octorian

I pretty much just use Audacious on Linux/UNIX these days. I think its a descendant of XMMS, and basically the same user experience as Winamp of old.

The problem I have with most "modern" players is that they seem to want to be a total music library manager, insisting on doing it all based on their interpretation of the metadata in your files. I'm never happy with this experience, so I'd rather something that lets me simply pick music from a directory structure I decided on an organization scheme for.

Yeah, this is something that so many of the comments here seem to miss. Simply having to pay for the standard is an enormous barrier to access for anyone doing anything of a non-professional nature with the information. It almost doesn't even matter what the price tag is. Just the fact that you can't say "read the spec, here's a link" to someone with casual interest in a forum post is enough.

Back in the day there were dozens of character sets that were alternatives to US-ASCII. Having once worked on an Email client, I needed to bake in a bunch of translation tables to convert stuff sent that way into UTF-8.

> The no-filesystem movement

Is that the movement to store all your data as an amorphous pile of crap, and then provide easy-to-use search tools to actually find the content you're looking for?

On one hand, I really like the search tools that come from this. But I still like to actually organize my data, so I can browse it if I want to. Also, these search tools seem to only work well enough on macOS and fall flat on their face in Windows. (and no idea where Linux falls on this)

I think this is a big part of why a lot of the US got cable a bit later than other places.

Because we dropped hourly billing for ISPs and didn't really have a tradition of time-billing for local POTS calls, dial-up Internet really wasn't very expensive at all by '97.

As a result, cable-modem services were probably quite a bit more expensive than dial-up when they were new for the majority of people.

This was the era when we were still trying to convince most adults that the Internet was actually something they needed access to, so justifying the kinds of pricing we have now would likely have been impossible for all but a handful of geeks in those days.

Yeah, I'm from SE Florida, so that timing sounds about right.

I recall when it was first being rolled out, it was some sort of weird hybrid service that did phone-up/cable-down. Not sure how long that nonsense lasted, because they weren't doing that anymore when my parents finally got it.

Dial-up still very much reigned supreme in the US in '97. However, we had finally stopped saddling it with punitive pricing models that discouraged people from actually taking full advantage of the Internet.

I don't remember cable modems becoming commonplace until maybe 4-5 years later. (though there was a fair bit of overlap, of course)

But not analytics that are too good, or certain people will write a lot of inflammatory articles about how your software is nothing but evil spyware.

Seriously, though, having a robust and automatic crash reporting system very much helps track down bugs you're never going to get a good report on or be able to directly reproduce.

Agreed, and I'm personally struggling to decided whether to get the 6 or 6 Pro an an upgrade from my "regular" Pixel 4.

The size difference between the two doesn't actually seem that substantial, but the specs difference kinda is. Meanwhile, both are bigger than the phone I currently have.

Did I miss something, or did they forget to cover "push", "pull", and "branch"? (and possibly a few other very common things)

> It's not that companies aren't hiring junior developers, it's that they _only_ hire from their college recruiting pipeline for their entry level roles.

As someone who graduated shortly after the dot-com bubble burst, I'm extremely bitter about this behavior. I basically got screwed out of that pipeline by economic circumstance, then was far enough removed to no longer qualify for it once things recovered.

(And that pipeline isn't just the hiring of new grads, but also the system of internship and co-op opportunities that lead to such hiring.)

Especially since the chips experiencing horrible shortages are the cheap simple ones used for those dumb features no one even thinks about anymore.

This. Very much this.

I've probably fallen into the "10x" camp myself at certain points in my career, and it was absolutely due to these factors. I should also add that having a general expertise of the problem domain and environment are enormous boosters as well.

Of course the moment I'm considered "fungible" and moved to a project I'm not passionate about at all, I'm pretty sure this evaporates entirely.

> I’ve found women are eager to set up a meeting within the first five or so messages, sometimes even hinting at it by the 2nd message

That's probably because they've had enough experience to become aware of "the great lie" with all of these approaches to dating, and are tired of wasting time with it. That is, the fantasy that the online conversation actually has any real meaning whatsoever.

No matter how much time you spend chatting or exchanging messages virtually, it is completely and utterly meaningless when held up against the first 5 minutes of that first in-person meet-up. So getting to that stage as quickly as possible tends to be the best for everyone.

>> Okay, which site was this? >The site it said it was?

I'm sorry, but I have absolutely no idea what sites fall under the banner of the "FooBarBaz.NET" dark web data dump.

Gtk's popularity comes from a couple of things that happened about 20 years ago...

- C++ dynamic linking used to be slower on Linux than C dynamic linking

- A lot of Linux die-hards are simply C++ haters

- Qt's licensing used to be unfavorable to purists, which lead directly to the Gnome-vs-KDE schism.

(Though I've always had the feeling that the license fight may have just been a palatable cover for a C-vs-C++ fight.)

The functional uselessness of ALL site breach notifications from EVERYONE who will send them to you is something that pisses me off to no end.

"Your Email was found in the data dump from the FooBarBaz.NET hack!"

Okay, which site was this? Is there a password I'm supposed to change? Was it actually a password I stopped using 5 years ago, but is still floating out there somewhere?

None of these questions are ever answered in a way that's actionable, so these notices get effectively ignored.

