plinkplink

There have been many tools that were sold as developer replacements over the years. - Microsoft FrontPage - Adobe Dreamweaver - A litany of glorified WYSIWYG editors - WordPress - Wix - Power Apps/SharePoint ...and so on.

Business owners have been getting sexually aroused at the prospect of taking a developer's salary and putting it in their own pockets for decades. Each iteration of this wet dream has only locked businesses into "low code" systems that require even more, highly-specialized developers to operate. Right now, and probably for a while, Devon, et al. is on par with the drag-and-drop automagical app building snake oil stuff.

LLMs are useful to help developers be more productive, which does translate to lay-offs, but until someone creates an AI that can translate the absolute fevered gibberish that comes out of business people's heads into a profitable piece of software, this is just MS FrontPage v100.0.

Just like an entire industry sprang up around fixing WordPress websites that business owners thought they could do themselves, pretty soon we'll start seeing job postings for AI-Generated Spaghetti Unravellers.

I'm (half seriously) imagining a future were software engineers are mostly consultants that show up and talk with business folks, then talk with the local robot, and get the project to actually work. Bill $1k per hour.

I use the Stylus browser extension to write and automatically apply CSS to websites I visit often.

Just add:

#root ~ div { display: none !important; }

.. to your custom stylesheet for medium.com (and all their crappy subdomains and clones) to get rid of that super irritating social media popup thing.

Either that or use Firefox's underrated "reader view" by pressing F9. It's totally worth it.

Stylus for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ Stylus for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...

If a high school class was optional to attend, that class would not be attended. Your solution instantly becomes "cancel the last class of the day."

Independent of Google since a vast majority of browsers are Chrome or built on Google's Chromium platform - which means they can spy on users.

Vile.

Absolutely infuriating.

It is important to keep Firefox solvent and operational as it is the last real independent browser. Everything else is built on Chromium (or Webkit), which are owned and spied upon by Google (and Apple?)

Yes. I'm sure a similar conversation happened during the first radio show, or the first magazine. Now the slippery slope has given us ads on billboards, on the radio, every three minutes on television, each inch of public space including right in your face at the urinal, on blimps, pulled behind airplanes, written in the sky, on the inside and outside of taxis and buses and trucks, in every store on every shelf, you are barraged while trapped at the gas pump, before a movie you already paid to see, they hire people to wave signs in your face while waiting at stoplights, and advertising is baked in to every electron of the Internet... you get the point; it's extremely bad for your personal mental health and that of society in general.

If we don't complain and let them know that subjecting us to sleazy ads is intolerable, where will it end?

A browser is a tool that we have to use for work. It is impossible to block bait-and-switch ads built in like this. It's bait-and-switch because the expected behavior is to display the changelog, not an advertisement for Disney.

Interesting. Yes; it is a slimy bait-and-switch ad for Disney's newest animated series - ultimately an ad for their streaming service. I will not support them by posting links here.

I put enormous effort into blocking as much advertising and marketing from my life as is humanly possible. I have written my own browser plugins and scripts, I have created network-wide blockers, I do not listen to the radio, I do not watch television, I do not look at billboards.

I use Firefox to protect my privacy from advertisers and to block ads. So you may be able to imaging my rage when Firefox updated and automatically loaded this full-page ad from Our Dark Lord Disney:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/98.0/whatsnew/?oldvers...

It's no secret that Mozilla needs cash. But I imagine this move is counter-productive as a lot of people like me, who support them monetarily as much as I can by purchasing their various apps and services, are driven away by loathsome ads.

you_have_become_the_very_thing_you_swore_to_destroy.meme

Toto Neorest... don't those things cost like, $10k?

I'm too lazy to even comment on this post.

If you were really an imgurian, you'd know that the correct perfect score is 5/7.

You forgot the one where you get a popup for moving your mouse out of the window. For some reason I hate that one the most.

No one thinks in spoken language. The construct of words is not the kernel of thought. More like the parsing of your subconscious thoughts (neurons firing) into human-readable language.

