I fall into this trap more than I’d care to admit.

I love learning by reading, to the point that I’ll read the available documentation for something before I decide to use it. This consumes a lot of time, and there’s a tradeoff.

Eventually if I do use the thing, I’m well suited to learning it quickly because I know where to go when I get stuck.

But by the same token I read a lot of documentation I never again need to use. Sometimes it’s useful for learning about how others have done things.

I'm the same, but thing is, 99% of the things I read about (on e.g. HN) are just... not important. I don't use them in my daily life.

But I do have a very large knowledge base of small tidbits of information, so if I do need to ever go in-depth, I know where/how to find it.

...not that I do of course, I struggle with my long term attention span, I can't read documentation front to back and for twenty odd years now have just googled for the tidbit I needed and skipped the rest.

Insofar as CVEs issued for proprietary software, I would expect that the owning organization would not be inclined to blame AI code unless they think they can pass the buck.

But as for eventually having to hire senior developers to clean up the mess, I do expect that. Most organizations that think they can build and ship reliable products without human experts probably won’t be around long enough to be able to have actual CVEs issued. But larger organizations playing this game will eventually have to face some kind of reckoning.

> If news on the web was journalism instead of attention seeking for ad revenue you’d be right.

That’s painting with an overly broad brush. Nevertheless, the news was relying on ads long before most people knew the word “Internet”, but there were far fewer channels to place ads back then, so in some respects news and media organizations had a captive audience in advertisers.

Mass adoption of television was effectively made possible because of advertising money.

There is also the added pressure that some organizations quietly pile on editors to keep people from clicking out to third parties at all, where their attention may wander away. Unless of course that third party is an ad destination.

Reputable news organizations are more robust against such pressures, but plenty of people get their news from (in some cases self-described) entertainment sites masquerading as news sites.

That’s fantastic, thank you.

I have a very useful plugin that automatically deletes website data (other than history and downloads) after a configured interval once you’ve closed the tab or window. You can define an exception list. I cannot recall its name, I’ll post back when I’m back at my computer.

Firefox Profiles are useful, but not nearly as useful as their analogue in other browsers. Same with containers.

I use both, but I try to use profiles very sparingly because you have to relaunch Firefox, which is at times unrealistic.

In the alternative, you can configure Fastmail to allow sending and receiving to/from a wildcard address (which for sending allows you to specify the sending address at send time). In my experience this works far more reliably, and is one of the features that pushed me to move to Fastmail many years ago.

I’ve never understood the “everyone is entitled to have their voice heard by the masses” idea.

It’s never been true before, let alone realistic. It’s only with the past several decades of networked computing that humans have been able to so vastly amplify the reach of an individual or group opinion.

Just because it’s easier than ever to publish speech doesn’t make having one’s speech published any kind of right.

I would submit that many essential things are shrink wrapped and commercialized (fantastic phrase, by the way).

It’s not just the planners either. It’s the people who are unreasonable and it’s the people who lack any external center of concern. By way of example: it used to be easy to get in touch with my physician. As the practice she works for has grown, they’ve made it all but impossible for physicians and patients to have a conversation privately and without an intermediary, except when you’re in the exam room or a physician places an outgoing call.

As their practice grew, so too did the number of people who believed they should or could (defensibly) go directly to their doctor about every little thing. People made unreasonable demands. So the practice reacted to protect the physicians at the cost of their accessibility to patients, other than booking a visit.

Which is all the more reason to speak out against it vociferously and absolutely, rather than caveat it with “even though our government has been doing this for the past quarter century”. Let’s not aid in the barbarism.