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Things that used to be hard and are now easy

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281–290 of 316 posts

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#281
post #67
post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

I agree with all of those. More things that are harder now: * Finding honest product impressions/reviews. * When looking for a configuration setting or tip to use any piece of software, find a one minute article with clear bullet points instead of an 11 minute YouTube video with a personal backstory and a VPN sponsorship. * Finding a cooking recipe that isn’t padded with SEO nonsense. * When finding an online discuss…

Recipes: finding a recipe that doesn't start with 1000 words on why this dish makes the author cry because it reminds them of their dearly departed Nana, followed by anecdotes about Nana.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#282
post #54
post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

Logging into an online account on a computer you don't normally use when you don't have your phone. This can range from "had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops" to impossible if you haven't saved backup codes ahead of time (Google). My wife lost her phone when we were on vacation and it was literally impossible for us to login into her Google account in order to use find my Android. We were trying to login on a r…

My phone screen suffered a bad accident, to the level of unusable. 4 weeks for a repair.

I needed 2FA to access company services. Email, chat, VPN etc. Which of course, was on my phone.

I emailed IT Support from my personal email to request a temp token. My ticket was closed, with a message saying "Email tickets are no longer accepted, use the service portal."

I needed 2FA to access the service portal.

Luckily I had a co-worker on a non-company chat service, so they opened a ticket on my behalf...

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#283

I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read

Back then you had a few programming languages. Now you have hundreds to make a decision.

Back then you had a few tech stacks. Now you have thousands to choose from.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#285
post #137

> Cross-compilation (Go and Rust ship with cross-compilation support out of the box) That's not right? Go has builtin cross-compilation. Rust does not, you need to bring your own cross toolchain even after adding rust-std for the target with rustup, unless there are recent changes I'm not aware of.

It works for pure Rust code but once you bring in C, you need another tool chain too. Same as Go, as far as I know. Zig has both beat right now, as you do not need anything else in either case.

Even if you don't bring in C, you need a cross linker and some libraries to link against. Rust doesn't come with those, except maybe for the mingw target.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#286
post #200

Wow! Let me continue :) - Text-to-speech and vice versa, using cloud APIs. - creating a solid objects from 3D models (3d printing) - messaging: pub/sub, message buses (kafka, redis, postgresql channels, rabbitmq etc) - advanced data structures are more available (sets/hashes/etc now in standard libraries of any language, and in many databases) Things that surprisingly still a pain: - scanning documents preserving for…

Elaborate a little bit on what you mean by "preserving formatting"?

When you scan a document with tables, indentation and get exactly the same document in, say, docx format.

I know there are solutions from ABBY but to me they are too complex and probably expensive (checked the price several years ago).

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#287
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I meant that C++ should have never been born. For high perf software C should be enough, while Go could work great for generic system binaries. Today's low end machines are not a Pentium 2 or 3, but a Raspberry Pi B+ with 512 MB of RAM (very low end, a real life machine would be a Pentium 4 with SSE2 and 1GB of RAM or a Core Duo with 2). Enough for Go and statically linked binaries a la plan9/9front.

> No. I meant that C++ should have never been born C++ was an important stepping stone. There's still a large class of software for which GC-ed languages are non-starters.

I said that for that C would be more than adequate. And, yet, Go's GC can be tuned. Not for an AAA game, ok. As for C, C + SDL2 would be a good backend for any PC gaming engine.

And if we had Go instead of C++ since mid 90's, today's Go compiler would be much more performant, for sure.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#290
post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

Connecting your laptop to internet via an Ethernet cable
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