fifticon

I think he is dead, there is little he can do now?

also, if you read them daily, once you have read the day's section: If you are not in it, you have the rest of that day to do what you want!

he will probably have to buy trump a yacht to get out of this one.

I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason. In a competition to be 'ever above everything else', tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern, be it Musk or Putin. If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you, he'd take your place. So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this. And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.

To elaborate on that: They were the handle on the code lines, for anything. You would often use the line number to either edit a given line number, or to remove it. 'Clever' people would even do mis-guided arithmetic on them, e.g.

  GOTO  MenuChoiceNum\*100 + 1000
  GOSUB MenuChoiceNum\*100 + 1000

I can answer part of that. Very few areas are even opened up to allow building private housing, all kinds of "neighbours" can veto anything, just to name two problems

peoples' outrage at this book appears to be inversely proportional to how much they have read or understood it.

I have become disillusioned with consumer laptops in this price range. In the past 1-2 years, I have had two different Asus Vivobooks die on me just outside the 24month warranty window. In both cases, I had to pay addiotional money to then have their repair department quote me price 110% of a new specimen, for 'repair'. That such pricy devices can blow up irrepairably in a window of 25 months, is not acceptable.

I hate the modern dark-pattern shop UIs, which tries to make it as difficult as possible to enumerate what is actually available. One example is when queries reply with 'what is most like' what you asked for, instead of honestly answering "no, even though movie X exists, we dont currently have it in our offering". Even though amazon prime is the poorest streaming option, I appreciate that they make it possible to exhaustively page through their entire offering, which I have done on a few occasions ("possible", because it is the usual user-intelligence-hostile ajax-javascript cursorless experience, where your browser is staggering in gigabytes as you approach the 3000-movie mark)

artificial indians?

Part of the appeal of refurbished computers is that currently, fresh new laptops and tablets have reached a horrible minimum-quality. I have chewed myself and our household through a possibly obscene number of laptops, tablets and smartphones over the last 15 years or so. One of the villains in this story is Asus.

An ugly pattern emerges. In my country, there is mandatory 2year warranty on bought electronics - if it breaks before 24 months, the retailer owes you a working specimen. Well, what do you know.. I see a pattern of a lot of these items breaking before 3 years have passed. It is almost as if some hierarchy of managers have dictated "can you make this thing last for 25 months, but no further than that?"

- 1 the non-replacable battery will die, leaving the device a brick.

- 2 the power management IC will die, so the system refuses to light up or receive electrical current.

- 3 often, when (2) happens, the motherboard will be toasted as a by-product, leaving you to pay 600 DKK to have the retailer inform you "we have looked at your device, unfortunately the motherboard died, so repairing it will cost you same price as brand new. Thank you for the 600 you paid to have us tell you that".

Within the last year, I have had two separate Asus VivoBooks die on me, both after about 24 months of use - but critically, ">24", so no repair/warranty. One of them a DKK-10.000 purchase, the other a DKK-6.500 purchase. Neither of them have seen particular abuse, they were used by me, as "household pets" - so laptops that never left the couch.

I have taken a long time to learn this, but my learned lesson is that I have stopped buying these "10k DKK for 24 months of laptop" devices.

I am a pathological computer hoarder, and I have plenty of desktop PCs that are still alive and kicking after 10+ years (in which I may understandably have to replace PSUs).

The scam/grift that suppliers like Asus are operating on comsumer devices, is that the PMIC is designed to fail, is soldered into the motherboard, and that they love whenever the failing PMIC kills the motherboard during its death throes.

shouldn't be too long at the rate we are going.

but the process to serve 5 terabytes hasn't.

as a 30+y employed systems programmer, when I read a story like this, I get angry at the highly piled brittle system,not at the guy having sl installed. I am aware there exists a third option of not getting angry in the first place, but I hate opaque nonrobust crap. This smells like everything I hate about front-end tooling. ignorance and arrogance in perfect balance.

OSB wood?

Driving the rest of the non-schoolchildren population around?

