I've had some luck giving either an example website to ape or listing out a particular era, monkey see monkey do seems to help a bunch.
I've done each of the 3 for side projects below to pretty good effects.
> This website will be run by IE6 and Windows Mobile 6, so use no dependencies, semantic HTML, a 3-pane layout, and only use JS (es3!) where absolutely necessary (and where necessary, put the script at the end of the body).
When I'm not specifically targeting support for retrocomputers I do something like this, then iterate until it looks right.
> Go look at Dokuwiki, django defaults, and common web 2.0 color schemes, use those for UI inspiration. Keep a 3-pane desktop-first layout, but enable mobile responsiveness with media queries. Use semantic html5 and prefer older boring solutions like surgical jquery or htmx-style islands of interactivity where needed, otherwise do not bring in dependencies without my say so.
And finally, if I'm doing a web app that I'm vibing out with the web stack because I want it one-shotted and not trying to do a good rust core with strong ports/adapters API surface for web or native client callers, I do something like this:
> This is a local web app, the frontend, backend, and desktop are all on the same machine. Use naive and simple development patterns that you document the style as you go, pick a boring web framework and use it idiomatically, but remember that some tricks that are intended to keep network round trips down are not as necessary because network penalties are not as bad as real traffic.
Granted, the above I don't like as much, but it does produce more 'modern' looking sites by default.
I divide up the world into the pre-iPad world and the post-iPad world.
Less because of the iPad itself (though it was the first mainstream 'consumption first' device in my mind) and more because of those sorts of early user-hostile and spyware-first models that were coming out around that time.
Hi Lucas! electronic engineering and plumbing and other skills traditionally seen as 'blue collar' may not be as affected by AI right now, but if the Optimus robots and Hyundai androids Japan is working on so as to supplement their aging population come into fruition, then those areas won't be as AI free as one would expect.
None of us know the future.
Having said that, while your programming career will be different from mine (I started in the twilight of the pre-pandemic era) because of AI tool abilities, the AI tools, while improving a lot, require good judgement to be put to useful work.
In a world where the AI is so smart that it does not need your judgement, then the business is so smart that it does not need any employees at all.
"Coding" as in "I can hand type syntax" will likely be more commoditized.
But being able to design and implement systems that automate and accomplish work useful to business workflows that are ill-defined, have lots of stakeholders who don't necessarily know the entire domain of the work, and need integration of a chain of people's workflows in order to make all the gears of industry go?
That makes you a good programmer. Add on the ability to socialize / network with people, identify an underserved market and bring a profitable product to it? That makes you a full on businessman.
Specific technical skills like digital logic understanding, algorithms and data structures familiarity, set theory, data-intensive application design, SQL (everything eventually becomes SQL with databases), C (still a lingua franca that in some form or fashion will be directly present or a heavy influence in whatever programs one works in), and yes, confidence bred from experience working in the industry, will make you valuable enough to be on whatever short list of humans hired, even if an AI agent is smart enough to handle or give educated guesses about whatever class of problems were commonly known and solved pre 2022.
Your value is no longer only or mainly in "I can follow the process of writing source code that compiles to a program somewhere" - your value is in your developing judgement and experience that lets you take the imperfect world of now, see a goal that the business needs to get to, and use various technical skills to bring that future world into the present state.
AI agents will eagerly and over-politely try to help, but beyond their limitations, your work will be needed then.
You can still do a full career in programming / technical fields, no it is not a wild hiring frenzy like it was 5 years ago, but you can still pursue this field - it's not as obsolete as lots of us like to complain about over here.
Mine told me my graphics card was "or similar" so my stock Firefox is doing at least okay.
While I still follow the general privacy first tenets, I have ended up backing off on some tools (noscript and librewolf) at the extremes of privacy because if every site is going to track everything by my IP or by my ASN or browser fingerprint, I do have a happy medium of being private enough while not being utterly broken in my browsing.
Roughly that looks like email aliases on demand via sieve rules, ublock origin with liberal use of filter lists, different handles and a password manager, frozen credit ratings, and Tailscale exit nodes or Mozilla(Mullvad) VPN for uncontrolled WiFi access points for my jnrootabke android device and mostly signal for comms.
I'm getting to old to be a privacy extreme enthusiast when all of my family side channels everything straight to Facebook, so this is the impure level of privacy I can sustain.
Same for me, also the "screen" size is off (just shows window size), the location is off by hundreds of kilometres and other information is quite generic (battery level "kept back", small set of standard fonts available...).
I never bought into Kindle because of this lockdown attitude. I buy audiobooks from audiobookstore and ebooks from google play books when lazy and itch and the other usual independent sites that sell drm free files when I'm not doing a jit in time purchase. I have a kindle I USB sideload or put files on sd card, because it has a physical keyboard.