Think of raw thought as machine code and internal monologue as a high-level programming language. Binary vs JavaScript. Some people are able to interact meaningfully with their subconscious machine code while others must abstract it into spoken language. There is an infinite spectrum between the two extremes that we all constantly tread.

Infants who don't know how to talk yet and animals (as well as hominids before language) do not think in words. Brains are not constructed in such a way as to use spoken language words as the fundamental component of thought.

I, personally, almost never think or reason about things in human language unless I am talking, practicing a speech, or writing. Then I must manually construct each word. I think deeply about things quickly and make useful logical connections between disparate topics that others tend to miss, but I tend to be slow at communicating.

I was a cable guy in San Francisco. The stories in this article are very plausible and even tame compared to the shit that I've seen.

My first day on my own I went to a "hotel" run by an Indian that barely spoke English in the Tenderloin. He pounded on a door for ten minutes shouting something unintelligible and finally unlocked the door to reveal a tiny room with shit smeared on the walls and a naked transvestite covered in blood from a heroin needle writhing on blood-stained sheets.

"Shouldn't we help?" I asked. "No. Is OK. Fix TV." All the little metal fittings on the cables throughout the whole hotel had been cut off by guests for use as makeshift pipes. The hotel charged by the hour and didn't ask any questions.

I have many anecdotes if anyone is interested in hearing them.

Physical qwerty keyboards on phones. I still miss the Motorola Droid 3 after all these years. photo: https://bit.ly/2yXQWU3

On-screen keyboards are good and all, but there has never been as great a feeling as sliding out a full keyboard and wailing on it. I doubt I'll ever be as fast with an on-screen interface as I was with actually typing on a physical keyboard.

I can second this, having worked in tech in Columbus for a number of years.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions you might have for vocal-free drum n bass. DnB works best for my productivity, but vocals ruin it. Here are some that I've found:

https://youtu.be/CL-vqNpGVQs https://youtu.be/-e-jXfHeUy0 (terrible transitions) https://youtu.be/TmENer4RPhw (anything by Monrroe) https://youtu.be/Q0dK7_3mkQM https://youtu.be/_QVbDoVT9Ro https://youtu.be/-qiMuebvq9E https://youtu.be/LYgNN8lDQ5s https://youtu.be/egd1cC5hH7s https://youtu.be/tRCvp0DI-Qg

Unfortunately, a search for "Drum and Bass no vocals" gives you every genre of vocals you can imagine.

Drum & Bass without vocals. I've put a lot of time, thought, and experimentation into this; nothing else comes close to keeping me as focused and highly productive.

Some examples:

Monrroe https://youtu.be/TmENer4RPhw https://youtu.be/41OKIznqMCg https://youtu.be/IKbadsY2MSs

Mix https://youtu.be/LYgNN8lDQ5s

You're thinking, "but it all sounds the same!" That's the point. It keeps you moving forward without breaking your stride.

For longer, less mentally demanding tasks this kind of stuff works great, too: https://youtu.be/VNP0-Tb9big

How many of these homework assignments become actual code that companies use? If you ran a business and your programmers were all busy but you wanted some new widget, what is preventing you from posting a job and tricking 100+ programmers into bootstrap your project for free?

A friend recently spent a week building a chat server with a very specific telnet/ssh interface as a "code test" for a video game company. I helped him test it and it was really solid. He walked the interviewer through the setup and how everything worked and then never heard back from them. I suspect that they simply used his code in their next project. What's stopping them from handing over his code to the next round of applicants with the assignment of adding all the features they need? They could post a high salary and offer great benefits, but never actually hire anyone.

We, as developers, simply can't be giving away free work. We're all aware of how opportunistic business folks can be. I refuse to do "homework assignments" (unpaid work) and so should you.

Install Stylish or Stylebot, create a new style:

.highlightMenu { display: none!important; }

Stylish - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

Stylebot - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...

Sorry if this has been answered already, didn't have time to read through replies.

If this becomes the new trend in design, I might have to get out of the business.