Something that I feel like I should have realized earlier but didn't until last year was how unbelievably lazy everyone involved is.
I knew they were stupid, I knew they had positions that I would consider racist, I knew that they were corrupt, but I guess I had assumed that they had worked for their corruption.
But no, you have RFK Jr.'s HHS lazily having ChatGPT generating anti-vax literature with broken links, you have Trump doing a blanket pardon of literally everyone involved with January 6 [1] apparently because he was too lazy to do any diligence. It's borderline farcical.
It is farcical. And then remember what a bunch of clowns the NSDAP's leaders were; the ranting Hitler, the esoteric nonsense of Himmler and Hess, Goering's makeup and fake uniforms, and then contrast that with their actions and impact on history. A clown-show widely mocked during their time, but look at the catastrophic impact they had: just because they're clowns doesn't mean they're not dangerous.
As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.
I might literally be the only person on earth that can honestly say I have been paid to write FoxPro, Erlang, F#, and ColdFusion.
My first software job was at a Tae Kwan Do studio who ran their own billing department, and the entire billing half was some weird custom thing written with FoxPro. Not Visual FoxPro, I've never actually used that, but the old school DOS stuff.
I absolutely hated every time I had to touch it and I had hoped that it would die in a fire. I hope Visual FoxPro sucks less.
I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s/early 1990s and I worked part time in the university library working on databases and interfaces first in dBase III then Foxbase (the predecessor to Foxpro; basically an extended dBase III clone) then DOS FoxPro. I rather liked them, but this was long before I had ever seen SQL or anything like that. The weird thing was that my boss (besides being the library's IT guy) was a taekwondo instructor! What is it about FoxPro and that?
I'm still kind of convinced that these "calls for pacing" are just a way to try and flex to their shareholders.
"Our technology is so unbelievably powerful that the entire world might shatter if we don't have government imposed handcuffs!!!!". It just reads like the corporate equivalent of the drunk frat guy saying "HOLD ME BACK BRO!"
I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash.
I'll admit that a large chunk of why I have such good memories is because it was one of the first programming platforms I learned, so there was a lot of novelty to it, but I still think it was a very fun platform.
It was so fun that it was "animation-first"; I would be dicking around drawing a shitty cartoon, and then decide I might want to add some code, so I convert to a movie clip and start scripting. I have played with a few game dev toolkits (and I'm even a maintainer for GDevelop on NixOS [1]), and they certainly can be fun, but I'm still chasing the high that I got from coding in Flash.
I actually think that, ironically, writing Flash games might be a valid path forward again. Ruffle has gotten quite good, and importantly the features are locked, so you could treat writing games in the same way that people do homebrew for the SNES or something.
Maybe if I can figure out how to get Flash CS6 working in Wine I'll give it a spin again.
I am sure that the legality of this is what prohibits it, but I wish someone would just do one of those decompilation projects of Flash MX or CS6 or something.
If that's the case, they should stop using git and Linux right now, because it's everything written in C. Having 0.1% of the code in a safe language will not change anything, it's only a bad security blanket.
> Having 0.1% of the code in a safe language will not change anything, it's only a bad security blanket.
Just because something does provide an immediate perfect solution does not mean it isn't not worth investigating and/or pursuing.
Also consider that bugs tend to be more prevalent in new code (e.g., [0]) as a result, you are likely to see more of a benefit from writing new code in a memory-safe language than raw line count proportions would indicate.
You don't believe in slowly and iteratively improving a codebase over time? Should git stick with its weird mishmash of C and perl and shell scripts forever, for tradition's sake, performance and maintainability be damned?
I don't understand your reasoning. Why should they quit git and Linux (and presumably all applications written in C) if they believe Rust is more secure than C?
It's the classic "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" response. You don't get dislike the current state of the world if you exists in it, apparently.
Rewriting it all in rust with bug for bug compatibility and byte identical outputs won’t cost more than $100k in tokens, but I don’t think this is an answer you’re looking for
I don't know if something changed recently, but I have been getting a lot of stuff "flagged by safeguards" in the last two days.
I am quite confident that what I'm doing is well within the law, and I'm not even doing any kind of pen-testing stuff, just some basic reverse engineering, but I can't even use Fable anymore because every time I enable it, it works for about twenty seconds and makes me drop down to Opus 4.8, and often even down to Sonnet.