But with the state of digital goods disrepect for the customer and locking us in mustache twirling reasons, I have better ways to spend my income. Yes I am not above reading shadow copies of books at times, but I'd rather kindle sell all titles as DRM free on rootable devices and their convenient storefront would be enough for me to direct my business there more.
The Kindle isn't a bad device on its own. Personally I use a Kobo. But I never pay for any ebook that I can't keep indefinitely one way or another.
I also have an old Kindle 4 that needs to be jailbroken before the May 30th deadline. Maybe I'll do that today. Gets you out of the ecosystem. And old Kindles can be found pretty cheap.
When Amazon started locking it all down last year I bailed on their ecosystem for Kobo’s store, but I use a Boox device. As long as I can back it up in any format I’m happy, and as soon as Amazon crossed that line they lost my business.
the drm is the reason why I never bought any kindle along with the relatively small non-expandable onboard storage, though the dx was tempting to me for a bit. I've stuck with Kobo, Pocketbook, and reMarkable and have been happy with them.
I prefer it as I don't like the following things about the kobo: ads for their stuff on the front page, and cumbersome sync (they seem to use a sqlite db to scan the loaded books on each sync, which for my ebooks takes a long while.) By comparison, pocketbook is what I want in a device: a file manager like interface to access my library, no fuss sync (via rsync and usb, primarily - I use their cloud to store books to read across devices), a good ecosystem of third party installs, and a front page that just features my books instead of whatever they want me to buy.
I used to feel this way, but I reconsidered my threat model. You know what format is "locked in"? Physical books. Can only exist in one location at a time. If you loan it out, you can't read it until it's returned. Subject to theft, fire, rot, bugs or simply being lost.
There are aspects of Kindle I don't love--the constantly changing cover art for books I've purchased--but I've never run into an actual problem. I've got 2,500 books on my Kindle devices, and I can access them anywhere in the world at any time on my dedicated readers, my phone, my laptop (via Kindle Cloud Reader).
If DRM is the price I have to pay for a dead-simple ecosystem, multi-device support and free cloud storage, well, I guess I'm happy to pay it.
You can copy physical books for storage/otherwise personal use IIRC so it's not quite as locked down as a DRMd book. Not sure what the legal state of hand copying a book and then loaning it out as it probably doesn't come up much.
I mean really? Oh I can't see someone heading down to the copy shop to scan every page of war and peace and then print it out when you can get a used one for less than the paper cost..
JMAP is a bonus (other fastmail user here) bjt if I can do custom sieve rules and or unlimited aliases created on demand at (somestring)@customdomainiown.com thst I can then use the sieve rules to put into a folder of the same name as that email address, I would rather give my money to support Thunderbird. Fastmail is fine and all but they are in australia so they live on spyware island and they dont have good native clients in the works like thunderbird does.
Unlimited aliases at custom domains are a part of the offering. Technically, Thundermail supports sieve rules, we do need to come up with UX to expose it to users for management.
Fastmail was developing JMAP for a while, it's not gotten a lot of uptake (mostly because Fastmails primary mail partners like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail are all 20 year old legacy dot com companies...did Microsoft spend all day trying to get Fairchild Semiconductor to play nice with them? No, they did a worse is better DOS and the rest is history).
But email is a least common denominator, and like how plan9 failed to take over from unix bc unix inertia, JMAP or deltachat IM over email won't take over bc of network effect inertia, I suspect.
> mostly because Fastmails primary mail partners like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail are all 20 year old legacy dot com companies
Pretty sure it's because MS wants you to use Outlook New (New) New and Google wants you to use their web interface. Nothing to with them being old, but everything to do with owning as much of your data as possible and have as many opportunities to show you ads as possible.
I still tell myself if I going to vibecode a windows app, it will be native and suport 2000 and be a completely static linked executive. Petzold style programming may require memory unsafe legacy languages, but boy does the resulting small fast program with accelerafor keys and native themeable controls make me comfortable.
If you have Windows 11 it comes with this new (open source) `edit` written in Rust - open a command prompt and type `edit`.
This is somewhat amusing, considering all the bloat that it comes with otherwise. Even `notepad` has become rather... feature full... it has tabs, spell checking and AI...
Clever use of email delay features to provide extra motivation to pull out the thoughts and post them to yourself. Thats a good habit cycle to power up and use.
I used to do morning pages each day, but i stopped because it seemed to be too hard to maintain the discipline. Everything takes discipline for me to do, if I want to act better than an overgrown toddler, i do have adhd but thats a challenge not a get out of grow up jail free card.
Whoever robbed me of my joyous hope and reward for doing good like journalling, just know I will start that back up someday. Perhaps tomorrow
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