These platforms are starting to let people bet on wildfire activity. What a fun way of incentivizing arsonists.

I love scapegoating individual developers as much as the next guy, but if you take a look at the Win32 API, you'll find loads of fun "features" such as:

- Every single function that takes a string has two implementations: one that ends with the letter A (and takes its strings as ASCII) and one that ends with the letter W (and takes its strings as UCS-16). And then it has a preprocessor-define (with no suffix) that gets expanded to either one implementation or the other, based on your compiler settings.

- windows.h defines preprocessor-tokens for min() and max(), which means any C++ program that ever calls std::min() or std::max() will error out with a very strange compile-time error, if it included windows.h first; the work-around is to define NOMINMAX first to prevent windows.h from polluting the namespace.

- Modern windows is perfectly capable of arbitrary-length file-paths, but ships by default with a 260-character filepath limit anyway, "to preserve backwards compatibility with older software that expects that limitation to be enforced". To get correct behavior you have to hand-modify your registry; otherwise you find out about this limitation when you go to unzip a .zip file and the unzip mysteriously fails even though the .zip file is valid.

These are all defects that other OS's simply don't suffer from, either because the other OS's were designed correctly from the beginning, or because the people in charge of the other OS's long ago took the hit (in short-term breakage) and fixed the problems rather than letting them linger forever to preserve backwards compatibility.

All Windows developers (good and bad) have to deal with these issues, probably forever, and every line of code they add to work around these problems has to be supported and debugged and tested as well, hence the damage compounds.

Before Trump, it was a cultural norm that a President of the United States was expected to follow ethical and moral guidelines as well as laws; not only because anything less would be dishonorable and a disservice to his country, but also because otherwise he would pay a steep political price for his unethical behavior. Trump's most significant political innovation has taken the form of figuring out how to convince a plurality of the American public that the only real standard for Presidential behavior is "whatever you can get away with".

Imagine it's ten years from now, and for $199 anyone can buy an in-home UPS from Home Depot with enough capacity to keep their lights on and their ice cream frozen for 48 hours. Once most houses have one of those, most power outages become more of a minor nuisance than a significant problem.

Part of it may be a dysfunctional corporate culture, but a lot of it is a consequence of Microsoft's business decision to maintain backwards compatibility at all costs. When you're committed to retaining every design mistake, forever, the complexity of the codebase just keeps rising, which means that less and less of it can fit into anyone's mind at one time, which means more mistakes are made going forward, and the technical debt just keeps compounding.

You're conflating your emotions with facts, in a field you very likely know very little about.

Always anonymous, always cowards.

Will it have a Genuine People Personality? Perhaps a cheerful and sunny disposition?

Perhaps the real problem is that there is simply no reliable way to tell a real human's post from a generative AI's post anymore, since by the AIs are trained on the posts of real humans and are asymptotically becoming indistinguishable from them. You certainly can't simply go by post-quality, since the some of the smarter bots are better posters than some of the, err, less-well-informed humans.

Because of that, it's hard to feel good about putting any real effort into a social media conversation, because in the back of your mind you're always wondering: am I engaged in any kind of constructive activity here, or am I just unknowingly humping a rubber doll that Zuckerberg (or somebody) has provided for my amusement?

A Dyson sphere would have significant environmental effects too, and it's equally likely to be built.

Insane Clown Posse, is that you?

Once they realized you'd pay the hire price, if the fees are gone, the businesses are just going to go 'yummy more money for me'.

This is dumb shit. Many stores around me explicitly charge you the difference if you pay by credit card to cover the service fee.

I have never had my debit card compromised. Ever. The fact that it's a direct line is what makes it not usable to buy things online, etc (generally). But it's very nice to use in person - I like that when I spend money, I'm actually spending it and not creating debt. (Don't get me wrong, I always pay off my credit card bills every month, which are not trivial sums .. but I'm only using them because they're the only things you can use online.)

Credit cards, on the other hand - we all pay for the insurance. It's not really the banks problem, its a problem that you have protection for because you pay for it.

"Just give me 1% in cash"

That's still money that comes from somewhere. Like .. from you.

"An opt-out setting that quietly ships settings data off-device is exactly the sort of thing that adds to administrators' workloads rather than lightening them."

Fine, but there's *tons* of them. This is a drip in an ocean. The opposite, settings you need to turn on are also fucking huge depending on the corperate environment it's used in. I mean, fiddling over one setting on a product with a user base as huge and diverse as Windows is nitpicking imo.

Places that have to deal with this are setup to be proactive about the larger problem set.