RebeccaTheDev

Triumph of the Nerds and Pirates of Silicon Valley is what convinced me to actually pursue software as a career. It was so hugely influential.

> The current climate around seems very sudden.

Is it?

Grievances against big tech - over issues like the stupendous amount of money being created for very few, and the damage being inflicted among many other things - have been building for years. Whether you view those complaints as legitimate or not very much depends on your point of view, but the anger is there, it is real, and it is palpable.

AI was the tipping point for a lot people, especially younger people. My teenager refuses to use it. Then, Elon Musk went to Memphis and threw gas on the fire, providing a perfect illustration of why people are so upset.

Data centers are an avatar right now of all of that because they are a physical manifestation of what people can't otherwise fight.

Conversely, I once had a very large yard for a suburban home, about a third of an acre. I sectioned my yard into about 5 sections, but I mowed pretty much the same way: whatever lines are longest without stopping.

The less time I spent in Alabama heat, the better.

> Also: subscription fatigue is real.

This. I just went and cancelled a bunch of vampire subscriptions that had accrued in my life (both in and out of the Apple ecosystem) and ended up saving somewhere in the range of $60 a month.

I get that people have bills to pay and building and maintaining software costs money, but when everyone wants money from me for every little thing, eventually I have to decide who gets what cut from an increasingly limited sized pie.

Apps like this that, while beautiful, replicate functionality that is "good enough" that I can get for free are the first thing to be cut.

To add on to this: if you're a "guy" still trying to feel out some really confusing feelings, playing a vixen online allows you to explore those feelings without it impacting your real life. It's the same reason it's pretty common for trans people to report preferring to play characters of their true gender in video games. It gives you a safe, low-stakes way to explore gender.

With furry especially, that particular fandom has for decades been openly and loudly supportive of LGBTQ+ people and a very very significant percentage are queer. It's a very, very safe place for exploration.

Nest thermostats. They were an endless source of frustration for me.

> I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path.

Just so you know, you're not alone here. Mine was a bit different (gender related) but the causes are essentially the same: I just kept choosing whatever path was easiest instead of facing what I was actually feeling. It made me fabulously "successful" at life and I had everything that you would expect to come along: wife, kid, big house, fancy job. It's a hard feeling to reconcile - being so successful in what most of society would say you should be ... and yet still so miserable.

So, I see you. <3

I mean, it's a hobby? It doesn't necessarily have to have a point other than to enrich your existence.

My Mastodon feed has a very "early to mid 2000s LiveJournal friends page" feel to it, and I honestly adore this.

I'll add my voice to others here that this is a huge problem especially for small hobbyist websites.

I help administer a somewhat popular railroading forum. We've had some of these AI crawlers hammering the site to the point that it became unusable to actual human beings. You design your architecture around certain assumptions, and one of those was definitely not "traffic quintuples."

We've ended up blocking lots of them, but it's a neverending game of whack-a-mole.

Three jobs ago I worked for a company that did e-learning systems for industrial clients. This was roughly 2004. One of the company owner's many ideas was a technical documentation system based on XML and XSLT. The "idea" being that technical writers or SMEs would rather write XML than, you know, use a word processor.

Unsurprisingly the idea did not take off, but I did find the XML/XSLT combination to be very interesting.

My day-to-day work now is mostly Python and Vue, but PHP was my bread and butter for almost 20 years and to this day probably still probably one of my favorite languages just because I am still so familiar with it. There's something to be said for knowing all the traps and rough spots, and knowing how to avoid them.

The things that held PHP up in the early days, especially it being just dead simple to deploy, are not as big a deal in 2025 as they were in 2005. Shared hosting, while it still definitely exists, is kind of a dying model. Most modern dev I see these days even in PHP is nginx/PHP-FPM and containers, which is really not that terribly different from any other web framework. Even Wordpress, these days I recommend anyone who truly wants to go down that path to find a hosted Wordpress provider rather than trying to do it themselves.

Personally? I would never start a greenfield project now using just PHP. I don't know many people who would.

But PHP + Composer + Laravel? Laravel did for PHP what Rails did for Ruby, and what React/Vue/etc did for JS. Composer gave PHP real package management. It cannot be understated how important it was to have a framework and package manager to take care of all of the thoroughly unpleasant parts. That way you can focus on building the app, not reimplementing things you've done so many time before.

Just wanted to say thank you for this service. I have a little homebrew clock I build from a Raspberry Pi and a small display in my bathroom. Below the time, it displays the weather forecast for the day so I know how to dress. That little clock has become an essential piece of my morning routine.

I switched to Open Meteo a few months ago when the previous API I was using quit working. It's been rock solid and such a nice user experience compared to everything else I tried.