thedanbob

It doesn't even have to be malicious. I used a certain syntax highlighting theme for years, when out of nowhere the author pushed an update that rearranged all the colors. It was extremely disorienting. I forked the extension and reverted the change, so I know that one at least won't change out from under me anymore.

I finally got fed up with TM and switched to borg via Vorta. So much more reliable. A couple of times I've gotten error messages when I went off network while it was trying to do a backup, but each time the repo was fine.

I once encountered an intersection with a big "NO ENTRY" sign on the other side. I turned but google maps wouldn't give me another route, so I did a u-turn and came back to it from the side. Which meant I was close enough to read the small text underneath that said "vehicles under 10 tons excepted". I don't think I've ever been so angry at a road sign.

> Why did NYC release it in the first place? Did they not QA it?

Considering Louis Rossmann's videos on his adventures with NYC bureaucracy (e.g. [0]), the QAers might not have known the laws any better than the chat bot.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok

> Ask me for some random information you shouldn't need? Get bogus answers.

I've never understood software that's free but you have to fill out a form of personal information to download it. Even if I was willing to share, what possible use is my full mailing address to some random software company? It's data collection for the sake of data collection.

Yeah, Spark. Shame because I really liked their client, but I refused to use it anymore after I realized what they were doing.

It's more common than you might think. I know of at least one popular email client that stores your credentials on their servers to enable features like multi-account sync and scheduled sending.

> MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice

> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.

Do you really not consider the first to be an example of the second?

> Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them.

Shift+Del asks for confirmation. I would expect OneDrive to do at least that much before deleting files off the local machine, even if they're recoverable.

> I could also write the same article about this website, how it was so full of bloat and ads that nobody wants I could barely get it to scroll, and it eventually crashed before getting to the end of TFA due to general resource exhaustion on mobile.

I found it ironic that after reading an article about all the stuff in Windows 11 that no one asked for, the site hijacked my back button to show me more articles I might want to read.

Same. I tried LibreWolf for a while but as TA mentioned, it required too much tuning. (It also isn't signed on macOS so installing has extra hoops.) I'm on Waterfox now and it's just about right for me.

As a counter-anecdote, I've had far more trouble over the years swapping physical SIMs than eSIMs. You'd think that going between two phones that use the same size card would just work, but in practice that isn't (wasn't?) always the case.

I haven't tried since that one attempt. I've picked up a few words from learning German songs as part of my voice training, but otherwise it's not useful enough to me to take the time and effort.

It's been almost 10 years so maybe they do it differently now. I just remember they made a big deal about the gendered nouns but nothing about the fact that sentences weren't even close to correctly structured. And too be fair, maybe that was coming later and they didn't want to overwhelm people, but a quick explanation would have been nice.

> "A friend who had been learning some language in Duolinguo and then couldn't say a sentence to a native", should be proverbial nowadays.

I tried picking up some German via Duolingo once. I thought it was going great, pretty soon I was up to full sentences. Then one day I realized (because my voice teacher sometimes makes me translate the foreign language songs) that I wasn't learning German sentences, I was learning English sentences substituted with German words. German grammar is completely different. I haven't touched Duolingo since.

> And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

Animals, specifically deer. That said, you can use brights when no other cars are nearby, and when there is a car coming its worth a few seconds of extra risk to not blind the other guy and put him at risk.

That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.

It seems like Shorts keep getting worse, at least the Shorts that I get presented with. For a while the most popular format was a clip from a movie or TV show with annoying royalty-free music slapped on top and a badly chosen title. Now I'm seeing clips shrunk down into a tiny content box within the Short while the background is some guy watching you watch the clip. Why is that popular?!

Don't worry, some of us got it. That part made me chuckle.

I was trying to help a friend recently with a bizarre issue with a Dell laptop: the 2 key (and only the 2 key) is unreliable. Normally I'd say "hardware problem" but it acted more like a software bug. Among other signs, it's unreliable in Windows and the BIOS but not in Linux.

Unfortunately, I don't have the skills to even diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. And my friend isn't willing to put Linux on it since he wants to sell it.

File systems seem to be a particular weakness of Apple. HFS+ is pretty terrible. APFS is better, until something goes wrong and then it's just as terrible. Add "network" and the situation is 10x worse. I recently gave up on Time Machine (via Samba) entirely because it would regularly corrupt itself and destroy all my existing backups.

Those lines are only needed on the VPN server, not the client(s).

I wrote a script that runs periodically on my home server to update DNS (Cloudflare) if my IP changes. In practice, it almost never changes and my ISP's general flakiness is far more of a problem.

A number of the titles appear to have 69 or 420 cents added to the amount that appears in the story.

I set up authoritative nameservers at home using unbound, which appears to be considerably easier than configuring BIND, but I still can't say that I fully understand it. DNS (and networking in general) is a bit of a dark art.

Interesting! I just got done creating my own Tiptap-based editor but I might still check this one out. Last time I looked it wasn't really possible to swap out the Trix editor in ActionText, so if they've fixed that I should at least be able to integrate my own.

I didn't realize that nesting is official now, last time I checked it was still a proposal. Nice!

CSS has a lot of weirdness but I feel like it's been following the trajectory of Javascript toward becoming decent language. Flexbox and the :has selector, and now nesting, cover a lot of the pain points I've had over the years.

Adding another +1 to Pocket ID. I looked at a couple of the ones you mentioned but they looked too heavy and complex for what I wanted. Pocket ID does one thing and does it well.

Bundler has always been the best package manager of any language that I've used, but dealing with gem extensions can still be a pain. I've had lots of fun bugs where an extension worked in dev but not prod because of differences in library versions. I ended up creating a docker image for development that matched our production environment and that pretty much solved those problems.

I rented a car in the UK a few years ago and by the end of the trip I was ready to set it on fire.

- Adaptive cruise control would randomly slam on the brakes on the motorway (just passed a 30 kph exit, the speed limit must be 30 now!), or match speed with a car in the next lane that was I trying to pass

- Emergency braking would trigger if I got too close to a car that was turning out of my lane, or a shrub while parking

- Lane assist reenabled itself every time I started the car

- Radar system would fail every ~3 starts, which would disable adaptive cruise control (ok) and blast a warning sound (bad)

At least now I know that if I'm shopping for a car in the future, one of my criteria needs to be "won't actively try to kill me".

To be fair, the AI probably hallucinates more efficiently than the human.