Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.

But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?

…In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don’t do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely

Did someone say… cookies?

I can just tell that whenever Twitter’s user interface has weak attempts at humour, it was put there during the previous ownership, and that just makes me sad.

Like when you delete your account the final message says “#Goodbye”, I was tearing up, thinking, like, shit, Musk really fucked everything up, did he?

The song that made me a metalhead. Didn’t know SID could do that much epicness. 🎸⚡

My fave remix is by Lukhash - though there’s one pretty damn radical remix that I need to hunt for later because it predates YouTube. Also, Matt Gray’s own remix of the song is pretty epic and trippy!

Ok, now I’m miffed that Google caved to Reddit’s demands and paid up.

Because this set a dangerous precedent.

Earlier, Google got a lot of demands from various publications to pay up for indexing the publicly available news sites. And they always responded with “Ok, guess you leave us no other choice than just exclude you from indexing altogether.” Let the site simmer for a while until they went “oh shit, not being indexed by major search engines sucks. we didn’t really mean it please come back”

It’s especially jarring because Reddit doesn’t even produce their own news content anyway. That search engine money isn’t going to the content creators. News sites at least could say they need to pay for their content to be written by their employees.

The Washington Post: “Democracy dies in darkness”

Wikipedia: “Knowledge that is shared in torchlight is fucking awesome”

Oh I have a Forever Mouse. Bought a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical in 2001 or so. Still works. Use it with my Raspberry Pi sometimes. Also bought another Microsoft wireless laptop mouse like a decade ago. Still works just fine.

…The Logitech mouse that I bought against my better judgement in 2020 is starting to show signs of fatigue.

Also how the everliving hell do you add AI to input devices? Are they just going to guess what I’m pointing at?

reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google’s own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community’s concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.

The way I think it, it’s possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you’d just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.

Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there’s also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.

Bonus speculative factoids:

• A pancake tortoise hatchling is called a Morsel
• A pancake tortoise adult is called a Flapjack
• A pancake tortoise group is called a Stack

I have no way of verifying this, of course. English language doesn’t have a governing body, after all.

Sharing screenshots and video captures.

The only place where I tried to use it was on Xbox back when Xbox One first came out, and I didn’t like the way it worked back then, so I didn’t really use it much. It didn’t send the actual media to Twitter, it posted a link to the file, and Xbox screenshots got deleted after 30 days. If I wanted to properly post it so that the media was actually hosted on Twitter, I had to save the full res media anyway.

(In fact actually saving full resolution Xbox screenshots used to be needlessly difficult. Only much later they added a way to save screenshots to OneDrive, which occasionally worked, and only very recently they decided they don’t bother with the Xbox screenshot hosting at all and auto-upload everything to OneDrive.)

To adapt an old joke: “If you see a raging dipshit driving like a lunatic in the middle of the road with their giant-ass car, you should contact the nearest police officer immediately. It’s possible they’re behind the wheel.”

You know what’s even more beautiful about capitalism?

When national (and multinational) legislation sets extremely high standards for drinking water providers. So high, in fact, that tech bros just go “you know, I have no idea how to improve on that”. So they don’t launch their shitty product here in the first place.

Until next time!

You Chrome folks need extensions to use non-Google search engines?

Firefox uses just bog standard OpenSearch definitions. No shenanigans. Ships with both Google and Bing if you’re into that sort of things. And you can add arbitrary search URLs, no probalo.

NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…

…sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

[looking up]

…it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong

I remember seeing this in an amusement park arcade!

I was a giant Nintendo fan and my sister was a Sega fan. She was like “oh, wow, look, Sonic!” and I was like “why did they hang him?” …and that was last time this game was discussed in the household.

I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and “portal crud”. …and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.

Sometimes Google’s results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.

Can we just say that Cybertruck is basically a sum of everything wrong with right wing wackos?

“Look at me, I’m a badass, driving around in a badass vehicle, unlike you filthy libruls. … Aww shucks! There’s road salt! And my accelerator pedal just fell off wtf. …OH NO! A LITTLE WATER TOO! Anything but that!”

This actually gave me a pause. I guess a lot of marketing bullshit is actually about turning people into warring tribes. “This thing is trying to market X? Well damn you, I like Y! That is the best! Everyone, get Y!” …actually explains a lot about the perennial Console Wars: the companies like it as long as someone is winning. (…Jim Steph Sterling really was right, following game business for a moment is an easy way to become a critic of capitalism)

I actually really like the C64 keyboards - not perfect by any means, but they are some of the best keyboards in the 8-bit computers, really.

Fun thing, I wrote one NaNoWriMo novel on a C64, so I don’t think the typing comfort is too much of an issue. Though for that experiment I actually used my C64C, because the low-profile case makes things a tiny bit more ergonomic. (I don’t use it that C64 specimen much for other purposes, because it has a busted/temperamental SID. The one in the picture is my C64G, which is one of the last models produced, basically C64C guts in a breadbin-style case.)

converting an autotools build recipe

Oh yes!

to a bare makefile

Oh no!

In the 1980s, 8-bit home computers were sold with slogans like “Kids can use these to play games! And use educational software! And the ladies can use them to keep track of the freezer contents!”

…One of three ain’t bad.

Decades later, we still open the fucking fridge to check what’s in the fridge. Such is the nature of technological progress.

(Random old person memory: when I was a kid I actually had some “home economy” software for Spectravideo SV-318, found in some random pile of tapes. I only used it once because it was boring, obviously. My father used the recipe book and added “Poop Cake”. That was enough recipes thank you very much.)

My personal headcanon: When no one is looking, Miriel tries to stregthen those useless legs by listening to some awesome inspiring music and just vibing along.

I bought a Canon laser printer 10 years ago. The only thing I’ve needed since then was a single new set of toner. (And a bunch of paper, obviously.)

Even back then it was pretty obvious that ink jets are waste of money and everyone that I knew who had ink jets were just constantly complaining about them.