I use nano for quick edits. I don’t know more than the basics of vim, and don’t do a lot of editing on the terminal so I haven’t needed to.

Fuck Spotify. I’ll buy albums (drm free, mostly from Bandcamp), pirate, or go without.

Today is bandcamp Friday, too. Bandcamp passes their cut on to the band.

People are lazy and don’t think very much. Spotify is right there.

Also enshittification: it was better to draw people in, and then they made it shittier and people stay

I buy music (mostly from Bandcamp). Now I have a big library and no subscription fee.

I don’t know a lot about how fingerprinting works, but some of what i’ve read is pretty insidious. Some things could probably be obfuscated, but some of what the trackers use has legitimate purposes as well. Your application may serve different content based on the screen size, or fall back to an older library if such-and-such API isn’t supported.

Personally I’d rather make targeting advertising and tracking illegal, and gut the whole thing to avoid the arms race.

So you’re going to make it illegal to call getBoundingClientRect and then pass that information to fetch through any mechanism?

You’d have to kill a lot of JavaScript and CSS for that to work, and then a lot of legitimate function goes away.

Done much web development work?

I’m pretty sure for fonts they can tell because they have different widths, which affects page layout, which can be measured.

There’s a lot of stuff like that.

Best would be make it illegal and give the law teeth. Solving it technically will always be an arms race.

Fuck is with these conservative losers jumping on the kings dick like pathetic fangirls?

The only thing driving conservatives is “in-group good, out-group bad”. There is no internal consistency beyond that. They’re the worst sort of people.

Modern social networks are pretty trash, but I don’t have an iPhone so this is a non starter.

Even so, I’d rather just… text my friends.

Windows is pretty bad and their management are soulless husks.

They could rip out all the AI garbage and I wouldn’t trust that they learned anything. Fuck 'em.

Linux is free and meet all my needs.

You’d think more libertarian types would be more in favor of walkable cities, biking, and such.

Break up Google, Facebook, and the other big platforms that let disinformation run rampant.

Hold decision makers at those organizations personally accountable.

Ars is weirdly pro-windows sometimes , in the comments. I don’t read them as much as I used to.

It’s hard to make a full judgment without knowing more details but “the pay is good and it’s easy” isn’t really a compelling justification for “and I help evil manifest in the world”.

I knew a guy who went to work for palantir a bunch of years ago. Was always friendly at work. I asked him “but what’re you going to do if they do bad stuff, like spying on people?”

He just shrugged. Didn’t care. The money was good.

I don’t know if this alone is proof that’s a bad person, but I think it precludes him from being a good one.

Conservatives don’t care about being correct or consistent. They say things for effect. They follow their feelings. Something inside them is broken and ruined. They project constantly onto others, because introspection would shatter their flimsy ego.

Also doing my part. Fuck Microsoft. It would have been a harder choice if Windows was, like, fast, stable, and efficient. But it’s not. It’s jank and AI slop. Fuck them.

I did some webdriver stuff for reasons I don’t remember anymore.

I also made a simple Django app to track job applications.

Unsolicited advice:

• use type annotations. You’ll thank yourself later when your IDE tells you “hey this can be None are you sure you want to call .some_func() on it?”
• use an ide. Don’t just raw dog it in notepad. You should have syntax highlighting, red squiggles for errors, the ability to go to definition.
• learn to use a debugger. Pdb is built in and fine.
• don’t write mega functions that do a thousand things. Split things up into smaller steps.
• avoid side effects. You don’t want your “say_hello” function to also turn on the lights

Yep. Infrastructure shouldn’t be privately owned.