Had the same experience with Doom II. Got it to run surprisingly well on a brand new Tandy 486DX2 + 4MB RAM, though I seem to recall having issues with SoundBlaster compatibility.

MD is not perfect, but it’s perfectly adequate.

Markdown apologist here - I think MD is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I use it a LOT. In fact, one project I work on has an entire git repo of just MD docs. It’s easy to maintain, and even non-tech people can author them with ease. In fat, I love that raw MD is entirely human-readable, and even if someone fat-fingers some of the syntax, it’s still very forgiving.

Don’t forget, many MD renderers support regular HTML embedding, including <style> tags, which makes it a very flexible choice.

I don’t think it’s going anywhere!

Impressive! Incidentally, I built my own Chess game from scratch pretty recently, using nothing but my own knowledge of the game rules and I am seeing some of the same patterns emerge, though I used plain data structures instead of tables. It’s always interesting to see different ways of solving the same problem, especially with inappropriate/inadequate tools. It’s kind of like figuring out how to make pizza without a proper oven.

Oracle is used for mission-critical legacy applications, which is common in the federal government IT space. Replacing with OSS is a nontrivial undertaking, but it is happening. For the most part, replacing Oracle’s Java with OpenJDK is relatively painless, but some agencies preferred the licensed version because it includes support. Replacing a database, however, is a much scarier task, even when you have experienced and competent DBAs.

Every time I see the term “SSO” I want to vomit. That does not exist any more. On my projects, there are literally dozens of systems each with their own siloed authentication systems. Just to throw out some of what I deal with: OKTA, MFA, MS 365, AWS, PIV/CACI, YubiKey, proprietary user name/passwords, IAM, OAuth, federated identity services, RSA, just off the top of my head. My single biggest fear is losing some or all of my credentials in sone catastrophe, so I keep my credentials in multiple places, including on my own phone and everyone else I know does the same thing. I have tried using password managers but one time my password database got corrupted and I lost everything, so now I just use plain text files - all of which is behind locked systems anyway (including my own phone). It’s maddening.

Good.

The obnoxious behavior of Windows update is the single biggest reason I left the platform over a decade ago. Too little too late for me.

Also there is one huge glaring omission in the article. The sneaky integration of ads embedded in the OS. I have thankfully never experienced this myself since I abandoned Windows before the ads became a thing.

I sometimes have to use Enterprise Windows 11 professionally, but I can’t ever see myself going back to it for any kind of personal computing. Basically Microsoft had a good thing and decided to enshitify it to death.

Yeah it’s almost like purposely frustrating people has negative consequences, which HP completely overlooked.

HP didn’t care, that was a problem for the low level support staff and the customers, not whatever exec was hoping to show reduced call volumes -> reduced staffing levels -> savings.

I don’t use AI to generate any code, but I have used a few tools sparingly as such:

1. Gemini as a replacement for Stack Overflow, but I always have to check the source because it sometimes gives examples that 10 or even 15+ years old, as if that’s a definitive answer. We cannot and should not trust that anything AI produces is correct.

2. Co-Pilot to assist in code snippets and suggestions, like a better Intellisense. Comes in handy for CLI tools such as docker compose, etc.

3. Co-Pilot to help comprehension of a code base. For example, to ask how a particular component works or to search for the meaning of a term of reference to it, especially if the term is vague or known by another name.

Believe it or not, we have just recently received guidance on AI-assisted work in general, and it’s mostly “it’s ok to use AI, but always verify it”, which of course seems completely reasonable, as you should do this with any work that you wouldn’t have done yourself.

On 1. gemini (et al) is not replacing stack overflow. its just regurgitating content it ingeated from stack overflow.

while SO allowed for new answers to show up, any new nextjs bug i ask about that is not yet common place on SO, i get some allucionation telling me to use some made up code api based on the github issue discussion.

Even enterprise COTS products can have some of these issues. We have an on-premise Atlassian suite, and Jira pages sometimes have upwards of 30MB total payloads for loading a simple user story page — and keep in mind there is no ad-tech or other nonsense going on here, it’s just pure page content.