Not if you’re willing and able to pay an arbitrary $30 a month extra. That lifts the oh-so essential data cap. Yeah… fuck Comcast, or whatever they are calling themselves this month.

Man, that’s a blast from the past! I had completely forgotten about that until I saw this post!

I wouldn’t say I ‘stole’ them necessarily. But me and my buddies did used to take them out and hide them near the desks as a prank.

Some thoughts, as someone who has used ancestry.com in the past:

• Do NOT submit your DNA to them! If all your family wants is to trace your family back for several generations, in most cases you can do that with old-school research. Not providing DNA doesn’t usually prohibit that. And as others have said, these companies are not trustworthy when it comes to being keepers of genetic information.
• You are right, the free trial on ancestry.com is a hook in to get your subscription, with the hope on their end that you will forget about it and and up paying for months on end while not using their services. It’s basically like a gym membership, but for history information.
• That said, it’s not that difficult to cancel an ancestry.com subscription. They make you jump through several screens and try to persuade your to keep it going, but it’s not insurmountable, and I’ve cancelled and renewed and then cancelled my subscription with them a few times.
• They do have an exceptional amount of genealogical information on hand, at least for Western researchers. I’ve found some surprising things about my ancestors on there that I couldn’t find elsewhere.
• For libraries and subscription level, it depends on what your needs are. They bundle them into subscription packages. If you think your ancestors have been in America for several generations I would just go with the cheaper American subscription. If you have ancestors who came from Europe a few generations back then you might want to go with a broader subscription plan that covers European sources. If you want to trace ancestors back from Africa or Asia you are going to be SOL regardless, because genealogy sources from those areas are usually very bad.
• One thing to note, in case this is a problem for you: ancestry.com at least used to be owned by or managed by the LDS church (the Mormons). And they have a pretty sordid history when it comes to the exploitation of women and girls, and (like quite a few other religions) have done and continue to do some very sketchy stuff in general.

Hope this helps.

I’ve found the same thing.

Whenever I ask an LLM for a pointer, I end up spending just as long (if not longer) refining the question than just figuring it out myself it’s doing a search on SO it in other online resources.

But even the IDE integration is getting annoying. I write a class with some functionality baked in, and the whole time it’s promoting me with a shit load of irrelevant suggested code. I get the class done, then I go to spin up a unit test. It knows which class I’m trying to create a unit test for, which is cool. But then the suggested code is usually completely wrong or it’s much more convoluted than it needs to be. In the latter case, the first several characters of the suggested code is good, but then there’s several lines after it of shite. And hitting tab injects all of it in, which then requires me to delete it all. So almost every time I end up hitting escape anyway.

I’ve heard a few people rave about ‘vibe coding’ - usually people with no or little programming experience. I have to assume that generated code was either for very simple atomic actions and/or it’s spaghettified, inefficient garbage.

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

Like others here, there’s not much extra I can do. My job seems very stable, I have no auto loans, both the family cars are in okay condition, I have a fixed rate mortgage, health is okay, and aside from one small loan I am paying back the debts aren’t bad.

A bottle of things I need to revisit:

• I stocked up on non-perishable foods that my family will eat. But I need to do a bit more on this front.
• I’m trying to cut back on extra spending. This is the biggest problem I have right now. Mostly due to unexpected bills and death-by-a-thousand-cuts small purchases.

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?

Daniel Day Lewis

His filmography is very limited because he was extremely picky about what he appeared in. But even still, I think all of his movies were good, even if done of them were uncomfortable to watch.

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.

Using an Ouija board to write even a short story sounds like an agonizingly tedious endeavor.

Imagine how galling this must be for Jeff Bezos. He’s put so much effort into his Bond villain persona. The guy even now looks like Dr Evil. But he’s being out eviled by a pudgy, dorky-looking South African nepo-baby.

Sure. The device I use is an Onn streaming a Android TV box. I think I got the 2023 4k streaming version and it was about $20, from Walmart. You can probably get cheaper models, but I wanted one with an Ethernet port.

Then I installed a couple of alternative launchers from the Play store on device. I also loaded F-Droid as well (though I had to do that directly through an apk). I can’t remember which launcher I went with in the end, but it was either FLauncher or Projectivity. They were both good.

The wrinkle here is that the OS defaults back to the default launcher (which has ads and a lot of clutter on it). But I used a free command line tool called adb to switch the default launcher off.

I’ve been very happy with the new setup. My kids (who use it all the time) occasionally complain that an app will crash while they are watching something, and take them back to the home screen/launcher. But I haven’t run into that, and it’s probably just them accidentally hitting a remote (which I know they accidentally do a lot).

I documented the process and posted them here, in another thread a few months ago.

Additional note: The default YouTube app isn’t very conducive to quick profile switching, which can be annoying. To switch profiles you basically have to go back to the OS level and do it there, then go back into the YouTube app. It’s an Android TV quirk. But I discovered that if you side-load the Amazon Fire version of the YouTube app onto the device, you can switch profiles within that version of the app, and it works just fine.

Some good options already listed. But here’s another.

Hey an Android TV box (Onn brand or similar) and install an open source launcher on it, like Projectivity. You have to use adb to disable the default launcher after the new launcher is installed, otherwise it keeps defaulting back to the default one. But once don’t it’s smooth sailing. You have a dedicated streaming device with a remote control and a nice UI with zero ads on the home screen.