the insulting thing out of it is I paid for his beers! he KNEW I was getting laid off and didn't say "hey...maybe I should be paying for these" nope, gladly accepted my money. He tried to contact me after the fact and I just blocked him.
I remember years and years ago when I still a regular employee I got into work one morning to find I no longer had access to any git repos. nothing. Well already knew the reason right then and there. I usually got in before everyone else so by the time people were coming into the office I was packing my stuff up to leave. People were all "where are you going?" I said "well I either got fired or laid off so I'm leaving, I'm not sitting through a bullshit meeting telling me why I was laid off"
wiped the laptop, wiped my externals, walked out, went and sat in a coffee shop to revise my resume. I got a call like an hour later asking me where I was and why I didn't attend the meeting I was apparently schedule for. I replied with "you laid me off" few minutes later they email me back saying they'll just send my ROE and last paycheque in the mail and then proceeded to explain why I and a few other devs were laid off. I didn't bother reading the rest of it.
Then I decided to become a freelancer and never looked back. best decision I made.
What REALLY annoyed me about the whole thing was I thought I was good friends with the IT guy that set up access to everything, he was the one that revoked my access the night before and didn't tell me. I was literally having a beer with him that night and he never said a word. out of everything that hurt the most. never spoke to him again.
further? newsflash, it's already there as is the rest of the country. how can you slide further into something when you're already up to your chin in fascist shit?
This is the EXACT problem with Americans. It's always "it's happening" or "soon" or "we're heading there" when the boat is already underwater.
What more is it going to take for US Citizens to finally accept that they're a fascist nation? what more does the Nazi in charge have to do for Americans to start rioting and resisting?
I've been doing it for like 20+ years now so I have a very solid client base and very solid referrals. All my new clients now are referred to me by previous/existing clients so it gives me the luxury of booking well in advance.
you're VERY justified in feeling skeptical, I'm seeing it first hand, you're correct.
I'm a consultant/freelancer and I'm booked for the rest of the year and well into the new year with jobs that pretty much consist of me reviewing and cleaning up AI slop.
Most of my clients are startups and small companies that went full in on AI and vibe coding. Now they're discovering that their attempts to save a few bucks by leveraging AI, cutting devs, etc is costing them more that what they envisioned on saving. The stuff they've built with AI doesn't scale, is full of exploits, and breaks quickly. With the recent Tea App thing many of my clients are now in a panic because they essentially did the exact same thing. They don't want their startup to be next in the news because some rando came across their house with the front door left open by AI.
the tech debt is massive, It's costing many of these places more to fix their vibe coders/AI mistakes than what it would have originally cost if they just used a solid dev team. Make no mistake, I'm charging them a good amount also.
All if it could have been avoided though. They could have continued to use their LLM's if they had all just kept a leash on it. if they dismissed the concept of vibe coding. A good chunk of it could have been avoided if the person feeding the prompts simply REVIEWED the code before hitting enter. I'm not kidding, IF they just LOOKED at what was being spat out things would be different. none of them did. they just trusted the AI to be smarter because they were lead to believe it was.
If the recent Tea App crap is anything to go by doesn't even require a hacker for someone to gain access to your info. Just takes more companies using AI to build shit without security and someone will just happen to find their open to the public firebase bucket.
Bingo. they'll just tack it on to what they currently have with most sites that have you sign in with your google/apple/meta account. mask it as the easier option instead of using another email/registering an account on your own.
And they won't just stop on websites. Google will also incorporate this with your phone. FRP will now require you have a valid ID with Google, same with account recovery OR simply signing into a new device with your existing Google Account.
Hell wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft roles out that you must have a valid ID simply to install windows. Already requires users to have a Microsoft account and be online to install it, what's to stop them from now requiring you provide a photo ID?
back in the early 00s I used to do AOL tech support. Even then a lot of people were on cable or DSL. Vast majority of calls we got were from people out in the boonies or the elderly so it doesn't surprise me that there are still a good chunk of people on dialup.
Actually by that point most of our calls weren't even for Dial Up. the thing with AOL support back then was if the user also had other computer issues unrelated to AOL that they brought up while on the line with us we HAD to address them and try to do support for it. Callers would discover this fact and use AOL tech support as a defacto go to tech support for ALL computer issues. They'd start off with some random easy to fix (they knew how to fix) dialup issue and then would say "oh wow you fixed it, I wish you could also help me with this problem I've been having for awhile with..." and yup, we'd roll our eyes and say "oh, what what's wrong?" A good chunk of my calls, believe it or not, would be for printer issues.
Nicotine+/soulseek. won't copy your spotify lists but you can manually download everything. will take time obviously as you'll have to search for everything.
if you don't mind downloading the music then Nictoine+, it's a GUI for soulseek. essentially Napster/Limewire. Anything you can get on spotify you can pretty much get there.
Keep in mind, like Napster, it takes time to find things you want. If you have your own server or hell even a cloud server with unlimited bandwidth and a good chunk of space you can put your music on there that way you can just stream it to whatever device you use to listen to music. Essentially a media server.
a year ago on Mastodon when EA started locking out games like Apex Legends, BF1, V, 2042, etc from Linux I said "I bet you Microsoft is about to launch a handheld and since they have a deal with EA and Gamepass they want EA Exclusivity on their handheld and to lockout Steamdeck/Valve" sure enough a few months later Microsoft announces their Xbox handheld with Asus.
I tried gpt5 lastnight and I don't know if it was just me but these people are going to be in shambles if they try to recreate their "boyfriend".
It would forget previous prompts within the same conversation. It felt like with each response it was like starting a new chat. I gave it a very basic prompt of "walk me through the steps of building my own one page website in basic HTML and CSS" and when I would ask a couple of follow up questions to either clarify something or explain a step in another way it would forget what we were trying to accomplish (how to build a one page website) or if I told it "something didn't work" to try and fix the problem it would then forget what we were even trying to do.
At some points it was almost out right dismissive of the problem and it felt like it was trying to make me go away.
Again maybe it was just me but it felt like a massive step backwards.
I like Floorp. it's a FF fork by a Japanese dev team. Best I can compare it to is Vivaldi as far as customization (what Mozilla will allow).
However the updates for it have been coming less frequently over time so I'm not sure how that bodes for the long term.
But hey i'm currently building my own FF fork with fediverse integration, tree style/stacking tabs, and vim navigation sooooo look forward to that? /shameless self promotion.
yes as a consultant/freelancer THIS is where the majority of my work is coming from now. if you're good at this SERIOUSLY consider consulting and freelancing for various companies that are now desperately trying to fix their AI tech debt. It's the ONE thing that is completely in demand right now due to the sheer incompetence of all these places that decided vibe coding and AI was the way to go.
you have no idea how much money you can potentially be making right now doing this. I'm booked solid for the rest of the year purely because of this.
make a directory, init a git repo, start claude code in that directory, feed it a prompt (a good vibe coder will utilize another LLM to write them the prompt), then hit shift+tab a couple times, got watch youtube.
no. I was talking about projects I was working on with him. he knew, he let me talk about them and said nothing.