Does anyone remember Dendy? (Famicom/NES hardware clone common in post-soviet countries)

33 years later, Russia’s hardware still only good enough for NES games. Incredible progress.

IIRC (from my coworker) Samsung had a feature where their phones could somehow emulate swiping a magnetic strip on a reader. This was ~6 years ago, so only some terminals had tap-to-pay.

I usually see the opposite (on reddit of course):

“I want to run Kali on my phone, plz help”.

“I am a Linux noob and went with Arch because I heard all the cool kids use it, now something bork”.

“Which distro???” (same question was last asked 4 hours ago)

The only one that caught my attention recently was GrapheneOS being in favor of using LLMs with the argument of “Linux kernel and other projects are using them already anyway”. Which is a strange argument for an OS that positions itself (and is known as) as a better alternative to Android.

There is a cool DIY retro computer kit, but the official tutorial/guide is in a dozen or so videos, approximately 1 hour each. No text equivalent IIRC.

Halfway through the first video, the presenter says “and to debug, you would need this clock board” (which is another kit). At least you can half-ass it, which is what I did. Then in video 4 or 5, you need a chip programmer (TBF i think there was a note that you might need it, but still is full stop otherwise). Kind of half-assed that one too, but still…

IMO videos are a great presentation media, but are horrible as tutorials.

by removing access to digital content and discontinuing software support.

I really hope this gets somewhere, because then it sets the precedent to slow down the shitty cycle of modern connected technology. Sue phone manufacturers for dropping support after X years. Sue Google and Apple for relentlessly upping their OS version, dropping old API support, restricting old apps and making independent installs difficult. Sue ISPs for shutting down 2G, 3G, (and now 4G?) and making a pile of e-waste in an instant.

Never bought the app on the Play Store (got it through F-Droid), but support Daniel via Liberapay. Probably the most solid, reliable, no-bullshit messenger app that I have used.

Ironically, a generic TV with a basic set of features is expensive because it is not “smart” and cannot have streaming tie-ins, pre-installed “apps”, or ads.

1. You learned something practical
2. You did work and can observe the result of your work
3. Your work is beneficial

Professional software development is now so abstracted from the real world (and other software development areas), those three are barely applicable.

When I used iOS last, a few years ago, photos were not considered files. (Yep… let that thought digest for a bit). This made things like SyncThing/Mobius useless. IIRC photos were managed through some separate API for “security reasons”.

To access photos on a connected iDevice from a Linux machine, you need iFuse, and even then, iOS presents you all images at once. So your photos, received photos, downloads, screenshots, are all in one big pile. Have fun. Oh, but they are split into folders. By number.

With how much effort is being put into phishing awareness and training, some people/companies still put zero effort into their communication.

Duting a lengthy process that involved an attorney, I got an email from a firstnamelastname(at)yahoo(dot)com, with no introduction, no mention of my name, a misspelled address, telling me about an appointment at another address that was… screenshotted from a website and pasted as image. Looks sketchy AF by any measure. Nope, that was a real email from a paralegal.

Filed a helpdesk ticket at work. Get a Teams message from “<FirstName> <LastName> (external)”, asking me my company machine ID in bad English. Responded with “you are helpdesk, do you not know this?”. After a few repeated requests for the ID and not answering any of my questions, I just stopped responding.

As someone said a long time ago (way before the LLM craze) “bad developers love new projects, they can write terrible code, take praise and zero responsibility, then toss it to the maintenance (actual) team who has to deal with it”.

(Context: in at least 2 companies I worked at, it was a common practice to have a “development team”, usually with knowledge of latest tools and frameworks, but very little knowledge of processes or industry, and an “application team” that maintains the software long-term, and deals with the processes and users directly)

They are very generous with aliases too: 25 mailbox aliases, 50 custom domain aliases. Compare to Proton, which allows only 10 non-revocable aliases for their domains and custom domains combined.

Because it’s an obscure / niche / loophole way. Not sure if it works on later Android, for example. Or in all regions.

You can have a Google account without 2FA, but you need to create it using a factory-reset old Android phone (Android 8 or so).

On iOS a few years ago, I prefered it to FF or Safari.

However, its “tracker protection” is questionable sometimes. They will list Google or Meta as enabled on site “to prevent breakage”, but do not give user an option to still disable it.

Also it doesn’t help that, for example, at U-Haul, employees just use their personal phone to scan a QR code and take pictures of your ID.

I expected the bottom to say something like “instead of cloud-native scalable microservices using AI models that cost an average US household salary per day to run”, but maybe I’ve been in corporate for too long.

As a software developer, this has got to be one of the most original unintended usage scenarios / reasons.

No amount of planning or testing in software will prepare you for ways users will actually use it.

“AI” is a pretty bad blanket term. BirdNet / Merlin is a model trained specifically on bird calls (and some noises) built to recognize bird calls. App and logo use huge general-purpose models to create content of questionable quality.

And yes, a decent birder should never trust just Merlin ID.