itfossil

Microsoft shops from the 90s called in to say: "You're wrong"

It just takes a bit more effort, that's all.

Adjusted for inflation? Who cares? People's compensation haven't risen enough to even account for inflation so how is that helpful?

It's not. Saying something isn't expensive because its the same price after adjusting for inflation is a slap to the face of millions, perhaps even billions who are effectively making less now than they were ten or twenty years ago after they adjust for inflation.

That phrase is not the silver bullet you seem to think it is.

The accident is that you basically can't buy a dumb TV anymore. It's a really sad state of affairs.

As it so happens I currently run a Roku TV that is not connected to the internet with an Apple TV attached. However that is not long a term solution and if it ever dies you can be damn sure I'll buy a different television.

Roku is breaking things constantly. If you ever have to replace that hardware, it will have more up to date software and your experience will be broken. This will be by design.

Even implying that somebody should consider buying Roku hardware at this point is stunningly irresponsible. In the last few weeks they broke HDR. Before that they broke the ability of their TVs to display content properly when using apps on the built-in OS due to some new craptacular frame rate feature they pushed out and have refused to roll back. Thankfully I can work around it on my Apple TV by turning on Game Mode for the input. They are currently testing a wide variety of invasive ad features that you can be damn sure will destroy your experience once they officially roll them out.

They harvest every bit of your data and sell it to whomever will pay.

Roku is a stunningly objectionable company. On top of all that (as if it wasn't enough), their platform lags behind everybody else. They refuse to license a full range of video codecs so pieces of software like Channels DVR will never work on their platform. Not to mention that when you run a Roku TV that isn't connected to the Internet, you lose the ability to customize various aspects of it. You can't rename the inputs for example.

Nobody should ever even imply that somebody should buy a Roku device. They are crap and there is virtually no chance of the company changing course.

They are a poster child for enshittification.

ROFL - Are you seriously telling me a device running Roku software is trouble-free? Sell this lie somewhere else please. Devices running Roku software, TVs especially are a straight up dumpster fire.

On top of that, its harvesting the hell out of your data.

Stop being a sucker. Toss that Roku powered shit out of the window.

This post resonates a lot with me. As somebody in the twilight of their coding career - I totally understand what the author means by "over-responsibility"

After 25 years - I'm over it. But the flip side of that is that I can't un-see the fact that so much of the tech shit in my life is broken and it has practically become a second job trying to manage it and / or fix it. Thankfully I don't do it by trying to code replacements like the author seems to. Instead I try to come up with workarounds or find replacements.

Nevertheless the weight of the curse is about the same I figure.

Excerpt:

So over the last week I’ve been subjected to multiple uses of the term “vibe coding”. Now back here under the rock that I live, that term struck me as rather peculiar so I queued up some videos to watch and took a tour of the idea this morning. Now now, don’t worry. This isn’t going to be just another anti-AI rant. We’ve had our fill of that, right? No instead we are going to focus on the flaws of the Venture Capitalist class, courtesy of the people running Y-Combinator.

Why them? Well it’s because they made this video which happens to be the first one I watched on the topic. I was going to watch a video in which Primeagen reacts to this video as that is what my friend sent to me but decided to just watch the source video instead as I didn’t want to waste the additional time listening to Prime to bash it (though make no mistake, Prime is awesome). As you may have noticed, I’m quite capable of doing that myself.

Hell I’m not even going to go into specifics here. Because the idea behind this is so ridiculously stupid that I just can’t be bothered to give it enough credit to waste that kind of time on it. However the 1000ft summary of the idea is this: Vibe coding is essentially a hipster name for so-called software engineers (or as the Y-Combinator staff likes to refer to them “product engineers”) who basically prompt coding AIs and mindlessly toss whatever crap it produces into the mix. Now to be fair by mindlessly I don’t mean just dumping the first round of output into the IDE, making sure it compiles and shipping it. No instead what I mean is dumping the third or fourth round of output into the IDE, making sure it compiles and shipping it.

See? I can be kind.

...click through for the rest!

So with each passing day I’m being forced to face the cruel reality which darkly looms: My country, the United States of America, is basically speed-running its way towards collapse. What does that look like? I can’t give you specifics, but I know for a fact that short of a sudden and abrupt change to either our leadership or the political institutions our leader has surrounded himself with, the world that we know and take for granted is about to come to an end.

