Not arguing that Gates isn’t a total bastard with how he ran things but that was decades ago and he hasn’t been in charge for just about as long.

We need to stop making him the target of rants and focus on the people who are actively destroying software and democracy. The current crop of ceos and board members are arguably worse with even less oversight and regulations combined with more wieldable power. Focusing on Gates is just diverting attention from these current monsters.

These are the questions that need answers before any meaningful advice can be given.

And solutions!

In the last 5 years we have blocked access to the internet through bot checks and ad networks. We block screens with ads or consent forms which aren’t even enforceable and make the user bark on command to get past.

We have become trained seals. Captcha popped up? Better bark. Cloudflare challenge appeared? Better bark like the trained seal and click the checkbox.

Nobody even talks about this. The fact these things are annoying is constantly discussed but I have yet to see any article covering the fact we have trained our species to bark when asked without question and what the ramifications are down the road.

There isn’t even a planned offramp from this trajectory, these things are going to get more pervasive and annoying while technology improves. Where doea this actually end?

Some people call that an abusive relationship. I call it M-F.

I look forward to their update on how that is going in 2036.

We have an enormous problem with software optimization both in cycles and memory costs. I would love for that to change but the vast majority of customers don’t care. It’s painful to think about but most don’t care as long as it works “good enough” which is a nebulous measure that management can use to lie to shareholders.

Even mentioning that we’ve wiped out roughly a decade in hardware gains with how bloated and slow our software is doesn’t move the needle. All of the younger devs in our teams truly see no issue. They consider nextjs apps to be instant. Their term, not me putting words in their mouths. VSCode is blazingly fast in their eyes.

We’ve let the problem slide so long that we have a whole generation of upcoming devs that don’t even see a problem let alone care about it. Anyone who mentors devs should really hammer this home and maybe together we can all start shifting that apathy.

It will forever baffle me how people all seemed to land on vibe coding as a term worth promoting let alone brag about.

Unless we’re talking about the programming that goes into the micro-controllers of sex toys. People doing that kind of vibe coding are doing god’s work.

I can confirm this has been my experience as well.

Anectdotally, the only people I know who say vscode is lightweight and snappy are devs that have have primarily used it, visual studio, jet brains, or some other common and bloated application.

I think pretty much every dev understands the issue but they are limited in what they can do about it. Quitting a job because they won’t let you optimize is noble but unrealistic for the vast majority of devs.

I would love for optimizations to start being prioritized. More specifically, I would love to see vendors place limits on memory use in apps. For example, Steam could reject any game over 50gb. I do not believe for a moment that any game we currently have needs more than 50gb except maybe an mmo with 20 years of content. Or Microsoft could reject apps that use more than X ram. They won’t ever do that but without an outright rejection, this won’t be fixed.

Unless you want to get fancy for the sake of not being fancy, you will likely be best just sticking with Kate.

Basic editing can be done in vi or nano or even piped to a file via she’ll. I don’t think any of those are necessarily better or worse than using Kate. Vi and nano would probably be faster but you would need to be in a terminal already.

That said, I am curious as well if anyone has a better answer.

They had no viable business plan with which to pay back investors so this was inevitable. It sucks though…not a day goes by where I don’t grumble about what an insult Discord is to their users.

What’s funny is if you added another “level” to this going back another 15 years there would be someone complaining about the same things but with Java as the target. “Java is slow” wasn’t just a joke for no reason after all.

There are some funny parts in the post as well as some true statements to the current state of things. We’ll see another post like it in 10-15 years and it will be a chuckle. Then we’ll all continue as we always have and deal with whatever comes down the pipe next.

It’s what humans do and it isn’t restricted to technologies or programming languages.

This is really interesting. It also means that there could be a statistically-significant increase in vulnerabilities if you are specific about the end use. In other words, while these two prompts are effectively the same, the latter could produce less ideal code:

“build me a blogging website” “build me a blogging website to track covid propagation”

It doesn’t change the fact that people should be reviewing everything with a fine-toothed comb but it is interesting.

This is a true statement but it also doesn’t accomplish anything. As much as you want others to care about something, they have quite literally a whole world of stuff going on in their head and these things are not necessarily priorities. They should be, but they aren’t.

We need to keep in mind we are in an echo chamber and as important as these things are for us, we are in the minority. It isn’t because people don’t care, they are just busy with their own gremlins.

It’s a problem but also very human.

Can confirm, there is a world of difference between people who are chatting about switching to Linux and the average computer user.

As much improved as it is, Linux isn’t ready for those people. Not because it is hard or they can’t figure it out but they don’t care or don’t have the energy. Most people don’t even know what Linux is there than a term they might have heard a couple times.

I would love for Linux to take off and Microsoft to feel the sting from abusing their customers.

I have an Nvidia card and run plasma and everything “just worked” for me including the proprietary drivers. Zero configuration (I am using CachyOS but Manjaro was fine as well as mint).

Figured I would add another data point for those thinking about switching but are nervous about the Nvidia support.

No need for paint when you create art with words.

Teams crashes or fails to work for me at least a few times a week and has for months. Outlook glitches out daily. I legit started using the web access instead of actual Outlook because it constantly bugged out.

Both Teams and Outlook are so ridiculously slow for what they do and the hardware they are running on.

Meanwhile in Windows 11: 4 years after release and I still can’t click on the clock on my secondary monitor to look at the calendar.

Well said. I find I have a hard time with trying to get devs who cut their teeth on Node to take a moment and think before just reaching for a dependency. A dependency might be the right move but taking a moment to consider is a bare minimum and most people don’t do that.

I’m trying to keep my panic over how that behavior translates to AI code in check but it’s a struggle given human behavior time and time again.