If anyone here works at Anthropic, did you make the safeguards super sensitive recently?
I am not sure that that's recent. Most books, even before the internet, were kind of low-effort shit.
You've always had terrible borderline-porn romance novels at grocery stores and terrible pulp novels and the like. We just don't read terrible novels from 100 years ago; whatever we read from that era now has survived the test of time. The same cannot be said about anything released in the last couple years.
Grocery store softcore porn was still very expensive in time, money, and space. The amount of energy required to move a book around is monumental in comparison to how much energy it takes to move the same number of bits of information contained in the book. The speed at which just the information moves (in modern digital networks) is nearly instantaneous. The space the digital book carries is not measurable by the human senses.
It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them, bar a few addicts. Now there is a river of information actively fighting for your eyeballs at every moment. And how the meme-gene works, the most addictive types will rise as the victor.
> It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them
I'm not sure I agree with that. Public libraries have been around for a very long time, certainly well before the internet. People could get all the books they wanted to read for free. During summer vacations when I was in grade school, I would read multiple books per month, sometimes multiple per week, because we lived close to a public library.
I don't know about your library, but my library would let me check out multiple books at once; I think 5 was the limit for children and 10 for adults. It was pretty easy to have a constant feed of text being sent into your bain.
I would argue there is some recency: it used to be the case that editors were working with authors in the sense of building their careers. Not even 10 years ago it could be expected an author might not hit it big until their 3rd or 4th book (George RR Martin was like this) and editors were focused on building the skills of their authors in storytelling. Now editors are also pulled in a billion different directions and work more like project managers on way too many books at a time, and things like typos and whatnot are being introduced into traditionally published books with glossy special edition covers.
I read a lot, and I own a lot of physical books, but I almost never actually read physical books anymore. I'm one of the happy few that used my Kindle for more than a week after getting it as a gift.
I find that reading on an ereader is many times easier for me, primarily because I can make the text gigantic and I don't lose track of my place on the page nearly as often. I'm not dyslexic (I've been tested), but I do think that there's some issue with my brain where if the text is small I really can't follow it. On all my computers the text is gigantic and even then I will click and highlight text as I'm reading so don't lose place. I would love to be paid to read but I don't think I'd love to be paid to read physical books.
I remember my grandmother was wholly unconvinced that my Kindle was a different thing than an iPad or a Game Boy, and that it was not "real" reading, for whatever reason.
Amazon has sold an estimated 70 million Kindle readers.
Ebook sales are at least 20% of book sales.
I read 60+ books a year. Almost all on my Kindle. My partner and my sister are similar. I know of one person who has bought a Kindle and not used it much.
Australians alone are reading 1.6 billion pages a month on Kindles.
I'd be surprised if a lot of people aren't like myself. I prefer physical books at home, but if I'm out and about travelling I always take my kindle.
Saying that, I rarely buy ebooks. I generally 'find' them online but only if I own the actual physical book. If I don't have the physical book whilst I'm travelling, I'll buy the eBook and then I'll usually buy the physical book too.
> I prefer physical books at home, but if I'm out and about travelling I always take my kindle.
Same. I prefer hardcovers, I usually look for first editions, etc. I'd prefer not to lug them around so I also have a kindle for if I want to read away from home. I usually borrow the ebooks from my library though when the ones I want are available so I'm not buying twice.
I don't think I could ever get rid of physical books entirely though. There's a somatic element to reading that I appreciate that you lose entirely with an ereader.
I didn't read OP's remark as "few people make long use out of e-readers," but rather "many more people have e-readers and don't use them," which I'm willing to believe but don't have any evidence of. At the very least it's likely to reflect the case with physical books. The people who don't read you don't hear as much from.
I don’t have any data, it just feels like a lot of my friends who got kindles for birthdays or Christmas would use it for a week and then then it would sit in a drawer for the remainder.
To be fair, I don’t think most of those friends actually read that much though.
One thing I do with my students is show them how to adjust text size and have them try out larger sizes. I think a surprisingly large number of people have never even attempted to change the text size on their devices and many can benefit from something different than the defaults.
