I mean, there’s still some download managers around, for example:

• https://f-droid.org/packages/com.gianlu.aria2app
• https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tachibana.downloader

But yeah, I imagine this functionality is now largely integrated into the apps that want to trigger the download. The advanced downloading functionality can just be a library and then the respective apps just need to strap a UI on top.

The only real advantage of a dedicated app, is that the other app’s APK size can be smaller, which isn’t too big of a deal anymore.

Might also be a product of experience, that you have a need for strict scope definitions.

When I was unexperienced, I would actively look for projects I could do and features to add to them. Because well, most project ideas were too large for me to tackle anyways and I needed the experience.

Now that I have experience, I have multiple long-term projects that could use some love, if I find the time. And I have the experience to tackle virtually any project idea, if I find the time.

Don’t particularly want to add another long-term project into the rotation, so I do spend a lot more time thinking upfront “when will this be finished?”.

One of the big, national grocery store chains here has managed to create a webpage, where:

• you cannot open a product in a new tab, and
• if you click on a product and hit the back-button, it resets the scroll position in the product list all the way to the start.

In effect, the webpage is practically unusable for actually browsing through products. They’re probably missing out on hundreds of thousands in sales, for something that could be fixed for like 50 quid.

Yeah, the title originally said “6.8 is Very Close!”, which confused me quite a bit.

Well, I just meant it was like bee hotels in that it’s a product you can buy to help out critters. I did think it was food, as “buffet” suggests.

Whether food is meaningfully helpful for ants, no idea. Did not overthink it too much in the few seconds until I realized it was poison. 🫠

Found some “ant buffet” in the shop a few months ago and thought “Oh wow, did people learn that those are dying as well and you can buy something like bee hotels for them now?”.

Yeah, it was poison.

Well, them being largely starch/carbs isn’t helping either.

Yeah, it always felt like the worst decisions under Spencer were forced onto him by investors. For sure, there’s some leeway in how you please investors, and she will be given more leeway at the start as well, which could get out of a rut and make things somewhat better.

But ultimately, I still expect her to play the CEO role for a profit-driven corporation. Because that’s what she was hired for. She was not hired to be the saving grace of gamers.

Yeah, still wild to me how they seemingly bought up half the gaming industry and how little output they produce from that…

Yeah, for folks with previous programming experience, I generally recommend the Rust CLI book, particularly the first chapter

It makes you build a small, usable program and shows you concrete ways to handle some intermediate topics, like error handling, unit tests, bundling etc…

Yeah, they have to fight it tooth and nail, because it threatens how they want to do business on a conceptual level. But I also cannot see how they would argue this case.

If another webpage said those publishers are a right cunt (written by AI), that would be defamation for sure. So far, Google was allowed to say those publishers are a right cunt, because they were quoting another webpage.
If they’re not doing that anymore, if they’re not even paraphrasing what another webpage said, but just making own claims, then that’s their own responsibility.

In theory, I could imagine a ruling that says that paraphrasing doesn’t have to be accurate at all times, but in practice, this would be absolute bedlam. Any webpage could publish the wildest misinformation and just say that, oops, they were paraphrasing.
So, even if they can get such ruling through, there would need to be law changes sooner or later, which explicitly make it illegal again.

Yeah, the unscientificness annoys me the most. Doctors have been practically pleading for people to eat more veggies for the past few decades.

Granted, not everyone’s the same. I know a guy who’s allergic or intolerant to so many things that a largely meat-based diet is his only real option. Having a support group for such cases is cool.

Instead, a lot of the posts in that sub talk about pseudo-scientific data, completely ignoring that it is far away from scientific consensus.

Oh yeah, for sure, but they do mean generative AI in this case, because it’s the hype du jour.

Well, whenever I’ve talked about this in the past, there was always someone who asked “You put (sweet) peanut butter into your savory food?!”.

Wikipedia also says that it commonly contains sweeteners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_butter

But yeah, not sure if that’s maybe specifically a thing in the US. They do love to put sugar into everything and I just came across this article, which mentions that when PB&Js became popular in the US, sugar was still seen as good: https://www.thetakeout.com/why-americans-love-peanut-butter-best-vs-rest-of-world-1850648598/

Of course, there’s screenshots. You just have to visit the dedicated screenshots page: https://neverball.org/screenshots

🫠

Yeah, I find it difficult, too, especially since management hasn’t caught onto this yet and still wants me to specialize.
And of course, the answer is that I should specialize in AI, because there’s currently a lot of new development happening there. But that knowledge is also getting obsolete by the minute, with ever more tools coming out and then again other tools that operate those tools for you.

The one thing I hold onto, is that no matter how the situation evolves, the basic job requirements for software engineering, i.e. being smart and being able to learn quickly, will always be an advantage.
I don’t think it’s possible to hold onto the confort zone from before, even if the industry implodes from the AI costs becoming transparent. But yeah, I do think we’ll land on our feet in one way or another.

Gradle uses Groovy or Kotlin for its DSL, though…

Yeah, I use unsweetened peanut butter (effectively just mushed peanuts) in lots of recipes where tahini would normally be used.

I still need to figure out, if I’m using tahini wrong. 😅
Sesame always tastes bitter to me, as does tahini. Peanut butter doesn’t…

Xbox tried to play nice and put their games on PlayStation. Sony didn’t return the favor.

My assumption is that Microsoft made their games non-exclusive, because it gives them more sales in the short-term. If you need a good quarter to please investors, that’s an easy way to do it, at the cost of your Xbox brand.

At least it would be wild, if they assumed that Sony, a profit-driven company, would just return the favor.

A few weeks ago, I downloaded a puzzle app.

Upon opening it, it told me that, by the way, it does not collect any data. Also, here’s a “Privacy Center” in the app to show me how they’re not collecting data. Unsurprisingly, the privacy center did not display anything.

But what was worse, is that the puzzles were either far too easy or just entirely broken.
The pinnacle of ingenuity was when a puzzle asked me to compare four shapes and find the one which is mirrored, but then showed me symmetrical shapes.

Trying this app was entirely a waste of my time.
Which is kind of the fundamental problem I see here. There’s so many apps for all kinds of purposes out there, it’s just not useful to create Yet Another Calender App. It’s a waste of time for me to try anything but the most popular app, or well, whatever is on F-Droid.
In theory, there can be hyper-specific niches that aren’t covered by existing apps, but that’s also damn near impossible to explain to potential users, so probably still don’t end up with many users.