The good vibes and optimism have left the industry.

Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup.

Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.

I'm really not sure which country you're talking about here. Saudi Arabia? Because Saudi Arabia is even worse than Iran in this respect but they're not being bombed. Should they be bombed?

Other companies have said that they're facing shortages, but if you don't read/believe the news, it's easy to ignore. Calbee is the first large corporation to make it unavoidably apparent that there are shortages, and that if things don't change, it's going to be much worse than mere ink shortages.

As a personal example, medicine that my doctor prescribed used to come in individually wrapped packs. It was like this for years. Due to plastic shortages, it's now all put into a single bag. Environmentally speaking it's better and I don't mind. But it's a massive shift and this is just the start of the shortage. With no solution in sight, and with shortage resolution taking months even if the war ended tomorrow, it's going to get worse and there's no way around it.

At some point, companies are going to start removing basic features. Governments and essential services are going to make people go through chatbots to get basic service. They're going to require AI to validate stuff that's already automated and working fine. Google search? That'll be all AI (and I guess they're already rolling it out). Dentist appointment? Going to need to do it through some AI app that requires an account and tokens "for a better patient experience". Verifying your ID when buying alcohol? Going to need AI to scan it and take 90 seconds to determine whether it's real. And it'll say you're an 7 year old farm worker in rural Botswana, so you can't get alcohol. And they're going to milk money at every level of this.

> Artists work in whatever canvas size makes sense for the motion they’re drawing.

made me think "what?" Artists making concept art or drawing for fun, sure. Whatever resolution is comfortable is fine. But for animation or in-game art, a resolution is always defined. Even the most amateur artists learn about sprite sheets the first time they try 2D animation, and rule one of sprite sheets is using a uniform resolution for every frame.

I tried to go outside a few times. Learned the hard way that it wasn't allowed. Plus many other kids weren't allowed outside either.

American CEOs are on the board of 8 companies but spend 5 minutes a year combined at the offices of those companies. They spend their weekends at private islands off the coast of the US Virgin Islands with other billionaires. They fire employees who ask for health care benefits or a day off. They actively endorse political candidates who went to the same private island with them and who will lengthen working hours, reduce benefits, and make it easier to fire employees. They want global surveillance to track anyone who's ever even considered saying anything bad about them. When it's possible to inject ads directly into our brains, those CEOs will force their employees to do it.

As an American who's been in Japan for a very long time and worked at Japanese companies, Japanese companies don't pay big bucks, but there are fewer deranged ultra rich people within them.

I'm someone who absolutely hates generative AI, but AI that assists people in living happy lives outside is something I'm completely in favor of.

If some goober installs massive floodlights that blast into windows of some houses, I think everyone would support a kid with a slingshot busting a few bulbs. If some guy is blasting music from a speaker at 3 AM every single day, I don't think anyone will complain about a cable being cut. If cameras are installed that sell data to companies like Palantir, companies that say they want to kill you and they're going to kill you and it's just a matter of time until they kill you, destroying those cameras is the non-violent option.

The funny thing about that era is you knew they started using Cloudflare because they went from stable with constant uptime to going down and showing a Cloudflare banner randomly all the time for a good year or so. They ran worse with Cloudflare than they did while they were allegedly getting DDoSed. The whole company glows, as the late great HN commenter Terry Davis would've said.