8,632 karma · joined November 6, 2012
jon@blankpad.net
In the case of NFSU2, a game which EA refuse to make available anywhere, I’m fine with people throwing a free version on the internet but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Copyright is a part of what allows small indie studios making fun things possible because it means it’s viable to sell those things and pay people’s salaries. Maybe if along with the machine god and death of copyright we also get some form of wealth distribution which means people don’t need to fund food and shelter via their work I’ll get on board but I’m not holding my breath here.
If we continue from your "water comes from the tap" example this situation feels like someone who has no experience of plumbing deciding they're going to replace their bathroom without bothering to find out how any of it works. They'll possibly end up with a bathroom that superficially works but they're also liable to find problems down the line with leaks, things not draining properly, or water pressure issues.
Some of the people writing software purely via LLMs are even turning this into a business, which I guess would be analogous to deciding you're going to run sewage treatment for a small city without understanding anything about how that works. It'll mainly hurt when the problems are invisible, so food poisoning, or inlets backing up and overflowing into a nearby river.
If you need an actual computer there are so many options along those lines now, and almost all of them are better than a Raspberry Pi in various aspects. Finally, if you just want to put some stuff on a screen then most TVs already have an operating system and a web browser on them, target that and you can get rid of the computer dangling off the back entirely.
Just because your VPN endpoint is on a VPS somewhere rather than a computer on your home network doesn't make it any more secure, and the scare mongering here that somehow a home router will drastically mess up a function as simple as forwarding traffic coming in on a port to another machine is weird... if you don't trust it to do that then I'd get rid of the thing because that's its entire job.
My gut feel is that you're correct but presumably they do have a decent number of proper corporate customers or none of these features would exist in the first place.
This is your cue to go get your parents to add you as recovery contacts for their Apple account now, rather than finding out that exists when they lose their phone.
Having said that I eventually replaced my pair of HomePod Minis with a Sonos soundbar because I wanted something with a bit more oomph to it, although I'd maybe have considered getting a pair of the big HomePods and using the Minis as rear speakers had this been available at the time.
Very few things are truly intuitive, they just happen to be similar to other things you've done and so you've got a step up on understanding them. Really good software engineers tend to be constantly playing with things outside their usual domain and so have broader range of concepts they can reach for when the time comes.