ThePowerOfGeek

Disqualifying in a social sense? Unfortunately, yes I think it would be. It doesn’t matter how awesome your husband is, for a significant chunk of the American electorate, a candidate’s calibre is eclipsed by the voters’ prejudices. And there is a hysteria-level paranoia towards LGBT folks among these people.

It took ages for a Catholic to be elected President due to evangelical paranoia about ‘papists’. And we still haven’t elected a woman, which is insane when you consider women make up half of the electorate. We did have a black guy elected twice, but that was due to a few mitigating factors: a) the timing was right (in the sense that he ran when diversity was seen as more acceptable); b) he was ridiculously charismatic; c) he was also half white; d) he was a Protestant Christian (despite what the ‘secret Muslim’ clowns kept screaming).

IMO it sucks that someone’s orientation, ethnicity, gender, religion, or heritage still bars so many good candidates from running (because this isn’t just a case of the visible candidates like Harris, Buttigieg, or even the likes of Carson, Hilary Clinton, or Palin getting denied at the final hurdle; many candidates never make it close to running due to these biases). But this is the ass-backwards, self-immolating world we live in.

Ah yes, more antivax nonsense. Just what the world needs right now. Especially with the growing measles outbreak due to people not vaccinating their kids.

I’ll stick with my hacked Android TV streaming box, thanks.

I used Roku for years z but their enshitification and investing aggressive home screen ads pushed me away. Getting away from Rokus was one of the best decisions I’ve made in quite a while.

Not if you’re willing and able to pay an arbitrary $30 a month extra. That lifts the oh-so essential data cap. Yeah… fuck Comcast, or whatever they are calling themselves this month.

I’ve found the same thing.

Whenever I ask an LLM for a pointer, I end up spending just as long (if not longer) refining the question than just figuring it out myself it’s doing a search on SO it in other online resources.

But even the IDE integration is getting annoying. I write a class with some functionality baked in, and the whole time it’s promoting me with a shit load of irrelevant suggested code. I get the class done, then I go to spin up a unit test. It knows which class I’m trying to create a unit test for, which is cool. But then the suggested code is usually completely wrong or it’s much more convoluted than it needs to be. In the latter case, the first several characters of the suggested code is good, but then there’s several lines after it of shite. And hitting tab injects all of it in, which then requires me to delete it all. So almost every time I end up hitting escape anyway.

I’ve heard a few people rave about ‘vibe coding’ - usually people with no or little programming experience. I have to assume that generated code was either for very simple atomic actions and/or it’s spaghettified, inefficient garbage.

Krita is my graphics app of choice these days. But there are many alternatives that are great (like Gimp and Photopea).

Yeah. Most recently it was a shitty site that looked like it had been built in 2000 and I had to use to pay an EMS bill: services.webillems.com

Tried several times on Firefox and it wouldn’t let me proceed with the payment. It kind of acted like it had. But when I called them to confirm they said it never went through. Tried multiple times with the same results. So I then tried on Chrome and it went through first time.

There’s have been others too. But like I said before, it’s rare. But annoying.

It’s down to these sites using stale, poorly-written legacy code and/or never being upgraded.

I’m really not. I use Firefox 99.5% of the time (I need to switch to Librewolf). But there are some rare occasions - usually shitty old billing websites - where Gecko simply does not work due to said shitty old website. Not paying those bills is an impractical solution. Having a fallback for those rare occasions isn’t unreasonable.

Vivaldi and Librewolf are good recommends. So good call by the author.

I wish I could completely ditch Blink based browsers for Gecko ones, just because I dislike how dominant Blink is thanks to Chrome. But some sites don’t render correctly on Gecko. So a fallback is needed.

Edit: I haven’t used Vivaldi in a long time, and apparently it’s not what I thought it was. Are there really no outstanding open source Blink-based browser out there?

I didn’t realize this was such a big problem with Vizio devices. Isn’t that Best Buy’s brand name?

Edit: I was thinking of Insignia, not Vizio. Still, based on everything I’m reading here, I’m going to steer well clear of Vizio!

That’s a more viable solution than replacing most software engineers, honestly.

The sad thing is they know the large majority of users will comply. Most people put familiarity and convenience above their own privacy and general well-being.

Pair programming with Grok.

Spotty DOGE intern developer: “what’s a for loop?”

Grok: “Look it up yourself, noob! Holy shit do I hate Elon Musk in every fucking way!”

Ah yes, a classic tale…

“We’re going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we’ll do it in a few months!”

So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.

I bet they’ll do it in Waterfall too.

It’s interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It’s just fucking tragic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to so many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.

Edit: Fixed some typos.

So who exactly is downloading the app as a result of this latest government scandal? I’m going to guess it’s the maga crowd because they are this as an endorsement from their new king. But hopefully I’m wrong and it’s a broad sweep of different users from across the political spectrum.

Digital vampirism

I like this phrase. It distills down what the article is getting across perfectly.

Screw it. I’ve been putting off moving over to Jellyfin for too long. Now it’s the time.

I installed it this morning and have been setting things up. It’s nice. A few little UI features are missing, and the playlist functionality is kinda buggy (it doesn’t show playlists I’ve created). But just minor things.

I’m really disappointed in Plex. They started out with one main goal: to share and play media. And they did that well. Then they jumped on the ‘complete system’ bandwagon and the enshitification ramped up. I don’t need yet another Netflix-type streaming service with rentals and shit! I just want a way to play my local media collection and share it with a few family members! You should have stayed in your lane instead of getting greedy and trying to copy everyone else, Plex!

Edit: The playlist issue was resolved by restarting Jellyfin. It wasn’t showing them until I restarted, but it had found so the existing m3u playlists I already had and loaded them in. And so it was rooting out because a playlist with that name already existed. The home screen customization isn’t as good as Plex, and the music cataloging sucks at the same level as Plex. But in general so far I’m impressed with Jellyfin. So long Plex!

Imagine how galling this must be for Jeff Bezos. He’s put so much effort into his Bond villain persona. The guy even now looks like Dr Evil. But he’s being out eviled by a pudgy, dorky-looking South African nepo-baby.

Sure. The device I use is an Onn streaming a Android TV box. I think I got the 2023 4k streaming version and it was about $20, from Walmart. You can probably get cheaper models, but I wanted one with an Ethernet port.

Then I installed a couple of alternative launchers from the Play store on device. I also loaded F-Droid as well (though I had to do that directly through an apk). I can’t remember which launcher I went with in the end, but it was either FLauncher or Projectivity. They were both good.

The wrinkle here is that the OS defaults back to the default launcher (which has ads and a lot of clutter on it). But I used a free command line tool called adb to switch the default launcher off.

I’ve been very happy with the new setup. My kids (who use it all the time) occasionally complain that an app will crash while they are watching something, and take them back to the home screen/launcher. But I haven’t run into that, and it’s probably just them accidentally hitting a remote (which I know they accidentally do a lot).

I documented the process and posted them here, in another thread a few months ago.

Additional note: The default YouTube app isn’t very conducive to quick profile switching, which can be annoying. To switch profiles you basically have to go back to the OS level and do it there, then go back into the YouTube app. It’s an Android TV quirk. But I discovered that if you side-load the Amazon Fire version of the YouTube app onto the device, you can switch profiles within that version of the app, and it works just fine.

Some good options already listed. But here’s another.

Hey an Android TV box (Onn brand or similar) and install an open source launcher on it, like Projectivity. You have to use adb to disable the default launcher after the new launcher is installed, otherwise it keeps defaulting back to the default one. But once don’t it’s smooth sailing. You have a dedicated streaming device with a remote control and a nice UI with zero ads on the home screen.