I think they crave shared experience, the social activity of watching together, of picking something that everyone wants to watch.

I miss it too, except I never wanted to watch what they wanted to watch. I couldn’t do it either.

Now I just miss them.

Wikipedia has citations. Check out the links at the bottom as well as inline citations.

Cognitive Surrender. I can feel it happening every time I use this employer-mandated Cursor crap. I’m fighting it as hard as I can. Every AI slop pull request I have to review makes me die a little more inside.

(Edit: I’m glad this was so well received, but people are hating on my “assembler isn’t as difficult as people think” post below. Oh well.)

First, I love this analogy. At the end of the day someone is still analyzing and decomposing problems, and whether you use AI primarily to search and summarize, to recommend, or to write some goofy starter unit tests, it should still be the human writing the code.

… and now I can’t unsee this rule of three crap. Ever since I heard about an author getting busted for using AI, and all the talk about how AI generates in “rule of three”, I keep looking at my own writing and saying “wait, I do this too. People are going to think my posts are by an AI.” Every part of this post was written by a human software developer on a cell phone while I should be getting ready for work instead.

Also I feel like pointing out: assembler is the human-accessible version, where you break code into files and procedures, give things useful names, you have a symbol table that gives you the addresses where your names ended up. You can insert things and edit things and all the addresses shift around to accommodate your changes automatically. You add comments, even block comments. You “inline” methods with assembler macros.

I would say assembler is more accessible than people think, and complex programs don’t require as much of the “hold everything in your brain at once” horsepower as people think.

99%? We can get these numbers lower :-)

Like the American Squid Game reality show? It uses squibs and has contestants pretending to die in a lamp-shaded way (gets caught, remote controlled squib goes off, looks down disappointed, after a short reaction time and thinking delay they lay down in a safe way - or jump-fall like a stunt person). Maybe they have a bigger special effects budget and don’t interview the “dead” people after?

Different domains need different authentication flows. If the provided email ends in a domain they recognize, instead of prompting for a password you’d be sent to another auth provider to authenticate there.

Agreed, I have one of the last “good” HP Color LaserJets from a tech recycler and last time I checked it was two model revisions old. This one still has a config option to allow unofficial toner, so I pay like $120 for a set of all four high capacity cartridges now, I think 5k pages black and 3k pages C Y and M. (It’s a MFP m477fdw I think) I think the next model was the first one that took the option away.

You can still use third party toner with some of the later models, but those are more expensive and come with some kind of jig for transplanting an HP chip into their cartridge.

I will never buy another HP product again (apart from replacement parts for my current printer), and will jealously guard this one and nurse this one along until it dies.

But in a general sense, being able to completely ignore the printer for literally months, and then turn it on and get a perfect print, and then ignore it again… really nice. That’s all laser printers. Never buy HP.

You’re right to be frustrated. Mine is the same way. It’s ok to be passionate about that, and to value punishing greedy ISPs by not paying extra for a business account. (In many cases you could even need both, if you might worry about occasional denial of service attacks and need to be sure attackers can’t also knock out your ability to work from home, for example.)

I think there’s a compelling argument in favor of protecting diversity of hosting and preventing a monoculture or a monopoly. It’s not super compelling, but it’s out there.

We also need more individuals paying for “business” Internet connections at home. We need self-hosters to be able to feel comfortable running public services from their homes. And so we need a set of practices and recipes to follow, so a self-hoster can feel confident that, if one thing gets broken into, the other few dozen things they’re hosting will stay safe.

The “family nerd” hosting things for the family needs to be a thing again. Sorry, friends, I know family tech support sucks. It’ll suck so much more when it’s a web site down and nobody can reach their kid’s softball team page, and there’s a game next weekend, etc. But we’ve seen what happens when we abdicate our responsibilities and let for-profit companies handle it for us.

(I wish so hard that I had a solution ready, a corporate LAN in a box, that someone can just install and use. I’m working on something, but I’m pretty sure I over-complicated it. It doesn’t need to be Fort Knox, it just needs to be pretty good. And I suck at ops stuff.)

Agreed. I feel like I’m in one, and the things that make us thrive are being tested like an immune system, against what feels like a deliberate Maek Number Go Up infection. It’s stressful and I can only try to trust that it’s necessary. I guess we have to keep that stock number up or else we get bought and destroyed by a competitor.

Not a fan of this whole system sometimes.

What goes around comes around, Russia.

Ohhh I get you then. Instead of checking against an author’s key, and building a distributed web of trust between trusted authors, you build a system that requires everyone collaborate on one shared chain of signatures.

Friend, PGP signed messages were around in the 90s. Key signing parties. Web of trust.

This is one of those “technically true but functionally useless” arguments, and I hate arguing the other side here… Valve always has the option to stop using Visa and, I don’t know, have customers write out and physically mail checks or money orders.

Obviously the number of customers who would do this is microscopic. It’s not a real thing anytime would ever do. But because the option exists, they aren’t technically making the content impossible to sell.

I got flamed pretty hard for pointing out that this sample size really needs to be in the title, but it needs to be said. Thank you. Sixteen people is basically a forum thread, and not a very popular one.

It’s still useful information and a good read, but a lot of people don’t click through to the article, they just remember the title and move on.

There’s a kernel of something positive in decentralization, though. Me pointing this out feels a little bit like someone saying how good COVID lockdown was for the environment, but I still feel like it’s an important point.

An internet made of lots of small sites is better at resisting censorship and centralized control. People should remain accustomed to using a bunch of individual sites, not JUST the biggest sites on the internet, and amateur sysadmins should maintain their “host a public web server from an at-home business internet connection” chops.

There being lots of small porn sites makes it harder for anyone to apply pressure and make certain kinds of affirming content disappear.

That’s … just about everything positive I could say about this idea. Not a fan.

Omaha resident. I don’t drive through Nebraska from end to end. I just live here.

Dungeons of Daggorath. I had a Color Computer 2 growing up, while we lived in a trailer park. I was still a little afraid of the dark, and the hallways and first person view with jump-scare monsters were a bit intense for me. I’d have to run from one end of the hallway to the other, to get to the bathroom and back.

The impressive event queue system in that game felt like magic to me, like I wondered what happened to the monsters when you turn the computer off.

I was a “smart kid” but I don’t think I was a smart kid.

(Something something original author, something something signed copy of the original source code on my github)

As a BBS era kid, I know you’re not trying to simulate the whole thing right now in the comments section. I’d say: you would have done fine, in any era. People talk, they share methods, and you would’ve picked up whatever you needed.

I think it’s just a common sort of nightmare, worrying about being unprepared, dealing with the consequences of lack of preparation.

I recommend the first few minutes of Jason Scott’s The BBS Documentary, for an overview of how people communicated in the pre-internet days. Especially if you imagine yourself a telegraph operator chatting with neighboring stations in the 19th century or something.

Are people dying right now? That’s an immediate need, if so.

Are they in power right now? Campaigning for reelection right now? That’s an immediate need if so.

Please don’t demonize “let’s focus on immediate needs” as I feel that’s a reasonable thing to want.