As someone who used to be an Assistant Manager at Blockbuster…keep that thing dead and gone. Like as a consumer, sure I get it, but working there absolutely sucked. No one remembers the late fees or the fact Blockbuster would send you to collections for ONE late fee (like a whole $3.25) and then send you those bullshit cards in the mail letting you know that you owe them less than $5? yeah I remember cause on a near daily basis I’d get someone in the store yelling at me that they’re trying to get a loan or a house and this little card is fucking it all up for them. MOST of the time the late fee was because the absolutely ancient computer system we used that they never updated…at all…since the 80s…would skip barcodes randomly on scans. That or some vengeful employee at another store would just manually add fees to someones account (yes that was possible, yes we could just add fees to random accounts willy nilly)

also my District Manager was a douchenozzle. Mike, rot in hell.

Qutebrowser is my main and Lynx is my “feed” browser. Qutebrowser you don’t need anything else. it just works and you can script the thing to your hearts content.

For a long time I was using Floorp, and while I like floorp and the dev team behind it, I just stopped using it as my main. Sure it’s a fork of firefox and they’re at the whims of mozilla which lately has been clearly evident with the slow updates to floorp.

Qutebrowser just works. The dev for it is a nice dude who is easily accessible for help. the community for it is also very helpful. the integration with things like greasemonkey make scripting and customizing anything so painfully easy. I mean there’s a great script for it right now that completely 100% circumvents youtube ads and it’s been working for months straight without any need to update. It also meshes extremely well with my Bitwarden.

I’ll never use a different browser again.

Plenty. If you’ve ever worked retail you’d know the answer to this question. the “lifers” will volunteer. You know the types if you’ve worked in retail. They’ll do it thinking it’ll look good to some upper manager and allow them to get promoted for simply showing loyalty to the company. The ones who believe and tell you constantly how the company can do no wrong, how great it is to work for said company, and how the company has their best interests in mind.

no other way does exist. Those no kings protests were nice and all but what exactly even remotely, slightly, changed? nothing. they trucked ahead like they will continue to do.

Democrat politicians will continue to chirp on twitter and make awesome tiktok vids but that’s all it is at the end of the day, talk. I can only watch so many committee hearings and just know “why am I wasting my time watching this? it’s just a dog and pony show and nothing will come of it.”

Look I admire AOC and Bernie and the rest of them but peaceful protesting is just going to paint a target on their backs for when they come for them and make no mistake, they will.

I just think Americans should “make it harder” for when the nazi’s eventually do come knocking.

“You are an absolute fucking idiot who can barely code…”

Honestly, that’s what you have to do. It’s the only way I can get through using Claude.ai. I treat it like it’s an absolute moron, I insult it, I “yell” at it, I threaten it and guess what? the solutions have gotten better. not great but a hell of a lot better than what they used to be. It really works. it forces it to really think through the problem, research solutions, cite sources, etc. I have even told it i’ll cancel my subscription to it if it gets it wrong.

no more “do this and this and then this but do this first and then do this” after calling it a “fucking moron” and what have you it will provide an answer and just say “done.”

primarily medium to large companies. the smaller startups seem to know better. the former laid off a bunch of staff and in most cases offshored the work to people who ONLY use AI to build things. A few rare cases it’s been a Project Manager who paid for a Claude.ai subscription and had it build things from start to finish then push to production. If I see something that has a gradient background I know they had Claude build it.

essentially, from what I’ve been dealing with, most if it is their offshore people using the AI to completely do the job from start to finish and no one is verifying anything. So it’s not even vibe coding, it’s “here’s a prompt, build it, i’m pushing it to production” coding.

As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I’ve been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.

A lot of is pretty bad. It’s a mess. But like I said I’ve been at it for awhile and I’ve seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn’t learn anything. It’s literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it’s AI pretty much stating the same shit.

I’ve been getting so many requests for gigs I’ve been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I’ve burned through all my contacts that now I’m just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.

yes it’s that bad (well bad for companies, it’s fantastic for developers.)

EDIT: Since my comment has gained a lot of traction I’ve marked down peoples user names and portfolios/emails to my dev list. If something more comes up (and trust me, it will) I’ll shoot you an email or msg on here. Currently I’ve already shoved off a bunch of stuff to others and have nothing as of now but I imagine that will change by next week so if more stuff comes up I’ll shoot you an email or DM.

naturalized are next “on the list” after they finish dealing with birthright citizens.

