- WYSIWYG editor is table stakes. The lovely folks at marketing once thought I was hacking when I `ps -eaf`-ed in an unresponsive Macbook.

- They "put" images in their post. They don't "upload the image and position it with CSS".

- It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for. Social integrations and "You may also like..." sections also come to mind.

> cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.

Not that I have extensive WP experience but unless you can name me an actual plugin that has good street cred for being used in the wild wild west, I'm gonna say this is not as easy as you make it sound. For one you just described a very rudimentary data pipeline which someone has to support and maintain even infrequently. Also, speaking from experience, plugins don't always play nice with other plugins. I once tried to export my very basic personal site out of WP to find the footnotes all messed up (I don't know now but back then I handled footnotes with a plugin).

We've progressed an impressive lot since, say, the nineties when computers (and the internet) started to spread to the general consumer market but the last 10% or so of the way is what would really be the game changer. And if we believe Pareto, of course that is gonna be 90% of the work. We've barely scratched the surface.

This is just my 2c as an outside observer, software engineer ofc. I'm sure some MBA could make a case for said synergy. But it made sense to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance, because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks. But Oculus?!?!?! IMO Facebook had a better chance opening a cloud computing division.

So, achieving the Metaverse dream with the money Zuck has spent was always gonna be a tall order at this point but if anyone could've made it work, it wasn't gonna be a social media company.

RIP I'm sure it was a noble device. My Pixel 3a is currently my wireless router for very German reasons. I worry this will kill off the still-decent battery life, as has happened with my OG Pixel.

I have since allied myself with what I personally consider the devil of consumer electronics just to stay on this boat.

Granted, I've only ever done multiple connections on Linux so maybe it's a Linux problem.

I've had to ally myself with a brand I've once sworn off just to get a flagship model Android with a headphone jack. Killing Reader is a greedy betrayal (they were pushing us onto Plus, the whole social web thing) but removing headphone jacks from Pixels is a cowardly betrayal! Eyeing you too there, Samsung. You and Google both have made it extremely difficult to maintain a modicum of principle in today's consumer landscape! You made me justify my purchase with a utilitarian "Better the jacked devil than the blue-toothed one".

(And before you ask, I only generally buy flagships because I upgrade my phone like, every five years, and in my experience flagships are just more bang for buck. YMMV tho.)

Anyway, honestly, wired is not perfect. Wired and wireless each have their inconveniences it's just that I'm more willing to put up with the inconveniences of wired. Wired connections have known failure modes, something which I really value in tech. I have a Sony WH-1000XM3 which can work both as wired and wireless and I love it for that.

Long live wired connections! Here's to a future with cheaper flagship models with a headphone jack!

> banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions.

You, jason_oster, a clown:

> Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil.

Also you in the same clown breath:

> sponsored segments in videos are the devil. Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model.

I'd lol but I'm already lmao.

> Stealing heartbeats is evil.

Appeals to emotion like that, you not only have a prospect in stand-up comedy but a long and prosperous career in political communications, if not being a politician yourself. Your two skill sets complement each other rather nicely judging by the current zeitgeist.

The only way someone could steal your heartbeat (or, frankly, anything) is if they made it unavailable to you. If your heartbeat were unavailable to you for the length of time you mentioned, you'd be dead. The only thing you should worry about stealing your heartbeat is your diet (and that includes diet coke) and sedentary lifestyle. You can't blame ads on this one.

I'll grant you a good faith interpretation of your Valentine's-worthy sentimentality. Replace "heartbeats" with "time" or "attention" and you have an argument at least worth considering.

But the thing is, you can't really prevent spending these resources; they tick away regardless. You can only choose where and how to spend them to make it meaningful. Your time is there to be spent, your attention exists to be called. All I'm really advocating for is that ads be moderated so they don't detract from anything else unfairly. Ads are information too and we need information to function. And like any form of information, they only become toxic and detrimental if they purport to be any more important than they really are.

