100%. I passed on the initial iPhone because you couldn't develop for it. Then the "sweet solution" offered was iPhone-themed web apps. Finally Apple published a real SDK, but you had to pay annually, and get your apps approved.

I got a Nexus S and liked it. Learning to develop for Android was a chore, but I was able to run applications I'd written and share them with others. I couldn't have done that with iOS.

However, you can (a) download the iOS dev tools for free, (b) build iOS apps on a Mac and run them natively in the iOS Simulator, and (c) install up to three such apps onto a device simultaneously (which must each be reinstalled when they expire after a week).

That's hardly an enticing pitch, but at least you can run code at all without the mothership's approval. And so can anyone else with whom you share the code and who's willing to climb the learning/installation curve. That's more than can be said for Android 16 at this time.

I believe I have the distinction of being the only person in the world to own a copy of The Mythical Man-Month that's been autographed... by Dave Barry.

(I swear I'm not making this up.)

LLMs excel at writing filler text which is mandated by some ritual but whose content is unimportant. For example, your fifth-grade report on the life and times of George Washington Carver, which is required work to get a grade but not anything likely to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge.

An LLM can write a summary better than a bored student, but that's really only of value to the student wanting to cheat -- it doesn't benefit society in any way, and the real value of educating the student is lost.

Are you sure it's *all* developers? Not all engineers are "lazy". ;-)

Hell, I don't even use Tab-completion in my text editor.

Ron Popeil had some iconic catchphrases (as immortalized in Weird Al's song "Mr. Popeil"), but I wouldn't call any of them a dark pattern.

But I will say that when it comes to buying appeal, there's nothing like dark patterns to really take the Shein off.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/606/

And you waited until NOW to mention this?

And another thing:

Firefox users ... will not be able to use their add-ons

Malicious add-ons can compromise user data

Which is it? Will add-ons be disabled across the board, or will add-ons run indiscriminately, unchecked by revocation lists?

I noticed recently that certain downloads to machines with old TCP/IP stacks and a mediocre wifi uplink were progressing much more smoothly than I was used to, with almost no collisions.

I was actually wondering if Comcast had done something to address congestion (before I knew of this story, I mean â" not confirmation bias), and it turns out that I'm in one of the pilot areas.

Oh, really? Because my first thought was "rat-fucked". :-)

For me, it was five weeks ago. :-) (But it wasn't for x86[_64] or ARM...)

The ones like GCC and clang that saw continued improvement over the last decade, definitely. The 2000-era Metrowerks compilers I'm using to indulge my classic Mac OS fetish, not so much. It's trivial to beat the 68K compiler, even without being clever.

In most cases, my code was already platform-independent, so I leave the C/C++ implementation in place guarded by preprocessor conditional directives.

What about playing not on a cloud service? I loved the original Starcraft and its Brood War expansion, but I opted to avoid Starcraft 2 due to its online-only requirement.

(I never did finish Brood War's Zerg campaign; any time I want to spend on RTS gaming can go toward that.)

One man's pain is another man's pastry. Especially if he's French.

Yeah? Why don't you write about it in your blag?

The only reason you'd be attacking PHP is so you can hide your own foolish design mistakes. Why don't you tell us what those are? WHAT ARE YOUR CRIMES?

Godwin's Law applies just as well to programming language advocacy: If your defense of a language requires pointing out that it's Turing-complete, you lose the argument.