I already switched to Immich. It’s pretty good at finding pictures, it doesn’t require a subscription, and it isn’t Google.

Starcraft is from before ubiquitous home internet. You could use your modem to directly dial your friend without an ISP. There’s no way it requires online activation.

Is Bitcoin really a good idea? bitcoin.com says you shouldn’t worry because it would cost “hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars” to run a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network for an hour. The US government spends this kind of money on wars, and likely has the means to reduce that cost by forcing offline or compromising a large portion of the trustworthy Bitcoin network. This alone wouldn’t allow money to be seized, but it could be used to destroy the crypto market, making that money effectively worthless. You wouldn’t normally need to worry about an attack of this scale, but the it’s not beneath this government and there are a few AI companies that could use a government bailout in exchange for temporarily converting all their GPUs to Bitcoin miners.

Does World War III involve different countries attacking and defending crypto currencies?

My old phone was constantly recommending that I send YouTube videos with spy query parameters to the e-mail address of a dead relative instead of Untracker. It’s like they designed the system to push users towards doing what they want users to do instead of helping users do what users want to do.

I have to use a Mac and I can confidently say that the experience of using a Mac has not gotten better every year. It just doesn’t get worse as quickly as Windows. It may be true that Apple Silicon has gotten better every year, but so has AMD.

This is just the average Atlassian or Slack experience coming to GitHub. You’re just trying to do your job and the platform is constantly trying to push you to use services of advertisers.

Give it a few months and your phone will helpfully install it for you.

The education system has been killing critical thinking for decades. Why start trying to save it now?

Techdirt says 2,456 files as if it’s 2,456 separate things, but it’s actually just the source code for their web frontend and that source code is comprised of 2,456 files. Normally, the source code for the web frontend isn’t a big deal, but apparently the frontend that they’re exposing is for a service that normal people aren’t supposed to be able to see, and the capabilities of the service are made public. There’s still a lot that could be going on behind the scenes and not surfaced through the frontend.

What is RentAHuman’s cut? This is a very expensive service to operate. If an LLM posts a request for somebody to go pick up a package, what happens if the package never existed? What happens if the human just says that it never existed and takes the money or even the money and the package? Somebody in the middle needs to be arbitrating between AI agents that are notorious for making things up or getting details wrong and humans that just want to make quick money. Nobody is going to send requests if the humans are randomly stealing and nobody is going to fulfill requests if sometimes the request is unsatisfiable and you don’t get paid.

I think this is an important feature for religiously observant Jews. There’s a loophole where you’re not allowed to use appliances or something, but if the appliance just happens to operate itself on a prearranged schedule then apparently that’s okay. In the manual it may be called Shabbat or Sabbath mode. Without a battery backup it adds next to no per-unit hardware cost if the device already has a cooking timer or automatic safety shutoff feature so it’s probably standard on most ovens and microwaves in markets that have Jewish customers. You may also notice this behavior with elevators that automatically travel on a schedule.

In old computers, CD audio worked by physically connecting an audio cable between the optical drive and the sound card. PC emulators can emulate this, but it’s more complicated for CD emulators running on a real computer.

He’s CEO of a large American company. Whether the company succeeds or fails, he’ll be left with more money than most people see in their life. It’s not make-or-break for him.

Claude says he’s sincerely sorry that users feel software quality isn’t a priority, probably.

I don’t know what the plugin does but script to append an audio file to all audio files is possible to do cleanly in just three lines. Being able to write three lines doesn’t make something good at programming, and taking many more lines would make it bad at programming.

Many senior level “software engineers” are just tenured programmers and they’re managed by business people who don’t know software engineering either. One of the major benefits of using off the shelf software libraries is that they generally work as expected and have been through much more testing than something you just wrote, and often these libraries even receive free or cheap maintenance updates. You don’t want your developers wasting time reimplementing things and then wasting more time maintaining those reimplementations.

Getting the AI to write it is like mitigating the initial reimplementation cost by going to Fiver.

Google Search being replaced by Gemini makes it easy for Google to have big AI numbers. Bing never got over its reputation of having bad result quality, and it’s only the default search engine on Windows PCs that don’t have Chrome or Firefox installed. My friend uses Windows and iOS and always sends me links to Gemini results, which normally are only slightly worse than “I’m feeling lucky.”

You’ll still be able to get consoles and cloud stream. The real problem is that the power to create is being taken away from regular people.

Most updates are a waste of time on my phone. Open a streaming media player for a closed streaming service and before it let’s you watch anything it reminds you that you can spend a minute or two updating to a new version indistinguishable from the o/d version. Who knows what they’re changing because the attack surface is basically nonexistent and bugs aren’t being fixed.

Would Wine be better with Microsoft working on it? The frequency and severity of regressions in Windows has been increasing for years now. Maybe for Wine to be a more accurate representation of Windows 11 it needs more bugs and less functionality. The Windows team is good at that.