apelapan

Winamp was perfectly fine by itself as I recall it. Even on a P100 without MMX which was what I rocked around 96-97. But as soon as you did anything else that involved any kind of IO, there would be skips and stutters.

Decompression in conjunction with primitive multi-tasking on MacOS and Windows. That remained an issue until Windows XP.

(Very small groups of) people used be in awe at LAN parties when I showed them how Linux could play an MP3 without stutters while copying large files across the network and browsing images.

Then it was time to play games and people were less impressed by me not being able to join any other game than Quake...

Not talking about rotten or cracked or missing teeth. Talking about minor cavities, minor possible alignment issues and various stuff like that. The stuff most people go to the dentist for. The stuff the article we are discussing beneath is about.

Yeah, just try a dozen different ones, spaced out over a decade or two to have enough time to figure out if they were bullshitting you or not with what they suggested...

You can perhaps collect negative experiences from people you trust, and use that to narrow your selection. But you can't use good experiences, since the treatment people were happy with might as well have been a no-op and whatever problem they have would have gone away by itself in a short time. And if there wasn't a noticable pre-existing problem that was treated, but something the dentist made up on the stop, the treament someone was happy with might as well have been actively harmful, just not enough to be noticed right away.

Dentistry simply have too little credibility as a profession. If you need to pull a tooth out to make it stop hurting, sure, a random dentist is quite likely to do a reasonable job. At least compared to a random blacksmith. But as countless articles linked in this thread shows, dentists have absolutely no clue if you have cavities that need to be treated.

Dentist can't spot cavities either, they just guess. The treatment for make-believe cavities will damage your teeth for real.

Why would it be reasonable to see a dentist yearly? Assuming there is no ongoing problem that needs ongoing care.

Obviously it was not a global "everyone" like today with WhatsApp. But I would guess that perhaps 20 out of 25 in my high school class was on ICQ back in 1999 or so. Most of us only had dial up, so we wouldn't be allowed to be online and block the phone for more than a 30 minutes or an hour per day.

Anyway, ICQ was not some elite hacker thing. Anyone with enough reading comprehension to tell milk and orange juice apart from reading a label could operate it just fine.

If management spends their idle time building dashboards by themselves instead of taking up developer time asking for dashboards to be built and populated for them, there might be productivity to be had...

I was quite happy using Zeep on Python a few years ago, when I last had to do a custom SOAP integration.

It is a bit of an old-school experience, but all the important parts are there and get the work done.

XML is not perfect, but it is mature. It has been the same for a very long time, all the warts and gotchas are well known. You need to be careful about the same things in 2026 as you did back in 2006.

Technically yes, but it seems like people's intuition for safe behaviour is worse across the board with modern technology, than it is with old technology.

Maybe it will improve by itself over time, but maybe not? There are a lot of things that humans generally suck at, and successful, human-friendly design must take that into account and work around it systematically.

Maybe phones/it/banking/payments/identity/authorization needs to be radically changed, in order to serve society well.

The issue is that someone can look over your shoulder and memorize your code, if you use a pin in public.

Some people will use the same pin for screen lock and BankID, and if someone gets their code and their phone they can cause a huge amount of trouble in a very short time.

Yes, you really shouldn't ever use a pin code for BankID (or your screen lock) in public. Only biometrics if anyone is watching.

9/10 runs I leave my phone at home, but when I do bring it for some reason, I'm very happy with my "Flipbelt(tm)". It carries a 250g phone with no slipping, sliding or bounce.

My Flipbelt has lost some tightness after three years and many laundry cycles, but it still manages a Pixel 10a with no problems.

The belt rests over the hip and I usually have the phone flat on my backside. I don't really notice it after a few steps.

Risk of any use of nuclear weapons is quite different from "nuclear annihilation". There are vastly fewer and vastly less powerful nuclear bombs/warheads today than 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.

The shelling of Mauripol in Ukraine at the beginning of the current war was roughly equivalent to Hiroshima in explosive yield. It had a lot more destructive power though, since it was distributed across a huge amount of explosions, and blast damage falls approximately with the square of distance to center of explosion.

Mauripol in 2022 was not a place you wanted to be in. When a bomb falls on top of you, it makes no difference if it is small nuclear or large conventional, you very much die anyway.

I'm not trying to make war seem nice or sell the idea that the world is heading in a great direction, I'm trying to make the point that nuclear annihilation is less of a threat today than before.

Nuclear annihilation on any sort of global scale is further off than ever in the past 60-70 years or so. The doomsday clock is mostly worrying about climate change, conventional war and Facebook boomers spreading and believing fake news.

I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.

