The subscription to his own machine had bugs that prevented him from using a basic windowed text editor and that isn't the last straw?
Readit NewsI started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing.
I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of something incredible. That's not to say there aren't downsides (WOPR almost killed everyone after all), but we're definitely in a golden age of computing.
I didn't imagine I would be sending all my source code directly to a corporation for access to an irritatingly chipper personality that is confidently incorrect the way these things are.
There have been wild technological developments but we've lost privacy and autonomy across basically all devices (excepting the people who deliberately choose to forego the most capable devices, and even then there are firmware blobs). We've got the facial recognition and tracking so many sci-fi dystopias have warned us to avoid.
I'm having an easier time accomplishing more difficult technological tasks. But I lament what we have come to. I don't think we are in the Star Trek future and I imagined doing more drugs in a Neuromancer future. It's like a Snow Crash / 1984 corporate government collab out here, it kinda sucks.
plagiarist commented on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used blog.alaindichiappari.dev... · Posted by u/alainrk
Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me.
Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules?
If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?
There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA code that moves billions of dollars daily. I've had my excitement setting up dev tools and configuring vim a million ways. I want starships now.
I want to see the future unfold during my career, not just have it be incrementalism until I retire.
I want robots walking around in my house, doing my chores. I want a holodeck. I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. I will not be content with twenty more years of cellphone upgrades.
God, just the thought of another ten years of the same is killing me. It's so fucking mundane.
The future is exciting.
Bring it.
Oh, no, you're imagining the wrong subgenre of sci-fi. These robots are actually owned and operated by billionaires.
plagiarist commented on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used blog.alaindichiappari.dev... · Posted by u/alainrk
And there was a time when using libraries and frameworks was the right thing to do, for that very reason. But LLMs have the equivalent of way more experience than any single programmer, and can generate just the bit of code that you actually need, without having to include the whole framework.
I would like a more reliable way to activate this "way more experience."
What I see in my own domain I often recognize as superficially working but flawed in various ways. I have to assume the domains I am less familiar are the same.
plagiarist commented on France's homegrown open source online office suite github.com/suitenumerique... · Posted by u/nar001
A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite.
My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.
Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.
plagiarist commented on Start all of your commands with a comma (2009) rhodesmill.org/brandon/20... · Posted by u/theblazehen
You can use an alias, which takes priority over $PATH. e.g. I have this in .zhsrc to override the "claude" executable to run it in the OS sandbox:
alias claude="sandbox-exec -f ~/agents-jail.sb ~/.local/bin/claude --dangerously-skip-permissions"How does your sandbox ruleset look? I've been using containers on Linux but I don't have a solution for macOS.
The contractor is acting on behalf of the company though? We don't need yet more magical liability protections for billionaires, we need fewer.
plagiarist commented on TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe nytimes.com/2026/02/06/bu... · Posted by u/thm
The only reason the US and Europe are targeting TikTok is because they don't own the platform. Facebook and WhatsApp (owned by Meta) are responsible for so much hate politics and social unrest around the world (Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ). Amazon, Google and Microsoft helped the Israelis conduct the genocide in Gaza with their AI tools (UN Calls Out Google and Amazon for Abetting Gaza Genocide - https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-o... ). But all that's OK.
The US government would have to demonstrate improving people's lives to get votes if they couldn't campaign entirely on hate politics. Obviously they prefer the hate politics and ragebait attention algorithms. That way they can funnel billions of dollars to themselves and their buddies instead of wasting it on services supporting US citizens.
plagiarist commented on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZG... · Posted by u/cdrnsf
Authoritarian regimes don’t run on facts. They run on the primacy of Authority. Cameras record factual information. Facts are inconvenient for Authority. You know, 1984 Department of Truth style.
They will have the AI just make a video of you doing whatever they feel like accusing you of and publish that from a .gov website.
Fyi, in Mint if you search application for "notepad", "Text Editor" is the first result. That is curated search done right. Search for notepad on windows and you probably get an ad for a travel website.