First was when I go the Kindle I realized I could make the text as big as I wanted so I would do that, as stated before.
Another time is when I wanted an external monitor and I bought a big TV because it was much cheaper. Because the TV was bigger the text was also bigger, and I realized how much easier it was for me to work.
I think I used to feel like there was a "coolness" factor to keeping the text small. I don't know why I thought that, but I think what's much cooler than having lots of small text is actually being able to read and understand the text on the screen.
Now I have no desire to impress anyone, and I keep my text in the browser at like 200%.
For me it's not coolness it's just context, 16:9 is too short to fit enough lines and scrolling and jumping is as annoying as tabbing in and out.
This is also one problem with ereaders for me, especially for anything technical. With paper when the textbook says refer to fig 13.2 or we covered this in section 4.3 I can just flip to that page with my fingers as a bookmark, read it, and go right back. Just not as tactile on computers. Even if you did like lsp assisted jumping all over the place you quickly forget what the heck was going on and where you came in from.
Of course maybe someone will come and correct me but this is just what I experience. It's still better flipping pages for technical stuff. It's like scribbling a DJ disc, imagine doing that with a mouse or keyboard. It's just… different.
> primarily because I can make the text gigantic and I don't lose track of my place on the page nearly as often... where if the text is small I really can't follow it. On all my computers the text is gigantic
+1 I prefer the Kindle for the exact same reasons.
I used to read a lot of physical books. But I can't tolerate physical books after I started reading on the Kindle, especially books with tiny text.
Plus it is easier to keep a better posture with the Kindle.
But it still does not feel so good to buy Kindle ebooks. Somehow purchasing physical books seems more justifiable.
I don't have a Kindle, but I've been reading books exclusively on my phone since I had a 3gs IIRC. I've increased the text size over the years and love having the 2-3 books I'm typically reading at once readily available.
What’s annoying is when you want to look back at something earlier in the book. Then you have to use the clunky search and hope you don’t lose your current place.
KOReader has bookmark support; if I need to go back a few pages (or use the search), I'll just set a bookmark for my current place so I can easily jump back.
The constraint here is the e-ink refresh rate. That constraint does not exist on regular screens, which is why I'm surprised neither mobile reader apps or even desktop software takes purposeful advantage of it: fast scrolling back with fine, per-page control, keeping page in-place and zero perceptible latency rendering full page. With a finger drag or click&drag movement, this can easily be even faster than with paper books.
I know this works because I've seen it with some PDF readers on desktop in the past, when I lucked into a combination of lightweight document and right "fit page to display" scaling. And, of course, this works natively in browsers with PgUp/PgDown, but only on the few remaining websites that haven't been thoroughly shittified (no "en-" there on purpose) with JavaScript and excessive styling.
When you go back in a physical book, you also put a bookmark (either an actual bookmark or one of your finger) to be able to resume reading where you were, no?
That's the only issue I have with ebooks and the reason why I would never read a technical / reference book on it where you want to jump around and have your fingers in some pages to flip back and forth.
Ha, no, I actually don't talk to that grandmother anymore and probably never will again since she's extremely racist and doesn't like my (Hispanic) wife. I wouldn't buy her gifts at the best of times.
One is racist in a way that is somewhat understandable (e.g. using outdated words like “oriental” to refer to Asian people). For her, I am more or less fine just rolling my eyes and continue talking to her, because I think she is ultimately a decent human who is just a victim of her time.
My other grandmother is not like that. She is actively very racist in a way that I don’t find forgivable. I don’t talk to her after Trump won in 2016.
It’s not that voting for Trump is in itself enough of a reason for me to cut someone off, but in her case the moment he won she just dropped all pretense and started being racist in ways that I have no interest in engaging with.
It’s a little sad, it’s not like all my memories with her are bad or anything, but it’s life doesn’t always work out like we want it to.
I knew they were stupid, I knew they had positions that I would consider racist, I knew that they were corrupt, but I guess I had assumed that they had worked for their corruption.
But no, you have RFK Jr.'s HHS lazily having ChatGPT generating anti-vax literature with broken links, you have Trump doing a blanket pardon of literally everyone involved with January 6 [1] apparently because he was too lazy to do any diligence. It's borderline farcical.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/01/22/trump-pardons-jan6-clemency
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