An unauthorized continuation of the official dataclasses backport from 3.7 to 3.6, that brings almost every single dataclass feature and optimization from 3.14 to every Python version between 3.6 and 3.13.

Originally created for production usage on RHEL8 systems where the target application is tied hard to system Python.

Intended to also be useful for similar situations on newer LTS editions of Ubuntu, RedHat etc.

Minimum wage is at least 10x too much. You would have no ownership and no startup grant.

There would also be no property taxes, but on the other hand there would also be no tax funded services like healthcare or education.

Wealth is a sharper answer than capitalism, even though it is an overlapping one.

To manage forrests and and other agriculture in the traditional way, we need extreme amounts of extreme poverty. We need millions and millions of people who are happy to spend 14 hours per day collecting sticks and tending sheep in the woods, in exchange for nothing more than a bowl of porridge. And they need to this every day all their lives.

We don't have that kind of poverty since capitalism took over from feudalism.

There are other ways than capitalism to build wealth in a society, but to the degree that they work and actually reduce poverty, they will have the same outcome.

On the 0.16.0 release it was more like 10% autofixable on the codebases I maintain. One of them had 100+ unfixable errors across less than 10k lines of code and tests in total. Previous ruff version labeled it perfectly clean on format and check with default settings.

Good thing we have LLM:s that can do the tedious work of checking each case and applying local annotations or updating the config globally! If I was stuck doing this manually, I would have just gotten rid of ruff and went back to black+pylint.

Sure, of you are a one-man shop trying to sell IT services in a regulated category to banks, hosting is not something you want to add to your list of problems.

This is not comparable to the situation in a company like Airbus, with perhaps 10k people of every imaginable expertise employed in just the IT department. Not comparable to most companies that are 1/50th of Airbus size either.

For a largish company (1000+ people, 500M+ turnover), assigning ten FTE:s to managing the racks and general core infra on a 365/24 basis and another five lawyers and general bureaucrats to deal with the general paperwork is nothing.

The reason for the big cloud shift in the 2010s was other things. A lot of hype/lies about how fast, cheap and easy things would be. And in many companies probably also a feeling that internal IT were a bunch of morons who failed at anything you asked them to do, and that anything else must be better.

It is only pyright/basedpyright that flags Optional[T] as deprecated as far as I am aware. Optional isn't actually deprecated by Python or anyone else.

You can disable it in the pyright settings. In my opinion T | None is not a meaningful improvement and insisting on changing it everywhere causes a whole bunch of churn and needlessly makes code stop working on older Python versions.

On the A380 you get to enjoy the higher ceiling also in economy. It does make quite a difference for how cramped you feel, even though the leg room might be the same.

And both B747 and A380 fly much calmer than the smaller, lighter widebodies, which is equally nice for passengers on all classes.

Are you just an employee or also an owner in that company? If you are an employee only, having a union to back you up could be extremely useful if things ever go bad.

It is somewhat annoying dealing with accounting and reporting for reverse VAT as a customer.

Not a dealbreaker in itself, but the sort of little thing you don't want to build a stack of. Shady PO-box address, Yahoo contact email, expired ssl certificates etc.

Scandinavian scrap metal thieves organize trucks and cranes to steal copper roofs from old churches and rip down railroad overhead lines all the time.

Free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and social safety nets make little difference.

Some people will stop at nothing to get more, no matter how much they already have. (Applies to billionaires and paupers alike). I guess you could call it having an entrepreneurial spirit.

No one steals car stereos anymore though, because you can't sell them to anyone. That mechanism could be put to more work. Heavy, EU-wide supervision and enforcement against scrap metal dealers would probably make a difference.

Relatively tiny? It is a 92 million person organisation with a 1.7 trillion dollar turnover, 2500+ years of continuous operations and covering an area 1/6th the size of USA.

Minimum wage is set by the states, 7.25 is just the national minimum. California has 16.90, Washington 17.13 etc.

If I'll update the icecone example to a single vanilla scoop costing $8.45 it still stands for a Californian.

By the way, USD 16.9/hr is on the low end of normal pay level for a IT technician or junior nurse in Sweden. Tax is highly progressive, so at that point they'd only be paying about ~18% total income tax though, perhaps that would be higher in most US states?

I don't think people should get ripped off just because they can afford it.

If you visit Sweden, don't buy ice cream in the historic area of Stockholm ("gamla stan").

As an American you might think "$10 for a single scoop of vanilla, that's nothing. A minimum wage worker packing groceries earn twice that in an hour back home". But you are not helping a starving ice cream labourer with your purchase, you are simply being taken for a ride. Walk a couple of blocks more and check the signs, and you can buy it at half price from a respectable establishment instead. Most likely the ice cream will be better at the next place as well.