For a good while, Plex was the only game in town that did the job well, and they put the transcoding feature behind the paywall.

Given it wasn’t that expensive for a lifetime pass a number of years ago (I remember it was cheaper than a game anyway) and they still seemed relatively user-centric at the time, many people like me felt like they were supporting developers building something that was useful to us.

I still run my Plex server since it’s not really costing me not to, but I’ve been running Jellyfin too for a little while and it more or less can do the same job these days

Has it really been at least 4 years since I checked on it?! Thanks for the correction! (And mild existential crisis)

I’ve just checked and quakenet still seems to be a thing at least!

IRC is still alive and somewhat kicking on places like freenode, obviously a lot of that kind of culture lives in discord today, but you’ve also got matrix as an alternative to that style, but I can’t say I’ve really clicked with it myself.

A few forums have managed to hang around (not that I recommend it, but I discovered somethingawful is still around recently), and the software to run one is still out there being maintained. Reddit really did a number on these sites though so Lemmy, etc is probably a good tool in the box for this too.

Flash games are dead for a pretty valid reason (security, etc), but sites like newgrounds still have a presence for the kind of stuff you’re thinking of. I can’t say I’ve browsed it in a very long time though. You’ve also got the indie game scene that blew up in the 2010s—I personally feel like that’s scratching the same kind of itch for me at least. Places like humble and itch.io are good sources.

The current silicon valley meta for a while now seems to be to do any shit to lure in a user base that they ultimately can cash in on a year or two down the line.

Once you piss those users off, they go somewhere else and the cycle continues with another company that pops up to solve the artificially created problems with whatever the old thing was. Rinse and repeat.

Whatever the service or software does is secondary to getting you to stick around until they have enough users to sell or sell to

Most Java engineers I’ve ever met have Stockholm syndrome with the framework du jour.

Depends if you tell anyone about it!

Frankly charities shouldn’t need to exist. Them doing so is a failure on the part of a country’s government for not adequately providing for the needs of its citizens. If a government and a private charity set out to achieve the same goal with the same level of attention, a government should be more effective given the charity simply won’t have anything close to the resources of a country. Therefore if the government was doing its job correctly, the charity would be a worse alternative and wouldn’t exist.

Charities also have to pump loads of money into marketing so that people remember they exist and actually donate to them—this would be entirely unnecessary for a government program.

Don’t get me wrong, the work that many charities do is incredible and the world would be going worse if we didn’t have them right now. But it would be even better if they didn’t need to exist in the first place.

Flashbacks to one of my early freelance PHP gigs I did about 2 decades ago where I opened up the existing backend source code to find a load of unsanitised user input directly from the query string getting interpolated into the various SQL queries the application made. Part of me also feels like the “bobby tables” xkcd already existed by this point, so I’ve got no idea how that website managed to not get nuked before I refactored it.

To top it all off, of course the application authenticated with the database using the root user…

Thankfully I think that was the worst I ever discovered in the wild

Chop up a spring onion and chuck that in with some toasted sesame seeds.

For a bit more effort I’ll chuck in some frozen stir fry veg when I’m cooking it. Sometimes I do an egg too

Look at all those methods I would never use to share anything from a website.

Might just be me, but if I wanted to share something with someone it’s going to be an IM

they’rethesamepicture.jpeg

I mean it’s right wing politics in a nutshell

Dupe fools with simple, comforting lies over complicated, uncomfortable truth. If people don’t understand reality they can’t change it.

I think you need to get your Haribo from somewhere else, they’re generally a pretty pleasant level of gummy. The only time I can remember them being hard is when they’re super old.

Well unless you’re getting whatever their version of sports mix or mini gems is called, which are supposed to be hard gummies.

“gotta see shit to know shit” someone once said to me

It pops into my head semi-regularly

Although apparently Cocchi Americano is very close, and therefore a good choice versus the more common substitution of Lillet Blanc

I’ve yet to personally get my hands on a bottle though

Even a gin martini is a bit of a mid cocktail IMO

There are plenty of much more interesting spirit forward cocktails out there

You can’t wear one leg each from two different pairs of jeans and go about your daily business.

Well not with that attitude you can’t! I can think of several ways to accomplish this

Tomato is a fruit

I wonder if the website did the thing where it lists their big customers like a trophy cabinet on the main landing page.

It would probably make a good list of places to sell snake oil

Also love that this is all evidence to back up the premise that building the happy path of an application is generally easy, one of the main skills in software engineering is ensuring the unhappy paths are covered sufficiently. I can say I’ve started a bank and keep people’s money in my wardrobe, I’ll be providing the service of holding their money—I’ll also probably get robbed sharpish because I’m not skilled in the kind of security needed to avoid that.

About 35-40h generally, I’m a software engineer.

I enjoy my job, but ultimately the point of me doing my work is to be able to do whatever I want with my free time. Life is for living after all

Absolutely zero if I’m trying to sleep or only just waking up

Managed amounts if I’m watching a TV or using a computer

Any other time, let the light in, my plants need to eat