THENATHE

The only thing I really don’t agree with is SaaS. There are numerous benefits to the end consumer as long as you phrase your thinking in the right way. Take Adobe, what most people consider to be the most gratuitous SaaS. I want photoshop in 2006, so I buy elements for $100 and get a shitty outdated version for the rest of my life. Or, I spend $8/mo on something that is constantly improving and adding new features, and get other programs too!

My workplace uses indesign, illustrator, and photoshop. But because the whole package was made available, we started messing around with premier and after effects and ended up adding a couple of skills to our design repertoire that we never would have fucked around with otherwise.

Plus, games that have SaaS last longer. Granted, skins are kinda lame. But think of a game like Helldivers 2, where the “battle pass” is earnable by in game play OR you can skip ahead with money. Great game, option to support the developers leads desire to keep development going instead of abandoning a game right after launch because “their work is done”.

Quality user experience in things that are core functions of use, and specifically them not getting bogged down (or potentially “bricked” by) the need for luxury, or ads, or ease of use.

In a car, the driver seat should, in my mind, be manually adjusted. Why? Because if the motor breaks because it has to adjust each time you sit down, and the last person to use the car is my mother or girlfriend, I literally cannot drive my car until it gets fixed because I am too tall.

But something like heated/cooled seats is perfectly fine to have as a luxury, because if my seat cooler fan breaks, I just have a sweaty back as if I didn’t have a seat cooler.

Same with manual transmissions: if I ever have my transmission start acting up and I don’t have the money to bring my car to the shop, I could probably fix it, albeit with a lot of difficulty and cursing. But an automatic? No way in hell.

Plus, my manual lasts longer, stays cooler, tows more, is more fun, provides more control, keeps me more aware and focused while driving, and is a theft deterrent.

You can apply this logic to anything: if the object becomes useless without it, it should be as basic, durable, strong, resilient, and/or foolproof as possible, but when the object would not break without it, it can have as much luxury as desired.

I know nothing about the fundamentals of “old computing” like what Mr. Atkinson worked on as I am only 27 and have much more contemporary experience. That being said, I still very greatly mourn the loss of these old head techs because the world of tech I use today would not have been possible if not for these incredibly smart and talented individuals. To learn to code without YouTube is truly a feat I could not imagine, and the world will be a lesser place without this kind of ingenuity. Hopefully he’s making some computers in the sky a bit better!

In the modern sense, this is very much a “I don’t want to do labor” issue. If all of the WFH jobs get sent overseas, the only thing left to do here is stuff that cannot be done on a computer from home, like construction, fabrication, forestry, food service, etc to name a few. A lot of us coder/designer/techy types are somewhat privileged in the idea that we can get paid a reasonable to high wage for doing something that is physically non-demanding and essentially only commands its price tag because of schooling and brainpower.

I can imagine a lot of us are going to get very angry if we suddenly have to haul Sheetrock for a living.

My boss recently sent me from 5 days in office to 3, and on those two days WFH I get basically nothing done. Not because I don’t try, but my position in a small company is structured in such a way that I essentially work with my boss as her right hand, so if she isn’t there to guide me or give me tasks I essentially don’t work.

I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.

I love work from home, but I can’t help but feel like its only real benefit is removing a lot of the overhead from jobs that are already considered overhead. Agree with this next part or not, it isn’t really debatable: to the average person (which we aren’t), basically anything that can be done on a computer from home is overhead.

Coding in the office? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Finance department? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Basically anything HR related? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Middle managers? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Graphics designers and the like? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Basically every job that has been moved to WFH should have been that way since computers became widespread, and it is essentially a problem that they weren’t WFH already. If it can be done entirely on a computer, it should be done from home. Leave the office space for housing and jobs that can’t be done from the comfort of one’s underwear.

If anyone else wants to do this, coin silver is nominally cheaper and is significantly more durable, and about as easy to melt.

I view things like a furnace or nice blowtorch as an investment into future projects that may otherwise not even be viable (in my mind) without the knowledge that I have said tool, so a small furnace for melting, while being more expensive, might expedite the process or increase quality, while also opening doors to future potential endeavors.

