This is great. I must be getting old since I'm actually finding buzzwords somehow useful now.

"no frills answers"

"vibe coding"

Such simple concepts and a common simple way of phrasing something to facilitate search and "communication".

I mean, this site only got any attention at all SOLELY because it was "AI everything". Otherwise, who would have even really gone to the site in the first place given how many hundreds of other recipe sites are out there?

and the thing about AI marketing is that, well, that's pretty damn obvious when you see it currently, for the text and images (never mind the copyright concerns), and then require more money to actually get out there in advertising.

or you had to figure out how to get code written for an Apple ][ to work on an Atari 400/800 (and hope there weren't any peeks and pokes in the graphics sections as those were pretty much untranslatable without an assembly guide to the graphics renderer).

Granted, that skill became VERY useful into college and adulthood needing to get C(++) code written for BSD/SunOS 4 to work in SystemV systems, back before "./configure" was a common thing in open source packages.

Java, and more so J2EE, just sucks the brains out.

Case in point, outside of Apache projects and JBoss (which try to implement J2EE standards as free things to avoid buying IBM's proprietary packages that implement the "standards" that IBM intentionally shoved into the standard in order to get people to buy IBM's "solutions"), who codes in Java open source anymore?

Back in the plain Java/Swing days, yeah, and I really loved being in THAT version of MVC and was really closing to writing a book for it...

but when IBM took over J2EE web dev architecture and that became the 'norm'? f' it. I had no brains left, every cell was being used to just get my work code to work.

and that didn't change, for me, or for anybody else. Outside of the Apache/JBoss services there was no open source community, no 'hacking', no...anything. because just doing the job sucked your brains out. I once had to explain, as I was leaving my prior company in 2010, that any "feature" they asked for required me, on a "full-stack", to mentally think and write in 12 different languages, once you realized that each XML configuration was really a different language from any other.

There's reasons the react, node, and general JS "stack" has so many packages and components available to it...it is because the typescript/javascript realm doesn't suck your brains out.

Yeah, it got me through 15 years of my 30 year career...but I'll never miss it.

I have been using Pocket (Read It Later) since 2009 at least. It got even more use when it was integrated into Feedly which I started using for RSS after Google killed Reader. (as another post said, there's always /somebody/)

However, I never use Firefox (their PWA support has always been second-class) and so I have no idea what pocket's "integration" with Firefox was like.

I'll figure something out. Having cloud bookmarks easily referenced was always useful - bookmark on my desktop mac, then read later on my tablet before zonking out, tagging anything if I feel like social media sharing the next day.

> Your copying that data digitally any way you cut it.

This, very much this. This is the reason we have the DMCA. VCR and DVD vendors were paranoid they were going to get sued for making "extra copies" inside the machine blitting video to your screen. So they "compromised" by signing the DMCA into law and creating a whole different landscape of rights and criminal prosecution for research.

I expect the other foot to fall soon, especially here in the USA. There will be new legislation and it won't be helpful or rational.

In 2023 inflation was at a peak and in many countries it hadn't subsided the way it did with the "soft landing" here in America. As such, it got to be a somewhat more expensive habit that had to be set aside in favor of, you know, food, travel costs (gas for those that drive), and housing, all of which also were (and still are) under heavy inflationary pressures.

Never blame on 'personal preference' what might also have a 'personal necessity' factor to it.

When you are involved in making an email editor, targeting Outlook while wanting to take advantage of 15 years of HTML/CSS improvements is just insane. We're still doing table layouts, not able to style hr dividers (so we use a border-top div hack instead of hr and it is ugly when dashed/dotted), there's the whole 'fab 4' process for an email that looks good mobile and desktop...but then there's /partial/ support for html5 on outlook for the web, but not everybody is there yet. Many are still on desktop '16, '19 (or the really REALLY buggy '13).

Supposedly Microsoft will EOL all of that in 2026...but then again, Chromium took how many years to finally kill off Manifest 2?

So really when it comes to your UI, your device, your whatever, I don't care. I just want to write html5 compliant div+css based html and have it work... ...well, until I keep bumping into gmail's limits on css size in your style tag.

There's 2 problems with the IOT these days

1) we don't trust that the hardware providers are willing to maintain the software. Case in point, refrigerators and microwaves that have 'expired' in their Android support and will never get upgrades, thus leading to zero-day insecurity issues (if Google/Android doesn't brick them by pushing an upgrade they aren't supposed to get - this killed thousands of Nexus TV devices by shoving 8 at them after saying in publicity that they weren't supported past 7.12).

