Honestly, a Japanese-style capsule hotel and net cafe would probably do very well in a university environment.
Granted, that’s still charging people for homelessness, which doesn’t help any of the underlying problems. It’s just slightly less dystopian since it’s cheap.
I once had a 25" TV kind of… “un-skin” itself. It slid off of a hand-truck by accident, and while falling a whole five inches to the ground, the sheer weight and mass of the tube pushed itself through the brittle plastic housing of the set. What was left was a pile of plastic shrapnel and circuit boards, with a fully intact tube sitting atop it. It was only ten years old at the time, and I think it was either bad plastic or it lived its life in a sunny spot, letting UV destroy the material.
TV tube glass is actually surprisingly robust along the front and sides, despite containing a vacuum. It’s the neck that you have to be careful with. One false move and it’ll snap, destroying the whole thing.
Wow. I didn’t realize this until you pointed it out. Thanks. TIL.
This is such a hilariously bad take. I like how “I can’t use Win32 on Linux” morphed into “re-write the whole app in Javascript just so I can use Electron.”
Meanwhile, Wine and QT are like: “am I a joke to you?”
I’ll add that (IMO) a lot of applications are becoming increasingly malicious, although less-so in the desktop space. I’m happy that devs like this are forced to quasi-sandbox their crap into a browser. Actually, if anyone knows how to crack into an Electron app in order to restore local plugins, user-scripts, and sandbox security controls, let me know. Or just liberate the guts into a local web app instead so I can use a real browser? This trend could be very useful for local security if those features become available.
unfucking postfix
This is not a task for the feint of heart, nor was it ever, even back when the technology was first invented. I salute you.
Officer, it’s this comment, right here.
I’m going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.
<rant>
You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don’t care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you’re in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn’t even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else’s data.
If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I’d like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn’t used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.
I’m seeing this the other way around. It’s possible the normalization is incidental: the comic exists because it’s a common interaction these days.
At the same time, the comic is from the New Yorker. Magazines have a different attitude about advertising in general, so (IMO) this is as anti-ad as a magazine comic can get away with.
I was gonna say: I have no idea what this is like.
I’m simultaneously living my best life, (mostly) ad free, and at once unaware of how the rest of the world navigates an ad-encrusted digital space.
To quote your quote:
I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.
I think the author just independently rediscovered “middle management”. Indeed, when you delegate the gruntwork under your responsibility, those same people are who you go to when addressing bugs and new requirements. It’s not on you to effect repairs: it’s on your team. I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. The idea that relying on AI to do nuanced work like this and arrive at the exact correct answer to the problem, is naive at best. I’d be sweating too.
Same here. At first, I thought I was going to get a better Discord experience with the dedicated ‘app’. Nope. Another web app crammed into Electron, multiplying the overall browser footprint on my system. It now happily lives on in a normal browser tab where my ad blockers and user-scripts claw back local control of things.
Hey, kudos for finding multiple anti-patterns all in one place like that. I didn’t even think about “underpowered desktop as company server” as another pattern, but here we are.
Sorry you didn’t get the contract, but that sounds like a blessing in disguise to be honest.
deleted by creator
The amount of work I have completed with Tampermonkey in situations like this should have made that same IT department quite anxious.
I mean, it’s a pretty good illustration of a deadlock. Most traffic intersections, especially 4-way stops are basically mutexes anyway.
Jamming a circle though… that’s like deadlocking a ring buffer message queue with threaded consumers. Or something. It’s just a spectacular way to break stuff any way you slice it.
That environment was wild though. At the time, you basically needed to be an electrical engineer and/or a licensed HAM operator, just to have your head wrapped around how it all worked. Familiarity with the very electronics of the thing, even modifying the hardware directly when needed, was crucial to operating that old tech.
Fellow tech-trash-disposal-engineer here. I’ve made a killing on replacing corporate anti-patterns. My career features such hits and old-time classics like:
In all of these cases, there were always better answers that maybe just cost a little bit more. AI will absolutely cause some players to train-wreck their business, all to save a buck, and we’ll all be there to help clean up. Count on it.
Unsolicited advice warning: Depending on how handy you are, you may want to consider grabbing a few wear parts or the most commonly replaced bits before inventory completely dries up. I used to have a newer (but still old) dryer and thought the heating element was failing - a replacement part was actually kind of hard to source. Anyway, that would give the ol’ beast a good shot at another decade or two.
I recall reading in Consumer Reports many years ago that most refrigerators were discarded not because they stopped working, but because of cosmetic damage. Broken plastic door shelves, dents, rust, out of style, etc. The compressors were still fine.
Yup. The enshitification kicks in super hard after a technology is mostly “solved”. Refrigerator compressors and insulated boxes are both very much optimized as much as they’re going to get. The only way to eke more cash out of making a product like that is to cut corners on other bits, or get people to buy a subscription somehow.
“A therapy” of goths, then?