> I have no intention at all of hosting anything I've made by hand, be it code, photos, recipes, etc.

Do you publish any such items on platforms you don't own (you specifically said you "have no intention of... hosting anything")?

I haven't in a very long time, over a decade at this point.

A few friends and I have a small handful of self-hosted services that we all run on a VPN between our places with stuff like a recipe sharing app, etc., but the number of people with access to that is single digits.

In terms of "hosting anything," I still have my own homelab, and my self-hosting will be limited to this sort of stuff for the foreseeable. A cluster of limited-scope apps that helps me and a handful of friends keep in touch after moving out of our hometown, beyond just chatting in Signal groups.

I won't be putting up my own public website (or portfolio, or whatever; be it hosted on my own infra or not).

Two decades. Rails was released in 2004, IIRC.

I appear to be in the minority here. Perhaps because I've been practicing TDD for decades, this reads like the blog equivalent of "water is wet."

"Welcomes" seems like a stretch.

If you must "choose to enable" encryption, that implies it's off by default. If so, GP's statement is accurate.

No, I mean you must select yes or no. can't use WhatsApp until you make a choice yourself.

Choose to enable backups.

I'm confused. Are you criticising the article, or simply expressing concern for what may happen?

The context suggests the former, but your criticisms bear no relation to the linked content. If anything, your edict to "write tests first" is even more succinctly expressed as "Red/green TDD".

But it is related, isn't it? I wrote "...each swearing they have the secret sauce and the right incantations...". Now compare it to ""Use red/green TDD" is a pleasingly succinct way to get better results out of a coding agent."

Doesn't it sound like the "right incantation"? That's the point of LLMs, they can understand (*) intent. You'd get the same result saying "do tdd" or "do the stuff everyone says they do but they don't, with the failing test first, don't remember the name, but you know what I'm saying innit?"

I'm perhaps uncharitable, and this article just happens to take the collateral damage, but I'm starting to see the same corruption that turned "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective" into "Mandatory retro exactly once every fortnight, on a board with precisely three columns".

>Doesn't it sound like the "right incantation"?

It sounds like you have a misunderstanding of what LLMs are/can do.

Imagine that you only get one first interaction with a person that you're having try to build something and you're trying to minimize the amount back and forth.

For humans this can be something like an instruction manual. If you've put together more than a few things you quickly realize that instruction manuals vary highly in quality, some will make your life much easier and other will leave you confused.

Lastly, (human) intent is a social construct. The more closely you're aligned with the entity in question the more it's apt to fully comprehend your intent. This is partially the reason why when you throw a project at workers in your office they tend to get it right, and when you throw it towards the overseas team you'll have to check in a lot more to ensure it's not going off the rails.

I view it as a collection of potentially helpful tips which have worked well for the author, which is exactly how it's presented.

There's no suggestion that this is The Only Blessed Way.

Thank heavens for that separation of powers, otherwise the President would be declaring wars and levying tariffs willy-nilly, without even bothering to check with Congress first.

Presidents have been doing the undeclared war thing since the end of WWII. Nothing new there, the tariffs and other EOs have maybe increased markedly in the last few presidencies.

George W Bush sought and received authorization for Iraq from Congress.

It's not just the war, obviously. This time the President has immunity levels that are unprecedented. And his cronies in Congress and SCOTUS don't seem inclined to rein him in on much.

Americans have forgotten that pieces of paper need to be backed up with threats of violence.

I honestly don't understand US politicians. In my country politicians have egos the size of mountains- they would never let themselves be sidelined.

I assume the reasoning is if they're so capable, why would they need to steal secrets and technology?

I use "reasoning" in the broadest possible sense.

A source for your claim would be helpful. Here's an alternative take, with source:

> In Q2 2025, the number of attacks involving malware, adware, and unwanted software decreased compared to Q1.

https://securelist.com/malware-report-q2-2025-mobile-statist...

A Samsung phone. I've owned several (not Samsung) Android phones, and have never had to deal with such nonsense.

Samsung phones are the most bloated pieces of shit I have ever seen. Mine came with an app just to view the msn.com web site and it couldn't be uninstalled. You have google and samsung in a tug of war over every single thing the phone does. I thought my home button was breaking because of how unresponsive it was, but it turned out it just waits for a sequence to trigger such and such unwanted AI assistant or whatever the hell. It's a crapshoot whether you accidentally launch google assistant or bixby or some other crap service you never even heard of. There are touchwiz sound effects that I hear in public and to this day it sends a chill down my spine because it brings me back to so much miserable time spent with that abomination of electronics.

On Samsung phones you can skip making a Samsung account. All the Google bits still work and it's basically the same as having a Pixel, except you'll have a few unused apps, a different camera and phone app and a very slightly different UI.

I had to guess arcane adb permission commands to stop a 2025 Samsung tablet from nagging the user about creating a Samsung account. It just kept showing up multiple times a day. But nice enough hardware with the promise of long updates at a reasonable price.

Heck, I own a zflip 6 right now and the ONLY hard requirement out of everything in the article I gone through was the google account. And I know of a way to get rid of it too, it would just break a couple of things.

I had mi phones before and they had only one hard requirement of needed a xiaomi account for developer mode. I circumvented it.

The article isn't just a pathetic piece of writting in general, it's also operating on tip top tier redditor-brained US-defaultism where "Android = Pixel/Samsung". I have no idea why the crowd here is letting it stick around.