It was 2 colour, only had 6 or 7 buttons, I could completely operate it without looking at it, and Rockbox gave it the two main features I really wanted: flac support and gapless playback.

The main advantage I have now is I can have my entire (digitised) music collection on my phone - mostly ripped from CD's or purchased from Bandcamp, because it's > 400GB, and I think the Sansa Clip+ only supported 8GB maximum back in the day. Was considering digitising stuff we only have on vinyl as there is a USB output on our turntable, but decided to just leave it in its pure form. Plus recording at 1x speed is almost like going back to the dual cassette tape recorder era and high-speed dubbing was 'special'.

Hardware-wise the clip on the back always broke quickly and then the headphone socket went at some point. Went through about 5 of them before they were obsolete/or on eBay for $100s, but were good enough and cheap enough to keep replacing. One interesting upside of the space constraint was that it made you curate your own music collection, and then opt for a different set (particularly after a few new purchases).

Looks like Rockbox now does a heck of a lot more than it used to back in the day. It's great you've breathed additional life into it.

Even the two Steve's and their Apple company had this issue (as did record companies etc. etc.). Try searching for python now and 'nary a snake to be mentioned.

To be fair I'm equally pissed off that a bunch of different pharmaceutical companies re-brand identical molecules with different names for each company and sometimes for different countries even within a single company.

Sometimes all this naming cleverness or arbitrariness just makes the world more confusing for everyone.

Just a reminder - socialism does not necessarily imply communism, and and implementation of communism thus far has been extremely corrupt.

I lived the in the UK for a couple of years in the early 2000's, the NHS was awesome. It's now a shallow shell of its former self.

Australia where I'm from is trying to imitate the privitisation of health, but my state-local for-profit hospital just went tits up and has been acquired by the government. Partially because a baby needlessly died because profit > caring about human lives, but it wasn't accountable and used tax havens etc. etc.

Fuckin' mess.

I feel for the the UK, because at their best, they probably had the best socialised healthcare system in the world (partly because their population size afforeded them access to medical equipment that other similar countries in Scandinavia etc. can't quite afford).

The US profit motive trumps well-being and healthcare tied to your employment just screws with our heads for most reasonable people. The people that need the help the most are denied it, whilst for the rich - it's built in.

You can idealise it like many things in mathematics, but implementation details fail compared to the abstract ideals.

It's similar in the way many businesses transitioned their scalability etc. to 'the cloud' starting a couple of decades ago.

It's a combination of loss of control and abdication of responsibility. They can claim to the customer the reason the service went down is now Microsofts or Amazons etc. etc. fault. Ultimately the end-user was the one that ended up losing.

It was a choice. There was something they could do - and keep everything in house, although cost-competiveness becomes an issue at some point and you get priced out of your target market. Everyone loses except for the cloud computing (or now AI) providers.

This guy is a complete dick. He also falsified travel expenses (verifiable via save history) in a Word document so he could complain about an independent local Mayor.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/feb/12/fantastic-gr...

The main point of the article is that they're psychedelic, but don't contain psilocybin as the active molecule.

In earlier centuries it doesn't seem unreasonable to allow the possibility of the mushroom ingester to describe their experience as visiting the fae realm, whether in the UK or otherwise - as an accidental occurence I don't know how else people from the past would be able to explain what they perceived to others?

Never used a LLM or anything explicitly.

Got annoyed when I had to deal with AI chatbots as front-line customer service - although that only happened once or twice in the last couple of months.

So basically, keep doing what I'm doing.

I like AI for specifically targeted applications: - e.g. 100,000+ AI "eyeballs" vs. a few 100 for diagonstic imaging, working out whether there's something to worry about or not. I hate the idea of generalised AI, LLM's etc.

Lowering the bar to enable 'creative output' from non-creative individuals just fucks up the world, because natural talent is replaced by unnatural talent, especially in (late) capitalism, where money is worth more than human experience to those few control-freak managers.

I'm old. I even earnt enough to buy a house with lawn over 4 years ago during my (pre-AI) career as a Software Developer. Get off my damn lawn.

How long did it last. Ironically it still gives me the shits because you can't select text on Netflix's front end.

Fuck this future.

I still buy physical media from them once a year (November) when availabilty and rest of the world can't compete price-wise. Yes I recognise the hypocrisy of said actions and minimise it as much as possible. Non-US based. Many physical media producers (e.g. Disney) no longer produce stuff for our 'region'.

The Pragmatic Programmers had just started praising Ruby, so I opted for the that over Perl, and just went with it ever since. Hated PHP and didn't like Python's whitespace thing. I never Ruby on Rails'd either. That said my first interactive website was effectively a hello world button with cgi/perl.

But trying to learn to code from reading other peoples perl scripts was way harder than the (then) newer language alternatives.

Now I'm over 50 none of that is nearly as important. I remember being young and strongly opininated, this vs. that - its just part of the journey, and the culture. It also explains the current FizzBuzz in CSS minimisation post. We do because we can, not necessarily because we should.