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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 7th, 2024

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  • Is the internet scarier?

    Or is it just millennials and “internet natives” having kids and more of them knowing better what the internet actually is.

    I tell people to imagine a public place with everyone in it, the majority wearing masks or costumes. With constantly recording surveillance. Do you take off your mask.

    Sure the mask is not perfect protection, and there are areas off to the side where people seem to not be wearing masks. But go ahead and choose a way to keep your kids safe.





  • The problem is artists often make their actual living doing basic boiler plate stuff that gets forgotten quickly.

    In graphics it’s Company logos, advertising, basic graphics for businesses.

    In writing it’s copy for websites, it’s short articles, it’s basic stuff.

    Very few artists want to do these things, they want to create the original work that might not make money at all. That work potentially being a winning lottery ticket but most often being an act of expressing themselves that doesn’t turn into a payday.

    Unfortunately AI is taking work away from artists. It can’t seem to make very good art yet but it can prevent artists who could make good art getting to the point of making it.

    It’s starving out the top end of the creative market by limiting the easy work artists could previously rely on to pay the bills whilst working on the big ideas.





  • During setup there is a keyboard shortcut to get to command prompt.

    Then a command you can use.

    Then the machine restarts and you can setup without a Microsoft account.

    (For reference I’m on my dual booting Linux phase. I’d like to ditch it altogether but Wayland isn’t quite there yet and x never will be.)


  • Absolutely. The reason these things don’t last is because it’s not worth the investment to redevelop and maintain.

    I’m just pointing out that’s the reason to move to where there is investment and sustainability in the product.

    Firefox cut funding for maintaining an option due to low usage. Speculative investment in a replacement fell flat.

    Google cuts investment for the same reasons and that happens often. They speculate on a new product then cut it if it doesn’t work out for them.

    Neither company doing this is a bad thing.

    The problem most people have is they are late to move to a mature product, which then having reached maturity is assessed as either a success or failure. Then due to low usage it’s cut.

    Then they’re looking for the next mature product. Again ignoring sustainability. Which is then also cut.


  • Portugal. They’ve essentially been doing this for years.

    Drugs are decriminalised and in themselves legal.

    It’s still technically a crime to use them but generally you are treated as a patient with addiction. Not a criminal.

    There’s still a massive body of criminal law around supplying, and producing them.

    So they are not dismantling controls on drugs but targeting the issues drugs cause instead of criminalising users needlessly.

    Not perfect there but certainly lessons to be learnt.


  • Firefox has also had issues in this regard.

    “Firefox’s built-in support for web feeds and Live Bookmarks was removed with the release of Firefox version 64 in December 2018.”

    https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox

    They pushed “Pocket” over RSS.

    Now they’re depreciating the Mac pocket app and it’s clearly not going to do well in the future.

    5 years of moving people away from RSS to another service, to then start to depreciate that service.

    5 years from the major redesign of google reader from 2008 to 2013 and closing it down.

    My lesson. Expect to change your software for the web every 4 years or so. If it lasts longer it’s a bonus. But chances are if you make the effort to move to the best (and most recently developed) candidate every 4 years you’ll be in a good place.

    You know when software gets stale, you know when there are better options, use them.

    Sometimes your current choice gets a new round of development, sometimes it goes stale.