apelapan

Winamp was perfectly fine by itself as I recall it. Even on a P100 without MMX which was what I rocked around 96-97. But as soon as you did anything else that involved any kind of IO, there would be skips and stutters.

Decompression in conjunction with primitive multi-tasking on MacOS and Windows. That remained an issue until Windows XP.

(Very small groups of) people used be in awe at LAN parties when I showed them how Linux could play an MP3 without stutters while copying large files across the network and browsing images.

Then it was time to play games and people were less impressed by me not being able to join any other game than Quake...

Not talking about rotten or cracked or missing teeth. Talking about minor cavities, minor possible alignment issues and various stuff like that. The stuff most people go to the dentist for. The stuff the article we are discussing beneath is about.

Yeah, just try a dozen different ones, spaced out over a decade or two to have enough time to figure out if they were bullshitting you or not with what they suggested...

You can perhaps collect negative experiences from people you trust, and use that to narrow your selection. But you can't use good experiences, since the treatment people were happy with might as well have been a no-op and whatever problem they have would have gone away by itself in a short time. And if there wasn't a noticable pre-existing problem that was treated, but something the dentist made up on the stop, the treament someone was happy with might as well have been actively harmful, just not enough to be noticed right away.

Dentistry simply have too little credibility as a profession. If you need to pull a tooth out to make it stop hurting, sure, a random dentist is quite likely to do a reasonable job. At least compared to a random blacksmith. But as countless articles linked in this thread shows, dentists have absolutely no clue if you have cavities that need to be treated.

Dentist can't spot cavities either, they just guess. The treatment for make-believe cavities will damage your teeth for real.

Why would it be reasonable to see a dentist yearly? Assuming there is no ongoing problem that needs ongoing care.

Obviously it was not a global "everyone" like today with WhatsApp. But I would guess that perhaps 20 out of 25 in my high school class was on ICQ back in 1999 or so. Most of us only had dial up, so we wouldn't be allowed to be online and block the phone for more than a 30 minutes or an hour per day.

Anyway, ICQ was not some elite hacker thing. Anyone with enough reading comprehension to tell milk and orange juice apart from reading a label could operate it just fine.

If management spends their idle time building dashboards by themselves instead of taking up developer time asking for dashboards to be built and populated for them, there might be productivity to be had...

I was quite happy using Zeep on Python a few years ago, when I last had to do a custom SOAP integration.

It is a bit of an old-school experience, but all the important parts are there and get the work done.

XML is not perfect, but it is mature. It has been the same for a very long time, all the warts and gotchas are well known. You need to be careful about the same things in 2026 as you did back in 2006.

Technically yes, but it seems like people's intuition for safe behaviour is worse across the board with modern technology, than it is with old technology.

Maybe it will improve by itself over time, but maybe not? There are a lot of things that humans generally suck at, and successful, human-friendly design must take that into account and work around it systematically.

Maybe phones/it/banking/payments/identity/authorization needs to be radically changed, in order to serve society well.

The issue is that someone can look over your shoulder and memorize your code, if you use a pin in public.

Some people will use the same pin for screen lock and BankID, and if someone gets their code and their phone they can cause a huge amount of trouble in a very short time.

Yes, you really shouldn't ever use a pin code for BankID (or your screen lock) in public. Only biometrics if anyone is watching.

9/10 runs I leave my phone at home, but when I do bring it for some reason, I'm very happy with my "Flipbelt(tm)". It carries a 250g phone with no slipping, sliding or bounce.

My Flipbelt has lost some tightness after three years and many laundry cycles, but it still manages a Pixel 10a with no problems.

The belt rests over the hip and I usually have the phone flat on my backside. I don't really notice it after a few steps.

Risk of any use of nuclear weapons is quite different from "nuclear annihilation". There are vastly fewer and vastly less powerful nuclear bombs/warheads today than 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.

The shelling of Mauripol in Ukraine at the beginning of the current war was roughly equivalent to Hiroshima in explosive yield. It had a lot more destructive power though, since it was distributed across a huge amount of explosions, and blast damage falls approximately with the square of distance to center of explosion.

Mauripol in 2022 was not a place you wanted to be in. When a bomb falls on top of you, it makes no difference if it is small nuclear or large conventional, you very much die anyway.

I'm not trying to make war seem nice or sell the idea that the world is heading in a great direction, I'm trying to make the point that nuclear annihilation is less of a threat today than before.