How might that work? Every approach I've seen has a drawback:
- Write the app using "web app technologies"? You end up shipping with each application a redundant copy of most of Chrome. Your users can't afford that kind of storage bloat in this SSD shortage.
- Use native code that calls the facilities of the operating system that the hobbyist developer uses daily? "Sorry, my app doesn't support your OS yet."
- Use native code at all? "Sorry, my code signing certificate ran out; I recommend building from source code. Here's how:" followed by a script that downloads and installs 20 GB of build-time dependencies.

And end up with a lot fewer people installing your app because of SmartScreen Application Reputation (on Windows), Gatekeeper (on macOS), App Review (on iOS and Android), and other deliberate friction that operating system publishers have ostensibly put in the way of wide distribution of malware that can read and exfiltrate every document in your user profile/home directory. A domain name, an entry-level VPS, and a TLS certificate to operate a web application are a lot more affordable than the code signing certificates to sign ports of a native application to all major platforms.

And again, the SSD shortage. Web applications keep working even if evicted from disk cache for capacity reasons.

Years ago, I thought of three application categories that won't get Free replacements any time soon: video games, players for rented movies and TV shows, and individual income tax return preparation software.

I live in a US House district that FiftyPlusOne has marked as a "safe" seat for the incumbent member of the low-government-services party. How would I go about convincing the public that a municipal bulletin board system is anything other than a waste of tax money?

Under current law, mobile carriers have power to exclude those devices from their networks.

You seem to be a bot, without the ability to provide any reasoning for your statement. People who don't understand how to code also can't DESIGN code to make the AI produce code without logic problems. A very basic and elementary bit of code, ask for a number between 0 and 9...now, what happens if someone puts a letter or other character in there? So, the idea of parsing the input to restrict what can be put in had to be done. It's a BASIC BASIC concept in code, but you still hear the occasional "buffer overflow" issue that can affect security, caused by people who just aren't good when it comes to programming.

Interviewing people to make sure they understand conceptually how to code, even if the need to write code has been cut way back should not change. It doesn't matter what the language is as much as having a good grasp on how to make things work with the tools available. Most people don't have much patience with a cashier in a store not being able to give correct change when customers use cash to pay, because basic skills needed for the job should be known, even when you have tools that make things easier.

MAGA is based on the idea that those from Spanish-speaking countries are unskilled and don't speak the English language. Now, if those who are unskilled and don't speak the language are being hired over MAGA, that says pretty clearly that MAGA is made up of unskilled and worthless people who KNOW that with ANY competition for jobs, they won't get the job.

Seriously, if an immigrant is a better choice, then people really need to look at their own skills before complaining about immigrants taking their job. The only ones who have a valid complaint are when companies will pay immigrants less for the same level of skill and experience, at which point, the COMPANIES should be the ones being demonized, not the people working and looking to get a job.

That comes from mismanagement, and putting people who don't understand entertainment in charge of too many areas of the company. When there are more movies and shows available across many different genres, you get a LOT of people interested. Not everything needs to be a blockbuster production, not everything needs to be a top tier production. It's good when you have all of them profitable, but the push where everything needs to be amazing for a specific demographic reduces the number of movies/shows, and that will cause your audience to shrink.

Unless you are a teenager, you may look at the movies that come out and decide there isn't ANYTHING worth watching. Go for too long where entire segments of the population see that there isn't anything they would enjoy, and that segment will just stop going to the movies. The same goes for shows on TV, if you get too many of a given type, or not enough of another type, you lose a lot of viewers. So, instead of needing everything to be a high cost production and getting fewer people overall, going for a mix of low budget, medium, and high will make people look forward to seeing what is new.

The same applies to games, where the variety in the types of games has dropped like a rock since around 2005, and now, there are far too many first person shooters, and not enough games that are DIFFERENT. The independent studios or small teams can come up with some of the original stuff, but most of those do feel like they would be better if they had a bigger budget for music/sound effects/voiceovers, etc. EA killing off those developers who were doing interesting things, plus the death of Interplay has really hurt the games industry, the same way these big movie studios are killing things with their focus being on "more of the same", without a lot of effort put in to be different.

I've made a page to let you test whether you've actually disabled all video autoplay. "De finibus" has a conventional video, a conventional animated GIF, and a motion JPEG presented as a filmstrip animated with CSS. What does and doesn't play for you?

As a fellow NESdev member, I've identified several reasons why a lot of people have migrated from forums to Discord or other proprietary chat.

- Registration friction. People register for forums and never get their signup confirmation because their email provider misclassified the confirmation message as spam and dropped it without notification. Or they don't get their signup confirmation for days or weeks because the person responsible for manually approving new members is working through a backlog or on vacation.
- People feel compelled to type longer, more detailed posts in a forum than in a chat room. That's fine on a desktop or laptop computer but not so practical on the on-screen of a mobile phone.
- Notification friction. It took seven years after Chrome and Firefox added support for the Push API before Apple did. As Alex Russell put it, "progress delayed is progress denied." Email notifications run the same risk of getting mistakenly dropped as spam.
- People expect to upload and watch video related to a post. Discord allows even free users 20 MB per attachment, enough to post a short video of a game that people can watch before downloading and running it. Forums tend to impose attachment size limits that haven't been reviewed in the years since the forum was established, often on the order of 2 to 4 MB, as well as limits on what media types are usable.
- People don't want their wording mistakes publicly indexed on Google and Bing and then archived indefinitely as "receipts" for use in later cyberbullying or cancellation campaigns against them.

