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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Well, it definitely looks to have backfired on US government. The politicians figured that they could force Bytedance to divest TikTok using a ban in the US as a threat, assuming that TikTok wouldn’t want to lose access to the US market and the 180 million or so (!) users. Instead of complying, ByteDance did nothing and the politicians and the US government were put into a position of actually enforcing a very unpopular ban.

    The timing of course is interesting. This comes right at the end of Biden’s administration, allowing for Trump to swoop in and lift the ban and take all the credit for that. Of course ignoring that is was Trump who originally kicked this whole thing into motion back in 2020 with his executive order to ban TikTok.



  • I’m expecting pretty decent software support for Windows 10 for another three years or so. Sure, there will be things here and there that won’t work, but most things will continue to work and many people who are on Windows 10 can just keep on using it for the next few years should they chose to do that. That’ll more or less match what happened with Windows 7, where it wasn’t until 2023 that I started to see support start to massively drop off. With that said, if Microsoft actually breaks Office on Windows 10 that’ll really change things.

    Also, I’d offer up 2001-2014 as a period of time where it was entirely possible to stick with one OS (Windows XP) the entire time.





  • The fun one that is at least a bit forgivable is “I found the solution! I just followed <long dead link to some other site>”. It’s especially fun when you keep finding multiple postings that look hopeful at first but then end up just linking back to the same dead link.

    The lesson here is that it can be helpful to future internet searchers (or even your future self) to copy the relevant information or briefly summarize it instead of just dropping a URL. Especially when linking to something like an company’s official support forum or posting as many companies will pull that stuff down eventually.








  • DDG has also really gone downhill for me. It’s still noticeably better than Google, but DDG nows does a lot of the same shit that originally made me give up on Google years ago. I’m assuming a big part of this is because DDG heavily sources their results from Bing, and while Bing does manage to be better than Google, it’s not much better.

    I really need to put some effort into trying out a few more search engines and seeing if they are any better. Last time I looked, many of them were also pulling results from Bing so they all had similar issues.


  • What they are doing is comparing your answer and seeing if it is consistent with how it has been answered previously. They realize that not everyone is going to give the exact same answer, so as long as you answer it in a way that enough other people have answered it, it should let you in.

    I’ll usually go with the minimum number of clicks that I think will get me through, since I’m lazy and it’ll also at times slow down how fast you can click which is annoying.

    I’ll also answer them wrong if I think it’s a mistake that enough other people will make. “Yes… that RV over there is a bus…”




  • Github Copilot is about the only AI tool I’ve used at work so far. I’d say it overall speeds things up, particularly with boilerplate type code that it can just bang out reducing a lot of the tedious but not particularly difficult coding. For more complicated things it can also be helpful, but I find it’s also pretty good at suggesting things that look correct at a glance, but are actually subtly wrong. Leading to either having to carefully double check what it suggests, or having fix bugs in code that I wrote but didn’t actually write.