Thanks for the nostalgia.

2010 - back then I was an insecure teenager, finding refuge and empowerment in technology, anxious that I will die alone. One year before finishing high school and two before meeting my future wife. I texted her also using Pidgin for ICQ and Google Talk (without the OTR, of course).

Now I'm a self-confident software developer, instead anxious that I will die in a fascist dictatorship, and absolutely sick of the modern shitnology, preferring to care for plants on the balcony after work, because they are something real and not annoying.

Tech is just not fun anymore. But maybe it's for the better, that made me go outside more.

But back on topic:

prohibiting encryption is like saying people should not be able to have private conversations without a microphone in the room which the government can always tune in to, if they see the need. Obviously completely ridiculous.

I guess just in case I'll keep my illegal encryption software somewhere hidden and encrypted. Will be fun when we will start sending crypto data hidden steganographically in a wall of text that reads like bad LLM output. Have fun scanning all the traffic looking for cues that are not there. Anything can be encoded in almost anything else. There is absolutely no way that a government, no matter how powerful, could enforce any such restriction in a bullet proof way against anyone who puts in the tiniest bit of effort.

Concerning making math illegal... Reminds me of DeCSS. Been there, done that. When people were wearing shirts with the illegal prime number. Fun times.

That's too harsh, unless you are a medical expert who is 100% confident this cannot be. I doubt that you are.

Skin has its own microbial flora and is the largest organ of our body. Imagine you take antibiotics. This can lead to all kinds of side effects, because good bacteria just as bad are killed and your gut needs to repopulate.

If you did not wash your skin for decades, I'm pretty certain that you will acquire a pretty unique and rich microbiome on your skin that co-exists with you in symbiosis if you are healthy. Now you just wash it away.

Is this the new official flag of the USA?

Yeah, I'm also more on the time blindness overcompensation club.

If I have no time fixed, minutes stretch into hours.

If I have some fixed time scheduled, I live by the clock and will rather be way too early than a little to late.

I have to trick my non ADHD wife to be on time, because if there's a schedule, I'm the master time keeper.

Being late is just way more stressful and I hate rushing and the anxiety of being too late to the train or some doctor or whatever.

My coping mechanism is to have the anxiety way earlier than other people. Everyone believes I'm amazingly organized.

I only trust people who get stomach aches when faced with stressful ethical dilemmas.

"nobody likes them but keeps watching them" - that confirms my theory that it's digital crack. I intuitively want to stay away because I feel that it cannot be good for my brain

I totally feel you. My wife was also confused why I suddenly was somehow frustrated and angry. Glad I'm not the only one.

Death by a thousand one-second cuts

In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most "alternative browsers" do - tweaking or repackaging.

These days, a browser is like it's own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.

I'd say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.

So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop "apps".

I managed to be 10 years on reddit in niche hobby and nerd communities and it feels like I lived in some parallel reddit all the time, reading about how toxic and broken it is supposed to be.

Same with YouTube. There are nice channels with less than 100k Views per Video or even just a fraction of it, producing amazing informative videos.

Gotta find the gems in the dirt.

I have a nagging feeling the platform is not or only a part of the problem, but collective human nature is. When enough people join a platform to be a representative sample, you get the representative shittiness of the literally median person on the internet.

Bandcamp, because it is the best place for independent music and there is nothing close to it.

Steam, because they started with non-horrible DRM (compared to other options) and now they are one of the companies that help Linux succeed for gaming (Steam Deck is just a Linux computer with controllers attached, and Proton is awesome for running Windows games on Linux).

My true faith is: don't be an asshole and be a decent, rational and empathetic human being.

Everything else I may or may not believe does not matter, it's decoration.

Python with type hints and mypy and ruff = <3

Large Python codebase without types = nightmare