My college professor in a user interface design class back in the 90's said it best after telling us a story about the NASA space program and it's UI design for Apollo:
If you can't train a monkey to use it, you can't train a human to use it.

I'm sick of apps that look good. I want Apps that WORK GOOD!

I'm sick and tired of having to relearn an app or report endless bugs because some just out of college app designer wants to vibe code some fancy app remake so he can say "I DID THIS MOMMY!!" to his parents like he's a fucking kindergartner holding up a finger painting.

Worse, I'm sick and tired of having to retrain other users and clean up bug mess because of said app designer.

I want a program that works. That is all.
I don't care that a program that works looks like something out of Windows XP. I don't care about bullshit features and UI elements that never work. I especially don't need a fucking box popping up every fucking five minutes to tutorial me about your bullshit feature or design that no one wants or cares about with a "GOT IT" button like a stripped down text based new age Clippy.

Firefox has (or at least used to have) skinning. How about working on that so that the kindergartners can play with their crayons and the adults can get work done instead of babysitting your slopcode for the umpteenth time. It's bad enough I had to create a theme so I can easily see what tab was active without having to waste time thinking about it because some idiot in your UI Dept thought white on white for the tab UI was a good Idea because some idiot at Google though it was a good idea instead of white on black or at least offsetting colors so you can easily differentiate like a good functional UI should be. I don't have time to retrain employees or submit endless bug reports and feedback loops because your "My First Sony" obsessed VTech Leapfrog Toddler app team is trying to justify it's existence again by reinventing the wheel for the 15th fucking time.

This is way I miss cutthroat managers like Steve Jobs. I hate Apple products but I have to admit that Jobs kept this bullshit in check at Apple when he was alive. If it didn't make sense, broke things, confused people or wasted time he would shoot it down and if the designer kept insisting, he was fired which kept the other app designers in line. The split second his body was cold you started seeing Apple UI's redesign themselves to the point you have a UI that's more art than function and then you wonder why your customers are bitching because they can't understand or even see your glass looking UI.

And if you happen to work as a manager in a App development studio. Print this post on wallpaper and hang it on the wall in your break room instead of some bullshit motivational speech or word cloud to coddle the kindergartner's safe space feelings. You'll probably be facing a harassment charge from your HR dept afterwards but It will be more valuable to your team and your customer's overall heath than any motivational new age crap you were going to put there anyway.

It's the computer.

More accurately, it's the power of the computer. It's too capable and it encourages students to doomscroll AI slop more then learn.

If I designed a school for education, it would literally be a better built Brother Geobook: Dirt cheap. Vastly under powered. black and white screen with optional backlight (preferably e-ink if the price was right to purposely keep screen refresh low to discourage videos) with a huge battery to get battery life measured in days instead of hours, and can only browse basic internet sites and email. It would have cloud connectivity for storage backup and the like, but just use a basic word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and notebook software. It would also have built in programming using either python or basic.

When I was in high school. I had a Ti-92 and later in college I had a Palm IIIc. I took all my notes on it did spreadsheets on it and programmed anything else I needed that it couldn't do on it. Saved a ton of paper and was easier to sort notes once I got home at my computer. Anything more powerful than that is basically overkill for learning and is all but guaranteed to suck kids focus from learning to playing.

All this does is contribute to Textile Mountain
https://www.textilemountainfil...

The best option would be to not overproduce at all, but that makes people unemployed so...

I'm not seeing a paywall on the site. uBlock Origin must be doing something.

The UHF app on our Apple TVs & iOS devices and the UHF Server in Docker to act as a PVR gives us everything for a few $ a month paid in crypto.
We haven't had cable since ~1999-2000. Downloading and the *arrs have kept us happy, but the better half wanted to check out some live sports. So IPTV it was.

One of our guys said something to the effect of "Copilot is Corporate Chat. It knows all the useless filler of management-speak, but lacks the competence of the people in the trenches.

Ouch.

I've used Claude at home for ages. Work was wanting to get some AI stuff for us and the only 'blessed' one is CoPilot. Everything else it blocked. All senior management seems to know about AI is "Hurrr... Copilot and ChatGPT."

Out team of ~8 (pentestesting & VA) were unanimous about Copilot being crap and Claude being the top dog. So some higher ups OK'd a Claude Teams package for work. To bypass the CorpSec tards, we use it from our lab environment that has its own unmonitored link and IP range.

Anthropic/Claude is just so far ahead of OpenAI/ChatGPT and MS/Copilot it's not funny.

