fuzzy2

Volvos are premium cars at a premium price point. Though the brand is now Chinese-owned, I would not group them together with the likes of BYD, MG, Leapmotor etc. They have no disruptive potential whatsoever from my perspective.

What I've seen so far from Chinese car makers (BYD and MG, to be precise) is, to put it bluntly, the bare minimum. Build quality so-so, design is… unconventional and software is just bad. It drives, but only just.

Maybe the more recent models, like the Xiaomi thing, are better. But at the moment, Tesla is at least on par, if not better. The brand being tainted is very relevant though.

Microsoft probably has a problem with tech debt, yes. That is however not the problem. Instead, the product strategy is. And it was bad even before LLMs.

Sure. Highly successful even, I would say. I can deliver to Microsoft and Google.

Not sure though what the magic ingredient is. I've had the IP address for 7 years before I decided to use it for mail, after one quick mail to Cisco's Talos stuff everything was fine. Software is Mailcow. Hosted at Hetzner in Germany.

And still, I cannot deliver to T-Online, so there's that.

At least they respond quickly to such inquiries. I have given up on T-Online Mail. I refuse to follow ridiculous rules like these.

fyi: DuckDuckGo has blocking now, too. I use it extensively to do away with all the clone sites of Stack Exchange, GitHub etc

All without using an account, saved locally in the browser.

Thank you for this article! It was way richer than others, with some actionable advice.

I guess I'll finally try Claude Code, need to get a burner SIM first though… I cannot for the life of me understand why I can just sign up for the API yet must give a mobile phone number for the product.

People must find it click-worthy, otherwise why would we get the amount of "we got him"-type of content we do?

Yes, it is (relatively, [1]) trivial. However, even though it is the shell default (Finder, Windows Explorer, whatever Linux file manager), it is not the operating system default. If you call unlink or DeleteFile or use a utility that does (like rm), the file isn’t going to trash.

[1]: https://github.com/arsenetar/send2trash (random find, not mine)

Trash is a shell feature. Unless a program explicitly "moves to trash", deleting is final. Same for Word documents.

So, no, there is no undo in general. There could be under certain circumstances for certain things.

Doesn't matter though. Every single one of these "casual" users I know has a terribly outdated device with a broken battery that doesn't even charge anymore.

And I agree: if it works, why replace it?

I mean, at least on modern C#, it could be as simple as

    public class UserIdInvalidException(Exception innerException) : Exception("Invalid User ID", innerException);

Even easier than most data objects you’d have to define anyway. And then, Exceptions are part of the contract. I’d rather not have an LLM write that up, but that’s just personal preference.

Doing it like this (or preferably with a custom exception) translates the technical problem into a domain problem. Without doing this, callers can't properly handle it. FormatException or OverflowException could be thrown at multiple locations, not just in parsing the user ID. This here is an InvalidUserIdException. It could be derived from ArgumentException, but IMHO InvalidOperationException is not appropriate.

The government or even courts are not involved with these blocks.

At the station itself, on the other hand, you might as well play "delay bingo". Is it an earlier training running late that is now slowing down other trains? Is it yet another Stellwerksstörung? Or maybe it's urgent track repairs? It might also be an Oberleitungsschaden!

To be honest, I don't care about excuses. Yes, problems happen, but this is systemic. Does it help me if I know the train tracks are broken yet again? It does not. The reasons (excuses) they bring up ring hollow. I don't feel that drivers or station staff would appear stupid if they don't tell. They are victims, too.

Actually Chrome does everything. Not via command-line switches however, you need to use the DevTools protocol. For example using Playwright. You get PDFs and PNGs of any size and resolution (PPI).

And I guess this is exactly what this service does under the hood.

No, I would certainly say it is. Checking the blog post linked in this thread, I find selecting a different version to be both hidden and also have (intentionally?) bad UX. That is exactly what a dark pattern is: making a surprising choice (major upgrade) the default while hiding away the less disruptive or even non-disruptive choice (minor upgrade).

Nothing stops Apple from advertising both at the same level.

Yesyesyes this here. Icons need colors, the smaller the more. Otherwise, they might as well be gray blobs. Peripheral vision works with colors, but it doesn’t do finer details.

rant:

But in the end, user interfaces are mostly “dead” anyway. No more structure, no more colors, no more icons. Everything is a flat sea of labels and boxes (or sometimes even just lines) floating(!) around. And no two user interfaces use the same style, even from the same vendor.

/rant

IIRC Azure DevOps was the “dead one”, all new development only takes place on GitHub.

From my perspective, Azure Pipelines is largely the same as GitHub Actions. I abhor this concept of having abstract and opaque “tasks”.

To all of these I can only say: in the hands of a domain-expert user, AI tools really shine.

For example, artists can create incredible art, and so can AI artists. But me, I just can't do it. Whatever art I have generated will never have the creative spark. It will always be slop.

The goalposts haven't moved at all. However, the narrative would rather not deal with that.

Well "use it" is a bit of a stretch. I’m a bit of a device hoarder. It's one of my experimentation platforms for Linux stuff, currently running Fedora Kinoite (with Universal Blue).

My daily driver (of sorts, don’t really need a laptop anymore) is a MacBook Pro Late 2013, with NixOS. It’s so much better in every regard, it’s not even funny. It also still has its original battery.

And that’s about it, I’d say! I find that everything else is really, really bad. It creaks, it wobbles, it warps, and it did so from day 1. The fan is loud and kicks in quite early. Well maybe the X200 isn’t as bad, but the X220 certainly is. And even after 14 years, it still smells when it gets hot.

Sorry for the rant. I really want to love it, but I just can’t.

Not a problem with data: URIs. But then, a report may not need fancy fonts if HTML is acceptable.

Oh yeah, PDF. In a past project I created a monster solution:

  * Scriban to fill in templates (LaTeX)
  * Custom Angular SSR to reuse frontend components (charts etc)
  * Playwright to convert SSR output to PDF
  * LuaLaTeX to convert LaTeX document + stuff to PDF

Super slow, but very high quality results. Do not try this at home!

Scriban is totally awesome though.

We already did the slipping. Sony sued Quad9 to have them block The Pirate Bay. They only lost after a lengthy legal exchange.

There's also voluntary censorship, so without any real due process, in some countries. Mostly at ISP level, but all the other entities you mentioned could also implement it. They may be forced to, as a means of dodging liability. There's all kinds of nefarious schemes.

What you describe is, at least from my perspective, entirely different from "full integration" (of AI in browsers). Instead, you want to replace computers entirely, with a voice assistant somewhat like Alexa, backed by SOTA STT, TTS and AI (possibly LLM agents).

I’m confused. I thought Expand and Contract was about mutating an existing schema, adding columns and tables, not creating a full replacement schema. But maybe I misunderstood?

What’s in the article, I know as the Strangler Fig Pattern.

They certainly do; however, we all know the game: Headlines only. Reading TFA? Meh

No monopoly. Only for cable internet, which may be a possible argument. For landline internet (DSL), there's plenty of alternatives.

It's important to keep in mind that Deutsche Telekom is basically doing the same, and has been… forever?

I disagree with this move, but it is not without precedent.