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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I had so many good times on forums back in the day.

    The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.

    When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.

    The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.






  • For real. It’s an amazing game that just can’t be the same again once you know all its secrets.

    I bought it for two of my friends, and they both ended up hating it lol. I don’t blame them, but I think it’s very much to do with the mentality of how you approach the experience.

    One friend just got plain stuck and gave up. The other found it frustrating that they were doing the same thing several times over, and just wanted to rush as quickly as they could to make progress.

    Personally, I enjoyed the slow pace of discovery. I loved that feeling of being a true explorer, discoving facets of lost civilisation. Watching in melancholic awe as a world crumbled around me. Finding just a small piece of new information was always a joy, and made it feel worthwhile to get there, even if I’d done 90% of the journey before.

    Slowly getting richer in a game where the only currency is knowledge.



  • This is great, honestly.

    If you go back to antiquity, education was about philosophy. It was about learning how to observe, and think critically, and see the world for what it is.

    And then in modern times, education became about memorisation - learning facts and figures and how to do this and that. And that way of teaching and learning just doesn’t fit any longer with what our digital age has become.

    In my opinion, we are heavily overdue for a revamp of what education should be, and what skills are most important to society in this post-truth world. Critical thinking is an important foundation to real knowledge that we don’t teach enough.








  • Google absolutely made a calculated decision when they decided to allow device manufacturers to fork AOSP and introduce closed-source modifications. If it wasn’t for that, I can’t imagine OEMs would have wanted to get on board, and so we wouldn’t have seen the huge adoption that happened, and Android might have become just another failed operating system.

    I do truly wish for a fully open-source “Linux on the phone” type experience, but what always kills that is apps, because companies just don’t make them unless the market share is there. Even Microsoft had to pull out after pumping so much money into Windows phone, and I think most of the reason was because they couldn’t incentivise developers to make apps enough.

    So I’m glad at least I can run Calyx, and have just a tiny bit more freedom while still keeping the apps I need, even if it’s nowhere near perfect.




  • Any company that hides their documentation has an awful product that they are actually embarrassed about, from a tech perspective. They are hiding it because they are afraid to show it.

    I’ve seen this so many times, and it’s a big red flag.

    These companies work on the basis of selling their product the old-fashioned way, directly to management with sales-people and business presentations and firm handshakes, and then once you’re sold then developers (which management doesn’t care about by the way) have to do the odious task of getting everything working against their terrible and illogical API. And when you need help implementing, then your single point of contact is one grumpy-ass old dev working in a basement somewhere (because they don’t care about their own devs either) and he’s terribly overstretched due to the number of other customers he’s also trying to help, because their implementation is so shitty.

    Conversely, public documentation is a great sign that companies took a developer-led approach to designing their solution, that it will be easy to implement, that they respect the devs within their own company, and they will also respect yours.

    When I am asked to evaluate potential solutions for a problem, Public docs is like the number one thing I care about! It’s just that significant.

    Side story - I once worked with one of these shitty vendors, and learned from a tech guy I’d made friends with that the whole company was basically out of office on a company-paid beach holiday - EXCEPT for the dev team. Management, sales, marketing, finance, they all got a company trip, but the tech peeps had to stay at home. Tells you everything you need to know about their management attitude towards tech.