As a nomad traveling around with a phone and ancient Surface

Ugh, I think no matters what happens, you lose. If your car has a CD player and is the main place where you usually listen to music, then it seems you would need to keep your CD collection in the car too, and that puts an upper limit on its size. Between the back seats and trunk, I could maybe fit a dozen or two beer-cases-repurposed-as-CD-boxes, but it would completely take over those spaces. And keeping even that small of a subset of the collection organized enough to be binary-searchable sure sounds annoying.

That was always the problem with CDs as a playback medium instead of just a long-term storage medium: inserting the CD back into the collection after playback. It's not terrible when you have shelving [and enough of it, since it keeps growing] but as soon as you have to pack things in boxes, it gets pretty hard to work with. I remember for a time there, before I had all my music ripped, where we were just listening to same 30 or 40 CDs sitting out in a loose unboxed pile that I jokingly called the "L1 music cache," over and over again. ;-)

Elsewhere you mention that you live in the car and simply don't have anywhere else to store things, so I guess this general kind of problem is going to be recurring. (Where do you keep your air fryer and microwave and coffee maker and stove and your wife's decorative bathroom hand towels that you're supposed to never use, the cat litter box, and the air mattress you put out when you have company staying over at your car for the weekend?) j/k but my point is that the cars have never been really CD friendly but if the car is your house and storage shed too, then .. oy, do whatever you can but it's never going to be convenient.

Music can't be the only thing where the market isn't catering to you. I might even go as far as suggesting the housing market as the number one mis-cater!

do you see how .. the decision to take [CD players] away seems much more to do with power and selling subscriptions than practical engineering capability?

Oh, sure! I didn't know that you couldn't get car CDs players anymore (I'm admittedly very out of touch with the new car market), but it doesn't surprise me that they're no longer something you can just take for granted by default. No doubt pushing subscription services played a later role in de-emphasizing CD players in cars, but you should keep in mind that real consumer demand had been doing that too, ever since around the turn of the century when HD-based MP3 players started to get popular. Subscriptions to proprietary streaming services are a bit of a late-comer to the CD funeral.

Even if there were no such thing as music streaming subscriptions, a lot of people today would be using their phones even in CD-ready cars. They would just party like it's 2001, playing files ripped from CDs. I don't know if that would be enough to remove CD players from cars, but I bet at least some manufacturers would have.

If the price in the menu is $100 and you're expected to give a 20% tip then you actually end up paying $120.

If the price in the menu is $120 with no tip then you actually end up paying $120, which is fair for all.

Hiding the true price by expecting tips is misleading.
The tipping system tries to guilt people into paying more, an up front price does not.

If the tip is not mandatory, then people will seek a discount by not paying it, which shifts the costs onto other people. If you're not intending to go back (ie you're just a visiting tourist not a regular) then other than the attempts to make you feel guilty you actually have no reason not to do this. Do you want to be paying more so that tourists can get a discount?

No the tipping system is stupid. Calculate the cost of paying servers, and add it to the prices on the menu, add the relevant taxes too so the price you see is the price you pay.

A CEO was looking for a friend?

Breaking code that works is job security. "don't break code that works" is something that most of the programming world has given up on, unfortunately (along with KISS).

I don't think that's true, unless you insist on immutability. In particular, it IS possible to do safe IO, most languages can handle it. For Rust, it's just a matter of defining the proper rules that make IO safe, and then enforcing them.

Good point, I should have more compassion for people like that

Like this: https://it.slashdot.org/story/...

I lived through the goto era and I'm not sure it's a good thing.

There's definitely a scam somewhere in the gift card's history; the guy writing about his situation is upset because Apple glassed his account over it, not over the gift card value. The process of not being credited for the gift card's code and then talking to the retailer to get one that hadn't been tampered with apparently went smoothly; but then the account and everything associated with it got terminated without comment or recourse.

Someone is presumably going to eat the value of the gift card, apparently the retailer either directly or through merchant fees and the payment card processor doing it; but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account if you inadvertently interact with a gift card that has been used for some sort of scam activity; even if you have proof that you purchased it from a normal retailer that sells gift cards; rather than some dodgy flea market arrangement that screams 'bagman'/'too good to be true'.

Aimed directly at the scammers? Probably not, unless the penalties for the scam are currently insufficient. Aimed at the ad networks who, currently, have zero to negative interest in ensuring that ad spend isn't overtly hostile before plunking it in front of you? Quite possibly more helpful.

I don't know if Google has been caught out as dramatically as ; but based on the sorts of ad impressions they deliver their standards are clearly pretty low or apathetically applied, and more or less the same perverse incentives exist.

I say go ahead and ban them. This notion of pervasive, constant, surveillance is a pernicious one. While they are at it, ban chinese CCTV equipment too.

If the cost of surveilling is higher, police departments will be incentivized to use it more sparingly, and with cause. I mean they used to use manned helicopters all the time. Remember when TV stations would show live video of chases?

Besides that, putting public money into local tech companies to make police drones isn't all that bad. Sure import Chinese motors, speed controllers, and batteries. But there's plenty of American know how for making quad copters with flight controllers.

AppImage has proven itself to be a huge disappointment, and I suspect the same holds true for the others as well. I was running Kdenlive on Kubuntu 20.04, and there were must-have features in a newer Kdenlive that required a newer Kubuntu, so I downloaded the last AppImage of the Kdenlive I needed.

When I tried to run the AppImage, it failed with a GLIBC dependency error. That, for me, completely killed the whole notion of AppImage, SNAP, and all the others. They need the entire dependency chain (essentially the entire operating) included in each package, or something will fail.

We can thank Red Hat for this entire packaging clusterfuck, naturally. If they had just adopted the Debian format, 99% of current packaging issues would never have existed. But they saw a good think and thought, "I wonder how we can destroy this awesome user-centric advance. Ooh! I know!" Hence, RPM was born, and the Linux world became a decidedly worse place.

He obviously is an AI. Not actual person could be that full of shit, so he must be. The self hatred means he's a bit more advanced than most, sure, but everything that comes from his is still slop.

If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.