While I agree that touch-typing isn't the primary skill of a competent, fast programmer -- it is still an amazing skill to have.

Although I've been touch-typing for almost half a century, it still fascinates me that the words appear on my screen simply as I think them. I don't even have to speak those thoughts -- my fingers automatically race around the keys and the words appear. It's almost like a direct interface between my mind and the computer.

Yes, I'm pretty fast -- about 140wpm which makes the whole experience even more fascinating since the words appear almost as fast as I think them.

Would I recommend that people learn touch-typing. Hell yes... I think people should learn *everything* they can, while they can. When you're young it's so much easier to learn than when you get old (like me). There are so many things I wish I'd learned when it would have been easier to do so -- foreign languages, playing a musical instrument, etc,etc.

However, here I am, a relic of the past. I can program in assembler for lots of 8-bit micros from the Signetics 2650 through the 8080, Z80, 6502, 6800 etc; BASIC, Pascal, C, Modula2, Java but now I'm faced with learning the intricacies of Python, Kotlin, Rust and crafting AI queries. It's getting harder every day because my brain seems to have simultaneously run out of RAM, CPU cycles and backup storage all at the same time :-)

I considered uploading to X but discovered that unless you pay them a monthly stipend, you can only upload very short vids (90 seconds I think).

So, if you do start paying them and upload longer vids, what happens if you stop your payment either voluntarily or perhaps because you die? Will your longer vids suddenly disappear?

None of the alternative platforms offer any kind of guarantee of continued service... hence people are far better off to self-host and federate if they are in a position to do so.

I agree. I spend about 12 hours a day working behind a computer keyboard/screen so when I'm not working I simply have no desire to carry a smartphone. I have an old-fashioned phone that only does SMS and voice -- I don't want to be connected to the internet 24/7.

What about *my* freedoms and rights?

The hypocrisy that is YouTube just gets worse by the day.

People like Jeff have perfectly good, harmless content flagged and removed for specious reasons while the company continues to profit from scammy ads that promote fake "health hacks", counterfeit electronics goods such as the fake "Sandisk" SSDs being pitched right now, "laser welders" that turn out to be just soldering irons, water-blasters that are nothing of the sort, etc, etc.

I (and thousands of others) have been reporting these ads using the mechanisms built into YouTube and also through @teamyoutube on X but the ads continue to run until the advertiser's spend is exhausted.

Surely, after a while someone must wake up to the fact that if YouTube/Google isn't going to act when these scam ads are reported and simply continues to profit from them then they become an accomplice to fraud and should he charged as such.

I've heard from hundreds of people who've lost money after being duped by these fraudulent ads and even when THEY complain to YouTube with their proof, the ads keep running.

Now there seems to be a lot of bonafide channels being deleted for "scams and misleading practices" without warning. Perhaps YouTube doesn't like the competition whenit comes to scamming -- it wants to retain its crown as "best scammer"?

It's a shame Jeffs video was pulled because I'm encouraging people to set up their own VOD servers and federate into a global network coordinated by independent search engines. This is the only way to dethrone YouTube now that it's clearly become an evil entity.

At the risk of invoking the Death of the Author trope, I don't agree with him here (and I note that he leaves that open too, by saying he personally doesn't want to and not excluding others from wanting to)..

Markdown is now a way doing shorthand formatted typing, effectively. What it's original purpose was is interesting, but not a limitation ('make', for example, was not made for software development but for compiling books). I'm computer-centric, not mobile-centric. A way of formatting bullets and tables without having to move my hands off the keyboard is great for me.

Be interested to see how it handles the round trip - can I take an existing note and edit it using Markdown for instance. But overall - can't see this as anything but a good thing.

I believe you are referring to https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwik...”>The Day the Earth Stood Stupid, which is the Futurama episode where the Brain spawn attack Earth. Fry is impervious to their attack, ostensibly because he is “special”, which allows him to save the world. One of the best of the series in my opinion.

The only people who have this kind of stuff are collectors/nostalgia people. They want things to be accurate - that's why go to that trouble.