When you see some CIOs who refuse to upgrade because they don't want to spend money, there is the flip side where these same CIOs keep the software for far too long. In 2026, seeing 2012 versions of programs is a BAD thing in a corporate setting because you run into compatibility issues with newer versions of the operating system(stuff from before Windows 10 having issues under Window 11).

Artificial limits, or subscription models are a bad thing, but when you know something is going end of life, do the jump to something new, before your old software loses support and the VERY important migration path to new software. I've seen it even in the consumer space, the old Eudora e-mail program was going to go end of life(Qualcomm was shutting the project down), and a migration tool to Thunderbird was provided as the path for users. The problem came from those who stuck with Eudora because people did like the program. BUT, then you have the problem where when you DO finally want to upgrade, and the tool to export to Thunderbird no longer works well, or it crashes because of 200+ mail folders. That's where it gets ugly to do the migration.

For Windows at least, Microsoft allowed the Windows 7 to Windows 10(and then 11) upgrade path to continue working, but it's possible that Microsoft may turn off the upgrade from Windows 7 at some point, and that is when it will get ugly for people who want to FINALLY upgrade the OS. Trying to migrate to new hardware for those currently on Windows 7 is already a BIG issue if there are no drivers for this and that.

Make the students go up and demonstrate their work. Assign homework, then have those students come in and test them in person, possibly showing their work up on a board to show how much or little they understand.

You are one of the clueless ones then, because you have zero understanding of what is going on, or how it affects everyone in the USA. So, here's a bit of information about how it affects us...

For starters, after Russia invaded Ukraine, sanctions stopped the flow of oil and natural gas from Russia into Europe. That had the direct impact of raising the price of oil and natural gas. Because the USA is run by idiots, even though over 90% of the oil the USA needs comes from domestic sources, we pay at a global commodity price for the stuff, so yep, the oil from the USA, it went from around $45-50 per barrel up into the $70+ range due to Russia invading Ukraine. Natural gas...yep, the price of stuff from the USA went through the roof, again, because natural gas is treated like a commodity, even though the USA produces more than 100% of the natural gas we need.

Our cost of living went up due to Russia invading Ukraine. The stupidity of Trump attacking Iran because he is a demented old felon and is easily manipulated just added to the problems, along with the tariffs on EVERYTHING.

So, wake up, and pay attention to WHY things are the way they are, not just what you hear on Fox News or whatever conservative BS pseudo-news source you listen to.

I'm only immortal for a limited time.

To be fair, the terms of use for online banking may preclude the use of AI agents. Realistically, you don't want AI to have access to your bank account, or to make payments for you, since there is far too much room for things to go wrong. Tell the bank you didn't mean to transfer the contents of your bank account to the Cayman Islands bank account of Elon Musk and it was an AI you gave access...think they will get you your money back?

It's one thing to use AI for SOME tasks, but another to give AI access to stuff you really don't want to lose, like all of your e-mails, your documents, or whatever. You may have heard about someone testing AI for a company and it wiped out his e-mail while testing, the same applies everywhere, but banks shouldn't let people use an "experimental" technology like AI access the accounts of people, unless those people are ready to pay out of pocket for any losses they may have due to AI not doing what they want.
   

There are all of these people who are still in denial about the problem, and how bad it will get. There are others who point to the early forecasts for when things will get bad. So, here's the answer for you, and MAYBE you will be able to understand.

First, for those who point to predictions made in the 1970s-1990s as being wrong, because effort has been made on the issue, that slowed things down in terms of how quickly temperatures would rise. It didn't STOP it, but it did slow it down a bit. We also have more information today than we did back then due to the Internet and having more weather stations brought online to collect information from more locations, so all of the weather models are improving over time. The science is still a work in progress, since meteorology isn't something that could really be studied well before the later part of the 20th century.

Now, for the first part, not realizing how bad things will get, the situation ACCELERATES over time, it's not a steady thing, it gets worse at a faster rate as time goes on, until things change. Trying to slow down the acceleration is what is now needed, but the push for AI data centers and using as much power as possible for the personal profit of a relative few is counteracting the efforts to slow down the destruction that really is happening. Look at how severe storms are, not just the number of storms, but how bad they get. Lack of rainfall harming farmland, excessive rainfall in other places, severe weather systems, an improvement that would at least get back to a stable condition where things aren't getting worse should be the new target, but again, just ignoring the situation is like looking at teenagers doing really stupid things that might get them killed or where they may kill others and not even trying to do something to avoid senseless deaths. We should ALWAYS try to make things better, even if there isn't much we can do.

Live on debt and hope the products actually mature fast enough to become profitable before the company goes bankrupt. If they show anything positive, those who own the debt will let them keep going in the hope that what was spent already won't be wasted money.

You have to understand that there is a difference between those who put corporate short-term profits first, and those who actually care about making the company do well in the long term. It's the focus on "make a company go public and be listed on a stock exchange" as the way to make the higher-ups a lot of money that is killing the culture. You see it in politics as well, don't make roads that last for 30 years, use cheap materials that cost less in the short term, but then you need to repave every five years because the roads fall apart quickly. Long term doesn't matter, it's all about short term and trying to convince the public that everything is great, even when it is all falling apart.

Intel is the perfect example, hype, hype, hype, dominate the industry, then sit back, do nothing, company products lose their advantage, but Wall Street continued to be pro-Intel for a VERY long time, even while the company was falling apart. Short term hype, and ignore what is going wrong, gotta drive up the stock price...

And, Intel products are still, "our next products will be so much better, trust me!" is the message from the executives, and Wall Street loves it, right up until the financial reports come out.

At this point, the goal is to make the company go public, talk big to hype the stock price, and sell while things are good, knowing bad policy will kill the company in the long term.