And are happy days really "hear" again?

I'm so happy! My dream has come true. Now I can write on FB, X etc. how evil Zuck and Musk are, and not only with examples of things they've done, but even better, I can make stuff up too!

And it won't get deleted, right?

Oh, happy day.

I loved OS/2. I am just a humble user and was a starving student at the time it was out, and the current Windows version was Windows for Workgroups. The OS/2 Workplace Shell was amazing! Desktop objects were actual object that could be interacted with via right-click. Everything about it was better than Windows. The guy who gave me a box of floppies to install it told me "It will turn your PC into a supercomputer". That was obviously BS, but it kinda felt that way, especially compared to Windows.

But there were no apps. Or rather, no free, "shareware" or reasonably priced apps that normal people could afford. I guess OS/2 was targeted at Enterprise customers, not consumers,

But then apps ported from Linux started to become available. I'd never heard of Linux, but when at last I got sick of OS/2 crashing and freezing, I switched to Linux and never looked back

It went like this: Windows would freeze and/or crash every day, sometimes multiple times per day, and you would lose hours of work before learning to save after typing ever sentence. OS/2 was much more stable, only crashing/freezing once a week or fortnight. But Linux, even back then, (almost) never crashed. It was free, much more reliable and had tons of free apps!

WTF, IBM?

I bow to your superior knowledge. I am basing my claim on job ads in my field. So, OK SAS might be necessary for employment in biotech/pharma, but what about every other industry that employs data analysts? I note that you do not mention SPSS, so I suppose you accept my claim?

Almost no-one outside of academia uses these applications, and those that do are the very largest companies and government departments. If you look at job ads for data analysts, it's all Python and R. What on Earth are the people that run Code.org thinking?

The issue is not about ability to follow procedures; it's about products that promise much but deliver little, and to use Cory Doctorow's term, the enshittification of everyday life.

Oh, the clickbait. Oh, the people who spend an unhealthy amount of time fixated on screens. If you thank that image is horrifying, you really need to get out more. Try looking around you at actual people (instead of staring at your phone) as you walk around an actual town or city in the real world.

Sheesh.

Yes, code bloat is a real thing.

Yes, things have got better (security, reliability), but they're still pretty sh*t.

The reason? "Productivity" (i.e. cutting costs by hiring less-experienced coders), and the insane belief of product managers that end-users want new features. We don't. We want our software to be so boring that we forget it even exists. The only updates should be bug fixes, including, of course, security features.

But how boring would this be for not only product managers, but also actual coders?

So, productivity + impedance mismatch between creators and consumers, probably.

Oh well, if you use open-source you can fix all those problems yourself, right?

That's a pretty none-specific headline! Which god, exactly? There are so many! How are you supposed to make a rational choice which one to believe in?

In an effort to look noble, they quote revenue. What about profit, and projected profit? It strikes me that very few large companies have the moral fortitude to forgo significant profits. I'll give them props when they release the profit foregone, and projected impact on share price.

Dear Slashdot readers: I know that many of you are coders ("engineers" for those of you in the USA, I suppose), and I myself am a hobbyist programmer. So I ask you: have you ever encountered, and can you envisage, an application designed for a single task to have 2M LOC? I'm not talking about general purpose software like Office suites etc.

This doesn't seem credible. But what do I know? Please correct/educate me if I'm wrong.

And doesn't refactoring 2M LOC seem almost guaranteed to introduce regressions and new bugs?

The mind boggles ...

Gee, this is a difficult one. I happen agree with the people who've gone dark in that misinformation is dangerous, lethal in fact, but don't agree the solution is to ban morons and evildoers from Reddit. Free speech is not an absolute; there are always legal and moral limits, almost always related to potential for harm. This particular issue is right on the boundary, for me. I could find myself agreeing with banning and not banning.

I guess my wishy-washyness is why I'm not a captain of industry and getting paid the big bucks like the top brass of Reddit. But I can't resist offering them one small piece of advice: the text of their response raises two very large alarm bells:

1, The treat the right to free speech as an absolute, rather than contextual and negotiated

2. They fail to call out the anti-vaxxers as dangerous idiots (or clever psychopaths). Are the Reddit brass afraid of them? Or perhaps the Reddit brass sympathise with some of the anti-vax views?

Nice try, Reddit CEO. But you can do better.

Really? How seriously can you take this research if the authors think New Zealand is an island? It's two or three islands, depending on how you look at things. Sheesh.

UBI = Universal Basic Income. That means its given to everyone, no questions asked and no strings attached. If it's only give to some subgroup of people, no matter how deserving, it's not Universal.

One of the major selling points of UBI is that the cost of determining who gets it is often greater than any losses it incurs.

A defining feature of UBI is that everyone gets it; this removes the social stigma of being "on welfare". If it's targeted, its just welfare. That's why most UBI trials are inconclusive. The other reason they're inconclusive or show no benefits is that they are trials: they have a definite end period. People aren't going to make major life changes (like starting a business) if they know their economic circumstances will change in a year or two.