firmretention

I was on the web in the late 90s! I don't recall seeing anything like this, although it certainly may have existed. Animated cursors yes (CometCursor!), but not little animations chasing your cursor.

I remember CometCursor and the like, but nothing that chased the cursor itself.

I have loud subwoofers in my car, but they're for my enjoyment. The fact that others might hear them is an unfortunate reality of physics. I try to be considerate in not blasting it in residential areas, late at night, etc., but bass is bass - it travels.

On the list of extremely annoying things you can put on a webpage, a cat constantly running after my cursor is definitely a new one for me.

My most hated one is not allowing me to right-click to open a context menu, or even worse, making right-click act the same as left-click, redirecting me to some page I never intended to go to.

Ivanhoe is a story about a Russian farmer and his tool.

I used to do this more often, but I find the gap is narrowing a lot. Most of the time I find I don't save enough to justify getting it in two weeks over 1 day.

Yup. My house is 50 years old and a townhome. I was killing 3-4 mice a week at one point! Got the entry points sealed and it's down to 2-3 a year. Will probably never get it down to zero because they can get in through my neighbors and find their way here somehow.

I never really saw them until I started working around Vanier. Seen some huge colonies near dumpsters.

Yeah, without sealing entry points, they just keep coming. Not only can they can squeeze through tiny holes, they leave a trail of pheromones behind them letting other mice know where to come in. Mice infestations are awful. Hate the buggers.

People are not generally answering interview questions based on instinct, but rather based on what they think the interviewer wants to hear to get the job. I would have interpreted this is as a leetcode style algo question and started by treating it as such, even though IRL my first instinct would be "get a lib that does it". Awful, awful strategy.

It's ridiculous because LLMs are far more capable. There was just a thread on HN the other day where multiple people shared experiences being able to decrypt, reverse engineer, and update the firmware of some long forgotten embedded device with zero background in the field using LLM coding tools. And you're comparing that to a preset generator.

I'm not saying LLMs will replace software developers, but this is such a ridiculous analogy that it hints to me that you've never seriously tried the latest tools.

I did this with my aftermarket Quest 3 headset strap. Added a few counterweights to the back to keep it from sliding down on my face. It is indeed much more comfortable.

Why not both?

then you need to tell both your MP and the Minister of Public Safety of Canada to reject this legislation

lol, for what reason? the LPC always gets its way

As someone who actually wrote primitive websites by hand in those days, the pages these produce are FAR more elaborate than your average webpage in those days. And divs/css? Should be using tables or gasp, iframes. This feels more like a vaporwave style re-imagining of what things were like than the real deal.

As an aside - anyone else really dislike the typeface used on this page? I find it difficult to read.

I wanted to upgrade to the new Paperwhite. Went through three of them with permanently lit pixels right in the middle of the screen until I gave up. Seems the quality control on these e-ink screens is really slipping. Meanwhile all the competitors are either selling the same old hardware from years ago, an Android tablet with an e-ink screen strapped to it, or color models that just have worse text rendering. My 2013 Paperwhite keeps soldiering on.

Your AI slop article stinks, and you should stop sharing them.

I've found two personal use cases for LLM generated code:

(1) I have an idea for some app, but either I feel it won't be useful enough/save me enough time to justify developing it, or I simply don't feel the problem is interesting enough to be motivated by it. In that case, a vibe coded tool is perfect. It generally does one simple thing, and I don't care about long term maintenance, because it just needs to keep doing that thing.

(2) Adding a feature to an open source project. Again, it's a case of "I want this feature, but am not willing to spend the time needed to implement it." Even a relatively simple open source project can take a day or two just to get a basic understanding of the code and where I need to make the changes. Now I can often just get a functioning vibe-coded implementation within a few hours.

(2) leaves me with some unsettling feelings about how this will affect the future of open source software. Some of the features I've implemented this way may very well be useful to other users, but I can't in good conscience just dump a vibe coded pull request on a project and except them to do the work of vetting it. But if I didn't have the energy to implement the change myself, I'm definitely not going to bother doing the work of going through all the LLM generated code, cleaning it up to the standards of the project, etc. Whereas before I didn't have a choice, and the idea of getting the change ready for a PR was much less daunting since I understood the problem space and solution well.

So at least for myself, I can see a future where many of the apps I use are bespoke forks of popular applications. Extrapolate that to many, many people and an interesting landscape emerges.

Hey some of us are in our late thirties! :)

The roomy case and big PCB make it very nice for modding. I put almost every documented mod there is in mine. The whole left and right side of the Pactec case is covered in knobs and switches. Added an LFO too that can do FM/AM.

The difference is that the output of LLMs is so distinctive in style that those ideas are communicated like a shapeless gray goo. The way something is communicated is as important as the idea itself. The tool becomes the dominant voice.

You didn't write this post. Your LLM did. Are you proud of yourself for copy and pasting "thoughts" that aren't yours?

Oh look another AI slop article pontificating on the merits of AI slop generators. It's slop all the way down.

Same experience here in Canada. I used to think it was something rarely done until I started spending a lot of time at bars in my university days. Every night, I saw countless people driving home drunk, and often the same people too. Even though the bartenders knew and were legally liable, they never said a thing unless they were stumbling down drunk.

A lot of these platforms are actually generating the content themselves to stick into playlists so that when users listen to them, they get 100% of the royalties.

Yes, you sit at that piano every Sunday morning and play Mahler for Maris. But you hate Mahler. Besides Maris, who doesn't?

I bounced off Season 2. Too much "weird for the sake of being weird". You could tell the first season had a plan, and the second was just winging it. Sadly an all too common occurrence for successful shows.