Shh! Can’t you see this is a library?

It’s the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

I wasn’t a great writer to start, but with editors guiding me, I came to be a nationally recognized writer. It’s a skill one develops. Maybe a few people spring forth from the womb ready to write, but must don’t. Additionally, I was told in high school to avoid writing; my voice wasn’t suited to regurgitating a teacher’s interpretation of literature. It took getting really pissed off at a national policy to find my voice.

And finding your voice is all well and good, but that doesn’t mean you’ve yet learned anything about the craft of writing. That first year was a crucible.

Understanding the length of dashes aside, I think a big part of this backlash is a lot of people are terrible writers, and as such, the idea that another user can actually write is offensive to them. They have no way to fight back with words, so LLMs provide a tidy way to dismiss the whole piece as a hallucination.

I, too, have a couple of different writing styles, which stems from having been an opinion editor in college. What Beeple generally see on here is my columnist voice, but I am capable of the editorial Voice of God when it’s called for (it is rarely called for).

No offence taken. Even on Firefox this seems to be a regular issue on sites like hotel/travel booking. When you don’t buy anything, the back button sends you to a landing page with more options instead of operating as designed. Weird as it is, Google’s move might make life better for Firefox users. I’ve been conditioned to open everything in a new tab because of such shenanigans.

I had an SP3 before this (rarely used, as I still had my main rig), and in both cases, the first thing I did was get a glass screen protector. And I’m glad I did, as at certain angles, the screen is clearly cracked in multiple places, but the extra glass is successfully holding the whole thing together.

The thing is, I was running KDE Neon on this, and as it’s a fanless design, it would regularly overheat. So it’s back to Windows for now. After the RAM shortage is sorted, maybe I can afford new kit.

Well, you want to be using Firefox in the first place. Chrome is just data-collection. You want uBO and NoScript and learn to check everything when a page fails to load.

Oh, the touchscreen was a huge feature to me. I figured I’d use it as a tablet for videos, RSS feeds and such, but the reality is it’s kinda useless when the keyboard isn’t attached.

I stopped trusting eBay when a local buyer got my old, fully functional motherboard after I did an upgrade. Met him in the parking lot, mobo back in its antistatic packaging atop some foam, in the original box.

He then filed for a refund after presumably taking a screwdriver to the LGA for unknown reasons and then claimed that was the condition it was in when I sold it to him (with photos). So … you want to destroy something you just bought? I don’t see the logic here, but then again, there was someone who bought a phone from me and wanted a refund because T-Mobile has spotty service in their area. At least in this case, eBay was like “It’s not on the seller to know the cell coverage in a buyer’s area.”

These days? I’ve been using it for years, alongside uBO. It’s astounding how many trackers and third-party sources pop up on many websites. I pissed off my last live-in girlfriend by having a pihole and blocking anything Facebook owns at the router level. She had to use mobile data for her addiction to Facebook and Instagram. But I’m not letting that tracking pixel into my home.

You get used to a page not loading, checking NoScript and whitelisting the site (temporarily). When that unleashes the additional 15-20 sites that also want access to MY computer, I look for another source. Like, I can accept they’re using a CDN, but past that, it’s stealing my bandwidth just for data harvesting, and I’ve gotten too old for that shit.

The hypocrisy here is stunning. Archives for me, but not for thee.

I’m pretty certain “My boss makes a dollar, and I make a dime. That’s why I shit on company time” is a century old.

I never had a cable subscription (that I paid for), nor have I ever subscribed to a streaming service (I had Prime for years for the shipping, not the content).

I own things, and I like it, much to the chagrin of the tech bros.

I ended up very happy I didn’t go into software once I heard the hell of agile and Jira. Like, I can do this all in Python … what are y’all talking about?

Agile just sounds like a stupid modeling method. Has anyone ever said without irony “we’ll get it better next sprint”? Really? You want better software as a software company? Thank god I was sitting down.

Of course you fucking are. If your company is hoping for reversions via this may as well die. The whole point is control, not output, efficiency or quality.

Since you’ve admitted to being argumentative, I’ll point out that you misspelled Berkeley. I was accepted there into EECS, though neither MIT nor Oxford. As it turns out, if you don’t apply, they don’t notice you.

Cool. I’m drunk and don’t care to do any digging, so if you’d like to do that on my behalf …

Musk doesn’t need to know how to make kids, but he does need to learn how to name them. It’s a child, not a password requirement.

The CS department at the University of Washington with all sorts of tech companies starting up? I mean, sure, if you want to believe your timeline, you’re free to feel that way, but claiming this was standard by 1992 is ludicrous to me.

I started as a CS major in 1997, and the term was not used.

while (idiocy continues);

do nothing;

end while;