Before I continue, I want to make one thing exceptionally clear: I’ve spent weeks thinking about what to write in this post. I have struggled with finding the right words and the right thoughts to clearly relay my ideas here. I have spent even more time trying to codify and validate those ideas for myself. As a writer who essentially has a front row seat to this horror show, I am awash in conflicting emotions that simultaneously are begging for my attention. It’s hard to not write about this topic emotionally. Very hard. That being said, I believe I have my thoughts organized enough and that I’ve spent enough time thinking this through, to accomplish my objective.

So what is my objective? My objective is to redefine the parameters for the upcoming civil war. Yes, I absolutely believe that’s where we are headed. But as it stands right now, I believe that the battle lines have been incorrectly defined. I believe this circumstance is the result of decades of propaganda and efforts on the part of the actual perpetrators in an effort to channel the easy to predict violence in a direction that points away from them.

So who are the perpetrators? That’s easy: The insanely rich. Trump is one. Musk is another. The big tech CEOs who lined up to show fealty on inauguration day are also included. A thousand others who you don’t see hamming up for the cameras are also to blame. These are the people who have laid the groundwork for the horrors we are currently experiencing and for the civil war we will all soon be taking part in. But if that war was to be fought today, it wouldn’t be fought between us and the billionaires who have spent decades embezzling every bit of money and resources they could get their grubby hands on. Rather it will fought between the relatively poor people who are all actually the victims of their charade.

...click through for the rest!

Over the last few weeks, the situation here in the United States has degraded considerably. The Republic is breaking down and none of the checks and balances the founding fathers put into place are working as intended. I do not anticipate this situation improving anytime soon. That’s because no remaining government official with actual power seems willing or capable of actually stopping Trumps agenda. To make matters worse, the CEOs of Big Tech companies basically lined up to kiss the ring by both contributing to the inaugural parties and attending the actual inauguration.

No it wasn't. The law specifically states that the president can only enact an extension in the event that TikTok is credibly attempting to negotiate a sale. They are not doing that, hence an extension will not happen.

Anybody who thinks TikTok is coming back anytime soon is a sucker. They aren't selling and the law only allows for extensions if they are in the process of selling. Trump may be able to violate the law with impunity thanks to the morons on our Supreme Court but nobody else involved with the TikTok ban (Google, Apple, Oracle) has that luxury.

From the article:

"WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden won’t enforce a ban on the social media app TikTok that is set to take effect a day before he leaves office on Monday, a U.S. official said Thursday, leaving its fate in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump.

Congress last year, in a law signed by Biden, required that TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance divest the company by Jan. 19, a day before the presidential inauguration. The official said the outgoing administration was leaving the implementation of the law — and the potential enforcement of the ban — to Trump."

After all of the drama, hand wringing and endless unverified claims that TikTok is a national security risk, I can't believe this is how they are going to end this. It's utterly mind-blowing.

So the other day on Mastodon I posted a link to this amazingly depressing video in which the author laments the fact that he lost one of his freelance writing gigs to AI powered tech. I also said that “the tech industry has devolved into a money hungry mob of extortionists, grifters and rent-seekers” and promised a subsequent blog post on the topic. This is that post.

So let’s start this post off on the right foot by making some declarations most of you will likely regard as a sign of premature-dementia on my part, shall we?

...Click through for the rest! Comment here for a spirited discussion!

Well if they can reach 300fps at 4k then they can prove to everybody once and for all that their dick is bigger than everybody elses.

Cause it ain't about the gameplay or the usefulness. It's all about that big dick energy.

Oh so its almost like everything else AI related, they basically cheated and lied.

If you are shocked by this, you are the sucker in the room.

So as was typical with my end of year posts that I used to make on my previous blog, this is an end of year post. All of my end of year posts are basically rants regarding the state of the world and the state of tech more specifically. This time around I am going to focus primarily on tech as there is only so much shit my brain can suffer through at once. So how was 2024 in tech? In a word: terrible. Let’s dig into that.

So why was tech terrible in 2024? Well a large part of this judgement revolves around the industry’s full fledged unquestioned embrace of AI bullshit tech. A lot of this to do with the fact that the big money investors tugging on the puppet strings of a lot of tech startups have essentially run out of practical ideas. Once the startups succeeded in getting the word out, the big tech companies decided that they all had to play catch up. Some of them bought into the ecosystem by investing in the startups, some of them built their own and some of them just piggy-backed on other people’s work.

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The amount of desperate rationalization in this thread is unbelievable. It's like watching people at a Pentecostal church start speaking in tongues in the hope that something wonderful will happen until it evolves into the realization that shit isn't going to happen and then slowly they just kind of putter out.

TLDR: The cacophony of fools is so loud now. Thank goodness it won't last.

