“Wanderfugl” is a name so bad it legitimately sounds like a Rick and Morty joke.

They should make a new chatbot called “healthy” that gives you pointers about how vaccines cause autism or tell you to enhance your immunity by swimming in super fund rivers and eating rotting, severed whale heads.

Just kidding, they should all go fuck themselves.

It’s bad when I watch pluribus and think about how great the Internet must be because all of the botnets would be shut down and there’s only like 12 people that would bother to use it.

I thought about buying a framework 12 for kicks but it’s Intel only and for that reason I’m oooout.

If I saw that obvious issue, what is their fucking problem?

The engineer’s problem is that the marketing and sales department started running all of the companies two decades ago. So, they’re constantly overruled.

Same here. I didn’t understand why anyone would want a double thick (or now triple thick 🫨) phablet that folds out into a full tablet.

The razr I bought two years ago is the first phone that comfortably fits in my pocket in like a decade.

My Linux systems are all pretty RAM rich and almost never even touch swap.

Dude, Windows swaps like it’s its job.

The job of swap is to be used after the RAM is full or is about to be full. It’s not to be used instead of the RAM.

I bet SSDs were a huge freaking performance boost for Windows generally speaking because of the way it swaps.

Lol, I remember power toys from freaking tucows.com (it used to be a software repository of sorts) in the nineties.

Windows and power toys, two relics from the ICQ age.

I feel like streaming has led to things being more fragmented, both because you need to be subscribed to the one service that carries the show and because there’s so many more shows being made.

I’m not who you were originally replying to, but I think two seemingly contradictory things can be true at once.

Yes, there is definitely more content nowadays, and less people watching the same things at the same time because of all of the variety of services and content and platforms, etc.

But that content tends to still be homogenous. The settings and costumes of the shows might be different, but most content cannot pass, for instance, the bechdel test.

For all of the emphasis on “eradicating woke” in the last few years, there really isn’t a whole lot of actual diversity in most media. I could probably only name a single show that expresses, for instance, communist ideas, and I think it was cancelled in recent years alongside scores of lgbtq characters in shows.

Plotlines are typical, production values are stepped up but there’s a large amount of, for instance, ideological consistency among all media produced nowadays.

If you’re looking for a variety of typical genre shows, yes, you’re spoiled for choice. But when you’re looking for something that breaks the mold even slightly there are really only a handful of things from which to choose.

And that’s leaving out how much derivative media exists. Vince Gilligan in recent interviews even lamented how he was one of only a few people that could get a new show with a new concept even started in the industry. Many shows are set in “universes” that are decades old. A lot of “new” movies are reboots or sequels of old movies.

There’s a thread of choiceless variety that used to apply mainly to things like groceries that has now infected much of media as well. Whole political movements now push to eradicate the little diversity (ideological and character identity based) that exists.

All of this leaves out what happened to music btw, which is becoming so algorithm-driven that it’s hard for those using streaming services to even tell if it was produced by a person.

I’ll just leave this here as well:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/

Edit: I realized after a while that the easiest way to summarize the homogeneity you see in modern media is that it is supply-side oriented. Shows, movies, and music are made (or not) primarily based upon how easily the corporate marketing apparatuses think they can shove it down the public’s throat.

Dude, I think you’re making up a guy to be mad at. People more often like AI because of vibes. There’s a fucking thing called vibe coding, and I’m supposed to take people seriously as software developers as they use the phrase.

So, then you are in favor of the disclosures?

Sounds absolutely fucking awful.

I mostly agree with this, but in corporate software the stuff mostly either doesn’t exist or is outdated to the point of basic inaccuracy.

I’m talking readmes that still have the template information in them or have stayed the same since the first commit.

IMO the best way to use this crap in software development for projects that already exist is to have the fucking things write up or amend docs.

Developers mostly hate writing docs, and in corporate software I’ve found that the docs are usually added once and then never verified again.

Writing up profuse gibberish that contains some amount of useful information is what these bullshit machines were made to do. Have it write up some docs, read them and make sure they aren’t completely insane and get a pat on the back from your boss for working with “agentic AI”.

Bought a lifetime Plex pass a few years ago so this doesn’t affect me. It’s honestly worth the cost especially over time.

Dude containers are often easier than running the underlying programs.

It’s great at bullshitting that it did what you wanted, even if it obviously didn’t, which I guess is what counts for results at Microsoft.

It would be much better if they treated it as the slightly better (yeah, I said it) auto complete that it is instead of the beginning of fucking sky net – which was supposed to be a bad thing anyway, remember?

But that wouldn’t move the needle on all of the share prices, so instead we have to pretend it can do people’s jobs when it fucking obviously cannot.

So, instead they keep pushing this AI (auto-complete insanity), and keep burning more and more cash. Imagine if we just put a portion of these billions (approaching trillions) into anything that could actually help anyone. Or don’t, because it’s pretty fucking depressing to think about.

But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses.

Not all process is pointless, but needless process by definition is. There are also a shit ton of things that stop engineers from “striking out on their own”.

If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.

The whole talk of “go[ing] it alone” kinda strikes me as “bootstrapping”, libertarian non-sense.

I don’t want to do marketing, sales, finance, legal, and product bullshit myself. That’s why I’m an employee.

Two things can be true at the same time, for instance, a company can have a lot of bloated, needless process that stifles people and still pull in enough money to be able to pay for their employees to live a life.

With the amount of market concentration there is in every sector as far as the eye can see, nearly every software-producing company has a cash cow of some sort, and then has a bunch of complete money losers that are subsidized by that cash cow.

So, it’s completely possible that the company overall fully sucks and hasn’t developed anything new of value to someone in decades, but the legacy business keeps the miserable employees from the bread line.

To return to the point, AI doesn’t solve any of this or even help with it.