That said, it makes your example all the more ridiculous, complaining about a thirty second ad when you are about to, excuse me, watch a livestream which would eat at your set amount of time/attention/heartbeat in far greater magnitude.

> Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model. They pay publishers practically nothing because they aren't paying for conversions, but for an estimate based on impressions and track record woo.

You also seem horribly misinformed about how sponsored segments work. Sponsorships are tracked heavily though differently. That's why they always ask you to use their sign-up/discount code or click the link in the description. It's how publishers/content creators prove to advertisers the reach of their channel.

Go watch some ads so you can make an informed opinion on them yeah? It won't kill you and I then wouldn't have to respond to gasp human-generated slop post. Pepsi had some banger ones in the 2000s.

In conclusion, this all really reminds me of my favorite poem:

> Hey, Jason Oster, quit your bullshit

> Stop pulling things out of your ass!

> You won't find gold there

> Just shit and curly pubes

Not quite Shakespeare but rolls off the tongue quite nicely, especially that last line.

In a sense, I'm just agreeing with a fellow comment in the vicinity of this thread that said GDPR is already the EU's shot at banning (targeted) ads---it's just implemented piss-poorly. Personally formulated, my sentiment is that GDPR as it stands today is a step in the right direction towards scaling back advertisement overreach but we have a long way to go still.

Ofc it's impossible to blanket ban targeted ads because at best you end up in a philosophical argument about what counts as "targeting", at worse you either (a) indiscriminately kill a whole industry with a lot of collateral casualties or (b) just make internet advertising even worse for all of us.

My position here is that ads can be fine if they

1. are even somewhat relevant to me.

2. didn't harvest user data to target me.

3. are not annoyingly placed.

4. are not malware vectors/do not hijack your experience with dark patterns when you do click them.

To be super clear on the kind of guy talking from his soapbox here: I only browse YT on a browser with ad blockers but I don't mind sponsor segments in the videos I watch. They're a small annoyance but IMO trying to skip them is already a bigger annoyance hence why I don't even bother at all. That said, I've never converted from eyeball to even customer from sponsor segments.

I'd call this the "pre-algorithmic" advertising approach. It's how your eyeballs crossed ads in the 90s and IMO if we can impose this approach/model in the internet, then we can strike a good balance of having corporations make money off the internet and keeping the internet healthy.

So it would be easy to link me to something that shows this consensus, right? It would help me see what the "consensus" has to say about the known limitations of Copilot too. It would help me see the "why" that you seem allergic to even hint at.

Look, I'm trying to not be close-minded about LLMs hence why I'm taking time out of my Sunday to see what I might be missing. Hence my comment that I don't want to invest time/money in yet-another-LLM just for the "privilege" of debating the merits of LLMs in software engineering. If I'm to invest time/money in another coding LLM, I need a signal, a reason, to why it might be better than Copilot for helping me do my job. Either tell me where Copilot is lacking or where your "contenders" have the upper-hand. Why is it a "must" to use Codex/Claude/Gemini other than trustmebro?

"notoriously bad" is news to me. I find no indication from online sources that would warrant the label "notoriously bad".

https://arxiv.org/html/2409.19922v1#S6 from 2024 concludes it has the highest success rate in easy and medium coding problems (with no clear winner for hard) and that it produces "slightly better runtime performance overall".

https://research.aimultiple.com/ai-coding-benchmark/ from 2025 has Copilot in a three-way tie for third above Gemini.

> Have you tried (paid plans) codex, Claude or even Gemini on your legacy project?

This is usually the part of the pitch where you tell me why I should even bother especially as one would require me to fork up cash upfront. Why will they succeed where Copilot has failed? I'm not asking anyone to do my homework for me on a legacy codebase that, in this conversation, only I can access---that's outright unfair. I'm just asking for a heuristic, a sign, that the grass might indeed be greener on that side. How could they (probably) improve my life? And no, "so that you pass the bare minimum to debate the usefulness of AI tools" is not the reason because, frankly, the less of these discussions I have, the better.

This shit was legacy when I was a wee new hire.

