I definitely don’t want that directory to be skewed with ads in favor of those with the most money, or who have decided to burn the most of their limited resources on ads instead of improving their services, lowering their prices, or hell, just taking more profit. The ads were the biggest problem with the good ol’ yellow pages.

I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?

I understand that some folks really like it but can’t quite grasp why. Though I believe them when they say it’s useful for them.

Writing code is the easy and fast part already.

On the off chance it’s not for that reason, productivity requirements will be increased until you must half-ass it.

In fact outside of tech if the dotcom bubble wasn’t being discussed it’s because most folks—being not, or barely, online yet—weren’t paying any attention to it per se. The bubble they cared about was the broader stock market bubble, which was definitely widely perceived as a bubble.

The site basically has a house style for those activities, and you can go crazy insulting and stirring people up all day long and not get moderated for it, as long as you stick to the approved style. Bonus: if you're not just half-competent, but actually good, you can probably get people calling you out on your behavior moderated, if they don't beat around the bush about it in just the right ways! That's why the majority of posts on here are trolling and shitposting, or fallout thereof.

If you stay under the moderation radar, trolling this place is like shooting fish in a barrel, even easier than most sites (no, I've not done it, but it's very obviously most of what goes on here). If the site cared about this, it'd have ignore-lists.

Similar to the "trees are mostly made from air" thing.

Though if we could get the newer settings panel of macOS a few versions back, before they inexplicably ruined the best OS GUI settings interface I’ve ever used, that’d be great.

I’ll never touch the tech again. The chemicals seem sketchy as hell (I don’t really want any hobbies that make me feel like I need a dedicated area of my house that I only enter while wearing significant PPE, and with gloves that never leave that dirty-zone) and after probably ten joyless hands-on hours burned over a couple weekends, I never got the fucking thing to print a single one of its test designs.

Seems like yet another fiddly hobby for its own sake (that might eventually yield some not-remotely-worth-the-cost fruits) rather than a useful tool. I don’t need what it offers that bad, the amount of money and time I’m going to put toward it in the rest of my life is zero. It’s probably a fine activity if the act of fiddling with 3D printers is the main draw for a person. Otherwise, no.

The existence of a sea of AI slop making it impossible to find or publicize writing is what will kill it.

It's purely a loss.

I found out around age 35, I think. From reading it online. I’ve told a bunch of people who didn’t know.