The only thing that kind of bothers me about libraries is that, as a tech focused individual, basically every book I read or whatever is either an ebook or a audiobook, and I don't want to have to go to the library to pick it out. I understand if I were getting physical books the need to go to a physical location to grab them, but if I'm getting something digital I don't want to have to go to the library. My library doesn't really offer an online catalog that you can just download from, only look at to see what you want to get in the library, and the free library services that they offer like the big ebook repositories don't have any books that I feel like I want to read, so it is just far easier to torrent things or have an audible subscription. Most libraries don't have really cool extra stuff like maker spaces or aquariums or anything remotely interesting other than books and maybe some computers for homeless people to use or whatever, so unless you're physically going there for a book, they're kind of pointless.

I'm not saying I don't appreciate and respect libraries, but they really just didn't change with the times around where I am, and it makes them far more inconvenient to use for someone in my particular position than it does to make them convenient. I will still support them as a public access, and I think it would be tragic if they went away, but I wish they would spend a little bit more of whatever budget they get investing on making it. Not a terrible experience to get shit online.

I really liked The Windows 7 theme and kept it on on every computer that wasn't a gaming PC, because I'm gaming computers. I want to squeez every last frame. But my dad always turned off the theme on all of his computers because it reminded him of Windows 98, and frankly, I am very sad that you cannot just get the old windows 98 theme in Windows today as a default feature. I know they're a third party apps that do that, but I wish it was still just a feature that they had because it really wouldn't add that much development time. I kind of am just over it with all of the extra bullshit in Windows, like I want an operating system with a file browser and a built-in web browser that I probably will never use, I don't want telemetry, I don't want recommended files, I don't want widgets, I don't want a news center on the side of my computer, I don't want any baked in AI bullshit.

I wish I could literally just get Windows 7 with all of the security and performance and compatibility improvements of Windows 11. Also a functioning search bar, which would be really nice.

For me, the part that is most wild is that I have never heard a Japanese onomatopoeia that sounds remotely close to what I would actually assume the sound to sound like. when I was a little kid and I was studying Japanese, it always made me think that Japanese people had different ears than I did, because if they're hearing all of these sounds the way they are and I'm hearing them all the way I am, there's no possible universe where we are describing them the same way, which would mean that we have to hear them differently. I now realize it's likely more of a societal thing, but it's still interesting nonetheless

I think the problem with open source in today's day and age is that old school programmers were all about making the landscape better, because they enjoyed computers where they had a passion for it. Modern-Day programmers, as a general statement, want money. Open source software is generally a terrible way to make money, but modern-day programmers believe that they can just create a really nice program and then make money from it. From a financial perspective, open source software is basically terrible for the people that make it, but really really great for the people that use it. That kind of goes against capitalism, almost, because basically every other capitalist-based business rapes all of the benefits for the person that develops the thing, so coming from a very american-centric perspective, it seems kind of wild to think that I can develop something that is really the backbone of a bunch of different stuff and very good, and make absolutely no money from it.

Yes. Hosting it for personal use would not be a crime, but distributing it would be. Additionally, even if people were to get it from you without you getting in trouble, they would all have to use a VPN to even begin to see anything, which is past the capabilities of most of the populace currently, which would make hosting it and distributing it via sneakerware basically useless.

The reason it is kind of wild is because a company being forced to sell basically the only thing it has in order to stay relevant in the second most major region of the world is kind of big news, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they just took the ban and then only started working in Europe and China. Is bytedance even known for anything other than tiktok? What do they do other than provide the service for tiktok?

The thing about China banning stuff is that it is sponsored by the whole government, so every ISP in China is forced to comply with the ban. In the US, unless all of the ISPs are forced to ban tiktok at a network level, the ban will essentially be on new downloads I'm sure.

If the ban is on new downloads, it will mean that the ban doesn't hit particularly hard, except for there will be no more platform growth, which would mean that the company sees all of the issue with it, but the users do not which would stagnate the platform and lead to its eventual death. Frogs in a pot of water turned up to a boil, instead of dropped in at a rolling boil kind of thing.

If it is banded in ISP level, there is essentially no real chance that anybody will put any effort to get around it. I see big statements all the time about how people slightly younger than me don't even know what command prompt is, which is frankly a wild statement because even people I know my age that are not techy. Like I am still know how to do almost all of the basic commuter commands and know how to download a VPN and similar. We are either going to see a Renaissance of tech people opened up because of the ban on tick tock and them learning about technology to try and circumvent it, or we are going to see the total death of the platform because most people don't really know how to do anything technical on a phone or computer anymore.

Either way, it's going to cause some fairly large shifts until something is done, and if nothing is done, maybe the main shift will be just to a different platform rather than a different societal state of mind.