The current US average tariff rate is 17%. But go back to 2024, countries were charging small single-digit percentages.

US 2.2%, Japan is 2.8%, EU 2.9%, UK 3.5%, Canada 3.8%

He is referring to the feature where Amazon broke-out the price and the tariff separately, like how it shows the price, sales tax, and VAT as separate charges. Amazon backed-off from the plan after Trump threatened called it a "hostile and political act."

A coworker who is a mechanical engineer developed a web-based tool 100% LLM coding. He had no prior coding experience. It wrote HTML for him, and took his JSON data and just threw it into the JavaScript files directly. It won't scale because the whole thing is client-side, and it added a bunch of junk files that do nothing. But he produced a 100% working tool that does exactly what he wants. He reached out to me and asked how to actually deploy it somewhere for a demo. I made him a web server, and he used the copilot in VS Code to deploy it. I keep asking him how things work, and he shrugs.

This was originally a prototype to show management that this tool is worth developing for real. But it works well enough that the team just uses it internally. He showed me that he added logging, and I asked how it works, and again he shrugged. The logs go into an azure storage blob that he can view. I have no idea how that works since it is entirely client-side. I bet the AI hard-coded some API key or credentials in there - but it's an internal tool so it kinda doesn't matter. At this point he is using features of Azure that I don't even know, so in a weird way I am jealous even though I'm the professional software engineer with 25 years of experience.

Come to the utopian city of Rapture! Where the artist does not fear the censor, where the scientist is not be bound by petty morality, where the great are not be constrained by the small! Want to be stronger, faster, smarter? Plasmids are the key! Book your flight now, use the promotion code GATTACA for a 10% discount!

Even if you embrace the online storage, the even obfuscate where that storage is. So I am reading "Widget Maker v1 Mechanical Design.docx" and I think "Oh, what other documents are there on the Widget Maker? So I want to access the FOLDER that it is in, and it is nigh impossible to find it. It's just in the ether somewhere.

OneDrive destroys the power of the desktop metaphor that Microsoft helped to make so popular. What was great about good ol' share drives is that they looked and operated exactly like a file on disk. But today, just renaming a file is hard because they do everything possible to not show you a useful Explorer/Finder view of things.

I do this exact same thing and they can pry POP3 from my cold dead hands.

IMAP is for people who want to leave all their email on someone else's mail server and be subject to their tools for searching/archiving/storage.
POP3 is for people who want to have full control of their email. I have more than 25 years of emails stored locally - every email I have ever sent or received. I have no interest in syncing that to some remote server via IMAP. Nor do I want my local storage to be "secondary" where I have to go through extra steps to download them and archive them. POP3 is perfect - download everything, leave it on the server for 30 days just in case.

Don't forget: Microsoft said that Windows 10 is the last version of Windows.

The article is correct though: The real reason is that the horrible parts of Windows 10 were optional before, and they are now required in Windows 11.

Also note that the web in general does this same stuff by default, and nobody cares. People log-in to Chrome using their gmail account, then happily browse an advertising-laden web while Google tracks and sells their every move. They log-in to Pinterest and Facebook and Tiktok and whatever, happily sharing their data. So the market has spoken: Nobody cares enough about the surveillance to actually change their habits.

How long before we login to Slashdot with Gmail credentials? This is like the last site left on the "old web." All 100 of us left. *shakes fist at cloud*

I have always dreamed of being cyber-augmented. A camera and a brain implant, so that I could look at a sign and mentally think "zoom in" and read it from a distance. Or look at some acquaintance and have it display: "Joe Smith, at 37. 2 kids Joey and Kaley. Joey just joined Cub Scouts. Kaley auditioned for the part of Dorothy." That would frieking rooock! Or to listen to a speech and have it pop-up with fact checks.

We have the tech!!!!

But the data stream is owned by assholes!!!

When we imagine this, we don't imagine that the video + your location + the last time you made a bowel movement is streamed to an advertising company who offers this as a free service so that they can beam targeted ads into your brain. That's now how this is supposed to work. Do I like the idea that a computer can warn the school principal that a student brought a gun into school? Yes! But not if that means the camera also tracks the student's every movement and knows who is on their period. That's not cool, and it's not worth it.

Technology futurism isn't evil. But the population at large ceded control of the internet to the least worthy of humanity. We can get to a really cool future only if people flock to systems that are designed around people controlling their own data.

This is an often-repeated rumor but the numbers say otherwise. The claim's origin is that Biden made a policy of not granting any new oil drilling licenses on federal land. But that didn't really change anything since there are plenty of wells, and it is difficult to open new wells on undeveloped federal land since it involves building roads, seeking permits, etc. Offshore drilling is generally easier, and we have a glut of offshore drilling wells that are still full.

The number of new licenses issued didn't change significantly between Obama / Trump / Biden. In some periods Biden's numbers were bigger, in some Trump's were bigger. The US isn't desperately looking for new oil and mineral sources. There are so many outstanding oil drilling licenses that have been granted and left unused, and we can already produce more oil than we can refine. Oil prices are really determined by refinery capacity, not new drilling licenses.

Shouldn't the OS be able to cast the screen, rather than this being a function of the application?

I propose a law requiring companies to continue to provide old versions of software. They can remove a feature from the new version, but I can still get the old one. In the past, if Microsoft removed a feature from Word 2005 for example, then one could refuse to upgrade. I could save the installer. Yes, eventually it won't work any longer, and I am not saying they must support every version into perpetuity. But if Netflix removes a feature, I can't download the old version. So they should be barred from putting a barrier in place preventing access or use of it.

Dangit, stupid HTML filter! The was supposed to be "Oh no, open source doesn't support [INSERT ENSHITTIFICATION HERE] like customers want!"

I think it was intended to be drippingly sarcastic. Sloppy is pretending that the failure to screen cast is a feature that customers wanted, then constructing a sentence like "Oh no, open source doesn't support like customers want!"

This is why browsers should not launch apps without first prompting. Steam, Discord, Roblox, GlobalProtect VPN, and BeyondTrust, Office 365/Teams, and gzillions more work this way. You should never click the "[ ] Don't prompt me any more for this application" button. This allows any arbitrary web site to get out of the browser sandbox and chain to security flaws (or even direct features like "subscribe to podcast") that are in the application.

Why Microsoft is calling Windows 10 ‘the last version of Windows’ May 7th, 2015
Why Microsoft Announced Windows 10 Is 'The Last Version Of Windows' May 8, 2015
Windows 10 will be 'the last version of Windows' from May 11, 2015