Notices by Al Sweigart (alsweigart@mastodon.social), page 4

Remember when computers would do what you told them, instead of trying to constantly shove suggestions/reminders/ads that you don't care about and specifically uninstall or get blockers for?

"I want to go camping this weekend. I was thinking of somewhere on the side of the highway or a sidewalk in front of a warehouse."

No camper thinks this.

"Anti-camping law" is just a way to hide how cruel "anti-homeless law" sounds.

I am this close to quitting being a tech book author and creating a startup whose search engine ranks websites by how little enshittification they have.

It'll basically be Wikipedia and Stack Overflow and people's old Geocities websites.

Photo taken October 2020

@pluralistic @defcon @eff I like how "my boyfriend and i even had an argument during your talk and now we are not speaking" is also somehow your fault.

@textfiles If you pitched the idea for Wikipedia today, they'd accuse you of being a communist.

Quick question about regex: Do these constant names make sense for these patterns?

ANYTHING is the lazy .*? pattern.

EVERYTHING is the greedy .* pattern.

SOMETHING is the lazy .+? pattern.

(I don't have a name for the greedy .+ pattern. Maybe ALL_OF_IT?)

And the . is ANYCHAR, while the escaped \. is PERIOD.

Are these names intuitive?

Uhg. AI-suggested code is fractally wrong. The function calls it gives me have the wrong arguments (like, it just uses the integer "128" instead of a memory buffer), and after I fix all that, I find that it's calling the wrong function in the first place. It's just making shit up.

AI gives plausible-looking answers, not correct answers.

"Anyone who wasn't liberal when they were young has no heart, anyone who isn't conservative when they're old has no brain."

Nah, you don't get more conservative as you get older, you get more selfish as you get richer. And my generation isn't getting richer as they get older.