Rapp snitches.

It's not like this sort of hustling didn't exist prior to LLMs but the volume has ballooned massively.

Recently I've been experimenting with Atlas, Revi and Ghost Spectre, which are custom stripped versions of Windows, and it's such a breath of fresh air. It really makes me feel like if only they'd just ruthlessly pull out all the new garbage without regard for "but we just made and shipped this", Windows would actually be pretty good.

Say what you want about Apple and their slow descent into a fully walled garden where independent software development is slowly eroded and sabotaged, but even their most reviled update in years (macOS 26) is still miles ahead of Windows 11 in terms of cohesion and polish.

I get what you're saying, but thinking about it, I'd be very surprised if the personal computing world ends up seeing anything like a paradigm shift that is so unprecedented it will catch the likes of Apple unprepared. And I realize it might sound arrogant or even ludditic to say this, but we'd need some sort of shocking new concept that no one ever came up with even in sci-fi. It's no longer really a matter of being able to technically implement something, but more about coming up with a human interface that is both totally novel and more convenient and practical than what we have now.

The qwerty layout comes from 19th century typewriters and we're still using it. The mouse was conceived of in the 1960s. Tiny computers that fit in the hand and voice operated devices have been utilized in early sci-fi works. And there's obviously VR, even though I think that's more of a toy than anything.

The only thing that is potentially in that same league of usefulness that I can think of is a brain-computer interface of some sort but those are currently so far away from having competitive practicality that there's a huge amount of runway.

I already thought it was very suspicious that Sinclair's official press release just talks about how the remarks were "inappropriate and deeply insensitive" without describing anything about the actual remarks. And it even calls for the FCC to get involved?

What this really says is: you should be very afraid, because we will completely demolish if it suits us and we don't need a pretext.

First video on the page. I'm guessing this is probably a news report, right?

Not that I don't appreciate your work from back then, but as a longtime daily Mac user I cannot wait for the day that this is done once again. The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing. Not to mention it's actually capable of locking up waiting for network access in some circumstances.

I don't know what the Finder source code looks like today but I bet it's a similar kind of hell project as the Classic Finder was back then when they first rewrote it, considering how reluctant they are to do anything to it.

    yt-dlp -i --format "bestaudio" -x --convert-thumbnail jpg --add-metadata --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail --audio-format "best" -o "%(autonumber)02d %(title)s (%(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s) [%(id)s].%(ext)s" "https:// ... youtube URL ..."

It cannot. The IA already basically got the worst possible judgment.

This is also not an existential threat to the IA, and payment has already been agreed upon. The reporting on this is extremely sensationalist.

Since when am I a trillion dollar company?

It's also worth keeping in mind that CSS is sometimes more complicated than it seems like it should be due to accessibility concerns and flexibility. That's why you can take some HTML produced by some part of your system and use it in completely different contexts with totally different designs, entirely as is, just by adding a few different rules.

I've been doing HTML dev since the late 90s and things were infinitely more difficult back in the old days. CSS might have been simpler, but doing complex things required tons of bizarre hacks that also made your design more frail and less accessible. These days CSS has improved to the point where you can do just about anything, and even very complicated effects can fairly easily be deconstructed just by looking at the devtools and poking around until you get it.

CSS isn't perfect, but all things considered I'm not complaining.

I don't know what chatrooms you were in, but I've been on IRC for many years and there were always plenty of moderators. And if there weren't, people would just move on someplace else. It's not like the concept of moderation hadn't been invented yet. File sharing might actually have been easier in the past than today due to DCC transfers and fserves on IRC (and torrents already existed since the early 2000s). Sure there were pitfalls, especially on networks like Kazaa, but you can't really expect to be pirating content on the open internet and not have some basic smarts to avoid getting taken advantage of. It's not like that's meaningfully different today.

Either way, I think it's sort of beside the point. Nobody is denying that a lot of things have vastly improved today, especially in QOL -- it should be better, as we've had years to develop the tech -- but the point is that the internet has also gotten extremely commercialized, filled with spam and low quality generated content, and neutered to the point where individuality has mostly been lost.

You can talk all day long about how the modern internet is technically far superior to the old internet, and how we don't have dialup anymore -- sure, I get that, and you're right. But this article is about how the joy of being part of a great new frontier has been lost. Everything is owned by some big faceless company now, everything is being curated according to some algorithm designed to maximize profit, and you're not allowed to touch anything anymore. That's a shame! And we can legitimately look back and say it wasn't always like this.

With that being said, this is just my view as someone who uses simple consumer oriented programs, and I'm not sure how well it'll work for more serious purposes.

Of course there are operational details that we don't need to be made aware of, but for an incident as big as this there's no reason to at least know how it happened and what could be changed to prevent it from happening again.

But no, it went exactly as anyone could've predicted, no notes.

1. they didn't budge an inch

2. spez is a fucking jerk as always

3. it was over after only a small handful of questions, some of which may have been preplanned

4. we learned nothing new.

It's exactly what everyone saw coming. gg.

This most definitely seems to me like it was more of a "how dare they question me" spur of the moment decision by spez than a legitimate PR effort. At the same time it just reinforces the obvious conclusion that third party app devs were lied to and set up to fail.

I actually really wish we had our hands on some of the earliest builds, even the "orcs in space" ones. I've been playing this game for so long that I'm curious how exactly the final version of it was beaten into shape over time, and how different it feels to play over its development period.