Github Copilot has been great in getting that code coverage up marginally but ass otherwise. I could write you a litany of my grievances with it but the main one is how it keeps inventing methods when writing feature code. For example, in a given context, it might suggest `customer.getDeliveryAddress()` when it should be `customer.getOrderInfo().getDeliveryInfo().getDeliveryAddress()`. It's basically a dice roll if it will remember this the next time I need a delivery address (but perhaps no surprises there). I noticed if I needed a different address in the interim (like a billing address), it's more likely to get confused between getting a delivery address and a billing address. Sometimes it would even think the address is in the request arguments (so it would suggest something like `req.getParam('deliveryAddress')`) and this happens even when the request is properly typed!

I can't believe I'm saying this but IntelliSense is loads better at completing my code for me as I don't have to backtrack what it generated to correct it. I could type `CustomerAddress deliveryAddress = customer` let it hang there for a while and in a couple of seconds it would suggest to `.getOrderInfo()` and then `.getDeliveryInfo()` until we get to `.getDeliveryAddress()`. And it would get the right suggestions if I name the variable `billingAddress` too.

"Of course you have to provide it with the correct context/just use a larger context window" If I knew the exact context Copilot would need to generate working code, that eliminates more than half of what I need an AI copilot in this project for. Also if I have to add more than three or four class files as context for a given prompt, that's not really more convenient than figuring it out by myself.

Our AI guy recently suggested a tool that would take in the whole repository as context. Kind of like sourcebot---maybe it was sourcebot(?)---but the exact name escapes me atm. Because it failed. Either there were still too many tokens to process or, more likely, the project was too complex for it still. The thing with this project is although it's a monorepo, it still relies on a whole fleet of external services and libraries to do some things. Some of these services we have the source code for but most not so even in the best case "hunting for files to add in the context window" just becomes "hunting for repos to add in the context window". Scaling!

As an aside, I tried to greenfield some apps with LLMs. I asked Codex to develop a minimal single-page app for a simple internal lookup tool. I emphasized minimalism and code clarity in my prompt. I told it not to use external libraries and rely on standard web APIs.

What it spewed forth is the most polished single-page internal tool I have ever seen. It is, frankly, impressive. But it only managed to do so because it basically spat out the most common Bootstrap classes and recreated the W3Schools AJAX tutorial and put it all in one HTML file. I have no words and I don't know if I must scream. It would be interesting to see how token costs evolve over time for a 100% vibe-coded project.

Even back in the early 2010s I've been trying to consume social media mindfully. I made sure to follow pages with meaningful content (e.g., The Dalai Lama, The Long Now Foundation, Aeon Magazine, tech-related pages, SpaceX, Elon Musk, indie creators). I don't just add or follow blindly.

Back then I could justify why my selection was "good" but even then, they were drowned out by the tedium of vacations, new restaurants, felt-cute-might-delete-later selfies. Slop/engagement bait is quicker to produce than meaningful thought-provoking content.

I am also pretty sure Facebook's negative signals (unfollow, don't show me this type of content) did not work back then, at least not deterministically. If something I did not like had enough traction, it will still pop up in my feed.

And of course, goes without saying that a lot of my choices aged like milk. Elon Musk turned out to be, well, Elon Musk. Some of the tech pages started shilling out crypto (and nowadays doubtless AI). The indie creators either stopped posting or fell out of favor with the algorithm which meant exodus from the platform. All that goes on top of my pre-existing grievances against my feed recommendations.

As the word-setter this might be an own-goal. As a word guesser, a random haphazard tactic might get you the word.

I'll Monte-Carlo my point but I have a warm bath tub waiting...

Naturally this comment isn't a "fuck yes!" to the idea of Microsoft-as-tax-collector but if we're discussing TFA, let's not be needlessly cynical to the idea presented.

> Hence, a solution. Or an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe.

However, other comments make it sound like a bunch of other projects have discovered that PyPI is a good distribution channel. Which, to me, sounds like using the Internet Archive as your CDN. Is PyPI the next apt/yum/brew or what?