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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He’s a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.

    Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires – pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.


  • Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.

    Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that’s a highly competitive title.

    They also don’t offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they’re intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.

    If you’ve ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service… you’d probably be the first.







  • The entire reason notepad still exists is that it edits and saves to plain text files. I do not see how an opt-in spellcheck or autocorrect interferes with that – though honestly, I don’t see who the possible customer is for those features either. It’s a waste of time, but it doesn’t undermine the application.

    What reason, honestly, did Wordpad have to exist? Who was clamoring for an RTF editor but thought any of the free the full-featured ODF editors or online service a la Google docs were not up to the task? Seems a lot of people are salty that Wordpad was dropped, but I just don’t get who was using it. This from someone so frustrated and annoyed by pretty much all WYSIWYG doc editors that I’ve lately been doing more stuff in latex despite how irrational I know I am being.



  • I have not encountered anything broken, aside from maybe binary app docstring stuff (e.g., automated example testing).

    On the contrary, everything seems precise, reliable, and trustworthy. That’s the thing to really like about Rust – you can be pretty much fearless in it. It’s just difficult. I die a bit in time any time I have a return type that looks like Box<dyn Fn(&str) -> Result<Vec<String>, CustomError>> or some shit . Honestly, the worst thing about Rust is probably that you have to manually specify heap vs stack when the compiler could easily make those determinations itself 99% of the time based on whether something is sized.


  • I like Rust a lot, philosophically and functionally… but it is WAY harder. Undeniably very hard.

    Just try and do anything with, say, a linked list. It’s mind-boggling how hard it is to make basic things work without just cloning tons of values, using obnoxious patterns like .as_mut(), or having incredibly careful and deliberate patterns of take-ing values, Not to mention the endless use of shit like Boxes that just generates frustrating boilerplate.

    I still think it’s a good language and valuable to learn/use, and it’s incredibly easy to create performant applications in it once you mastered the basics, but christ.




  • There’s just zero merit to these “people on the internet are saying X” stories.

    Nothing of value to sourcing a few retweets, ticktock duets, instagram stories, or whatever the fuck TMTMTM version of it you get.

    Actual street interviews with random schlubs are far, far more informative than this crap. The internet is huge and you can find literally any opinions on it. Sourcing these anecdotes is absolutely the trashiest tier of journalism and anyone writing one of these stories should think hard about an immediate career change.

    Run a fucking poll if you want to write a story about public opinion.

    The world will be a better place the day after every serious news media organization leaves twitter and tells all their journalists they cannot use it as anything other than an original source to what a specific public figure has to say.


  • You have fundamentally misunderstood the interoperability that is being discussed re: podcasts and drawn a totally spurious conclusion.

    You can connect to nearly any podcast using as little as an RSS reader. You can build your own podcast app TOMORROW and that app will be able to access pretty much any podcast from any network (with very narrow exceptions for the worst actors, e.g. Spotify exclusives, NPR One, etc).

    The only purpose of the various platforms is boosting discovery. There’s nothing oligarchic happening there; for pretty much all of them listing your podcast is free. There’s also absolutely no necessity to use any particular platform’s discovery tools or to list your podcast on any platform. It’s totally fine to distribute it yourself, via a link, using whatever means pleases you. Your “podcast discovery platform” could well be your local bookclub’s email list – and while the quality of that discovery may be worse, it in no way inherently limits what you can access. Even if you use that platform’s app, it should still generally be possible to add any podcast via RSS URL (if any major apps don’t support this, they’re behaving in a deviant way).

    There is absolutely nothing oligarchic in general. At least for now, so long as the fucking fuck fucks at Spotify don’t get their way.





  • God, I remember in the early-ish days explaining what browsers were to AOL users.

    It honestly felt pretty early in AOL days that people were mostly just using it for email, chatrooms, and otherwise as a web browser on the regular, non-AOL internet. Then AIM becoming more popular as time went on, but eventually third-party clients totally obviated that in a lesson Google would learn from well (and their takeaway was to destroy Jabber/XMPP with great prejudice before they lose control over their users).

    Explaining parents that all they needed to do was open another browser – literally any other browser – while AOL was running and they could go to the websites with it was rough. “AOL has you connected to the internet already, you don’t need to use it to go to infoseek.com” or whatever.

    Whenever they finally did it it seemed like magic. WOW, how does this connect to AOL! Then they’d close AOL and disconnect the modem and tell me the other browser was broken.

    I remember all my friends convincing me to switch to Opera because it had tabs and that was revolutionary.