jordand

I work in the games industry with exceptionally skilled system programmers that can do that too. They're getting on in age, and there's fewer programmers in the younger generations that are interested in any of it. Technology is sadly increasingly homogenising around Unreal Engine 5

Apple is extensively and heavily using GenAI internally, and I've not got confidence in their product quality going forward (macOS is still declining in overall quality, from my experience)

There's now an EU option in Fastmail for hosting your data

I'm looking at alternative email provider options, and I'm struggling to find options that have banned GenAI, and have the features and reliability I need. I will gladly pay a premium for a provider that's not going to let AI creep in gradually, and take a bigger role over data and security

...and that's a dealbreaker for me

Mullvad. Best option on the market, and what I'm moving to

The article linked at the bottom of this is a much more interesting read: https://starlabs.sg/blog/2025/11-breaking-into-a-brother-mfc...

Read the article. My point is Musk has been doing backflips to keep things afloat with Tesla, while competitors like BYD (and really Waymo too given the self-driving) are continuing to succeed, grow, and innovate.

SpaceX is the largest buyer of Cybertrucks. They've spent more than $100 million on them. Link: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-buying-own-cyber...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono... - Worth a read if you haven't already

There's been concerns for a while with the PS5 and the use of liquid metal in that. Especially given it stands vertically, and that liquid metal can "shift" downwards

I recently bought a Lenovo Mini PC (01Q8X10) for under £300 that has a Snapdragon X1 CPU (and 32GB LPDDR5 RAM!) and it's turning out to be perfect for self-hosting running the newly released WSL Containers on Windows 11 with WSL 3 (it doesn't fully support Linux yet). Podman had some issues with WSL 3 that they're still releasing fixes for, but it's all working with that too.

They're still getting the bare minimum of maintenance software updates. It's 2019-era tech that's long overdue a refresh.

The number of people using web browsers has gone up massively though over the past 15 years. 2%-3% right now isn't as bad as it would have been in the past

Many industries are sadly coupled to Windows, for years to come. There's no getting rid of a lot of legacy software/code. Oddly enough, Microsoft has rolled back their forced Copilot, in a rare step in the right direction.

It's not that dissimilar to how Dioxus does this kind of thing with rsx! but yeah, it first got released in 0.19 and got big improvements in this release. It'll be interesting to see how uptake and adoption goes.

The breaking Rendering changes have always been the big challenge, especially with external plugins that need time to migrate too. They're starting to get less disruptive over this past year.

LTO drives/tape are not friendly, consumer grade technology. One look on a search engine, and it's all obscure refurbished server parts costing hundreds. The prices of them going forwards might increase sharply too and make it unviable...a bit like external hard drives right now. So yeah, printing everything out and hoping for the best is the only sensible option...

LTO tapes are the worst possible format for passing on family photos to family members. I dread to think of anyone in my family trying to setup an LTO drive when they barely understand how to use their smartphone.

Blu-ray drives are becoming increasingly rare sadly, so it's not great to hand over to others in the years ahead. An external hard disk drive kept safe and secure might be your only option. I had the same issue 6 years ago winding down my company and archiving data. Only sensible options were M-DISC and external hard disks.

There's very few companies now making new Blu-Ray drives too. Pioneer has supposedly stopped producing them, and the ASUS drive I bought earlier this year was one of the only SKUs on the market. Sony stopped producing high-capacity recordable BDXL discs too which means they aren't much of an option now for large backups.

GrapheneOS last said they should be able to support Pixel 11 along with the Motorola phones

People have had a lot of issues with drivers and locked-down firmware on Snapdragon devices, so even with official Linux support for the chipset, the devices themselves could still be a nightmare to get working.

Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X for the past 2 years or so, but the community is still having issues with drivers and firmware on devices. I bought a surprisingly capable Lenovo mini PC with a Snapdragon X at a massive discount and it's stuck on Windows 11 for now.

I ran into all of this with the first few years of my career. Even after years, MAUI has struggled to gain traction and Avalonia has grown and is far more the de-facto choice for .NET cross-platform GUI. Both work collegues and myself have ran into XAML/WPF Styling horrors where it's all one giant aggregation/inheritance nightmare generated by Blend (and done by someone that didn't quite know what they were doing)

All true and yeah, I did discuss with my employer at the time about how they needed to think long term about migrating to SQL Server or MySQL/PostgreSQL with a web front-end. However, the giant IT contractor they were stuck with would only allow SQL Server and charge a fortune, and they didn't have the time/money/know-how to go anywhere with that. They were stuck with Access!

In 2026, Microsoft Access is still fully supported and bundled into Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscriptions. Back in 2014, I'd said to my employer that it's not going anywhere for at least a decade (and that they can fully ignore a report they'd received from the NDPB that oversaw their work that suggested Access might be at risk of disappearing)

I've looked into these before and they're often a monthly/annual SaaS that are either by a one-person company, or worse, something like AirTable that gets crazy price hikes out of nowhere (or shut down) that's a disaster for a small company. Place I worked already had Microsoft Office paid for so why move away from Access.

For RAD, Delphi was filling a pretty big niche in its day, and it's still used in some companies local to me. I remember being told during an interview that it performs really well and it's kept up well enough with the changing times. I knew someone from University about 10 years ago that got her first Software job writing Delphi!

All these years later, Microsoft Access is still alive and kicking, and just three years ago, the 32bit version got Large Address Aware (LAA) support! Technically my very first software job was writing VBA in Microsoft Access for a few weeks and they're probably still running it (there's no drop in replacement for it or cheap way to migrate away)