2) the bigger issue: we want all of that magic. we really do. we want to just go "computer, turn the oven on 350 and let me know when it is ready" while i'm downstairs in the laundry room sorting things. We actually really want to go "computer, find and book the best flight for us to get to Houston to see the family, including a rental car" and have it all just happen. The whole "Agents" thing was promising that back in the late 90s, even without AT&T's "the company that will bring it to you" advertisements.

But here we are with the companies that can bring it to us: Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft...and we don't trust any of them. Some do, perhaps many do. But many more don't right now.

the late 90s was a period where 'agents" were all the rage in popular tech media and in the lexicon of large-scale software architectures.

in the military this was reflected in the idea of various elements able to handle telemitry be able to exchange information securely (e.g., one helicopter on one side of a mountain range could echo what its radar is seeing to another chopper on the other side of that range. the idea of 'agents' was to exchange that information without interactive efforts by either pilot.

in the civilian world this was reflected by the whole "and the company that will bring that to you? AT&T" ad campaign. This idea that the agent will handle scheduling your medical appointments, business appointments, do your flight and apartment bookings when you're planning a vacation. That it could just do it all on your behalf.

Now back then, the issue was APIs. How can we agree on the interfaces such an agent would need. This led to web services, and IBM so over-engineering the code required to do it (code that IBM would nicely provide for you at a cost), that...nobody dared actually go into that space deep enough to fulfill the promises. IBMs hurting over the decades since is partially from this self-inflicted wound of getting into the standards body and trying to corrupt the standards into something so complicated that only IBM could save you from them. The end result?

When was the last time /. actually had a post about web-services?

Been a while, hasn't it? The early 2000s were all about XML and WSDL and all that...and NOTHING of importance (commercially) has come of it. The complexity killed the drive to actually do something.

Now, it is entirely possible for new systems to do that, whether by AI or by basic web-scraping tech...but we're at a new impasse: nobody trusts the corporations that can afford to do it. I mean, yeah, lots of us are on google or amazon or apple or several...but we don't trust them with EVERYTHING. and we don't trust them to just act on our behalf. They can plan things and we can eventually approve (and they can only plan within the info they have, and there's no cross-info available, so google doesn't know my delta info, and apple doesn't know my marriott info, and google and apple sure as bleep aren't talking to each other right now), that the promise of those agents of the 90s could never be achieved.

We all want that Star Trek future where we just go "computer, book a holiday in San Louis Obispo from May 12th through the 15th. Flights, resort, and car." and have it happen, complete with our preferred airline, hotel chain, and rental company...but we don't trust any corporation like Google to actually have access to all that.

So this is the alternative: the AI operates on your browser using info that's only here on your client, and instead of data-accurate web-services, it uses web-scraping to try to handle it all.

but that still leaves you as a person giving up your trust.

Originally the Disney buy wasn't in the name of ABC but rather ESPN: applying the statistical models to sports for predictions.

While they did continue sports reporting 'til the end, I'm guessing the accuracy rate wasn't quite as high as their reputation for political polling was, and they didn't grow. An educated audience doesn't go to back prognosticators when they don't show accuracy, and an uneducated audience only goes to those that keep telling them what they want to have happen and somehow bury their failures, like evangelical megachurches and televangelists and the likes of Alex Jones and all that, or, say Cramer at CNBC :) .

If traffic is down 74% from pre-pandemic maybe that's because Amazon has gone through multiple layoffs of its tech force, across the country, in the last few years. Same with many of the big-tech firms - Oracle, META, Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet/Google.

Texas is very pro-corporation when it comes to IP rights, particularly patents and trademarks within its courts. There's a reason most patent trolls file in Texas.

META/Zuck is probably setting up to get the courts to reconsider whether or not gen-AI results can be copyright protected.

When I added -ai, it also got rid of the "sponsored" links across the top.

Well, first things first, double-check any ancient PHP that's still active for security issues. Most of the changes in the last 25 years have been because of exposed vulnerabilities.

Next, if you are still doing PHP for new projects, then next steps depends on if one of those projects is relatively simple.

If it is simple, then just write it with the new frameworks (and I'm on the VSCode side as far as the editor goes).

If it is more complex and you need to get a handle on the frameworks, then just pick ONE legacy/existing project and rewrite it to the framework so you get a feel for what the framework does but also what it needs so you know instinctively, "ok i used to do this, i have to do it that way now". That transition is really important when changing frameworks, in any language (e.g., moving from react to web-components or angular; moving a node app from express to fastify; moving react to next based server-side rendering).

So yeah - if you're still doing PHP, don't replace all the old stuff other than what security changes are needed. But definitely do all new projects to newer standards and pick some way to learn the new standard that isn't mission-critical or overly complex, then take on the complex project once you know what the frameworks do.