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Is this what it feels like to become one of the gray bearded engineers? This sounds like a bunch of intentionally confusing marketing drivel.

When capitalism has pilfered everything from the pockets of working people so people are constantly stressed over healthcare and groceries, and there's little left to further the pockets of plutocrats, the only marketing that makes sense is to appeal to other companies in order to raid their coffers by tricking their Directors to buy a nonsensical product.

Is that what they mean by "agentic era"? Cause that's what it sounds like to me. Also smells alot like press release driven development where the point is to put a feather in the cap of whatever poor Google engineer is chasing their next promotion.


> Is that what they mean by "agentic era"? Cause that's what it sounds like to me.

What are you basing your opinion on? I have no idea how well these LLM agents will perform but its definitely a thing. OpenAI is working on them , Claude and certainly Google.


Yeah it’s a lot of marketing fluff but these tools are genuinely useful and there’s no wonder why Google is working hard to prevent them from destroying their search-dependent bottom line.

Marketing aside, agents are just LLMs that can reach out of their regular chat bubbles and use tools. Seems like just the next logical evolution


And? Git is "idiot" in British parlance. I don't think software should be made to appease some false idea of corporate politeness.


To note, I'm not judging if it's a good name or not, I'm saying it starts with a handicap. I didn't put it in that order, but more than politeness[0] I'd assume using a popular character might not be the best for searchability, or being taken more seriously than a fan project.

GIMP's name definitely hurted it before there was enough acceptance of it. Ultimately I think most names will work out if the project gets past a critical mass.

[0] I assume you put the sexy aspect into "politeness" ?


And the journalists know if they reveal their sources that the people behind them will subsequently have their lives destroyed by the powerful.


Death by a thousand cuts. Microsoft Recall in a vacuum isn't the issue, but rather a decade of

- Forced Cortana (oops no let's shut that down) - Forced OS Updates (oops your computer doesn't have the requirements) - Ads in your start menu - "Yes" and "maybe later" interactions everywhere - Edge force defaulting itself on occasion - Literally needing configuration management to run powershell on a daily cadence because settings might not get respected - 5 Layers of failed UI frameworks duct taped together

Basically Windows is becoming such a bear to wrangle that you might as well use Linux and save yourself the pain and $100 per computer.


Anecdotally I am seeing communities I am part of gone from Reddit and other public social media in favor of private or semiprivate ones like Discord, or avoiding digital entirely in favor of physical spaces.

What I see on social media is more just the leftovers. There's little authentic interaction and engagement there.


Respectfully, this is a small sampling of what's happening.

Reddit and Twitter, the two posterchildren of poor management, have plenty of actual interaction. They also have a significant amount of shitty noise, which is incredibly off putting, but the average person is still more likely to go there than where our niche communities end up.

They might be dying slowly, but they're not even on life support yet.


Twitter is doing fantastic.

Just because people want to go back to more censorship doesn’t mean Twitter is dying.


> Twitter is doing fantastic.

Reported yesterday [0] that it’s worth 73% less than when elon took over.

You absolutely may have a different definition of fantastic but what was once one of the largest social sites losing 3/4 of its value in 15 months is significant.

aside from actual financial analysts, my own personal anecdata has pretty much mirrored their analysis. i’ve gone back and gave it an honest try like 4 or 5 times and each time has been worse than the previous. it just reinforced why i (and more and more people) choose to spend our time in other places.

[0] https://fortune.com/2024/03/30/fidelity-x-stake-73-decline-s...


Just gotta say that both things can be true.

Investment banks can find it worth less than it was from a return on stock financial view,

and millions of users can find it a fantastic messaging portal,

and individual people may not like aspects of the portal.

"was once one of the largest social sites" - I feel that X is still one of the largest social sites wordlwide and especially in the US.. Priori Data has them in the top 12 of the world at 600 million users 6 days ago.

(https://prioridata.com/data/social-media-usage/ )


I think reddit is actually thriving. Everyone I know spends time there nowadays.


I think Reddit used to be a niche site for hackers [1], hobbyists and enthusiasts. Now it's a mainstream site where regular people browse news and memes. Maybe Reddit alienated it former audience, but it doesn't mean it's dying - it just changed.

[1] as in "hacker news"


The internet used to be a place for hobbyists, hackers, and enthusiasts. That's not true anymore, at least not exclusively. But that supports your point - when the lake turns to saltwater you dont survive by being a freshwater fish.


Maybe the closest thing to this is a Blackmagic box of some sort. I use a the Ultrastudio 4K to capture 4K60 output, pipe through OBS and pass through as well.

Will run you $1K though. Corsair/Elgato has some solutions in your price range but the devil is in the details of precisely what you're trying to accomplish.


An HDMI splitter (i.e. an HDCP down converter/stripper) and a video capture dongle or card can be had for like $60, plus a computing running OBS. It’s not an elegant small box, but it’ll get the job done for lower resolution needs.


QA was literally invented for the airline industry.

Software QA when actually practiced is more advanced now than airline QA.


Nah, in the software world, the truth is QA is where the people who can't get jobs as programmers end up. I've seen testers go on to become programmers, but I've never seen a programmer become a tester. Maybe it's different for real-time or life-critical systems, sure, but I can confidently say this is how it is in web development.


