This. I'm 55. My teenage years were in the 1980s, where CDs started to appear but vinyl was still mainstream. I remember Dad having a significant vinyl library and I also got my own collection.

But I hated caring for that thing. The medium is finicky, prone to scratches and whatnot, and CDs had more length and also more range and better sound. So as soon as I was able to get CDs, I got rid of my vinyl collection faster than one does it with a hot potato in their hands. I used vinyl daily, hated the whole burden of caring for it; and against CDs, I really found them wanting.

Too bad the medium got degraded with idiots who used dynamic compression, but inherently CDs and lossless digital audio in general is way much better. I never understood the vinyl resurgence, until some people explained it as being something more performative and also a way to get better artwork and physical mementos of the music. Understandable, but I still feel it's weird.

But I really hate with my guts how AI capabilities are shoved down our throats on every instance of consumer-facing software, and I hate how it's carelessly used, sometimes with devastating consequences. The latest case where some accounts were hacked by abusing Meta's AI is an example.

And also, as a teacher, I hate how AI has upended higher education. I'm still adjusting my workflow to work around student's AI-enabled cheating and abuse.

So, while it's just a tool, it's been a tool that has seen some very crappy uses, and companies are quite happy to empower and enhance humanity's worst tendencies with it.

This software is a beast to build and package. On first compilation, it spent like ~5-6 hours just pulling Rust crates. This time thankfully was significantly reduced once the relevant packages were in cargo caché; only the changed/added ones were picked up.

But the second problem is even more annoying. Building Deno happily consumes about ~16-20 GB of precious disk space on space-constrained SSDs. This is too much.

I think we should go back to more efficient software, both in object code formats (the product) as well as in the build process. Why would a single JS runtime need 20 GB storage to be built? This is wasteful.

(Some might wonder why a chemistry school has a botany department. Well, that school taught pharmacy since the 1930s and pharmacists use plants as medicines so yes, botany was part of the core school activities right from the beginning...)

I'd suggest "encumbered" or even "infected".

People now have access to good terminal emulators. Back in the day, you had cmd.exe in Windows. Now you have a plethora of Linux/Unix terminal emulators, Terminal.app in MacOS, and Windows Terminal in Windows 10/11. These are quite capable applications able to render good, complex text-based interfaces.

So, my terminal, while it could perhaps improve in its battery usage, does not behave like this.

Oh my, now I get why people complain about advertising in Windows. The relentless noise of the OneDrive and Edge advertisements, riddled with dark patterns, is deafening. It's not like they are notifications, either, but as The Reg article pointed out, they are full-screen things that prevent you from doing anything else.

I have my own W11 setup on my laptop but somehow it never was this spammy. Well, if wifey complains about it when she's using it, I'll say: "There's always Linux...". Let's see if she wants to switch. So far, she has refused.

  > A strange game.
  > The only winning move is
  > not to play.

I hate when games are into multiplayer modes even when played in single-player campaign (e.g.: Generation Zero) and thus cannot be paused.

Another thing that I hate in this regard are unpausable cutscenes. I remember when I was playing The Witcher 3, that at last there was some cutscene advancing some plot point, and right into the middle of it The Wife™ would barge in telling me something important that would require my attention... but I cannot pause that scene so I had to miss it while I listened to her. Why, oh why, devs hate pausing cutscenes so much??

I felt grateful that I had to go to class every day in such a lovely building (which still stands, btw, albeit with some additions and modifications). Having the opportunity to be there was, and still is, one of the highlights of my life.

Claws-mail (https://claws-mail.org) has a good working Windows version. Native desktop app, lightweight, extremely fast, able to handle multigigabyte inboxes for breakfast. The only drawback for some would be that it does not compose (although it can display them just fine) HTML mail, only text-only mail. This is an architectural decision.