The driver, which instead gets an - at least in europe - somewhat awkward job, having to work two tiny shifts with a useless break in the middle. Source: Worked twenty years in public transport resource planning uptimization algorithms, and came to know how dearly the actual bus drivers hated those "work two times a day with a useless unpaid break in the middle". (Our algorithms would often generate them to e.g. arrive at fewer <something to optimise for>, but our clients would tell us "you can't make that many 2-part shifts, our bus drivers would kill us".

I am worried about them as a substitute for search engines. My reasoning is that classic google web-scraping and SEO, as shitty as it may be, is 'open-source' (or at least, 'open-citation') in nature - you can 'inspect the sh*t it's built from'. Whereas LLMs, to me seem like a chinese - or western - totalitarian political system wet dream - 'we can set up an inscrutable source of "truth" for the people to use, with the _truths_ we intend them to receive'. We already saw how weird and unsane this was, when they were configured to be woke under the previous regime. Imagine it being configured for 'the other post-truth' is a nightmare.

Something I have noticed over the last 20 years: Male underwear. The stuff I used to buy in the 1990's would function until it fell apart because of holes worn in the actual cloth. The stuff I buy now (boxer shorts) appears designed to fall apart. Mainly, the rubber stuff making them elastic breaks down faster than anything else, so in about 12 months, they are horrible to use, because the broken rubber makes them slide off me, in a way that is more impractical than sexy. Given that this was not a problem in the early 2000s, I conclude that some MBA must have optimized them in the meantime. There is probably some brand that costs 4x as much where this isn't a problem - but those I used to buy in the nineties, didn't cost 4 times as much.

I wish the 'find anywhere' instead expanded and highlighted the correct place of that command in the menu. In that way, it would teach me gradually a mental map of the shape and set of commands I have available, ie I imagine it would let me notice 'neighbour commands'. I realise this is not the most efficient way to do this, but it would be 'incremental on the job learning'.

nice to see all the fern tramplers signing in, sigh :-/

I've had colleagues like that since the 1990's :-) :-( But yes, we would like AIs to be better than Kevin..

it is a mega-OS, an application forming an OS on top of the actual OS, and dwarfing said OS. It's like our original OS'ses now form a sort of BIOS :-/, necessary evils to host the 'browser OS'. It is what MS feared in the 1990s.

your argument sounds like "some people choose to do the dishes, some of us choose to let other people do the dishes".

Some of the "free choices" you claim people can make, will only be possible if some other people don't make those same choices.

well, they've got an orange unprincipled opportunist and his 'friends' on their team now, so it appears they will be able to pull through

I wholeheartedly agree. For decades, MS management have treated UI dev strategy as an 'almost forgot' afterthought, and the result means halfassed and soon-orphaned attempts at quickly 'reinventing everythimg' every few years, with too little care and effort. Devs then skip these, having been burned. I still recall the mess of silverlight - ui framework designed and guided by clueless managers.

basically MS has dropped the ball on UI since the time of WPF (I maintain apps stuck in WPF at work). It looks like the crayon electron browser kids are running the ship now adays :-/

I find WPF incredibly unsexy; unfortunately everything they have tried afterwards is even more amateurish. As others have mentioned, they have probably doomed themselves to eternal KPI hell, so with zero management vision, zero management talent, zero management strategy and zero management commitment, they are incapable of delivering anything to rise above Q3 mediocrity (Ie, they cannot deliver on any meaningful multiyear strategy, because they all have their heads up Q4 asses). They are the Intel of UI, at this point.

erh you can do this somehow,I did it to mine?

now what _I_ want, is to be able to resize the taskbar again.

also, I would prefer win11 didn't disable just about everything I had configured, particularly preview for file types. and - I dont know how they did it, but basic file explorer view feels much slower than win10,on the same machine. given that file explorer is basically all windows boils down to, i am not happy that they tske efforts to make it crappier. and given that win95 was able to show a file grid in 1995, I wonder how they are able to screw that up, 30 years later?

these are not aeroplanes, but planes for making wood flat and smooth. Though I have little doubt this guy could have made aeroplanes if he had set his mind to it.

I have been peeing on corporate for years, but I am very discrete about it, lest they find out it is me.

in my country there are plenty of critical services you basically can't access without mobile apps. e.g. interacting with medical services, and official personal id app.