> Software QA when actually practiced is more advanced now than airline QA.

...eh, I think "when actually practiced" is doing a lot of carrying there.

What do you mean by "actually practiced".

Outside of the aerospace and healthcare industries, I'm not sure there are many software shops that are doing QA to a level I would like to trust anyone's life with.


what does advanced mean when comparing things so unlike from each other?

also software is the least likely comparison I would have made; software quality is a shit-show on a general level, and the vast public is quite aware of this every time a subway timeboard blue-screens or gets frozen on an AMI screen, or the POS machine that they're forced to interact with at work does something equally as stupid.


> request was denied

> mac mini proxy server

I love that the programmer's solution is more expensive than doing it the right way had OP's request been approved.


... At the end of the the deal with had two mac mini's with auto fail over configured via health checking. Thank goodness we got rid of the service provider that refused to let us pair with the network. Once that happened the networking team could just do normal peering with a standard router.

But yea, in the early days that mac sat on my desk. It only got moved when I pointed out the issue to our new security team and their jaw hit the floor. =)


Absolutely nobody is arguing that optional items are what is making it tough on people. It's housing and basic groceries.

In 2005 I managed to wiggle my way out of poverty by splitting a $615/mo apartment 4 ways on minimum wage (and I considered that quite lucky at the time). I ate mostly rice, soy, beans, and frozen veggies because that was the cheapest thing I could eat. Eggs were a luxury.

That same apartment is $1799/mo now and minimum wage is virtually the same. I would probably be dead or worse trying to escape poverty in those same conditions. Add in that the humiliation people must feel driving for Uber or running Doordash. You're helping others live a lifestyle that's unreachable for you, ever.

Even though I can afford it these days I still refuse to Doordash / Uber because I feel like these services are fundamentally dehumanizing. I will fetch my own food, and drive/transport myself. It's not hard.

These unemployment numbers just bury the struggle of regular people with a numerical handwave.


Here's a workflow:

1. Normally I run everything on my own devices, use 1Password, 2FA, etc, but rarely I need to use a locked down device and manually and painstakingly enter 100+ character passwords and 2FA keys. Installing anything on the device is out of the question, but I need to use a web browser and auth using these credentials. Copy and paste and externally using any devices to connect with the system is prohibited.

How does doing a FIDO2 dance work in this scenario?


> Copy and paste and externally using any devices to connect with the system is prohibited.

Like a keyboard? In which case: How do you enter your password?

Is that a common scenario? Where you can use a (presumably) usb attached keyboard but you cannot insert your security key?


Air-gapping the machine running a web browser from the machine that stores your passwords seems completely reasonable to me.

So does preventing people from plugging random USB devices into shared machines.


Passkeys have a fallback flow where they show a qr code you can scan from the screen of the device you want to log in to. Requires bluetooth though to prove you are "near" the device. I guess that's also disabled on these hypothetical locked down devices?


I can't imagine that working correctly on a machine at a library.

Also, connecting via bluetooth defeats the purpose of air-gapping.


And yet all the non-technical folks you give this advice to will look at you like you have two heads. This is completely unreasonable unrealistic user-unfriendly advice


Many people use shared computers at our local library. I can afford a nice quiet office and big monitor at home, but many people cannot.

I imagine they either memorized their passwords, wrote them on a piece of paper, or stored them on an (air gapped from the library machine) cell phone.


There is a keyboard and mouse attached to the server already, but few if any services run, and if they do they're fairly locked down, or in some degraded state.

It's not a server I need to access often in this way. But I think these necessary-but-limited-use scenarios will be interesting should passkeys really catch on like passwords did.


> Is that a common scenario? Where you can use a (presumably) usb attached keyboard but you cannot insert your security key?

I don't know how common it is, but this is the exact issue that makes passkeys a nonstarter for me.


This is covered by the cross-platform scenario. It's not super elegant, although I'd say it's easier than typing 100+ random characters (and also trusting that the locked down device doesn't have any key logging?). Lots of providers have their own FAQ, but here's one: https://www.corbado.com/passkeys/faq#:~:text=Passkeys%20have....


why does this need a technical solution? Just type in the password. Presumably if the system is important enough to be airgapped and needs a 100+ character randomized password (without copy paste and without hardware keys), it is important enough for you to spend the time to memorize and type in the passwords.

Otherwise, it is just security theatre if you won't even spend the time to make absolutely sure that 1) you are typing into an authorized device that won't log your key strokes, and 2) that using any other "assistance" mechanisms represents a breach in the security of this system.

Just friggin memorize it and type it in. For me, I memorize my bank password and PIN even though it's very complicated. This information is important enough for me to commit the time and not cheapen out by "relying on a tool". Of course, I keep it in my password manager as a record, but in daily use I absolutely do not say to the teller: oh I need to look it up. I recite to the bank my passphrase and other id confirmation by memorization, I know it even better than my own phone number.

If you need multiple people to log in, each person should have a different password, only memorized by that person alone.

If the person can't memorize it, I would say either change the design of the system or fire this person because "they had one job: to memorize and type in this password".


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