Love to see and I've been waiting for the Pi500 release for awhile. I'm running my house on Pi400s so the Pi500 will be a huge upgrade. They are still silent, have double the RAM, triple the speed, so whats not to like? Plus they will fit into the exact same desk crevice where the current Pi400s live.

New Pi day is the best day!

Its a shame you aren't even reading what I'm saying. Let me be especially blunt:

The entire healthcare industry is full of companies that are making bank at the expense of the dying, sick and the disabled. This includes hospitals, big pharma, medical device manufacturers and insurance companies. They are all working tirelessly to increase their profit margins at the expense of people who can't afford to pay the inflated prices. Because of their greed, people are needlessly dying.

Frankly I would cheer just as much if somebody capped the CEO of one of these companies just as much as I'm cheering for them capping UnitedHealth's CEO.

So cut the shit and stop posting the same response over and over again please.

There are a lot of rich corporations in different parts of the healthcare industry headed by rich executives who are making bank while poor people die of preventable causes. Spin it however you’d like - no matter which one of the executives of any of these companies got assassinated I suspect that you’d be here simping for them regardless.

> All money paid out in claims – $303b

Complete and utter bullshit. That's the amount they listed as the cost of revenue yeah, but I'm willing to bet that a large chunk of that isn't being spent on claim payouts. Given the complete and utter lack of transparency into that number, neither you nor I can rightly claim that's what its spent on.

In any event, I don't care how profitable they are. I'm not looking to play that game. Their business model requires them to MURDER their customers in order to maintain their profit margin. This is what they are doing, day in and day out.

The fact they are making any profit at all, acting solely as the gatekeeper between people and the medical care they need, should be an indictment which strips them of the moral high ground... yet in this diseased and ass-backwards economic system (which has turned more into a religion than anything else) people like you actually have the nerve to claim it as a defense.

Interesting point. However the fact remains that even long before the rise of the technologies you cite, people with resources were hoarding wealth and lording it over those who lacked it. The core issue here, in my opinion, is actually human greed and the fact that in some people it simply cannot be sated, regardless of how much they manage to acquire.

Capitalism attempts to harness that core flaw within our human nature rather than trying to suppress or curtail it. The followers of Capitalism effectively believe that empowering and legitimizing this greed will produce a form of collective well-being. Evidence of this can be seen in the a large variety of nonsensical theories that they have pushed over the years such as the infamous "trickle-down economics" theory.

At some point, humanity has to grow beyond treating life like a game where we are all trying to put points on the board. In our current iteration of civilization, Capitalism provides the basis of the rules we play by and money is the metric by which we keep score. Kicking Capitalism to the curb would only be the first step to evolving beyond infantile obsession. If we don't manage to do this, we will all pay a collective price.

The time to pay the piper will likely come sooner rather than later at the rate things seem to be going.

P.S. I really appreciate this discussion, thank you for taking the time to engage!

Totally agree. I touch on this later on in the actual blog post:

"Capitalism is inherently immoral. It pits us against each other. It posits that the accumulation of money and resources should be our ultimate end-goal. So it’s no wonder that over the hundreds of years we’ve had to figure out how to exist within its confines, some of us have become exceedingly good at it. So good in fact, that others are forced to do without basic necessities and aren’t even afforded to the dignity to die comfortably."

On December 4th, 2024 somebody brazenly murdered the CEO of United Healthcare, Brain Thompson, in broad daylight. Health Insurance company executives around the country are wiping their websites of their identifying information in fear that any one of them might be next. Nationwide law enforcement is hunting for the shooter, but thus far he appears to have slipped through their fingers. What do I think? Well I hope he escapes because I love the smell of justice in the morning.

Health Insurance companies are a plague on modern society. They are the ultimate form of capitalistic parasite that has managed to wedge itself somewhere between our collective needs and our collective lack of resources. They then exacerbated the situation so they could make billions of dollars a year of profit in the process. Make no mistake, they are in the business of killing their customers for profit.

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Quoting is part of fair use ;)

Feel free to keep on trying though!

So let’s get right down to it: If you use AI, you are a thief. If you don’t use AI and you have published content online that can be accessed without going through some sort of paywall, you have probably been robbed. Does this sound extreme? Well I’m truly sorry to say that it isn’t.

To those of you in the know, these statements are likely not going to shock you. The rest of you are likely just shaking your heads in disbelief. So let’s get into the nitty gritty of this. The first step in understanding how I can make such a broad statement and legitimately claim that its accurate is to understand how copyright works...