My parents moved to the US from Canada back in '98, became US citizens, and I’ve been hounding them almost daily at this point to come back home to Canada. At this point I don’t care if I go into massive debt providing for them or if I have to get a second job just to be able to afford a place to rent with more than 2 bed rooms.

I’m just so terrified every day that ICE is going to detain one of them or both. I just can’t get through to them that they need to leave the US and come back to Canada right now.

just call it Alligator Auschwitz.

Of course they’re going to send children and pregnant women. Do they think the Nazi Germans were all “you know what? the jew kids and pregnant jew women are too much for this. lets leave them alone.” no. You don’t gear up for a genocide by picking and choosing those within the group you plan on genociding.

“History is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of War, Peace, and Revolution continue on forever.”

he’s just so bad with names. Surprised he didn’t call it the X Party. wouldn’t that have been more “cool”? surprised he didn’t ask Grok to come up with party names, I mean hell I use chatgpt to come up with names for videogame characters and it works well.

This is going to fizzle out when he inevitably gets distracted by something else.

ensures a third term for your glorious leader and solidifies a dictatorship. Democrats will win the midterms or rather be “allowed” to win the midterms to which Republicans will blame all this that they literally just did on the Dems and the morons that we call the American People will believe it. Power will then at that point be solidified.

oh boy the UN sends another strongly worded letter.

the UN is just a dog and pony show, they have no power at all, anywhere.

hey don’t rope the rest of the world in with your fuck up. Humanity hasn’t failed, you failed. Americans failed. Just because I live above a Nazi Bar doesn’t mean I go down there to have a pint. Fuck at this point if I did your SS would probably arrest me.

So stop being a bunch of Nazi’s that you claim you aren’t and go start rebelling.

why wait? I was hoping you americans would have acted by now but…psh I’m not holding my breathe anymore. almost any other country would be rioting, violently, right now but you guys have zero leaders to rally anything. and any thing close to an opposition leader you have is saying “just wait for the midterms!” yeah…ok buddy either you’ll be lucky if your dear leader allows midterms to happen OR they do, dems win across the board, but most of this shit goes into effect AFTER said midterms thus the nazi’s blame the dems for everything and ensure glorious leader wins a 3rd term.

shit I’ll be surprised if most of you guys are still working, eating, not in a camp, or hell even alive by that point.

what’s annoying is reading on bsky or mastodon or other places with Americans going “it’s happening” or “soon this will be normal” etc it’s like no bro, it isn’t happening and it isn’t soon, it’s now. It’s already happened. you’re living in it. you’re a nazi nation. you aren’t becoming nazi Germany, you currently are nazi Germany.

you’re at the end of that poem. your government is now openly saying they’re going to arrest politicians and citizens that don’t agree with them. your government is taking away birthright citizenship and very soon they’ll go after naturalized citizens and then just straight up regular citizens.

if you’re not a white, “straight”, christian, male earning over $500mil a year you’re fucked. they WILL come for you. They’ve already laid out the protections for the group previously mentioned. You’ve lost your country and no amount of peaceful protesting is going to return it to you. There’s literally one course of action left but I believe the average American is either too afraid or unwilling to commit to it.

Mullvad is great, only VPN i’ll ever use. I’m just a random number to them. no emails, no names, nothing. Hell I can even just pay them in cash if I wanted. Their service has improved too. on some wifi networks it would take me a couple minutes to connect but now it’s instant. Soon as I boot into my WM just “mullvad connect” in the terminal and I’m good to go.

They never try to lure me into buying more/bigger/better like pretty much every company does now.

Windscribe enters the chat.

Biggest mistake I ever made was signing up for them. just the constant daily emails trying to be “funny” to get me to return.

What’s funny about this whole thing is it’s almost like PirateSoftwares days in EVE Online when he invited everyone to Pochven space cause he thought he was hot shit and then proceeded to get his ass handed to him and he rage quit the game. He brought attention to something that ended up having the opposite effect of what he wanted.

Granted he was absolutely shit at EVE regardless of what he’s told his audience. couldn’t fit a ship to save his life, ran for CSM and no one voted for him, then rage quit when everyone and even his own corp proceeded to kick his teeth in.