sure, the new one is objectively better in many ways—but the old one was easier to get out of the snow, and it rarely surprised me.

Great!

As much as I love Kotlin and have a great deal of respect for JetBrains, I’ve always preferred the other Java IDEs over IntelliJ. The fact that choosing Kotlin—which I genuinely do prefer—effectively locks you into IntelliJ for the foreseeable future has been one of the main reasons I’ve hesitated to recommend it unreservedly for every project.

Just to be clear: I think IntelliJ and the rest of JetBrains’ tools are excellent and absolutely worth the price. I simply happen to prefer the alternatives—and they happen to be free. That said, I realise this is very much a personal preference, and one that most others don’t seem to share.

More broadly—and at least in online spaces—I often notice that many vocal proponents of atheism exhibit traits typically associated with religious behaviour:

- a tendency to proselytise

- a stubborn unwillingness to genuinely engage with opposing views

- the use of memes and in-jokes as if they were profound arguments

- an almost reverential attitude toward certain past figures

There’s more, but I really ought to get on with work.