ThePowerOfGeek

Krita is my graphics app of choice these days. But there are many alternatives that are great (like Gimp and Photopea).

Yeah. Most recently it was a shitty site that looked like it had been built in 2000 and I had to use to pay an EMS bill: services.webillems.com

Tried several times on Firefox and it wouldn’t let me proceed with the payment. It kind of acted like it had. But when I called them to confirm they said it never went through. Tried multiple times with the same results. So I then tried on Chrome and it went through first time.

There’s have been others too. But like I said before, it’s rare. But annoying.

It’s down to these sites using stale, poorly-written legacy code and/or never being upgraded.

I’m really not. I use Firefox 99.5% of the time (I need to switch to Librewolf). But there are some rare occasions - usually shitty old billing websites - where Gecko simply does not work due to said shitty old website. Not paying those bills is an impractical solution. Having a fallback for those rare occasions isn’t unreasonable.

Vivaldi and Librewolf are good recommends. So good call by the author.

I wish I could completely ditch Blink based browsers for Gecko ones, just because I dislike how dominant Blink is thanks to Chrome. But some sites don’t render correctly on Gecko. So a fallback is needed.

Edit: I haven’t used Vivaldi in a long time, and apparently it’s not what I thought it was. Are there really no outstanding open source Blink-based browser out there?

That’s a more viable solution than replacing most software engineers, honestly.

The sad thing is they know the large majority of users will comply. Most people put familiarity and convenience above their own privacy and general well-being.

Pair programming with Grok.

Spotty DOGE intern developer: “what’s a for loop?”

Grok: “Look it up yourself, noob! Holy shit do I hate Elon Musk in every fucking way!”

Ah yes, a classic tale…

“We’re going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we’ll do it in a few months!”

So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.

I bet they’ll do it in Waterfall too.

It’s interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It’s just fucking tragic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to so many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.

Edit: Fixed some typos.

So who exactly is downloading the app as a result of this latest government scandal? I’m going to guess it’s the maga crowd because they are this as an endorsement from their new king. But hopefully I’m wrong and it’s a broad sweep of different users from across the political spectrum.

Digital vampirism

I like this phrase. It distills down what the article is getting across perfectly.

Musk calls it a “massive cyber attack”.

I call it “systemic infrastructure and personnel losses caused by the malignant narcissistic man-child who is running the company into the ground”.