toddestan

joined 2 years ago
[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 0 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Just because a hammer makes for a lousy screwdriver doesn't mean it's not a good hammer. To me, AI just another tool. Like any other tool, there's things it is good at and there are things it is bad at. I've also found it can be pretty good as a code completion engine. Not perfect, but there's plenty of boilerplate stuff and repetitive things where it can figure out the pattern and I can bang out the lines of code pretty quickly with the AI's help. On the other hand, there's times it's nearly useless and I switch back to the keyword completion engine as it's the better tool for those situations.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I don't think there were SSDs that large when they first came out in the late 2000's. I saved up for an 80GB one back around 2009, and it was an absolute piece of trash. It was fast when it wanted to be, but most of the time it would randomly stutter and just go unresponsive for several seconds causing the rest of the PC to hang up until it decided to start responding again. After fighting with it for too long, I replaced it with a traditional harddrive which at least behaved as it was supposed to.

It was several years later before I tried another SSD, buying a relatively inexpensive 120GB drive that actually did live up to the hype.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I wouldn't say the OP is wrong. The king is definitely the more valuable piece, but doesn't mean the queen isn't a more powerful one.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

While your average early/mid 2000's CRT TV is certainly not stylish, I do appreciate the buttons and convenient access to a set of inputs and the headphone jack. Today's TVs are all form over function, which is especially annoying since the form is just a black slab.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

I'm sure Google is perfectly capable of auto-filtering crap like that if they wanted to. They just don't give a shit.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

If it's supported by your hardware and software you're still using, I'd be tempted to blow away Windows 10 and put Windows 7 on there. I ran Windows 7 for several years after support ended - best Windows experience ever. Rock solid stable and no hassles of having to deal with updates. I eventually moved onto Linux after continuing to run Windows 7 for general desktop usage started to become unfeasible, but for something that just needs to run Windows to do some specific things, I'd definitely consider it.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This time it was a willful and intentional leak (at least if you believe the article's version of the events), whereas the guy who left the prototype at the bar was a complete accident. It's not surprising to me that Apple would fire someone who intentionally leaked something. As for the guy who left the phone at the bar, I guess it depends on how careless and negligent you think that was.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

Which one specifically?

While there are certainly Linux desktops I prefer more and those I prefer less, as someone who is forced to use Windows 11 at work I'd gladly take any Linux desktop environment over that mess.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Well, actually thinking about you would have to split the 1995 internet into the internet and the world wide web. I actually spent a considerable amount of time on usenet - this of course being back when it was more than alt.binaries. Probably around then I also discovered MP3s, and the main way I had of getting a hold of those long before the days of Napster was public FTP sites. With any luck, when I found a good one there would be others mentioned in the greeting and/or some sort of readme that I could then go check out. I could also try snagging them on usenet, but the server my ISP ran didn't really put much effort into making sure the binaries groups had any sort of decent retention, but every once and a while I could snag something. I also still had access to AOL, but I don't recall doing much in their client other than checking email.

In any case, that was all outside of the WWW. As for the WWW I remember using to do things like look up guides to video games I was playing, and other fun stuff like looking up Star Wars and Star Trek fan sites. It was more of a toy for me - for things like getting news, looking at the weather, or researching things I tended to go to "traditional" sources. Honestly, the whole every website had had animated gifs, blink tags, MIDI music, and horrible background images is more a meme than anything else. Sure, that's not to say there weren't sites like that, but even so that was more of a late 1990's-mid 2000's thing (coughMySpacecough). In 1995 most things still pretty simple. In 1995 trying to get too fancy would result in your site taking a while to load at 14.4k (a single MP3 took forever), and would grind the average PC (something like a 486 with 4-8MB of RAM) to a halt.

As for cars, I agree with the OP is the 1990's is when the typical new car took a big leap in terms of quality. What they lack is the cool factor that cars from the 60's have. Things have gotten better since then in general, though I'd argue that some things like usability and ergonomics have taken a hit.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

Do you really remember the internet back then? Of course it wasn’t enshittified, there were only dozens of people online. And it really depends on what you mean with enshittified, the designs were horrible and polluted, sure it didn’t had ads, but realistically even a page with adds nowadays is more readable than most websites back then, with tiling images background, gifs everywhere and interesting font choices.

I’m sure that the vast majority of stuff you do online today wasn’t available in 95, so yeah, it might have become “enshittified” but it also became usable, and a shitty usable thing is better than a pure useless thing in my book.

Do you remember the internet back then? Sure, there were some truly terrible websites around back then, but most of the internet wasn't like what MySpace looked like a decade later.

Is it though? Most cars from the 90s are in dumpsters by now, they consumed so much gas that it simply wasn’t worth keeping them. And by the 90s cars had already started using electronics so they don’t even have the appeal that a purely mechanical car from the 60s brings to the table. Also again with the affordability probably wasn’t all that much better than now, where you can probably get a used car for very cheap.

As someone who was around back then, the quality of 90's cars were far better than the 70-80's cars that preceded them (in general). By the 1990's a lot of issues that plagued the early electronics in cars (late 70's-80's) had been sorted out, things like fuel injection became standard, the quality of paints improved drastically - 1990's cars didn't rust out nearly as bad as cars from previous decades. Of course most of these cars are gone now - the newest 1990's cars are over 25 years old at this point, but it's still not uncommon to see them driving around. Much more so than seeing cars from the 60's-70's driving around in the 1990's.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 12 points 3 weeks ago

It surprises me how little stick-built houses have changed in the last 50 years or so, at least in the USA.

[–] toddestan@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I avoid buying from Amazon as much as possible, but good luck doing anything online and avoiding AWS.

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