You guys can hate on this but I, for one, have always dreamed of unreliable search results with links to relevant businesses embedded within the text. If only a voice assistant could read them out loud and also remind me to drink Pepsi every other paragraph, we’ll finally have achieved the promise of the Internet.

I can’t believe plutocrats that hate unions are against a progressive party. Also, I have never read one thing about American history except WWII porn where they pretend we were involved the whole time.

/s

Also, there’s easy tools to help you. I know VS Code has accessibility code linter extensions. I’m not as familiar with Xcode or others but I’d bet there’s something that at least treats it like a code warning if you do something that would make your web site gibberish to screen readers and the like.

We’re pretty much all gonna be disabled at some point. Some of us will piss off the mafia and be sank to the bottom a shallow sea while in our prime. But ideally, we all live to have vision problems or some other need for accessibility to exist.

It’s a joke, dog. It makes it so the page comes out white when printing. It’s not something anyone should actually put in their code.

This is a good point. I obviously said the code was a joke but accessibility is something I was ignorant of early in my career when I was just trying to make the code work. Once I got some experience under my belt, I really focused on it as critical before shipping. And, surprisingly, I was always able to request extra funding for it.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-intro/

If you buy whatever Brother laser printer, the ink doesn’t dry up and you never have to print anything anyway. It’s like $100 and the cartridge lasts forever.

And also; don’t print. If you’re a developer, put in the css that says:

@media print { body,html {display:none;} }

That might not completely do it because it’s a joke but slap !important or whatever wherever you want.

These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.

Very rude to call Elon Musk “chemical sludge” even if that’s basically what he is nowadays.

I imagine they assumed readers of PV Magazine would be photovoltaics enthusiasts.

Meta should probably never be blamed for innovating when all they do is steal ideas from potential competitors and crudely duct tape them onto existing products. Instagram was once a useful, good app and now it’s 80% features from Snapchat and TikTok and you maybe see a friend’s post a week late.

Multiple electronics stores caught on fire. I doubt Mossad found a specific box that said “To: terrorists” on it and only rigged those pagers. They just don’t care about killing civilians.

Because the U.S. government gave them $6.6 billion to do it under the CHIPS Act: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-wins-66-bln-us-subsidy-arizona-chip-production-2024-04-08/

With TSMC, it’s insurance against China invading Taiwan but Intel (and probably everyone else) got a load of subsidies too. After the chip shortage during the pandemic and Russia invading Ukraine, chip production became a national security issue.

I had my suspicions before but the moment I realized for certain Elon Musk couldn’t run a software company was when he judged people by lines of code written.

You make a good point about using it for documentation and learning. That’s a pretty good use case. I just wouldn’t want young developers to use it for code completion any more than I’d want college sophomores to use it for writing essays. Professors don’t have you write essays because they like reading essays. Sometimes, doing a task manually is the point of the assignment.

If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.

Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.

Anything Elon Musk can track is probably a security risk until he stops being the most divorced person to ever exist.

Laziness is the number one skill anyone innovative should have. Whoever invented the wheel definitely didn’t do it because they liked work. It was because they hated it knew there had to be a better way.

So, what we really need is lazier inventors. Only then will we get lazier robots.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.

Maybe add a spoiler alert next time. Jeez.

Yep. Thanks for catching that. I meant NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and accidentally combined it with HHS (the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services that NIH is an agency within) and that was apparently too many acronyms.