jerhewet

I could not agree more. You might love him, you might hate him. But he was a fixture in the Golden Age of Personal Computing.

In my case it's Windows 7. I have to override the useragent in Firefox nowadays; Hacker News now rejects any attempts to login or browse the site if I don't fake the browser useragent.

Fabrice Bellard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

GeoSpoof could not be installed because it is not compatible with Firefox 115.37.0

On the sites I visit often I use uBlock Origin to make fonts large enough for me to read (damn you, presbyopia!). Otherwise I use Ctrl-+ to increase the font size (Daring Fireball, for example).

news.ycombinator.com##:style(font-size: 18pt !important)

myanimelist.net##:style(font-size: 14pt !important)

old.reddit.com##*:style(font-size: 17pt !important)

Have my angry upvote. :-)

One of my faults is "When somebody tries to explain something I hear 'A' and everyone else in the room hears 'B'". And vice-versa. But if someone can iterate a very VERY rough cut of what they want and hand it off to a design / development team ... well ... damn. That might make everyone's life a lot easier.

Wow. Possibly the worst dickover[1] I've ever encountered.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore

I'm going to be 70 in November, and I can't wait to retire ... hopefully in 6 months, but chances are I'll keep working until I'm put out to pasture by the company I'm currently working for.

Throwing code hasn't lost its appeal, and I'm still learning new stuff every day, but the landscape has changed too much for my tastes since the early 2010's.

Nowadays we're doing "devops" instead of actual programming, the cloud has become the new mainframe, web browsers are just thin clients, buy-once-use-forever is long gone and replaced by monthly rent-seeking services and forced updates, and the sixth (seventh? eighth?) iteration of spicy autocomplete (as in "You no longer have to know how to write code!") is pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I started writing code in the early 70's, and became a paid developer in 1975. I still love programming, but I'm completely fed up with everything else that has ruined the experience in the past 10 to 15 years. I'm sure I'll still be throwing code after I retire, but it will be for my own enjoyment, and it won't be using any of the latest fads and dead ends (pretty sure we're on the eighth iteration) from the past couple of years.

uBlock Origin. Right-click, Block Element, click "Create", done.

Microsoft Teams. The poster child for web-based UI crap.

Mine would be "helicopter shots" when I'm watching the evening news.

I don't want to watch 45 minutes of "live coverage" from a news chopper hovering over a building on fire (or, from recent events in Los Angeles, water being sprayed on some storage tanks) while all of the talking heads try to make it sound interesting and relevant. Or, even worse IMO, a helicopter following a car chase for three hours, from freeway to surface streets and back to the freeway. Or a helicopter hovering over somebody's house for an hour because there are dead people inside.

This is worth 30 seconds of coverage. Tops. Move on to the actual news, please, and if it's worthy of a follow-up when there's an actual conclusion, another 30 seconds to wrap it up.

If I turn on the news and see a helicopter shot, I change the channel.

I stand corrected! My memory is pretty vague on this, but I was pretty sure Joel had said something very close to this in one of his blog posts in the early 2000's, but it looks like Zuckerberg was the first one to use the phrase "move fast and break things":

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/move-fast-break-things-fac...

Joel Spolsky.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

anatomy

Autonomy?

[autocorrect strikes again! :-)]

I wish our Lambdas would spin up faster, but otherwise I've been very happy with them over the past six years. We seldom run over the free tier limits, and when we do we get a bill for a couple of dollars. Dead simple to code for, dead simple to spin up a new instance or scale an instance if we need to.

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months.

I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it.

IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and rent-seeking, to my own bought-and-paid-for computer sitting on my desk that did exactly what I told it to do using software that never changed unless I wanted it to change, and now we're back to dumb terminals (browsers) that talk to mainframes (the cloud) that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software and have gone back to renting me the software and pushing changes that I never asked for and never wanted in the first place.

I will never use spicy autocomplete for anything, and I find it depressing that people are being forced to use it in order to keep their job. I see a very dark future for computing if real skills are all replaced with garbage being vomited out by rules engines that harvested their "guess the next word" results from today's internet.

Will Atlassian be harvesting code and content from private Bitbucket repositories? The wording in their policies and FAQ's is vague, so I'd like to get a definitive (Yes / No) answer.

Browse to https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent... and copy the latest UserAgent string for Google Chrome.

In Firefox, about:config > general.useragent.override > new string, click +, paste in the value from the website above, click the checkmark.

This will work most of the time on the sites that hired lazy, incompetent web developers to design their pages -- washingtonpost.com, lowes.com, and the worst offender of all, homedepot.com.

I have the book (and CD) on my shelf above my machines in my home office. I vaguely recall buying this at Costco, around the same time I bought the 4 volume Microsoft Press C++ series (for dirt cheap, at the time) from Costco.

MS Press used to publish some amazing references. I have a LOT of 'em.

I like this. It should be a status.

"I deficated this issue. Closed."

for posterity

Anyone remember this one?

Microsoft Press: Learn Java Now (complete with J++ installation CD). https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572314281

Steve Gibson, Gibson Research.

https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm

Just scroll down the page and look at the size of the completely self-contained executable programs. THIS is what Win32 is capable of. Something we always had with Win32 that was thrown away with .Net and C#.

And _please_ just spare me your opinions of how Steve Gibson "doesn't know anything about security". That's not what's important here. What's important is how freakin' small his full-on GUI stand-alone executables are.

EDIT: Just noticed this on his page.

Total Historical Count of files downloaded from this page: 52,292,601

Hmm. I guess I'm living the good life with all of the Firefox configuration changes I've made over the years. I have six right-click menu items and four buttons (page back, page forward, reload, and bookmark):

Save Page As, Select All, Take Screenshot, View Page Source, Inspect Accessibility Properties, and Inspect.

And one additional entry for uBlock Origin at the bottom of the menu (Block Element).

[insert light bulb going on over my head]

This hadn't occurred to me. I think you're right. This could get very interesting over the next couple of years...

https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/

See: I.C.E.

At least the headline makes sense to me.

Most technical problems are people problems

Certainly explains Microsoft Teams and Windows 11.

[note there is no /s -- it's 100% a people problem, because the wrong people are steering the ship]

JShit doesn't belong anywhere

Or, as I prefer to call it, Kiddiescript.

C# has way to many features, it feels bloated

Could not agree more. Too many -- WAY too many -- "features" from Javascript and functional languages have been jammed into C#, and the language has suffered for it. Every time I see "var blah" in C# code I cringe at how lazy you must be to not use strong typing when declaring a variable.

Same goes for "astink / await". If you need asynchronous multi-threaded code, use the damned Thread Parallel Libraries that Microsoft provided over a decade ago. Being forced to have every damned thing you write in C# wrapped with astink is just one giant code smell.

Yes, I'm old. Thank ghod I'll be retiring very soon, because as far as I'm concerned the tooling and languages I've used over the past 50 years have taken one step forward and at least three steps back in the past five years...

about:config, type ".ml." in the search (no quote marks), set everything to false / zero / blank.

I don't want anything even vaguely related to spicy autocomplete on any of my machines, and I go to great lengths to kill anything that even resembles it with fire.