ryandrake

Same here. We have had outdoor hanging string lights for ~10 years with nice incandescent bulbs that occasionally burn out. I thought I would join the 21st century and started replacing the burned out ones with LED versions. Big mistake. In about 3 years, half of the new LED ones have already failed. Managed to find a new pack of the incandescent ones and so far so good.

As a user of native apps, I can always tell when the developer (or, often, the UI designer) chooses to "fight the platform" and reinvent things themselves, instead of embrace the platform and use what it provides for free. Developers who insist controls should look like their own vision, instead of what the platform provides (and users of that platform expect). Apps built this way always look/feel a bit weird and off. Keyboard shortcuts don't work like you'd expect. Accessibility functions that you normally get for free are missing. Controls behave just so slightly differently for them to be odd to work with. The app "sticks out" among the rest of your native apps, and usually not in a good way.

So you end up with situations like: My time picker looks exactly like I want it to look, but it doesn't handle leap seconds. And: My login form behaves exactly like the vision our PM dreamed up, but autofill doesn't work anymore.

Reminds me of all the de-crufting you've always needed to do when you install Windows. Looks like we've gotten to the point on macOS too, where you need to run third party scripts on a new OS installation to gain back control of your system resources and remove unwanted crapware.

For those of you who don't read NTSB reports as a hobby, know that Preliminary reports generally do not assign probable cause or list contributory findings. They're usually just full of basic, factual information like the date, time, location, weather, info about the aircraft and pilot, and so on. So don't go into the PDF thinking you're going to learn the cause of the crash.

Yea, the planets are gigantic, and in distant orbits from their star. I don't think we even have the ability yet to directly image exoplanets much smaller than, say, Saturn, or closer to their stars than Saturn.

Being able to tie an IP to a rough physical location was, in retrospect, a huge Internet design mistake. IPs should be like random UUIDs. They should have been designed to get assigned randomly when you obtain one, rotated / thrown away periodically, with no hierarchical numeric relationship with the ISP that is assigning them.

> But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk".

Line Must Go Up.

If treating employees with dignity and giving them intellectually challenging and satisfying tasks make Line Go Up, then that's what employers will do. If making us push "Allow Claude To Do This" hundreds of times over and over makes Line Go Up more, then that's what they'll make us do. If sitting us in a factory and giving only our finger freedom of movement makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If strapping us into pods like in The Matrix makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If feeding us into wood chippers makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do.

Yea, I got into programming because... I like programming. Not whatever the fuck this is. We've been reduced to hamsters pushing a button and getting a little pellet back, over and over.

I must be lucky or work in a great company, because I've never seen this, and I think it would be totally unacceptable for a coworker to even think about doing this. What kind of horrible company culture normalizes this kind of behavior?

I wonder if this toxic "Why are you talking to me? Just RTFM or ATFLLM (ask the fucking llm)" attitude can be filtered out during interviewing.

There's still value in sharing and building off of other projects. You can't just one-shot a Quicken or Photoshop replacement.

This may be a silly question, but why does an open source project need revenue? Or employees? Couldn't Mozilla's few core projects run on volunteers?

> But he laid out a blueprint for ruling by executive decree.

Other presidents also extended the power of the executive branch and over-used executive orders. Of course, not to the extreme degree Trump did.

Trump's legacy will be his effective use of social media saturation and his "mask off" approach to rallying his base. Previous (R) administrations felt they had to maintain at least a little civility and be coy about the kind of people they were rallying, and cryptic about the kind of emotions that activated these people. You had to use innuendo and dogwhistles. Trump proved that you can directly preach to people's anger, belligerence, and cruelty, win elections based on those messages, and even maintain your popularity by delivering on your promises with oppressive, cruel policies. This lesson is going to be burned into politics long after he's gone: You don't have to even try to be a statesman to lead government.

A thing can have limited agency and the ability to act, but still not consider morality as an input guiding those actions. An autonomous robot, or a wind-up toy, for examples.

Exactly. Don't keep your life on your phone. We shouldn't have to take these precautions but unfortunately we do.

