I've heard this one before.

"This new technology has been great while the wealthy early adopters could use it to exploit the masses, but now that it's becoming more widespread and democratized, we must regulate it carefully, introducing rules with which only the wealthy and well-established can realistically comply, to protect society."

How about that worst of both worlds, the tutorial where the author starts out writing as if their audience only barely knows what a computer is, gets fed up partway through, and vomits out the rest in a more obtuse and less complete form than they would've otherwise?

1. Turn on your computer. Make sure you turn on the "PC" (the big box part) as well as the "monitor" (TV-like part).

2. Once your computer is ready and you can see the desktop, open your web browser. This might be called "Chrome", "Safari", "Edge", or something else. It's the same program you open to use "the Google".

3. In the little bar near the top of the window where you can write things, type "https://www.someboguswebsite.corn/download/getbogus.html" and press the Enter key.

4. Download the software and unarchive it to a new directory in your borklaving software with the appropriate naming convention.

5. Edit the init file to match your frooping setup.

6. If you're using Fnerp then you might need to switch off autoglomping. Other suites need other settings.

7. Use the thing. You know, the thing that makes the stuff work right. Whatever.

Congratulations! You're ready to go!

Reading the FAQs, the whole situation smacks of changing for the sake of change. It seems like some important functionality of the old system isn't available in the new system, but they're pushing it through regardless. Combined with this downplaying of Linux support, perhaps some political representatives with low technical skills have been talking to some lobbyists. And unless the Finnish school system has bought into Chromebooks in a big way, they seem unusually eager to support ChromeOS.

I wonder if the whole Secure Boot/Microsoft shim key issue is a part of this.

I once had a manager hand me a project brief and ask me how quickly I thought I could complete it. I was managing my own workload (it was a bad situation), but it was a very small project and I felt that I had time to put everything else on hold and focus on it. So, I said that I might be able to get it done in four days, but I wouldn't commit to less than a week just to be sure.

The manger started off on this half-threatening, half-disappointed rant about how the project had a deadline set in stone (in four days' time), and how the head of the company had committed to it in public (which in hindsight was absolute rot). I was young and nervous, but fortunately for me every project brief had a timeline of who had seen it, and more importantly, when they had received it. I noticed that this brief had originated over three months prior, and had been sitting on this manager's desk for almost a month. I was the first developer in the chain. That gave me the guts to say that my estimate was firm, and that if anyone actually came down the ladder looking for heads to set rolling (one of the manager's threats), they could come to me and I would explain.

In the end nothing ever came of it because I managed to get the job done in three days. They tried to put the screws to me over that small of a project.

I appreciate the touch of making this with generative AI. Unless someone went to the effort of deliberately writing "VIbc coam" on the spine.

It's 2026 and people are still falsely conflating digital with suspect and physical with safe. We live in a world where plenty of commercial software that comes "on a disk" is unuseable without constant approval from the publisher, and plenty of "digital download" software can be downloaded once and then used and reinstalled forever without needing to ask for anyone's permission.

I understand the confusion. For a long time, you got an item on physical media, and no-one could take it away from you. Then downloads and cloud services became popular, and at the same time this crap started happening. But not everyone's trying to screw us with downloads, and the people who are, are doing their damndest to screw us via physical media as well.

The issue isn't digital vs. physical, it's own vs. lease.

JS has saved me many hours of mind-numbing, error-prone manual keyboard work by giving me a way to hack together a simple bit of automation as a web page.

Even when a computer has been ham-fistedly locked-down by an overzealous IT department, I can almost always still access a text editor and a browser that will load local HTML files.

I wouldn't be surprised if book readers spend 92% of their time on older books. Or if music listeners spend 92% of their time on older pieces.

Icons that are based on English puns and wordplay are easily understood by speakers of other languages.

This reminded me of one of those Top Gear "drive across a foreign country in weird vehicles" specials where Jeremy Clarkson needed to borrow a cable to jump-start his car, and laboriously mimed out jumping for "jump", and walking a dog for "lead", to a perplexed local. Richard Hammond was cracking up but finally managed to point out what a fool Clarkson was being.

Geolocation is an accurate way to predict the user’s language.

And as an addendum to this, in 2025 nobody should be using Windows' "Non-latin/-unicode character set" setting to guess the user's preferred language. That's a pre-WinXP kludge. I'm specifically looking at you, Intel integrated graphics software writers, but you have plenty of company, don't worry.

This is a short, interesting video, but there's really nothing here for any competent programmer, even a fresh graduate. It turns out they they update the software by sending the update by radio (/s). The video hardly goes any deeper than that, and also makes a couple of very minor layman-level flubs.

