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Comment No shit (Score 4, Insightful) 166

New phones are several hundred dollars, and offer very little improvements over models a few years old. With inflation and every other cost of living rising, wages stagnating, unemployment rising, people are making choices. And more often than not, the choice is to pay food and rent instead of a shiny new phone that doesn't do anything new.

Comment Re:Visual Studio is a great IDE, but... (Score 1) 45

Curious what Mac you're using? I'm getting a new personal laptop somewhat soon, and the M5 chips look really nice. How much RAM do you have? I've currently got an M1 mini with 8GB of RAM that works pretty well but it tends to start bogging down when using containers and having a bunch of youtube tabs open. I'm not sure how much of the Apple Tax on memory I need/want to spend.

Comment Re:holy hell visual studio is expensive now (Score 2, Informative) 45

Yeah I used to have the MSDN subscription where you'd get binders full of CDs every quarter.

Visual Studio Community is free though for non-commercial use, and commercial use as long as you're under a certain annual revenue (Something like $1.5 million I think?). I'm sure the volume licensing that most shops use is far less than $500/month.

Comment Re:Meanwhile slashdot has released popup ads (Score 4, Informative) 45

VS26 is surprisingly good. There is a ton of AI crap in it, but you can completely turn it all off. VS26 runs noticeably better on my machine than VS22 did, I've been using the preview version for a while now without issue in my day job. Like I mentioned though, we're migrating away from Windows altogether now that .Net runs well in Linux and there are good cross-platform IDEs available.

Comment Re:Visual Studio is a great IDE, but... (Score 4, Insightful) 45

It's different now though. The alternating good/bad Windows releases used to be the core of the system was good or bad. Windows 11 is pretty good though. What's made it bad is shitty choices that Microsoft is making trying to squeeze money out of users. Ideas like their Recall AI crap they keep rolling out. Overwriting system settings with every update. Why do I have ads on my "Professional" edition for xbox crap? Why in the ever loving fuck does the built-in solitaire game now require a recurring subscription if I don't want to watch ads between games? I don't want to use OneDrive or Edge, stop prompting me about them.

And yeah, there's plenty of easy workarounds to almost all of these issues, but the point is that they keep making these decisions and pushing them on users. The Windows system itself isn't horrible these days, it's the management decisions that are killing it. A new version of Windows won't fix that.

One of the old school Windows developers posted a pretty good video on this the other day. He makes some good points, and honestly if they followed his ideas, Windows would be much better for developers and power users. But I don't see them doing that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Visual Studio is a great IDE, but... (Score 2) 45

Not a fan of Microsoft, but Visual Studio has made a ton of improvements over the past few years, including this release.

Unfortunately they've fucked Windows so badly recently, and JetBrains has made their IDE free for non-commercial use (And far cheaper for commercial licenses than MSDN) that myself and a ton of other .Net devs are moving off of Windows completely and won't be getting to use this new version.

Comment Re:Apple, your focus groups led you astray. (Score 1) 58

I loved my mini, I just wish it wasn't made with the crappier low-end components. I'd guess that's part of why the sales were so low, people wanted a small powerful phone, not a small gimped one. A Mini Pro would have been amazing. I finally upgraded my 12 mini to a 16 Pro, the phone is too damn big to comfortably hold and use one handed.

Comment Re:The Algorithm seems to be in charge at Spotify (Score 3, Interesting) 93

I've been saying this for a while as well. My spotify playlist has roughly 2,000 songs in it, but it continually plays the same 100 or so over and over. It's obviously not anything remotely close to a true random shuffle, and it's obvious that they've put work into making it not truly random.

The only thing I can think of is the royalties are cheaper for 2 plays of the same song than two plays of two unique songs.

And in researching alternate platforms, it seems that they all do this, making this an industry-wide issue, which screams that it's some BS licensing thing shitting up the experience for the end users.

Comment Re:There is no debate (Score 1) 76

Lack of single payer healthcare also keeps tons of people from starting a business for themself. By the time someone has built up enough experience to have a good chance of making it on their own, they'll have a family depending on them so they can't take the big risk of leaving a steady job.

The spouse/kids have a medical issue that isn't a huge deal in any other civilized country, but you're now dependent on healthcare subsidized by your employer for them to get treatment without bankrupting the family. Most people simply can't afford to give that up.

Also housing. Most people can't afford to risk lean months while starting a business because housing and other necessities are taking such a huge chunk of everyone's paychecks now.

Things are this way by design.

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