Or, just don't bring a phone if you're particularly vulnerable. What are they going to do? Deny you entry because you don't carry a phone? If we're really at that point, where merely not having some item is suspicious, we're in deep shit.

I don't think it's reasonable to change an OS in such a way that apps which did not previously crash on startup now crash on startup. Unless there is some huge change, like moving from one CPU architecture to another, apps should not even have to be rebuilt, let alone modified, just to keep working year after year.

But companies are not part of "everyone". Companies are amoral. They have no concept of morality, only legality. If doing X produces Y profit and is legal, they will do X. If doing X produces Y profit, but is illegal and the fine times the probability of getting caught is Z, then they will do X if Y > Z. Shame and morals have nothing to do with the equation.

I agree with both of those things! I'm just suggesting a precaution. People SHOULD be able to cross the road without getting run over, but we look both ways as a precaution. We shouldn't have to, but we do.

Not to blame the victim, but maybe we should not be keeping so much personal information about our lives on a device that is at risk like this. A border patrol agent who gains access to my phone is going to be pretty disappointed to find basically nothing about me on it.

> It has always been this way; but for the hundreds of years before computers that fit in the palm of your hand that have your entire life on them

Or, maybe it might help to stop putting our entire lives on our phones.

If a border patrol agent coerces access to my phone, they're not going to find much. A few default apps, Lyft, an a music player. They're not going to find any social media, any photo album full of personal pictures, any banking apps or really anything that helps them understand what kind of person I am. I'm not going to like them going through it, but the blast radius is limited.

And that's me, a regular Joe, not wanted by Interpol. If you're at high risk, you should already have normalized this "app minimalism" mentality.

> As for what happens when you can genuinely not remember your passwords, I honestly don't know.

This is pretty scary. I don't know any of my passwords because they are random strings of letters, numbers and symbols, and they're only kept in a password manager that sits on my powered-off PC at home. How do these border agents expect me to recite my passwords from memory?

> They mistake "is this true?" for "this should be true".

For some reason, HN commenters constantly struggle with this (simple) concept.

And, "Both sides are bad" only provides cover to the side that is worse.

What a ridiculous policy. I dabbled in iOS development for a while, over 10 years ago, and published an app that probably got 10 users total, when it was available to everyone. I don't think I even know 12 people who would test an app for me.

You're right that a policy like this favors newcomers. Buy why is being "old" and/or "done" seen as bad in software? We need more developers to embrace "done" and stop changing software for the sake of changing it. Most of the software I use, I like just the way it is. I don't want more features. I don't want the UI to change (again). I don't want AI and chat in them. I don't want to have to upgrade my operating system just to keep using them.

They can’t even figure out if they want the inmate to be dead or alive. Incompetence has no limit.

> Saying that what happens on the internet doesn't actually matter nowadays is clearly untrue given even just the most cursory look at the state of the world today.

I mean, you can still have this: by 1. Not being Chronically Online and 2. Not worrying so much or watching what is going on online.

I’ve managed to keep the separation between “online” and “the real world.” Mostly by just not participating or caring about social media. Online only invades Real Life to the extent that you allow it to.

There might be someone over on Instagram “canceling” me right now! I have no idea because I don’t even have an account there.

Yea, this letter could have been written about garden variety "suspected cheating" 20 years ago. And the professor's attitude is the same as a couple of professors I remember back then:

Prof: "I know you cheated."

Student: "How do you know it, can you prove it?"

Prof: "I have ways, trust me I know."

Student: "I know the material, I'll re-take the test right in front of you if you want."

Prof: "Either admit that you cheated and get a F, or don't admit and I'll send you to the school's academic integrity department."

When I took my Freshman year undergrad programming course decades ago, I had already been programming in that language for at least three years. It would have been quite painful to have to deliberately not do things I already know how to do because "I didn't learn it yet."

This was definitely a problem in classes before AI. I had a number of infuriating teachers who insisted on failing me for doing X, because "you're going too fast and we haven't gotten to X technique yet."

All-my-tokens-ar-gon