It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.

It's not. Saying something isn't expensive because its the same price after adjusting for inflation is a slap to the face of millions, perhaps even billions who are effectively making less now than they were ten or twenty years ago after they adjust for inflation.

That phrase is not the silver bullet you seem to think it is.

Roku is breaking things constantly. If you ever have to replace that hardware, it will have more up to date software and your experience will be broken. This will be by design.

Even implying that somebody should consider buying Roku hardware at this point is stunningly irresponsible. In the last few weeks they broke HDR. Before that they broke the ability of their TVs to display content properly when using apps on the built-in OS due to some new craptacular frame rate feature they pushed out and have refused to roll back. Thankfully I can work around it on my Apple TV by turning on Game Mode for the input. They are currently testing a wide variety of invasive ad features that you can be damn sure will destroy your experience once they officially roll them out.

They harvest every bit of your data and sell it to whomever will pay.

Roku is a stunningly objectionable company. On top of all that (as if it wasn't enough), their platform lags behind everybody else. They refuse to license a full range of video codecs so pieces of software like Channels DVR will never work on their platform. Not to mention that when you run a Roku TV that isn't connected to the Internet, you lose the ability to customize various aspects of it. You can't rename the inputs for example.

Nobody should ever even imply that somebody should buy a Roku device. They are crap and there is virtually no chance of the company changing course.

They are a poster child for enshittification.

On top of that, its harvesting the hell out of your data.

Stop being a sucker. Toss that Roku powered shit out of the window.

After 25 years - I'm over it. But the flip side of that is that I can't un-see the fact that so much of the tech shit in my life is broken and it has practically become a second job trying to manage it and / or fix it. Thankfully I don't do it by trying to code replacements like the author seems to. Instead I try to come up with workarounds or find replacements.

Nevertheless the weight of the curse is about the same I figure.

So over the last week I’ve been subjected to multiple uses of the term “vibe coding”. Now back here under the rock that I live, that term struck me as rather peculiar so I queued up some videos to watch and took a tour of the idea this morning. Now now, don’t worry. This isn’t going to be just another anti-AI rant. We’ve had our fill of that, right? No instead we are going to focus on the flaws of the Venture Capitalist class, courtesy of the people running Y-Combinator.

Why them? Well it’s because they made this video which happens to be the first one I watched on the topic. I was going to watch a video in which Primeagen reacts to this video as that is what my friend sent to me but decided to just watch the source video instead as I didn’t want to waste the additional time listening to Prime to bash it (though make no mistake, Prime is awesome). As you may have noticed, I’m quite capable of doing that myself.

Hell I’m not even going to go into specifics here. Because the idea behind this is so ridiculously stupid that I just can’t be bothered to give it enough credit to waste that kind of time on it. However the 1000ft summary of the idea is this: Vibe coding is essentially a hipster name for so-called software engineers (or as the Y-Combinator staff likes to refer to them “product engineers”) who basically prompt coding AIs and mindlessly toss whatever crap it produces into the mix. Now to be fair by mindlessly I don’t mean just dumping the first round of output into the IDE, making sure it compiles and shipping it. No instead what I mean is dumping the third or fourth round of output into the IDE, making sure it compiles and shipping it.

See? I can be kind.

...click through for the rest!

Before I continue, I want to make one thing exceptionally clear: I’ve spent weeks thinking about what to write in this post. I have struggled with finding the right words and the right thoughts to clearly relay my ideas here. I have spent even more time trying to codify and validate those ideas for myself. As a writer who essentially has a front row seat to this horror show, I am awash in conflicting emotions that simultaneously are begging for my attention. It’s hard to not write about this topic emotionally. Very hard. That being said, I believe I have my thoughts organized enough and that I’ve spent enough time thinking this through, to accomplish my objective.

So what is my objective? My objective is to redefine the parameters for the upcoming civil war. Yes, I absolutely believe that’s where we are headed. But as it stands right now, I believe that the battle lines have been incorrectly defined. I believe this circumstance is the result of decades of propaganda and efforts on the part of the actual perpetrators in an effort to channel the easy to predict violence in a direction that points away from them.

So who are the perpetrators? That’s easy: The insanely rich. Trump is one. Musk is another. The big tech CEOs who lined up to show fealty on inauguration day are also included. A thousand others who you don’t see hamming up for the cameras are also to blame. These are the people who have laid the groundwork for the horrors we are currently experiencing and for the civil war we will all soon be taking part in. But if that war was to be fought today, it wouldn’t be fought between us and the billionaires who have spent decades embezzling every bit of money and resources they could get their grubby hands on. Rather it will fought between the relatively poor people who are all actually the victims of their charade.

...click through for the rest!

"WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden won’t enforce a ban on the social media app TikTok that is set to take effect a day before he leaves office on Monday, a U.S. official said Thursday, leaving its fate in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump.

Congress last year, in a law signed by Biden, required that TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance divest the company by Jan. 19, a day before the presidential inauguration. The official said the outgoing administration was leaving the implementation of the law — and the potential enforcement of the ban — to Trump."

After all of the drama, hand wringing and endless unverified claims that TikTok is a national security risk, I can't believe this is how they are going to end this. It's utterly mind-blowing.

So let’s start this post off on the right foot by making some declarations most of you will likely regard as a sign of premature-dementia on my part, shall we?

...Click through for the rest! Comment here for a spirited discussion!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651468

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Cause it ain't about the gameplay or the usefulness. It's all about that big dick energy.

If you are shocked by this, you are the sucker in the room.

So why was tech terrible in 2024? Well a large part of this judgement revolves around the industry’s full fledged unquestioned embrace of AI bullshit tech. A lot of this to do with the fact that the big money investors tugging on the puppet strings of a lot of tech startups have essentially run out of practical ideas. Once the startups succeeded in getting the word out, the big tech companies decided that they all had to play catch up. Some of them bought into the ecosystem by investing in the startups, some of them built their own and some of them just piggy-backed on other people’s work.

...

Click through for the rest!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502054

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

TLDR: The cacophony of fools is so loud now. Thank goodness it won't last.

New Pi day is the best day!