princevegeta89

Well, we do not really have to quit using them; in my case, for instance, I have two separate accounts with two different phone numbers, and I keep getting 20% to 30% off coupons on one of them most of the time. Whenever I need to get groceries or just get food, I go ahead and leverage one of these coupons, and it works out very well; in the end, the total comes out to slightly less than what I would pay if I went and picked it up myself.

It is no longer surprising to me that my cursor acts as if it does not recognize the .env file, and while I am editing it, it does not give inline suggestions;

however...when it is debugging problems or responding to questions about the code, it will just say it read my env file and found xxx environment variables as a verification step, or sometimes it will even mention that I need to uncomment some environment variables in the env file, which makes the whole deal about security feel iffy giffy....

Youtube Premium is so dodgy. It's already expense and even if you get it, they will default to a miserable 480p on Mobile, while you have 1080p60fps available.

You can change it manually, but it's a defeat of the entire purpose..they intentionally removed the setting to apply the max. quality available to all videos you watch, while already charging you a monthly subscription for the goddamn premium. What a bunch of goo(gl)ns

I used Windsurf for quite long and they're basically dead for now after they became Devin.

Everything feels dull and they're always several features behind while Cursor is just killing it every other week.

I'm back to VsCode plus Copilot Pro.

Given the well-known hexagon on its north pole this decagon doesn't seem that surprising after all.

Deep sleep is a great option. Archive is a couple steps beyond that, it essentially makes it equal to the app being uninstalled, at the cost of a bit of a disk space.

The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time. Apps like Delta, Southwest etc. are the perfect candidate for this. We require something similar to ephemeral apps that exist only for a limited period and automatically get deleted later. If the OS could provide such a feature by default, it would be a blessing. However, this again contradicts the commercial interests of many companies and services, so Android and iOS will likely never implement it.

On Android, especially the most recent versions, the archive functionality for apps has been a lifesaver. It basically packs apps into a specific format, keeps their entire state, and stores it on the disk. This also completely stops the app from running in the background and any other functionality that we don't need.

When we need to access the app again, we just have to restore it, which actually downloads the app and puts the app data back into it. It brings us back to exactly where we were before.

I do this to a lot of my apps these days, and it works very well. When we look at it, apps are nothing but a logged-in state for services that makes it easy to access them. On a typical web browser, you would have to keep logging in every now and then. Apps have a more persistent logged-in session that sometimes lasts forever as well.

This is likely a small side track that emerged recently..... but i'm afraid that's not really the situation. the younger generation utilizes a ton of social media, and they would need to rely on smartphones just for that.

Folding phones aren't going away; they're becoming more mainstream. The initial versions of folding phones that came out five or six years ago had issues and some aspects that weren't addressed. But we are literally in the sixth or seventh generation of folding phones, and Samsung has basically perfected them. If you think the durability is bad, think again, because they are very, very durable. I use a Z Fold 6, and it is built like a tank. The next ones are even tougher.

In terms of usefulness, they are actually more useful than the bigass phones like the iPhone Max or S26 Ultra, and other comparable ones from various manufacturers. The outer screen is pretty small and very usable with one hand. There are a few multitasking options you can choose from once you unfold them. you can have two or four apps open at once if needed. They are also very good for watching videos. A huge number of smartphone users do spend a lot of time watching stuff on their screens.

The latest Samsung Z Fold 8 has become a huge success... its size appears to be even more ideal for one hand. the thinness and overall size of it once opened has essentially seemed like the perfect form factor for the latest generation of smartphone users.

Immich. It's very feature rich and has a massive community.

And yet, that is what they do, meaninglessly and stupidly enough.

Dude thank you for making AltTab. Recently you've introduced the pro version and paywalled some features behind it. That's totally fine and I bought the pro version but my honest 2c for you is...25 bucks for a window switcher app seems too high. Please make it 15 or less. Thanks

100 is no big deal

And also, pretty much any internet-generated social media content, basically. Reddit is another classic example. If you look at many posts in subreddits containing a huge number of users, you could easily tell it is AI-generated, especially these idiotic "Am I the asshole" posts or "askreddit" posts and any other posts involving interesting situations.

