We tried guys, really we did. The vibe coding was working but it was sabotaged by liberals and Canadians. The only option is to end social security and put the poor and elderly into workhouses or send them to the shower blocks.

The tech sector has a massive diversity problem. Lots of young men raised with one hand on their dick watching porn while reading libertarian propaganda. I get why vulture capitalists want naive, manipulable children running their businesses but I wish real adults were in charge.

I have left multiple platforms that don’t offer parental controls, family sharing etc. Fortunately better alternatives exist to all these platforms.

As a older man and father I think these people are pathetic little children and I avoid shitty commercial social media in my house and around my family. Unfortunately they are still having a devastating impact on society.

They exist. Firefox and chromium are open source. Big companies pay their dev costs but they can be forked. Chromium is a descendent of WebKit which is a descendent of khtml from the KDE project. The engines have been open source for decades It’s the proprietary crap they put on top which is the problem.

I was a huge SpaceX fan from the early days so watched a lot of Musks presentations and interviews and noticed a lot of repetition and always felt he was strongly working from talking points combined with a reasonably good high level understanding of the topic.

He didn’t work as well off script and seemed to have stunted emotional development, not unlike a lot of internet age manboys raised on memes, video games and porn. It is difficult to reconcile his behaviour with an adult, father and manager of people and money. I suspect he has some seriously competent peiple around him like Shotwell who cover for his fuck ups.

IMO he probably is the kind of guy who can soak up stuff around him, turn it into a set of talking points and repeat it with the appearance of expertise. I think he may have had some cognitive decline due to age and lifestyle but I think he was a pretty competent bullshit artist in the past.

I am not an expert at anything but like many IT people discovered long ago that I can pick up most things in my general field with a bit of research. It is a dangerous mindset sometimes. There really is the feeling that with some basic undergrad math and comp sci and a weekend of googling you can understand quantum field theory and it’s totally delusional of course.

Unfortunately the fake it to you make it culture seems to have won. It doesn’t matter how crap you are, if you put yourself out there with confidence you will outcompete the quiet competent types. And when you get caught out there never seem to be consequences.

They cancelled one too many shows we liked a long time ago and we swore off Netflix for life. Never going back. If they ever make another good show I will wait awhile to see if they cancel it or ruin it before I go get it from somewhere else. They burned a lot of their old loyal customers that made them a success and now they have to acquire new customers faster than they lose them which isn’t sustainable.

A camera in every pocket isn’t so good for the ASD kid being mainstreamed into high school with a severe phobia of having his picture taken.

Got several kids at regular public schools (not in US) and their policy never allowed phones during school hours from the start. It is pragmatic and doesn’t cause any drama. The kids get messages home if needed and can collect phones when they leave. It is a relatively normal society where kids walk and ride to school by themselves and parents aren’t obsessed with stalking kids or bubble wrapping them.

Schools have a duty of care and sadly are as much baby sitters for working parents as they are places of learning and phones create more problems than they introduce opportunities.

Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don’t want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don’t.

I made an effort to only use Firefox because browser diversity is important for the web. It can be rough sometimes when things like.chromecast only work.via unstable extensions but I persist even on mobile.

I suspect the Mozilla corporate structure and leadership needs to be reviewed. They don’t seem to know where they are going and get sidetracked.

Things like lack of good cross platform support for passkeys (fido2/ctap stuff) is going to hurt them even more as people won’t be able to use Firefox to login to many sites on Linux where there is currently no blessed platform libraries for this. Unfortunately stuff like that is going to drag me back to Chrome for some stuff which handles this fine on Linux.

Request a GDPR export and you will get your entire comment history. There are tools that can read that history and delete all the comments. I did encounter errors deleting a small number of comments which may have been due to the subs being privated. I deleted the problem ones from the json and the rest got deleted. I manually checked a sample of the 12 years of comments to confirm the accessible ones were being deleted.

My kids who are now teens had ipod touches practically from birth (we got the first versions of the Ipad, raspberry pi etc). They looked so clever to non-technical people fluidly swiping puzzle pieces around on a screen in a UI language most adults at the time barely understood. Then one day I put a wooden puzzle in front of them and realised their touch puzzle apps lacked several degree of freedom available in the physical world and they didn’t know how to rotate. The physical world is so much richer in many ways and skills learned in it are often more widely applicable.

It isn’t that technology isn’t valuable and can provide a benefit. It isn’t automatically superior or more complete and some people fetishize it to a ridiculous extent. For decades kids spent a huge amount of time cutting and pasting content into powerpoint in primary schools here at the expense of illustrating, reading and hand writing because companies like Microsoft were engaged in a war for mind share. Most technical people like myself thought this was a very poor use of technology but less technical people probably thought we were luddites. I have seen my kids do animation and story telling with apps that I think is quite a good use of technology but I wouldn’t deny them the experience of doing art with physical materials which I think in most ways is more foundational.

Phones like vapes in schools are there so businesses can profit by exploiting kids. The device hardware is powerful and potentially useful with the right software but the most popular apps are generally exploitative and potentially dangerous to mental health and privacy and because the industry uses dark patterns based on gambling to drive up engagement they are a distraction and reduce attention.

My kids have a lot of access to technology and the Internet at home. I am not opposed to them having phones when they show the right level of maturity and demonstrate a real need but they don’t need them in class. Their school has had a phone policy for a long time which I support. Kids should have the freedom to be themselves at school and make mistakes without them being captured and spread via mobile devices.

I pay for Nebula but watch nebula creators on Youtube. Watching on Youtube boosts them in the algorithm and gives them a small share of premium and it is more discoverable. The problem with distributed alternatives is that using them would disadvantage creators on youtube which is their primary outlet. We may need to concede that unlike Reddit or Twitter that clearly can and should be replaced by distributed alternatives, Youtube has proven to be a natural monopoly and as such needs to be regulated to protect consumers and creators from monopolistic abuses.

As with all monopolies/cartels/prohibitions unsatisfied demand always finds alternatives. If the rules get in the way people circumvent them. Youtube premium price increases will create a bigger demand for ad blocking. Just as the balkanisation of streaming services and reduced value will return many people to piracy. The people who run these organisations are idiots who destroy brands and shareholder value to get short term attention and bonuses.

I am very selective with what I watch but even so the amount of good content on youtube exceeds my available time while other services have a couple of shows a year to binge and then they can be dropped. With writers and actors striking conventional content is only going to get thinner for the other streaming services. There is a limit to what I will pay for a painless ad free experience for the whole family on all their devices and Youtube is rapidly approaching it.

I remember a show of hands on distro use at a linux conference in the mid 2000s and just about everyone used Debian. I think we were all suprised. I suspect that would be different today with Ubuntu variants, Arch, Fedora but I doubt the handful of actual Red Hat users has changed. They always presented themselves as a much bigger distro than they ever were and their advertising and media coverage gave a very skewed impression.

I would see people using Centos and ask why and it was because they were in IT, but not grass roots linux users, and they thought Red Hat was the major Linux distro because of all the publicity they bought and the certifications. Red Hat’s importance was that their relatively small number of enterprise customers brought in real revenue which funded full time developers and was a huge benefit to Linux. But for average Linux users they were and remain a bit of a side show.

I regularly rotate streaming subscriptions. They all got greedy and there are too many competing services offering too little value. If any service starts locking people in to fixed terms or forcing ads I will drop that service entirely. I don’t like piracy because it doesn’t support creative jobs and I think it should be unnecessary if services behaved reasonably. But the one or two decent shows a year that might be an exclusive to any particular service can be obtained on the high seas or I can live without them.