On the sites I visit often I use uBlock Origin to make fonts large enough for me to read (damn you, presbyopia!). Otherwise I use Ctrl-+ to increase the font size (Daring Fireball, for example).
One of my faults is "When somebody tries to explain something I hear 'A' and everyone else in the room hears 'B'". And vice-versa. But if someone can iterate a very VERY rough cut of what they want and hand it off to a design / development team ... well ... damn. That might make everyone's life a lot easier.
> now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore
I'm going to be 70 in November, and I can't wait to retire ... hopefully in 6 months, but chances are I'll keep working until I'm put out to pasture by the company I'm currently working for.
Throwing code hasn't lost its appeal, and I'm still learning new stuff every day, but the landscape has changed too much for my tastes since the early 2010's.
Nowadays we're doing "devops" instead of actual programming, the cloud has become the new mainframe, web browsers are just thin clients, buy-once-use-forever is long gone and replaced by monthly rent-seeking services and forced updates, and the sixth (seventh? eighth?) iteration of spicy autocomplete (as in "You no longer have to know how to write code!") is pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
I started writing code in the early 70's, and became a paid developer in 1975. I still love programming, but I'm completely fed up with everything else that has ruined the experience in the past 10 to 15 years. I'm sure I'll still be throwing code after I retire, but it will be for my own enjoyment, and it won't be using any of the latest fads and dead ends (pretty sure we're on the eighth iteration) from the past couple of years.
Mine would be "helicopter shots" when I'm watching the evening news.
I don't want to watch 45 minutes of "live coverage" from a news chopper hovering over a building on fire (or, from recent events in Los Angeles, water being sprayed on some storage tanks) while all of the talking heads try to make it sound interesting and relevant. Or, even worse IMO, a helicopter following a car chase for three hours, from freeway to surface streets and back to the freeway. Or a helicopter hovering over somebody's house for an hour because there are dead people inside.
This is worth 30 seconds of coverage. Tops. Move on to the actual news, please, and if it's worthy of a follow-up when there's an actual conclusion, another 30 seconds to wrap it up.
If I turn on the news and see a helicopter shot, I change the channel.
I think that stems from the format. It has to be video so they must show something. Better than a stock footage of a fire or, as South Park did, an "imagine if that school was full of rabbits".
We see the same useless media in thumbnails of text-based news and in the articles themselves with irrelevant stock photos.
Not only is it useless but it makes me consider the site/network less reputable if they're engaging in such attention-grabbing practices that tend to pander to idiots.
I stand corrected! My memory is pretty vague on this, but I was pretty sure Joel had said something very close to this in one of his blog posts in the early 2000's, but it looks like Zuckerberg was the first one to use the phrase "move fast and break things":
I wish our Lambdas would spin up faster, but otherwise I've been very happy with them over the past six years. We seldom run over the free tier limits, and when we do we get a bill for a couple of dollars. Dead simple to code for, dead simple to spin up a new instance or scale an instance if we need to.
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