If you get the urge to try Capitalism again, you should take a look at Capitalism Lab [1]. It picks up from the original Capitalism series and adds a lot of UI enhancements / quality of life stuff as well as some new features and moddability.
I still don't understand this one. Yes, clicking a link can trigger what it's linking to. That's the entire concept of links.
You can also put a shortcut to a program on your desktop and - horror of horrors! - clicking the shortcut will execute the program! How crazy is that?
I get that some people don't want the markdown functionality in notepad (you can turn it off very easily, btw). But I don't understand why suddenly the idea of hyperlinks is being blasted as a terrible security vulnerability?
Surely there has to be more to this, in order to generate so much hubbub, than just people not understanding the basic concept of hyperlinks?
Yeah, we also have many highways with a speed limit of 80 and one with speed limit up to 85mph (~137kmh), so you wouldn't necessarily even be speeding.
I wonder what is a "commercially reasonable effort" for a non-commercial website to collect, accurately verify, and securely store everyone's identity, location, and age?
Personally I'd say none at all, unless the government itself provides it as a free service, takes on all the liability, and makes it simple to use.
It also defines personally identifiable information as including "pseudonymous information when the information is used by a controller or processor in conjunction with additional information that reasonably links the information to an identified or identifiable individual." But it doesn't specify what it means by 'controller' or 'processor' either.
If a hobbyist just sets up a forum site, with no payment processor and no identified or identifiable information required, it would seem reasonable that the law should not apply. But I'm not a lawyer.
Clearly, however, attempting to comply with the law just in case, by requiring ID, would however then make it applicable, since that is personally identifiable information.
It's more than that even. AI may have plenty of utility. But does the massive capex on GPUs that will all be obsolete in a couple years?
You can still run a train on those old tracks. And it'll be competitive. Sure you could build all new tracks, but that's a lot more expensive and difficult. So they'll need to be a whole lot better to beat the established network.
But GPUs? And with how much tech has changed in the last decade or two and might in the next?
We saw cryptocurrency mining go from CPU to GPU to FPGA to ASICs in just a few years.
We can't yet tell where this fad is going. But there's fair reason to believe that, even if AI has tons of utility, the current economics of it might be problematic.
Over the course of my learning and my career, I've kind of gone back and forth on this a bit.
On the one hand, software is like a living thing. Once you bring it into this world, you need to nurture it and care for it, because its needs, and the environment around it, and the people who use it, are constantly changing and evolving. This is a beautiful sentiment.
On the other hand, it's really nice to just be done with something. To have it completed, finished, move on to something else. And still be able to use the thing you built two or three decades later and have it work just fine.
The sheer drudgery of maintenance and porting and constant updates and incompatibilities sucks my will to live. I could be creating something new, building something else, improving something, instead, I'm stuck here doing CPR on everything that I have to keep alive.
I'm leaning more and more toward things that will stand on their own in the long-term. Stable. Done. Boring. Lasting. You can always come back and add or fix something if you want. But you don't have to lose sleep just keeping it alive. You can relax and go do other things.
I feel like we've put ourselves in a weird predicament with that.
I can't help but think of Super Star Trek, originally written in the 1970s on a mainframe, based on a late 1960s program (the original mainframe Star Trek), I think. It was ported to DOS in the 1990s and still runs fine today. There's not a new release every two weeks. Doesn't need to be. Just a typo or bugfix every few years. And they're not that big a deal. -- https://almy.us/sst.html
I think that's more what we should be striving for. If someone reports a rare bug after 50 years, sure, fix it and make a new release. The rest of your time, you can be doing other stuff.
It depends largely on what you're doing with it. True, I would never want to have to talk a customer through setting up and running a python system. I know there are ways to package them (like 37 different ways), but even that is confusing.
However, a decade ago, a coworker and I were tasked with creating some scripts to process data in the background, on a server that customers had access to. We were free to pick any tech we wanted, so long as it added zero attack surface and zero maintenance burden (aside from routine server OS updates). Which meant decidedly not the tech we work with all day every day which needs constant maintenance. We picked python because it was already on the server (even though my coworker hates it).
A decade later and those python scripts (some of which we had all but forgotten about) are still chugging along just fine. Now in a completely different environment, different server on a completely different hosting setup. To my knowledge we had to make one update about 8 years ago to add handling for a new field, and that was that.
Everything else we work with had to be substantially modified just to move to the new hosting. Never mind the routine maintenance every single sprint just to keep all the dependencies and junk up to date and deal with all the security updates. But those python scripts? Still plugging away exactly as they did in 2015. Just doing their job.
Just put relevant ads locally and the problem goes away.
