Depressing, but not surprising. Even before the AS hype, I had long noticed that many people I regularly talk to (including a member of my immediate family who has been a teacher for decades) make horrendous spelling and grammar mistakes that they wouldn’t make if they picked up at least one book, at least once every few months. So: people were already forgetting how to write, spell, and even read coherently way before chatbots.

Sounds familiar: didn’t the AWS outage last month also nuke 3,000+ USD ‘smart beds’?

Toilet cameras. Every time I think to myself that humanity’s intellectual capacity has hit a new low, reality proves me wrong.

Exactly. I always joke, even at work, that if I was a dictator, I would be a pretty eccentric one. Jailing political opponents? What a waste of time and energy. Repressing minorities? Couldn’t care less. Curtailing women’s rights? Nope. Centralising the economy and giving friends and family juicy government-backed contracts? Nah, that’s not me. But I WOULD make EVERYONE work from the command line lest they’re willing to die at the stake.

A command line is WAY faster than using the mouse, provided you can type fast enough. A thing I’d like to add is that, to me, all those shiny pointy-clicky interfaces are little more than a distraction: they literally slow me down and prevent me from doing real work. Of course, this last bit is a very personal opinion and YMMV.

Totally not a bubble. At all.

I have ZERO sympathy for companies whose services are affected by this. Because seriously, fuck Amazon.

…and 99,99% of middle managers ‘’‘working’‘’ in tech be like yeaaaaaaaa daddy just cram that shit down my throat like I’m an abused goose!

Reminds me that, at least according to Wikipedia, one of the biggest allies of the ‘Aryan Brotherhood’ US prison gang is none other than… the Mexican mafia.

I always thought not being able to use it’s and its correctly was bad enough…until I saw people confusing those and does in the wild…wtf.

I bet it tastes like cheetos.

Reminds me of the most traumatising conversation I’ve had in a good while, which included the following (abridged) exchange:

Me: You do know that, if payment for your yearly M365 fees fails for some reason, or you simply don’t want or don’t care about it anymore and let your subscription expire, you will get read-only access to your OWN data, which is stored in YOUR computer, and unable to create new files in Office ?

Him: So what? If you have a newspaper subscription and you stop paying, you won’t get the newspaper anymore, that’s just how subscriptions work.

…

I am not talking about a 10 year old. This is a 50+ year old dude who does entrepreneur’s consulting for a living.

I’d say ‘change banks’.

No they don’t. There are viable, open source alternatives for 99% of the software/services we use. The fact that people are not aware of it is already like half of the real problem.

I wasn’t a big fan of GNU initiatives, and even less of ‘viral licenses’, until I encountered Public Money, Public Code. The more you think about it, the more fucked up it appears to you that governments pay for Windows/365/AWS licenses, using your tax money, because decision makers haven’t got the slightest clue about FLOSS, and if they do, they mostly don’t have the nutsack to implement the sweeping changes that would be necessary to migrate.

Atril and xpdf don’t have any markup capabilities, but Okular has. You can install Okular regardless of what desktop environment you are using.

This, coupled with the fact that firewalls are protocol-agnostic. You can, for instance, use ‘port https’ in your Packet Filter config instead of ‘port 443’, but that simply means that PF will block/pass traffic to whatever service is bound to that particular port, and NOT https connections in general.

No matter how old I get, I still find it weird thinking, even for a nanosecond, that for me to exist my parents and grandparents had to do THAT kind of thing.

Little Dick Sunshine

I was once in the plane and I asked the flight attendant to please bring me some water. I wanted to swallow an Omega 3 gel cap. Thinking she wouldn’t be long (I didn’t fly often back then), I put it in my mouth. It was only a couple of seconds, but the flavour of that thing dissolving is still on my top 5 of the most disgusting things I’ve ever tasted.