Not just that. Even comments, some of those are basically AI crap, cleverly disguised as real users. It is such a waste, honestly. AI has brought upon us a low-quality world to live in, out of nowhere. This is such a pity.

Interesting. Instagram and Facebook both seem to be filled with AI-generated fake crap today. Even the so-called news items that I see there seem to be fake. I don't even know who would be subscribing. Especially to Facebook as of today.... It is filled with pretty low quality content overall. On the other side, WhatsApp has been getting filled with a lot of bloat. And even today, I find it confusing to use communities in WhatsApp. The entire navigation and experience around that feature confused me a few times. There's been more and more push towards the AI crap on WhatsApp as well.

The only good thing about WhatsApp is, it is used by everyone that I know, so I can connect with them pretty easily and make calls, etc. I hope they don't enshittify it too much to the point where I'll go and use Signal full time.

I think their only advantage in the business is pricing somewhat lower than comparable MacBooks and also having the option of replacing individual parts. But I think MacBooks, especially with AppleCare, are an irreplaceable deal. They cost a bit higher, but then their resale value is also quite high and they are pretty damn reliable. They even survive drops and abuse. The hardware components like speakers, camera, Wi-Fi chip, etc. are all top notch. I am happy to spend $500 extra just for peace of mind and the option to not have to deal with headaches alone. This is coming after my experience with Linux desktop and several distros on my custom-built PC that I ran for many years.

And M5 and M5 Pro are kicking the hell out of comparable ARM processors, and even their own predecessors for that matter.

And high quality software in modern computing and options only exist on the macOS platform. Windows is full of junk, otherwise it would have had some chance there. But the entire platform is far too mismanaged and it is very predatory that using the platform, the OS itself, feels like a fucking pain in the ass. I would put Linux above Windows, and while it is very complete and has a billion options and customizability, there are some pain points for me in terms of upgrades and also available software tools that I use from day to day. Many of them just don't exist for this platform.

And I am not even talking about the privacy aspect here. Obviously, macOS is more friendly in that sense, and that gives them another vote on top of these existing votes already.

I started hating Google Search because of its relentless AI dumps on the results page, but I have also stopped using it at all, more or less.

I got the Google AI Pro plan, which gives Gemini access by default with generous limits, and also includes free credits, code assist in VS Code and other editors, and also to Gemini CLI. And I'm just simply using that for all of my needs. It seems to work quite well so far. I see how Google Search is not relevant for me anymore.

The only browser that supports them on Android is Firefox - but Brave is my main browser and I can't seem to move away from it

Goth girls ... they went with the right kind of fetish after all

Not just Facebook, but also make sure to avoid TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, along with YouTube Shorts. Many of them are just nothing but fake AI content, and these days people are using AI to create fake profiles of good-looking, cute girls doing impossible things or actually showing off their bodies, and so on. At least 50% of what you see on your feed should be considered AI-generated content.

I would say save your time and energy, and invest that into something else - forget all this social media.

At the same time, it also made things three times more complicated when it came to debugging. They found themselves swimming in the shit

I recently worked at a stupid startup where the entire logic of the app was basically delegated to several third-party services out there. It felt like an absolute piece of shit overall. Following the flow of things end-to-end was a nightmare. It was so stupid because the so-called co-founder PM at that company thought it would be cool to keep doing that.

I am with you on this.

I would disagree here. You probably need OAuth with popular social services and implement username, password or OTP-based auth overall. For an MVP, you don't need to care about more details beyond this; it is hardly 10% of the entire effort, if not 5%.

I will 100% agree with this. It just feels very scary to see entire teams completely handing off all coding needs and testing needs and also design needs for that matter, to AI. This not only makes people lose their touch but also allows them to push insane amounts of code every day. PRs get impossible to review for humans because they are too huge and they add too much burden so they unsurprisingly use AI to review those things again. And with the amount of code churn, nobody knows what exactly is being implemented. And I have seen first hand that as the size of the code base grows, tracing problems and actually debugging things when things go wrong gets incredibly rough and complex.

