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.

She’s actually too old to be a boomer. Pelosi is silent generation.

I bought a mechanical keyboard back when this whole mechanical keyboard fad was in its infancy back in the mid-2000’s. Honestly, the main reason I bought it was because I thought the key backlighting was cool. It’s a nice keyboard, but I find a decent membrane keyboard (such as what I have at work) to work just as well for a fraction of the cost.

I suppose I can’t complain about the durability though, as it’s lasted nearly 20 years now.

Not too long ago I checked out the current state of what is out there, and it’s just nuts with all the choices. Not to mention all the fanatics that seem to like to build dozens of keyboards.

Interestingly, despite all the heavy customization of things like switches and keycaps, there seems to be very little ability to customize the layout. Many of the various compact keyboards out there make some interesting design choices (IMHO) about what keys they leave off, and where they distribute the keys that they decide to still include. I wouldn’t mind taking a short at creating my own compact layout, but that doesn’t seem to be what the hobby is about.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

You’re thinking of a swamp cooler. In some places they work great, in other places they’re next to useless.

Air conditioners are called that because they “condition” the air by not just cooling but also by reducing the humidity.

The other problem with moving manufacturing due to tariffs is that tariffs can always be changed, whereas moving manufacturing is a longer term investment that can cost millions, if not billions when it comes to things like chip fabs. No one wants to make an investment like that, only to have their investment suddenly become worthless because some politician decided to change how the tariffs work.

Trump’s idiotic and constant flip-flopping on these tariffs have completely destroyed any chance of them actually accomplishing anything (not that they really had a great chance of that in the first place, but anyway…), because no one is going to move a factory to the US when Trump can and will change his mind based upon a whim or whoever is whispering in his ear that moment.

To be fair to Kamala, she hasn’t announced that she’s running in 2028. Neither has AOC for that matter. This is just some pollster polling against some names that people might have heard of.

I remember being annoyed when PS2 suddenly was a gaming console and not a line of personal computers from IBM.

Yes, I know it’s PS2 vs. PS/2 when written out, but no one ever says PS-slash-2 when speaking.

Excel is a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets like Excel are first and foremost aimed at accounting sort of tasks. Whether they actually need Excel versus something like Google Docs or Libreoffice is another thing. The big thing with Excel is that it gets used (and abused) to do things that it’s not really intended for doing such as those spreadsheets that are full of macros trying to be an application, or those spreadsheets that are trying to be a database, and so forth.

From an engineering perspective, I find Excel to be annoying because it’s clearly first and foremost an accounting tool, and some of its behaviors like the way it rounds numbers and tries to turn everything into a date is downright obnoxious. I still use it from time to time for quick and dirty things like whipping up a couple of plots quickly (and this doesn’t really need Excel… but at work all the computers have Excel), but otherwise for anything more complicated I’d probably switch to something else.

The only two games I have that I’ve put more than 1000 hours in are Factorio and Rimworld. I’d highly recommend both.

The size increase in hard drives around that time was insane. Compared to the mid-90’s which was just a decade ago, hard drives capacities increased around 100 times. On average, drive capacities were doubling every year.

Then things slowed down. In the past 20 years, we’ve maybe increased the capacities 30-40 times for hard drives.

Flash memory, on the other hand, is a different story. Sometime around 2002-3 or so I paid something like $45 for my first USB flash drive - a whole 128MB of storage. Today I can buy one that’s literally 1000 times larger, for around a third of that price. (I still have that drive, and it still works too!)

The Samsung monitors we get at the office still appear to be just dumb screens. No remote or anything like that. But that’s from their business lineup of monitors. Wouldn’t surprise me too much if their consumer/gamer lineup would be different.

I have to say, they really should come up with a different name. Searching and finding the website for a company named “Why!” is pretty much impossible with today’s search engines.

Most of those apps could be replaced by a website that will work anywhere. But a website can’t spy on you as easily… so they push apps instead.