(FWIW, back when I worked at a certain big company and they provided this service to employees, the data dumps actually did contain enough useful info to answer the questions some of the time. But the services available to the general public, even if you pay for them, are damn near useless.)

> My old lenses feel like quality scientific instruments, in comparison, and have long focus throws that allow me to focus very accurately.

FWIW, I've noticed that Hasselblad lenses have the longest focus throws of any lens I've ever used.

In this day and age its easy to forget that even "dumb" appliances still use microcontrollers. Yes, even functions like monitoring temperature, turning a compressor on and off, and beeping if the door is left open for too long... are probably more easily and cheaply done with a low-end microcontroller than some sort of electromechanical contraption.

Of course people who present you with an XY problem are often the same sorts of people who begin the conversation with my most hated trope of them all...

"Asking to ask"

(Often coupled with diverting the conversation from a public forum, where it can be useful to others, into a private one-on-one conversation where you suddenly become on-the-hook for solving all of their issues.)

And why some of my past upgrades were driven by the web browser over-taxing the machine on certain sites, while nearly everything else was perfectly performant with absolutely no complaints.

> It feels like when I was a kid and went from a 386SX to a Pentium at 4X the speed

I remember the jump from the 486 chips to the Pentium being that dramatic. Heck, 486DX2-66 to P100 brought Linux kernel compile times from 45 minutes down to like 5 minutes.

Back then, I think a big part of these jumps wasn't just CPU design. I think a lot of it was that those CPU design changes were often accompanied by massive improvements to overall system architecture. So the I/O buses, memory, peripherals, all of it got a lot faster as part of the same upgrade.

My old MacBook Pro is in desperate need of an upgrade, but I'll probably wait for the next iteration on the M1 (probably due sometime this fall) before I upgrade. Far too much stuff I use comes from outside the Apple RDF, and is likely to drag its feet for as long as possible before bothering to make a native build. (Plus I still occasionally have reason to fire up VMware, but I'll soon offload that job to a separate machine.)

Thankfully I've always treated my laptop as a secondary machine, and my current one only gets painful (or really just hot and poor on battery life) when I'm trying to run modern video codec stuff on it.

> Edit: Windows can maintain backward compatibility with its ecosystem if they did it well, like Apple has done.

Backwards compatibility with the ecosystem, especially the enormous ecosystem of software that doesn't have active maintainers chomping at the bit to test/patch/update with every single OS change, is a HUGE part of why people use Windows.

Apple really doesn't have this. Instead, they have a critical mass of software that is inside their RDF and actively updates to every breaking change they roll out. They have the "luxury" of not having to care if they break random bits of old software* in the process.

(* software that may be niche, may not have large individual user bases, but which might actually not have modern up-to-date drop-in replacements)

> The Linux developers don't want Linux's internal APIs to be stable documented interfaces

It also has the "benefit" of making it extremely difficult to actually distribute stable device drivers that are closed source, or are simply not part of the actively-maintained kernel source tree.

> Let's leave the general computing devices for people who actually need that power, just like the early days.

With that attitude, eventually the impact of economies of scale will end up denying us the ability to afford those devices or to use them how we see fit.

Chances are that newer models (S/X with MCU2, the Model 3, etc) don't have such bad issues. Beyond that, I can easily think of a few reasons...

First, this doesn't affect the parts of the car necessary to actually drive it. (Remember, the dashboard on the Model S is a separate component.) The actual "car" part of the car still works just fine, and you can even reboot this part while driving without causing problems.

Second, most people who actually own these cars tend to be somewhat protective of the company's image. Therefore, while you'll see plenty of ranting on Tesla-specific forums, it rarely leaks out into the greater conversation.

Third, and most importantly, all of the reporters who write articles covering Tesla are doing so from the perspective of an outsider looking in. They jump all over the great features and new easter eggs, but are completely and utterly oblivious to all the "quality of life" issues you'll only ever notice if you actually own the damn car and drive it every day.

> Their software now detects the issue before it occurs and adds a notification alerting the driver.

I've never seen this notification on my 2015 Model S, whose MCU (the center console display referred to here) has become increasingly unreliable over the past year. Its gotten so bad that there's almost a 50/50 chance of needing to reboot it every time I drive. (its actually even worse than that now, as the car now gets stuck installing a firmware update every night and needs a reboot to get that bit working again)

I honestly can't tell if the issue is eMMC partial failure, corruption, or simply a lack of proper regression testing on Tesla's part. (After all, if all new cars use the new MCU2 then they probably don't care about my MCU1 car unless they have to.)

That being said, I personally care a bit more about long term reliability and responsiveness than being annoying and making them pay. So the moment I qualified for an upgrade to their newer MCU, I just went ahead and scheduled that. Sure, it actually costs me money, but in exchange I get a faster UI, better software support, and hopefully fewer issues. (I plan to keep the car for a while still, and MCU quirks are really my only complaint.)

> How about things like the speedometer?

The speedometer is on the dashboard display, which is a somewhat independent unit that will work fine even if the MCU (center console display) isn't working correctly.

Yet nearly every serial terminal from that era tends to struggle to handle text at >9600bps without some form of flow control at some point.