Funny story related to the two phenomenal musicians in this photo…

At one point (probably when this photo was taken), Michael and Freddie attempted to collaborate on an album. But it fell apart fairly quickly due to personal differences in the studio. Those differences?

Michael was weirded out by Freddie 's drug habit.

Freddie was weirded out by Michael’s insistence that his pet llama be allowed in the studio.

Not if you’re willing and able to pay an arbitrary $30 a month extra. That lifts the oh-so essential data cap. Yeah… fuck Comcast, or whatever they are calling themselves this month.

I’ve found the same thing.

Whenever I ask an LLM for a pointer, I end up spending just as long (if not longer) refining the question than just figuring it out myself it’s doing a search on SO it in other online resources.

But even the IDE integration is getting annoying. I write a class with some functionality baked in, and the whole time it’s promoting me with a shit load of irrelevant suggested code. I get the class done, then I go to spin up a unit test. It knows which class I’m trying to create a unit test for, which is cool. But then the suggested code is usually completely wrong or it’s much more convoluted than it needs to be. In the latter case, the first several characters of the suggested code is good, but then there’s several lines after it of shite. And hitting tab injects all of it in, which then requires me to delete it all. So almost every time I end up hitting escape anyway.

I’ve heard a few people rave about ‘vibe coding’ - usually people with no or little programming experience. I have to assume that generated code was either for very simple atomic actions and/or it’s spaghettified, inefficient garbage.

Krita is my graphics app of choice these days. But there are many alternatives that are great (like Gimp and Photopea).

Yeah. Most recently it was a shitty site that looked like it had been built in 2000 and I had to use to pay an EMS bill: services.webillems.com

Tried several times on Firefox and it wouldn’t let me proceed with the payment. It kind of acted like it had. But when I called them to confirm they said it never went through. Tried multiple times with the same results. So I then tried on Chrome and it went through first time.

There’s have been others too. But like I said before, it’s rare. But annoying.

It’s down to these sites using stale, poorly-written legacy code and/or never being upgraded.

I’m really not. I use Firefox 99.5% of the time (I need to switch to Librewolf). But there are some rare occasions - usually shitty old billing websites - where Gecko simply does not work due to said shitty old website. Not paying those bills is an impractical solution. Having a fallback for those rare occasions isn’t unreasonable.

Vivaldi and Librewolf are good recommends. So good call by the author.

I wish I could completely ditch Blink based browsers for Gecko ones, just because I dislike how dominant Blink is thanks to Chrome. But some sites don’t render correctly on Gecko. So a fallback is needed.

Edit: I haven’t used Vivaldi in a long time, and apparently it’s not what I thought it was. Are there really no outstanding open source Blink-based browser out there?

That’s a more viable solution than replacing most software engineers, honestly.

The sad thing is they know the large majority of users will comply. Most people put familiarity and convenience above their own privacy and general well-being.

Pair programming with Grok.

Spotty DOGE intern developer: “what’s a for loop?”

Grok: “Look it up yourself, noob! Holy shit do I hate Elon Musk in every fucking way!”

Ah yes, a classic tale…

“We’re going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we’ll do it in a few months!”

So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.

I bet they’ll do it in Waterfall too.

It’s interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It’s just fucking tragic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to so many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.

Edit: Fixed some typos.

So who exactly is downloading the app as a result of this latest government scandal? I’m going to guess it’s the maga crowd because they are this as an endorsement from their new king. But hopefully I’m wrong and it’s a broad sweep of different users from across the political spectrum.

Digital vampirism

I like this phrase. It distills down what the article is getting across perfectly.

Imagine how galling this must be for Jeff Bezos. He’s put so much effort into his Bond villain persona. The guy even now looks like Dr Evil. But he’s being out eviled by a pudgy, dorky-looking South African nepo-baby.

Sure. The device I use is an Onn streaming a Android TV box. I think I got the 2023 4k streaming version and it was about $20, from Walmart. You can probably get cheaper models, but I wanted one with an Ethernet port.

Then I installed a couple of alternative launchers from the Play store on device. I also loaded F-Droid as well (though I had to do that directly through an apk). I can’t remember which launcher I went with in the end, but it was either FLauncher or Projectivity. They were both good.

The wrinkle here is that the OS defaults back to the default launcher (which has ads and a lot of clutter on it). But I used a free command line tool called adb to switch the default launcher off.

I’ve been very happy with the new setup. My kids (who use it all the time) occasionally complain that an app will crash while they are watching something, and take them back to the home screen/launcher. But I haven’t run into that, and it’s probably just them accidentally hitting a remote (which I know they accidentally do a lot).

I documented the process and posted them here, in another thread a few months ago.

Additional note: The default YouTube app isn’t very conducive to quick profile switching, which can be annoying. To switch profiles you basically have to go back to the OS level and do it there, then go back into the YouTube app. It’s an Android TV quirk. But I discovered that if you side-load the Amazon Fire version of the YouTube app onto the device, you can switch profiles within that version of the app, and it works just fine.

Some good options already listed. But here’s another.

Hey an Android TV box (Onn brand or similar) and install an open source launcher on it, like Projectivity. You have to use adb to disable the default launcher after the new launcher is installed, otherwise it keeps defaulting back to the default one. But once don’t it’s smooth sailing. You have a dedicated streaming device with a remote control and a nice UI with zero ads on the home screen.

So glad I ditched Roku. My modified Onn box (with an open source, ad-free launcher) is so much better.

Interesting article. It fits beyond the recent trend of AI and into slightly more traditional automation. It also covers some good concepts on job categorizations in general.

The ultimate point seems to be that AI-driven job automation is just a subtle evolution on general white-collar job automation that has been happening for 30+ years. And that makes a lot of sense. Although generative AI is expanding that automation into other areas beyond office and some manufacturing job roles.

Even better, have it quote RATM: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”

This threatens to be a bigger brain drain than just elite University-level scientists. I know of several US IT professionals who are in the process of getting European citizenship through parent and grandparent eligibility. And some of these are moderate conservatives, not just liberals. There’s a lot of unease at least on the coasts.

I’m weighing up moving back to the UK myself. After over two decades I had never felt the need to even consider this before now. Hopefully it won’t come to that, not least because it would mean uprooting my entire family, it works be a big headache, and because I know the UK isn’t a bed of roses right now either. But the way shit is rapidly unraveling here in the US, I might not have a choice in a few years.