There is a preservation effort for the old NASA computing hardware from the missions in the 50s and 60s, and you can find videos about it on YouTube. They go into much more detail without requiring much prior knowledge about specific technologies from the period. Here's one I watched recently about the ROM and RAM used in some Apollo missions: https://youtu.be/hckwxq8rnr0?si=EKiLO-ZpQnJa-TQn

One thing that struck me about the video was how the writers expressed surprise that it was still working and also so adaptable. And my thought was, "Well, yeah, it was designed by people who knew what they were doing, with a good budget, lead by managers whose goal was to make excellent equipment, rather than maximize short-term profits."

I had a mini movie night with two colleagues, one is around middle age like me, and the other in their twenties. We were going through some DVDs and Blurays, and Die Hard came up. We two older folks said we liked it but the younger said that they'd never seen it. Well obviously we had to watch it right then.

Afterward, the young colleague said they found the movie boring and unoriginal. Talking it over, we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.

Although I haven't played it myself, to read someone saying that Ultima 4 is derivative and lacking in originality feels a lot like that experience with Die Hard. Additionally, I think that the real old games usually expect a level of imagination and willingness to put up with discomfort that even I sometimes find a little offputting in 2025, despite the fact that I grew up with many of those games and had no issues with them at the time. If I don't remind myself of it, it can be easy to forget that old hardware wasn't limited only in audio-visual power, but also storage size and processing power.

I still search through old games, but I'm looking for ideas that maybe didn't work well or hit the market right the first time, but still deserve further consideration, especially in light of technological advances that have happened in the intervening years.

I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner's photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.

I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup "options", which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn't seem to be any way to do it while using the "service" normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.

People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these "services" with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I'd imagined.

Gamer sites on the early Internet were full of these "Easter eggs" that were really just non-obvious things with clear explanations in the manual.

One that I found particularly irrimusing (and seems to keep popping up forever) was that holding some combination of buttons on the Gameboy Advance when you turn it on "plays a secret, alternative start-up sound, then it just sits at the Gameboy logo until you press a button. That's all it does."

Except if you read the manual you'd know that holding that button combo overrides the normal start-up and forces the GBA into multi-play download mode, so you can play those games without having to take the cartridge out of the console. Pressing a button in that mode cancels it and resumes normal start-up, loading a game from cartridge if one is inserted.

I've seen some people insist that their manual didn't say anything about this, but I have trouble believing them given that it was written in the manual for the GBA which I bought on launch day.

Unfortunately we all know what happens when you tell hackers that something's going to be very hard to break into.

I understand that they were excited about the idea and wanted to share it with gamers, but if they actually wanted to give the system the best chance of success, they should've kept their mouth shut.

Guys, I know AI slop sucks, but maybe don't shoot the messenger (downvote OP)? I think it's worth knowing how mainstream media is presenting this.

A few years ago I had a software problem, and in the course of trying to solve it I found someone with almost the identical problem on SO, although no-one had posted a solution. Later on, I managed to piece some facts together and come up with a solution that worked for me. Trying to make life easier for others having the same problem, I posted my solution to that SO question, along with a brief explanation of what I thought the underlying problem was, and how my solution addressed it.

I got several upvotes, and one or two comments from people saying it worked for them too, which was nice. There was also a post from someone it didn't work for, and they outlined why they thought that might be, which was constructive.

Unfortunately there was also some salty grump who weighed in just to tell me that my solution wasn't "correct". Not that it didn't work mind you, just that it wasn't good enough for them. As far as I bothered to look into their vague comments, my solution may have fixed the issue more as a side-effect than directly, but it did fix the issue. Meanwhile this person offered no alternative instructions of their own.

As time goes on, I seem to run across this sort of -- not just unhelpful but "anti-helpful" -- attitude more and more often on SO.

"If you wish to be a writer, write."

Epictetus delivered this burn over 1900 years ago.

Yeah, I'm sure that almost all of us have felt this way at one time or another. But the thing is, every team behind every moronic, bone-headed interface "update" that you've ever hated also sees themselves in the programmer's position in this meme.

I once saw a documentary about Bedouin tribes that were dying out. The problem was very simple, from the outside; they were killing virtually all of their female children.

The team interviewed an elder of one tribe, asking him about this practice. As expected, the elder said that parents wanted sons to continue their family names.

"If no-one in the tribe has any daughters, where will these sons find wives?" asked the interviewer. The elder confidently replied without hesitation, "They will get wives from other tribes." "But what if the other tribes kill their female babies just like your tribe does?" the interviewer persisted (In fact, they had met people from several tribes, and indeed they all followed this terrifying practice). The elder looked at the interviewer like he was a slow child. "They will get wives from other tribes."

It's a persistent dynamic memory allocation that's accessed by multiple processes! :)