As the dude from this picture, let me tell you that piracy was reeeally different 30 years ago (more like 25 for me). We were years away from DSL, downloading a piss-poor CAM rip of Star Wars ep1 took hours. Then you’d invest in a CD burner and exchange movies with your friends.

When I cancelled my subscriptions a year ago, I found out about Jellyfin and the *arr stack, took a couple of hours to set them up, and now I can download a whole show in a couple of taps while my friend is telling me about it, and watch it on my TV in 4K, or on my phone in the subway like 15 minutes later.

Sure, the underlying methods of acquisition haven’t changed much since BitTorrent came out, but the ecosystem is on a whole other level.

Same, the best one was the dude who created an account with my email but his own phone number. So I text him to try and scare him with the fact that some random dude got hold of his private info. He was unfazed and replied “my nephew set it up for me, guess we’ve got the same email address”…

homer_sofar.jpg

Got it today too. I clicked on “fuck you” or something like that, and I went on to watch my ad-free video.

Yeah that’s a nice reaction, the other dude wasn’t being a jerk so no need to make him feel bad about it.

The VBA part of the meme is real, VBA is (was?) localized. Turns out it’s a horrible idea: some keywords are badly translated, some are not translated at all. Googling localized error messages is useless, so you need to guess the original error message from the translation. Want to copy/paste a function from SO? Not so fast, you need to translate the keywords first! And the variable names as well while you’re at it.

Ironically, you end up spending a lot of time on translation-related issues. I’ve worked on a french-VBA app, and it was a miserable experience (well, even more miserable than english VBA).

Nick Fuentes, for one. He seems pretty proud of it judging by his Twitter.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure 15 minutes after this post OP was crawling barefoot in HVAC ducts.

It works really well, I want to support them and donate but I’m afraid YouTube will find a way to block them like they did to others…

Nah, Hibernate, Spring and most major Java frameworks have largely moved away from XML. It’s still supported, but these days it’s mostly configured in the code directly, with properties loaded from yaml, JSON or the environment (for containers).

The JDK ecosystem is in a pretty good spot nowadays. With Spring boot you can whip up a productions ready back-end very fast, or if you prefer a more hands-on approach there are lighter frameworks/libraries quarkus or micronaut.

The Java language itself has evolved fast and is actually pretty nice now, and if you prefer something more modern akin to TS or swift you can just use Kotlin which is almost 100% interoperable with Java.

Since Java 14 it looks like this:

Exception in thread “main” java.lang.NullPointerException:

Cannot invoke “String.toLowerCase()” because the return value of “com.baeldung.java14.npe.HelpfulNullPointerException$PersonalDetails.getEmailAddress()” is null

at com.baeldung.java14.npe.HelpfulNullPointerException.main(HelpfulNullPointerException.java:10)

My favorite brand is Gildan, because they seem to have a monopoly on (metal) band shirts.

My second favorite is Volcom, because they work with local artists to make beautiful designs for their apparel.

“Well, it was the result of having multiple pastors tell me essentially the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount parenthetically in their preaching - turn the other cheek - to have someone come up after and to say, where did you get those liberal talking points? And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ, the response would not be, I apologize. The response would be, yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak. And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”

It’s been commonly used as a pejorative in French for a decade or so.

Yep, at my previous job I moved a pretty complex build system from Jenkins to github actions. It worked fine and was much simpler to maintain.

And yes there are ways to run github actions on your own machine, but I haven’t tried it.

Yeah that’s all we talked about over at Slashdot at the time. Nobody else gave a fuck.

what force might have coerced Microsoft to behave more reasonably, in that situation?

Strong antitrust and anti-corruption laws. Their actions were not “unreasonable”, they were straight up illegal.

Edit: also you should read up on the whole thing. They didn’t break compatibility with their own office suite of course. What they did is lie to (and almost definitely pay off) the standardization body: “here is the spec for OpenXML, you see we’re open it’s right here in the name, anyone can implement it and be interoperable with us”. So OpenXML was standardized along with OpenOffice’s OOXML (at the start of the process, only OOXML was considered for standardization).

Once the deed was done, they of course didn’t implement OOXML in MS Office (as is their right), but they also didn’t implement their own OpenXML spec properly, which means OpenOffice still had to reverse-engineer an intentionally obfuscated and broken format to try and read/write documents compatible with MSO.

So the whole thing has been absolutely useless, except for a couple of “experts” from the panel who came out of it a bit richer.

Nope, the correct solution would have been for MS to compete fairly with OSS, instead of, for example, buying the standardization of its Office suite formats, and then never implementing those formats to prevent OpenOffice from being 100% interoperable.

The Big Lebowski is the pinnacle of humour! Now get off my lawn!

Yep that’s the idea.