For a long time I had a Commodore 64 set up ready to go in my rooms, connected to a 1541 snail drive and a C2N cassette. I had a Mac/SE 30 an d a Mac Plus. I had an Atari ST. I enjoyed them all, and I can absolutely appreciate wanting this kind of thing.

For myself I've moved on (played the C64 version of Portal? That was developed on hardware I donated) from physically collecting, although you could argue I've merely transferred the habit to synthesizers instead. But I absolutely recognise and understand the enjoyment people get from this, and it's nice to see this kind of thing being done.

Heard this so, so many times over the last 35 years. 3GL, 4GL, graphical-style (Powerbuilder etc.), object orientiation...so, so many times.

It's a giant string generator, copying from other people's strings. It's a good giant string generator, but that's what it is - another tool in the box. Most of programming is not just the syntax, it's the ideas. "Doing exactly what you want it to do" - hah, most people absolutely cannot specify exactly what they want a thing to do.

It seems we 100% agree, but based on your final jab I think you missed the key point. I am not saying "both sides are bad." A more accurate paraphrasing would be "anti-science positions are wrong no matter what side they come from." But even that misses the crucial point. Take a look at what the OP posted:

This person asserts that typically, conservative people question the use of fluoride, not liberals. Anyone watching the current US news cycle might conclude that too. But historically, it was the other way around. My point was this: People should stop associating concepts like "liberalism" with Democrats, and "conservatism" with Republicans. It doesn't work like that. Parties change their positions over time and cannot be mapped to these basic (and overbroad) concepts.

This realization helps people break free of partisan thinking. I have had hyper-partisan family members who don't care if their position is stupid. But if I remind them that a liberal once held that position, well suddenly they question it. I've seen the look on their face: "How could I possibly have had a liberal thought? Impossible!"

You are exactly right when you stated "Mainstream Republicans took the stupidest ideas from the lunatic left and made them the center point of their platform." Just understand this completely shifts people's assumptions about party identity. If someone chooses to, based on data, consume raw milk, consolidate power in a unitary executive, and raise tariffs -- that is totally fine. But they should not call themselves conservative. And we should call it out when people erroneously assume that a belief is conservative or liberal when really it's just "dumb."

Did it start and run more than twice in a row? Well then, it's not an Eleanor clone.

The anti-fluoride and anti-vaxx movements have always been on the Democrat side. Under Trump, those anti-science conspiracies are being embraced by Republicans as well.

This is, once again, a reminder that Trump and MAGA are not conservative movements. Anti-science positions are not, and were never, solely the domain of one party. They just chose *different* anti-science positions. The Republican who believes that climate change isn't real is applying the same kind of wrongthink as the Democrat who believes that alkaline water cures cancer.

I mean - I was there. People were on dial-up. Fast display of the page was the thing people liked. SEO didn't even really exist as a concept at that point, and the whole PageRank thing was later and quickly dropped. At the time it launched and started getting sway, Google's results were different-but-fine. It progressed quickly to better, but by that point people had mostly moved.

People have forgotten and bought into the legend. Google won because it was a white page with a search box. Alta Vista had gone for the 90s portal fad, and people didn't want that.

Later revisions of Google may or may not have been better, but certainly the "gained sway" bit was because it was faster and not laden with stuff you didn't care about.

Nah, the large Microsoft hops they have their documents on the cloud anyway. Share drives and local SharePoint have been replaced with OneDrive, Sharepoint online. Outlook is in the cloud, messaging is Microsoft Teams, etc. Half the people open a document from SharePoint and edit it in the online Microsoft Word and don't even know they are doing it. Then if you get really fancy, you have documents in ERP systems that are on the cloud too.

PLUS: The hybrid solutions are sneaking into things that are supposed to be on-prem anyway. So IT goes through all the work to setup their ERP system on-prem (SAP, Oracle, etc.) but then a bunch of features require cloud connections to work anyway. So technically the documents are local, but maybe your indexer, search, analytics, virus scan, and reports all require the cloud. It's the worst of both worlds, and it is becoming the default.

Now I lay me in my bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infra-red,
How I hate the night.
-- Marvin the Paranoid Android, aka Douglas Adams,