For the Longest time, I thought the future was either going to be the Demolition Man Future or the Robocop Future. I'm now convinced that the Idiocracy future is the most likely future of mankind.

And this is why you give out cash instead of gift cards. It doesn't tie the receiver to a particular product and some scammer from halfway across the world won't rip them off.

The only time it had luster was when it was pinned against the SpikeTV VGA's

When your competition is Funkmaster Flex rapping about how Good Madden was after it won Game of the year, you win by default.

One of my ram sticks went bad in my computer after running for 7 years. Because of the way I bought them (1 kit of 4x8MB DDR4) I had to send all four back and decided to drive to Micro Center to upgrade to 4x16 DDR4 Sticks in the interim and use the RMA'd sticks for another build.

On November 10, that cost me $299.
A year ago I could have upgraded using the same sticks for $149.

On Black Friday, I went to the same Micro Center to see what deals they had and decided to check on the RAM prices since they were inflating.

On November 26. The same exact RAM sticks were $399.

They literally went up $100 in less than 30 days.
It's even crazier since those sticks are DDR4 and have less demand since most people are upgrading to DDR5 at this point and were probably there in stock when I bought some of them on the 10th. They just marked them up since it would cost that much to replenish the stock when (most likely if at this point) they get more DDR4 RAM.

I posted this over two years ago. it's still true today: K12 Does not teach kids to think. It teaches kids to react

Basically, kids today can't do math because they were taught to react to math from a game on an iPad while using a Ti-83 calculator to pass standardized tests.

So imagine giving a 7 year old Frog Fractions on an iPad that he plays between his Screaming Minecraft vtuber and AI Chinese generated Spiderman / Super Mario Bros. YouTube watching sessions and then wondering why he can't do fractional math and sounds like someone from Idiocracy.

No. They probably don't want to hear the Roosters crowing in the background when employees are working from home on a Teams call and figure that since livestock isn't allowed in the office they can avoid that type of interruption.

And no. This isn't a joke. I've had at least three calls like this from Xerox Support over the past 5 years when their support site would crash and I had to call them for toner and parts support. To be fair I always got the parts and support on time so Kudos on Xerox but its definitely not something you expect to hear on a business support line.

Derelict in this use case is correct. In this case, you have landowners who don't have any interest in farming the land. Think a landowner who inherited the property from their farmer grandpa and don't have any plans to farm it but don't want to sell it for some reason. In those cases they lease the use rights yearly to farmers that do. Otherwise the farm would sit there growing grass and trees and therefore become derelict.

It shouldn't take a genius to realize that if a landowner is just profiting from land use, an energy company offering Lease + energy profit sharing looks better than just a straight land lease, even if the land lease is significantly higher up front.

First off, he's right about farmer destroying solar. There are big energy groups buying any farmland they can get cheap and putting Solar farms on them.

Locally there's a solar group that bought out leases for land that farmers were planting on that would otherwise be derelict. Even when the farmers offered to buy or lease the land at significantly higher value than what it's worth (or in one case, higher than what the solar company was leasing it for) the leasing company refused because the solar group offered stock in their company that if the solar farm is profitable would result in a solid revenue stream that would be sustainable for at least a few decades until the panels wear out.

The problem with this is that food demand is not getting smaller, and once you dedicate farmland for solar, it basically makes the land useless for anything but solar since the solar shade blocks plant growth and once the solar panels are degraded and/or the company goes under, now you have rows and rows of useless solar panels that were cemented into the ground as well as their wires and conduits (and possibly chemicals if batteries are involved) that you will absolutely have to find and remove at a significant cost in order to even attempt to return that land back into farm capable condition.

Meanwhile, Malls, Stores and Plaza's have these huge parking lots that you can easily install solar canopies in that not only shade the cars of customers and can be used to charge parked electric cars, but you immediately have an electrical customer in that Mall, Store or Plaza and the stores aren't going to care since they see it not only as a green thing, but as a customer service thing due to the shade.

Now to be fair I don't know if Trump is banning all solar or just farm solar, but it makes sense to ban farm solar to encourage more parking lot canopy solar if that is what he's planning. As for wind, I'm not sure why he's banning them other than because he doesn't like the look of them or he read that study from 50 years ago that says wind turbines kill birds (because wind turbines in the 70's moved at significantly higher RPM's than modern turbines) even though 1 solar thermal plant reportedly killed more birds and insects per year than all of the bird strikes on all modern windmills combined.