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180682578
comment
byMobyDisk
8, 2026 @10:56PM
(#65955902)
Attached to: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp To Test Premium Subscriptions
You are right. And also, the advertiser/data broker won't want the data for "only people who don't pay." They are going to be very interested in those people.
180666924
comment
byMobyDisk
2026 @04:07PM
(#65953176)
Attached to: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp To Test Premium Subscriptions
Many people avoid Meta products because of the predatory pricing model. In that model, "payment" means giving up our privacy and control of our data to advertisers and data brokers. Instead, offer a model where we pay directly, and give us control of our own data again.
Any other deal is pointless. Any "premium" service is for their benefit, not ours.
180661758
comment
byMobyDisk
2026 @06:17PM
(#65951154)
Attached to: Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong?
Without copyright law, the GPL would still be necessary. The GPL prevents someone from modifying software that someone else created and keeping those changes hidden.
180650072
comment
byMobyDisk
2026 @11:20AM
(#65946582)
Attached to: PowerShell Architect Retires After Decades At the Prompt
Powershell *could have been* the best shell scripting language ever. But Microsoft destroyed it.
The core problem with scripting languages is that they rely on lexical parsing of the text output from a command. You run a command to get a list of the employees, and you know that the 3rd column of the output contains a string with the date they were hired, so you used sed and awk to skip 2 commas, then any spaces, then grab the first four digits, and now you have the year of their hire. Great! But this is difficult and likely to break if the output format changes.
Powershell commands returned objects, so you run the cmdlet and grab the "Hiredate.year" property. That won't break, and if it is removed the code *should* throw an exception. And the brilliant part is that it still worked like a textual command-prompt when used interactively, because Powershell displays the objects as text when you typed a command! Amazing! It is the best of both worlds.
And it can call .NET so it has all the power of a real language like C#!
Yet Powershell is the least reliable, most likely to break in unexpected ways, scripting language that I have ever used. My teams have forbidden it from anything more than a few lines because we have been so burned. So where did Powershell go wrong?
First problem: Powershell's CD command doesn't work. The current directory is always c:\windows\system32 unless you do some wacky stuff. There is a reason for this, but it is dumb and not worth it. Just never use Set-Location in Powershell.
Next, even though Powershell has exception handling, it ignores errors and just plows on. So that example I gave about Hiredate.year doesn't actually work. If they change the output, the code silently breaks, completely defeating the entire purpose of the language. Plus you have the old problem of: 1) CD/Set-Location $myDirectory, 2) delete *.*, and if the CD command failed you just deleted c:\windows\system32. Genius!
Next, Powershell has lots of DWIM (Do what I mean) commands. So suppose you call .Count on something, Powershell could decide to return 0 of that thing has no count property. Or it could decide to return the count of properties on it. Or it could decide to return the Count property of the first object in the collection, if the collection has only one element. It depends.
Powershell makes extensive use of "implicit" variables like $_ and global settings. So you can call a command that changes those and your script behavior changes mid-run.
Return values are broken - there is a return command, but it doesn't do what you think it does.
Overall, Microsoft didn't learn any of the lessons from PERL, PHP, or Python about what makes a language unpredictable or inconsistent. They took the best idea to come into scripting in 20 years, then combined it with the worst mistakes of those languages.
180621524
comment
byMobyDisk
2026 @01:24PM
(#65937636)
Attached to: Amazon CEO Jassy Says Tariffs Have Started To 'Creep' Into Prices
The current US average tariff rate is 17%. But go back to 2024, countries were charging small single-digit percentages.
US 2.2%, Japan is 2.8%, EU2.9%, UK3.5%, Canada 3.8%
180621094
comment
byMobyDisk
2026 @01:05PM
(#65937594)
Attached to: Amazon CEO Jassy Says Tariffs Have Started To 'Creep' Into Prices
He is referring to the feature where Amazon broke-out the price and the tariff separately, like how it shows the price, sales tax, and VAT as separate charges. Amazon backed-off from the plan after Trump threatened called it a "hostile and political act."
180620992
comment
byMobyDisk
2026 @12:58PM
(#65937574)
Attached to: 'Just Because Linus Torvalds Vibe Codes Doesn't Mean It's a Good Idea'
A coworker who is a mechanical engineer developed a web-based tool 100% LLM coding. He had no prior coding experience. It wrote HTML for him, and took his JSON data and just threw it into the JavaScript files directly. It won't scale because the whole thing is client-side, and it added a bunch of junk files that do nothing. But he produced a 100% working tool that does exactly what he wants. He reached out to me and asked how to actually deploy it somewhere for a demo. I made him a web server, and he used the copilot in VS Code to deploy it. I keep asking him how things work, and he shrugs.
This was originally a prototype to show management that this tool is worth developing for real. But it works well enough that the team just uses it internally. He showed me that he added logging, and I asked how it works, and again he shrugged. The logs go into an azure storage blob that he can view. I have no idea how that works since it is entirely client-side. I bet the AI hard-coded some API key or credentials in there - but it's an internal tool so it kinda doesn't matter. At this point he is using features of Azure that I don't even know, so in a weird way I am jealous even though I'm the professional software engineer with 25 years of experience.
180620928
comment
byMobyDisk
2026 @12:47PM
(#65937538)
Attached to: He Went To Prison for Gene-Editing Babies. Now He's Planning To Do It Again
Come to the utopian city of Rapture! Where the artist does not fear the censor, where the scientist is not be bound by petty morality, where the great are not be constrained by the small! Want to be stronger, faster, smarter? Plasmids are the key! Book your flight now, use the promotion code GATTACA for a 10% discount!
