doodpants

...But I don't want to read blogs in my feed reader. I always click the permalink to read the post at its original source. What's the purpose of forcing me to endure my reader's inferior UX?

Sounds to me like you're no longer interested in playing games, where a "game" is something that has formal rules, mechanics, and physical equipment. You'd rather just sit around a campfire and tell stories. Which is of course fine, but don't blame games for being games.

Selling hardware at negative margins is not a "necessary" evil; it's just a business model that some manufacturers choose to impose on consumers, and then we end up with things like DRM-encumbered printer ink cartridges.

Every computer is general purpose at its core. But some computers ship with software/firmware that restricts the purposes accessible by the end user.

I downloaded it just fine using Firefox. However, when I unzipped it, and then opened the resulting folder, there were no .exe files inside. A moment later, Norton reassured me that it had automatically deleted the malicious .exe files, and I was safe.

So I disabled Norton, and unzipped the file again. This time there were four .exe files, each 8kb in size, for running the movie in various resolutions.

I double-clicked one of them. It immediately reduced the resolution of my displays, and moved/rearranged all of my open windows, putting them all onto the right-hand display. I heard music, but saw no video, and panicked and hit Alt-F4 to stop it. My display resolutions were restored, but I had to manually put all my windows back where they belonged.

Perhaps I should have trusted Norton.

Neat effort, but my one complaint is how much whitespace there is between and around various UI elements, especially in item lists such as in the Start menu and the sidebar of various configuration dialogs. Actual Windows XP hails from an era before visual designers all collectively decided that high information density was bad aesthetics.

"On an up-to-date Windows PC with Copilot enabled, you can currently do the same thing by pressing Windows + C. For PCs without Copilot enabled, including those that aren't signed into Microsoft accounts, the Copilot key will open Windows Search instead"

Just tried Windows + C on my Win 10 machine; it brings up a dialog that helpfully informs me "Cortana in Windows as a standalone app is deprecated."

Plus, driving Twitter into the ground is better than driving it into pedestrians.

Makes as much sense as QWERTY for thumb typing. In either case you're not touch-typing, so the only advantage is visual familiarity of layout. (As a Dvorak user, I prefer desktop keyboards in which it's possible to pry off and rearrange the keycaps to match.)

Suppose I "buy" a piece of digital media, which let's agree for the sake of argument actually means "bought a license for". Suppose I also then torrent a copy of that same media for the purpose of backup and/or offline access. Is it still piracy? After all, I have a license for it.

I grew up playing Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and the like. For me, the whole point of a video game is the gameplay, not some story that the creator wants to tell. I barely tolerate narrative in video games, and mercilessly skip cutscenes whenever possible. I have no interest in playing any of these so-called "walking simulators".

But maybe that's just me.

Thanks for the inform.

Re: y2k; Yeah, who knew that year numbers were going to keep increasing? No one could have predicted that. /s

Based on a lot of the responses here, I feel compelled to say: saying "Copying is not theft" is not the same thing as saying "People should violate copyright law".

I feel that "copying is not theft" is a truth that needs to be clarified because a lot of discussion around copyright and piracy tends to conflate copying and theft, which makes it natural to skew towards the point of view that the unauthorized sharing of content and ideas is an objectively immoral act, and paint the issue of piracy in terms of right and wrong, as opposed to legal vs. illegal. Whereas in my point of view, copyright law is an artificial construct that we as a society have chosen to enact, in order to support a certain model for financially compensating those who make creative works. Other societies may choose differently; copyright law is not a reflection of natural, fundamental morality regarding the sharing of ideas and creative works.

In conclusion, when I personally say "copying is not theft", I'm simply saying, let's not conflate the issues, so we can have a more nuanced discussion. I'm not advocating piracy. And I would encourage others not to interpret "copying is not theft" that way.

What do you mean "old enough"? They still don't ship parallel cables with printers. :D

People try to build all new, better software tech all the time! But doing so breaks backwards compatibility with existing stuff, which greatly hinders adoption. So it mostly remains relegated to experimental research projects, and if you're lucky, the best parts of it get incorporated into existing projects gradually over time.

Yeah, it's just like Python, which was named after Monty Python, but for some reason their logo is a pair of snakes. What does that have to do with a British comedy troupe?

You might be the only person in the world who writes bug-free code on the first try.

> Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup.

Vanilla is the most popular flavor? That makes me skeptical of the whole story. ;-)

The Amazon links at the bottom of the post go to the first edition of the book; the second edition seems to not be listed on Amazon yet.

Have you looked at the CppFront[1] project by Herb Sutter? It's less of a completely new language like Carbon. It's meant to be C++ with a "nicer" syntax, while providing 100% linking compatibility, and with 100% source backward compatibility available when desired.

[1] https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront

So, you think the website would be better if it:

- had low contrast text in a thin font

- had pointless animations of content fading in as you scroll down

- had a GDPR cookie consent popup

- popped up an interstitial form asking for your email address so you could receive their newsletter, but only after you've had the site open for 30 seconds and were in the middle of trying to read it

- was completely blank if you disabled JavaScript to try to avoid all of that nonsense

No thank you; the current design is unironically perfect IMHO.

This video is amusing and all, but is the author's point that enshittification isn't a thing, or that it's not a legitimate reason to go elsewhere? If so, I must disagree. What's the alternative? To just continue sitting in the slowly boiling water?

I enjoyed the article, but if I may express a peeve of mine... In the code listings, can we please not use a syntax coloring scheme that makes the comments nearly unreadable? Especially in blog posts like this, where the code deliberately contains numerous explanatory comments. Such low-contrast text slows down my tired old eyes.

> That't literally the only place where operator overloading makes any sense.

That may be true for C++ (I'll take your word for it), but not for all programming languages in general. For example, in C# it's fairly common to overload == and != to implement value equality for reference types (classes).

Of course, you should really only do this for immutable classes that are mostly just records of plain old data. And C# 9 introduced record classes, which is a more convenient way of defining such classes. But record classes still overload these operators themselves, so you don't have to do it manually.

Is that what that was? I thought my mouse wheel was being wonky.

I use the "Disable JavaScript" extension in Firefox, and created a rule which disables JavaScript for the entire substack.com domain so as to avoid this nonsense. Unfortunately, some sites such as this one use their own domain name despite being based on Substack, so I still have to disable it manually in these cases.

There used to be a Tetris clone for Mac called Quinn. The web site for the game said: "Quinn is an implementation of a popular falling-blocks game which, according to the Tetris Company, must not be named here."

Don't know about anyone else, but the reason I never bought Super Mario Run was because it required a constant internet connection, AND you had to create an account with Nintendo. (At the time, I had an iPod Touch rather than a phone with a cell connection, and usually kept Wi-Fi turned off to save battery, so I only played games that could run offline. So my situation was probably not common, but Nintendo's choices here still feel a bit invasive.)

Which at the time was a sci-fi game set in the future.