From a US perspective, some civil rights improved after 1999 (such as gay marriage), though I guess some civil rights were weakened (privacy after 9/11). All improvements are being rapidly rolled back now though. Societally, I think homosexuality is more accepted now; not sure about transgendered people. I think there’s less racism now, not sure (I lived in a very rural area back then, and now live in a large city, so IDK). Housing was more affordable. I don’t think anti-intellectualism was as widespread. There was less acceptance of authoritarianism. Technology has definitely advanced, but slower than I would have imagined. Climate has changed more rapidly than I would’ve expected.

I almost never have cash or even change now, so that’s what I tell them. I used to give them some money if I had it and wasn’t immediately going to use it. One of my old friends used to give them a beer out of a pack he bought if there was a person outside the store or on the corner begging on the drive to wherever he was going.

“Innovation” really started accelerating when we started using agriculture and had division of labor. An aristocracy (not sure what’s the best term here) would form where some people had a lot of free time, and didn’t need to spend all their time hunting/gathering/building/migrating. This enabled them to follow intellectual pursuits. All of this was at the expense of everyone else though. It’s still kind of like that with wealthy nations extracting wealth/labor from poor nations, allowing the wealthy nations to spend some money funding universities and research.

I had a Mox and it was the most stable router I’ve ever had. Never had to power cycle it, and I even have to power cycle my fancy Asus somewhat often.

Yeah, Apple’s stock went up 5% yesterday because of Tim Cook’s meeting with Trump (where he promised $600 billion investment in US manufacturing), and Apple’s saying they won’t be affected by the new 50% tariffs on India. There are also ghost factories that were built during Trump’s first term.

You guys have pensions?

Private property (as opposed to personal property) is property owned by individuals or entities that generate profits from others’ labor, and is abolished under communism. So, no, you can’t take someone’s personal PC (or any personal property). I’m not that deep into communist theory or thought, so not sure if “free markets” can exist under communism (I know money and states don’t exist), but I know there are theoretical socialist societies where free markets exist (market socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc).

I never understood the popularity of AWS. It’s much cheaper using VPSs and even dedicated servers sometimes. I’ve worked on very cost-sensitive projects where I rolled our own highly-available k8s and postgres clusters on dedicated servers and VPSs and saved the company a shit load of money. Only used the “cloud” to store backups (Backblaze). There’s tons of other options other than major “cloud” providers, and they’re often much cheaper.

Hmm, a lot of my career was done doing embedded programming, where mistakes in production are very costly, and software/hardware has to be released with basically zero bugs, so that may be where the disconnect is. I still think bugs and technical debt are costly elsewhere too if the product is going to have a long lifecycle, but executives are just dumb.

For open source stuff, Codeberg is good. For private stuff, just git + ssh is good. Gitlab and Bitbucket are fine for corporate stuff, I guess. An organization could just self-host a Forgejo (or Gitlab) instance as well.

I keep hearing stuff like this, but I haven’t found a good use or workflow for AI (other than occasional chatbot sessions). Regular autocomplete is more accurate (no hallucinations) and faster than AI suggestions (especially accounting for needing to constantly review the suggestions for correctness). I guess stuff like Cursor is OK at making one-off tools on very small code-bases, but hits a brick-wall when the code base gets too big. Then you’re left with a bunch of unmaintainable code you’re not very familiar with and you would to spend a lot of time trying to fix yourself. Dunno if I’m doing something wrong or what.

I guess what I’m saying is that using AI can speed you up to a point while the project accumulates massive amounts of technical debt, and when you take into account all the refactoring and debugging time, it results in taking longer to produce a buggier project. At least, in my experience.

I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.

Chamoy on fruit or candy is awesome.

I’ve tried Copilot for a while and played around with Cursor for a bit. I was better and faster without Copilot due to sometimes not paying enough attention of the lines it would generate. This would cause subtle bugs that took a long time to debug. Cursor just produced unmaintainable code-bases that I had no knowledge of, and to make major changes, would be faster for me to just rewrite it from scratch. The act of typing gives me time to think more about what I’m doing or am going to do, while Copilot generations are distracting and break my thought processes. I work best with good LSP tooling and sometimes AI chatbots (mostly just for customized example snippets for libraries or frameworks I’m unfamiliar with; though that has its own problems because the LLMs knowledge is out of date a lot) that don’t directly modify my code.

Yes. It affected the entire economy. I was young, but I remember people around me being worried about losing their jobs, some losing their jobs, and some unable to find jobs (everyone around me were factory workers). The data seems to reflect this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE. The system depends on the rich investing their money, and when they get scared to invest in “productive” enterprises, they just stash their money in “unproductive” stuff like government bonds (which should actually signal to the government that the government should borrow and spend on productive stuff to take advantage of low borrowing costs, but the government is stupid and usually does austerity instead).

I agree, but very large corporations (like WalMart and Amazon with high levels of vertical integration and revenue greater than the GDP of many countries) are kind of like a command-economies and “work” (for the shareholders). So, I think command-economies can work, but the question is for whom.

I’ve bought some yaupon tea bags before. It was actually pretty good. I like black tea, and don’t like coffee though, so people expecting a coffee taste may not like it. It’s very comparable to black tea, IMO. I also have a yaupon bush in my yard, but never tried processing and ingesting it.

The numbers are going to be cooked to a crisp under this admin.

Oh yeah, true. Forgot about the the supplement grift.

Not sure about the soap thing. It definitely strips more of the “seasoning” than just water in my experience. And it’s my understanding modern dish soap contains some synthetics, and cast iron is very porous (I use the cheap kind, I think the kind for camping, lol), so I avoid soap. I just use very warm water and sometimes mechanical means (stainless steel scrubbers) to clean my cast iron. Tbf, just cooking very fat/oil heavy stuff restores much of the seasoning whenever it’s lost.