Because they always think they’re the exception and everyone else is doing it wrong.

They are wrong in this belief because being idiots they don’t have the capacity to be aware that they are idiots. But generally this belief is true. It is more positively expressed in these words: “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” When I look at the dismal state of software, I see crap everywhere. With the rise of slop generators this is bound to become worse.

I sell individual cables. Some are new (some in original packaging), some are used.

If it was about real AI – not stochastic parrots – I would be all for it. What happened to those developments that started in the 70s where you have automatic formal proofs that a piece of code does what it is supposed to do? That is intelligent. Producing slop more voluminous and convoluted than humans could produce or understand is not intelligent software architecture just like fixing a hole in a roof by throwing what sticks at it is not intelligent building architecture. Both may do the job for some time. But what are the long-term costs and who is capable to clean up? In my opinion, what’s most desired is tools that are bug free, do what they should without annoying the user, and are radically simplified in their architecture. (For example, I would be happy with a perfectly working product that does what NFS or Samba aspire and fail to do for decades.) Apparently, AI can’t deliver that. To have the billionth app that is a browser wrapper and shows me exactly one website is much more important.

I started to sell cables I don’t need anymore, this year. Works great and keeps the copper in the ground.

Runs on anything that runs Linux:

NAME
       pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03)

SYNOPSIS
       pdftotext [options] PDF-file [text-file]

DESCRIPTION
       Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.

       Pdftotext reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a text file, text-file.  If text-file is not speci‐
       fied,  pdftotext  converts file.pdf to file.txt.  If text-file is ´-', the text is sent to stdout.  If
       PDF-file is ´-', it reads the PDF file from stdin.