180542387
comment
byMobyDisk
7, 2026 @04:20PM
(#65908821)
Attached to: 'Everyone Hates OneDrive, Microsoft's Cloud App That Steals Then Deletes All Your Files'
Their attempt to obfuscate save locations in their office software so that it automatically saves to OneDrive locations instead of to the local computer is equally pernicious, intrusive, and frankly disgusting. They have made it very difficult to navigate to something like "desktop", and require multiple clicks to do so.
Even if you embrace the online storage, the even obfuscate where that storage is. So I am reading "Widget Maker v1 Mechanical Design.docx" and I think "Oh, what other documents are there on the Widget Maker? So I want to access the FOLDER that it is in, and it is nigh impossible to find it. It's just in the ether somewhere.
OneDrive destroys the power of the desktop metaphor that Microsoft helped to make so popular. What was great about good ol' share drives is that they looked and operated exactly like a file on disk. But today, just renaming a file is hard because they do everything possible to not show you a useful Explorer/Finder view of things.
180520259
comment
byMobyDisk
2026 @04:58PM
(#65904197)
Attached to: Google To Kill Gmail's POP3 Mail Fetching
I do this exact same thing and they can pry POP3 from my cold dead hands.
IMAP is for people who want to leave all their email on someone else's mail server and be subject to their tools for searching/archiving/storage.
POP3 is for people who want to have full control of their email. I have more than 25 years of emails stored locally - every email I have ever sent or received. I have no interest in syncing that to some remote server via IMAP. Nor do I want my local storage to be "secondary" where I have to go through extra steps to download them and archive them. POP3 is perfect - download everything, leave it on the server for 30 days just in case.
180479367
comment
byMobyDisk
2025 @04:27PM
(#65888823)
Attached to: How Windows 10 Earned Its Good Reputation While Planting the Seeds of Windows 11's Problems
Don't forget: Microsoft said that Windows 10 is the last version of Windows.
The article is correct though: The real reason is that the horrible parts of Windows 10 were optional before, and they are now required in Windows 11.
Also note that the web in general does this same stuff by default, and nobody cares. People log-in to Chrome using their gmail account, then happily browse an advertising-laden web while Google tracks and sells their every move. They log-in to Pinterest and Facebook and Tiktok and whatever, happily sharing their data. So the market has spoken: Nobody cares enough about the surveillance to actually change their habits.
How long before we login to Slashdot with Gmail credentials? This is like the last site left on the "old web." All 100 of us left. *shakes fist at cloud*
180398105
comment
byMobyDisk
2025 @12:38PM
(#65861899)
Attached to: Tech Giants Can't Agree On What To Call Their AI-Powered Glasses
I have always dreamed of being cyber-augmented. A camera and a brain implant, so that I could look at a sign and mentally think "zoom in" and read it from a distance. Or look at some acquaintance and have it display: "Joe Smith, at 37. 2 kids Joey and Kaley. Joey just joined Cub Scouts. Kaley auditioned for the part of Dorothy." That would frieking rooock! Or to listen to a speech and have it pop-up with fact checks.
We have the tech!!!!
But the data stream is owned by assholes!!!
When we imagine this, we don't imagine that the video + your location + the last time you made a bowel movement is streamed to an advertising company who offers this as a free service so that they can beam targeted ads into your brain. That's now how this is supposed to work. Do I like the idea that a computer can warn the school principal that a student brought a gun into school? Yes! But not if that means the camera also tracks the student's every movement and knows who is on their period. That's not cool, and it's not worth it.
Technology futurism isn't evil. But the population at large ceded control of the internet to the least worthy of humanity. We can get to a really cool future only if people flock to systems that are designed around people controlling their own data.
180384021
comment
byMobyDisk
2025 @12:08PM
(#65857711)
Attached to: Trump Ban on Wind Energy Permits 'Unlawful', Court Rules
New oil and mining permits were pretty much halted.
This is an often-repeated rumor but the numbers say otherwise. The claim's origin is that Biden made a policy of not granting any new oil drilling licenses on federal land. But that didn't really change anything since there are plenty of wells, and it is difficult to open new wells on undeveloped federal land since it involves building roads, seeking permits, etc. Offshore drilling is generally easier, and we have a glut of offshore drilling wells that are still full.
The number of new licenses issued didn't change significantly between Obama / Trump / Biden. In some periods Biden's numbers were bigger, in some Trump's were bigger. The US isn't desperately looking for new oil and mineral sources. There are so many outstanding oil drilling licenses that have been granted and left unused, and we can already produce more oil than we can refine. Oil prices are really determined by refinery capacity, not new drilling licenses.
180252911
comment
byMobyDisk
2025 @02:35PM
(#65828429)
Attached to: Netflix Kills Casting From Phones
Shouldn't the OS be able to cast the screen, rather than this being a function of the application?
180252895
comment
byMobyDisk
2025 @02:33PM
(#65828425)
Attached to: Netflix Kills Casting From Phones
I propose a law requiring companies to continue to provide old versions of software. They can remove a feature from the new version, but I can still get the old one. In the past, if Microsoft removed a feature from Word 2005 for example, then one could refuse to upgrade. I could save the installer. Yes, eventually it won't work any longer, and I am not saying they must support every version into perpetuity. But if Netflix removes a feature, I can't download the old version. So they should be barred from putting a barrier in place preventing access or use of it.
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