And AI that has been helping all this time will suddenly stop helping out with this one use case. I have experienced AI running in circles, in this case trying to find a root cause. It failed, and the user is left holding the bag. That is when you feel like you have just been dropped into a vast ocean without a lifeboat. Then you'll have to just start looking through those massive chunks of vibe-coded crap to understand what is going on.

AI is good in terms of improving speed, but I am afraid we are massively taking it the wrong way as engineers. Everyone is just letting it go on autopilot and make it do things completely from start to end. The ideal solution lies where every piece of code it writes is reviewed by authors, and they make sure they are not checking in crazy stuff day in and day out.

Well, I know Bitwarden is pretty demanding and also not so straightforward to do self-hosting.

But we have Vaultwarden which is ridiculously easy to deploy and also very lightweight while being immensely popular; has never had any major security incidents so far - and it has thousands of eyes on it for every single commit.

I've been hosting this for three years now and I have never had a single problem with it. always worked with my Bitwarden clients on all of my devices. So if you would like to, try Vaultwarden.

Using coding agents, it feels like always working under a blanket where you cannot see beyond it, and there is this thick mask blocking you from knowing what's going on. it unfortunately projects a very bad impression that things can be built very quickly and that systems can be designed in a robust and maintainable manner. But even with the best models that I've used, that is not true. When the number of features reaches a decent figure, the hallucinations grow, and more often than not, we have no idea what the AI agent is writing. Pull requests become meaningless because there is too much code to review, and AI is handling it anyway. So it's basically taking the eyes off engineers in general. There are many bugs waiting to be uncovered. Compare this scenario to the absence of all these coding agents. All engineers would know the codebase very well, how the flows happen, and how to do a deep dive. I have a very bad feeling about this unproductive direction in general. It's good for writing small modules, but companies seem to be expecting to churn out a lot of code in a very short amount of time.

An overwhelmingly large number of engineers have close to zero satisfaction with their work. A lot of firefighting happens across the board. There is a ubiquitous use of AI everywhere in reading documents, writing documents, and wherever hallucinations occur, critical information is also being missed. It's not a surprise at the end of the day, but this entire situation has put us in a very messy overall circumstance.

There are entire companies that bought into Cursor to adopt across all of their engineering orgs.

Well, I think either way, Internet ads are dead for the most part. They have been dead for many years now. They started exactly the same way and went through the same flow. There were all kinds of ads: ads to install junk, ads that were totally misleading, ads that were very sexual in nature just to tempt users into clicking them, and ads that were totally irrelevant to the topic of the website or the user's interests.

But then it got so bad that people started using ad blockers long ago, and they got rid of this mess. Later, companies slowly started moving away from Internet advertising in general, and when the mobile and smartphone market started to take off, all the money flowed into that world instead. If you look at the way ads work in the mobile industry, even today, they are full of junk and incentivize users to install apps and perform specific actions. There is an equal amount of junk and misleading content in mobile ads today, like there used to be in Internet ads more than a decade ago. But right now, we are at that point. Mobile ads will also start getting muted one way or the other, and there will be huge incentive and opportunity sitting on top of that right there.

To add to this specific article, though, I would say it would have hardly made a difference anyway for the author in 2025.

> but it certainly is from a culture and society perspective. Like living in the 12th century except there are also shiny glass skyscrapers.

I am surprised looking at this seemingly racist comment. Just because someone doesn't follow your tradition/culture doesn't mean they are living in the 12th century. There are people living everywhere in the world.

Dubai is in fact very developed, and there are not just camels living there - there are people, and many companies - albeit not so much primarily in the tech industry.

They do not have the tallest building in the world there worth $1.5 billion for no reason. They have tech needs like any other country and I hope that clears your confusion.