By that I mean, if you're a site about say, board wargames, and there's some new board wargame that wants to advertise on your site, ok. Edit your page to add an ad graphic with a link to the seller. That's cool. And maybe the people reading your page will actually want to buy it!
But there's just no way that third-party ads through some generic ad network will ever achieve that fit or reliability. And ads based on tracking people's data and suggesting things based on what you interacted with on social media or whatever? That's always going to be hot garbage at best. Adding in a third-party ad network (and probably behind that brokers and other middlemen) can't possibly make it better, it can only make it worse. So that's what we have today.
But go back to simple static ads relevant to the content of the page and problem solved.
Yep. The only time I ever had a malware-infected computer it was one of those drive-bys. You didn't even have to click through the link to the site advertised at all, the browser would just go ahead and start prefetching it, so in case you did, it would seem quicker. And meanwhile the Adobe plugin would just happily start executing whatever code came from it.
I had to thoroughly wipe my computer and the computers of two others that fell to the same malicious ads.
Now ublock origin is standard and no Adobe products are allowed.
I did a couple of contract-to-hire positions and found it a great way to get to know the company, the people I'd be working with, and the type of work I'd be doing. As well, it was a way for them to get to know me and my work without a convoluted 3 month long interview process full of useless whiteboard puzzles, personality tests, and silly questions like "If you were a sandwich, which type of sandwich would you be?"
It can be precarious having nothing long-term lined up, but at least you're working and getting paid. More precarious would be having nothing long-term lined up and just sitting around hoping for a call back for yet another round of interviews.
Of course if you have other immediate offers, that changes things a bit. But that doesn't mean someone who doesn't is somehow desperate or the least qualified. When so many companies take so long with their hiring process, even good candidates don't usually have immediate offers.
The sweet spot is taking a contract-to-hire in your spare time while you're currently employed, so you can make the switch cleanly without months of downtime, uncertainty, and financial stress in between. And without most of the silly interview games. Gives you time to wind down, document, train somebody at the old job, and when you start the new one you're ready to go from day one.
As to the last point, I've known or been referred by someone on the inside for all my career jobs that I eventually ended up in. If I didn't, I'd try to make a contact on the inside, to find out what the company and team are like, and who's the hiring manager, before applying.
I think that's just good practice, call it pre-screening. No need to go through the whole lengthy (and expensive for the company) applying and interviewing process if a casual meeting discussion first doesn't go well.
I did cold apply and get a job offer once. I accepted on contingency because their contract had a weird clause. They balked at the contingency and I canceled the acceptance. That was a waste of all of our time.
What does PowerToys Run do that the standard WIN+R run dialog doesn't? Or just hitting the WIN key to get the search dialog?
I'm kind of a power user, since the C64 and DOS 3.3 days, and I find that Windows' current built-in stuff always works well for me. Never seen a need for a separate launcher app.
Also wonder about that FancyZones. I love how easily Windows makes basic window and desktop management - shortcuts like WIN+[arrow key] or WIN+TAB or CTRL+WIN+[arrow key] that let you move windows around, snap them, tile them, divide the screen between two, switch to another desktop, etc. All those basic functions which if you have MacOS, for some reason you need to buy separate apps just to get that basic functionality. Haven't ever felt a need for a separate app for that either.
I liked Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, and played it long before I heard of Star Control 2. But being from 1989, it could use a bit of a modernization remaster. I found the combat crazy difficult the last time I tried to play it, but maybe that can be fixed with the right Dosbox settings.
And the reason that it makes them more money is because that is exactly what the algorithm is designed to encourage and what it pays out the most for.
If we were still in the era where feeds were just a chronological list of posts by people you're subscribed to, that might be a little different.
But the feed is manipulated by algorithms that dump any non-toxic things away into obscurity while upranking and featuring the most controversial things in order to get more engagement. That's by design.
>If we froze features, and only fixed bugs (and browser compatibility), customers would eventually drift away over the long term because they do need some new features.
Why not sell it as an upgrade/add-on/DLC then? More money for you and less hassle and bugs for the customer to deal with.
No, they expect to have the opportunity to upgrade to newer versions which may be different if they want those differences. They don't expect the one they bought, learned to use, and have grown proficient with to suddenly be completely different one day for no good reason.
Consider buying a truck because you haul stuff around a lot. You don't expect to just come out to your driveway one morning and find a fuel-efficient minicar there instead because someone at the car company decided that people like fuel-efficient vehicles, so they would steal back all the trucks they made and replace them. However, maybe you used to haul a lot of cargo but you don't anymore so you've been thinking of replacing the truck and a fuel-efficient car would interest you, but you want that to be your choice.
[1] https://www.capitalismlab.com/