Palacegalleryratio [he/him]

My personal favourite is to break from staring after 30 mins, exclaim, “Hang on, we’re going about this completely back to front!” then spend the next hour deriving from first principles, only to arrive back at the original problem, but now with slightly different notation. At which point I realise that all I’ve done is get myself back to my starting point… Then it’s back to the staring.

“From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.

Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal…

…even in death I serve the Omnissiah.” - some bird in New Mexico apparently

Totally agree. IRC and Mailing lists used to be the best option for platform agnostic open source communities, but when better options exist it’s now used out of stubbornness. Even if not intentional, use of these systems with their own cliques and etiquettes now acts mostly as gatekeeping through obscurity and are off putting to outsiders who may well be prevented from participating.

You know what, this is on us. Chat GPT is just a prediction engine that tries to say what words it thinks follow a preceding prompt, and it’s looked at millions of examples (written by us) and it’s seen hapless clients and users complain about bugs and be told: “user error, works fine” so often chatGPT just thinks it’s just the culturally accepted polite response to a bug report, in the same way as responding to “thank you” with “you’re welcome”. This is a dark mirror on our profession.

To be honest I thought it was a dead project

Is this really better than proper Linux in any way? Other than native play store, which means you can run shitty phone apps stretched fullscreen. Not sure I see the benefit.

Only when it pulls out “works fine on my machine, must be user error”

Truly the UK is the worst nation.

• A Brit

I’m running a 3 year old flagship phone (As it happens an iPhone). It’s still blazing fast, still has great cameras, still got the latest os and the battery health is still in the high-80s percentage range which is plenty for a days use. I don’t see any compelling reason at all to change my phone (more compelling is a £60 battery replacement when the battery does start to fail to win another years life) and I bet many others like me are in the same boat.