In the 1980s, home computers were sold like this:

“Look at these awesome games, kids! And as for your parents, uh… well, you could use the computers to… uh… I dunno… keep track of the contents of the fridge? Yeah, let’s go with that.”

Nobody ever did that. Not then, not now.

Don’t buy a smart fridge, it’s a scam

Limiting the power mod reach is a good thing, but still, this will break Reddit. Ordinary users will not be lining up to step in as small time moderators. Especially if Reddit Inc is going to remove them if they do anything they don’t like.

Reddit Inc will just go “what the hell, we’ll throw more AI shit in the Automoderator. It’s not like it’ll do worse than the current arbitrary quagmire of moderation rules - or maybe it will be, who can tell the difference anyway”.

At this point, I can only say one thing fairly confidently:

We’re certainly living in a timeline

These days I’m usually just confused about autosaves. Especially in games that don’t have clear checkpoints. I don’t mind taking explicit saving away but don’t oversimplify it by trying to pretend saving isn’t even a thing that happens. Nothing more fun than pointlessly replaying 30 minutes.

(Technology that is needlessly oversimplified just sucks. I hate that if YouTube jams on my smart TV, there’s no option to, you know, shut it down or restart it. You have to literally go and pull the plug. Samsung thinks we’re bunch of idiots but they’re a bunch of idiots I tell you)

Also, explicit saving is still better. To quote one local game journalist, when the PC-focused game magazine expanded to cover consoles: “I want to save the game right away, not after I’ve been run over by a zombie in the subway five times.” /old person whinge of the week

I started out with Slackware 3.0. It broke all the time. Tried Debian. Was happy ever since. Tried Ubuntu on laptops but later decided it’s just Debian with extra steps so I went with Debian after all.

I’m always like “du shows disk usage of files, and df shows how much of disk is free”.

A lot of people are filming in 6K or 8K, but only because it gives them more editing leeway when the final video is delivered in 4K.

“YESS! YESSSSS! GIVE IN TO YOUR EMACS SIDE!!!”

Google Search really sucks these days. I can’t find any images of Richard M. Stallman as a Sith lord, even though I’m sure vi fans have made several edits by now. …It’s been a while.

The only “real” computer (that is, a non-SBC one) I’ve installed Linux lately on was a work laptop. Touchpad, GPU and Wi-Fi worked straight off in Debian. Though I think it only installed Nouveau, never bothered with the real Nvidia driver. And it had some weird thermal regulation issues. Once it somehow left the filesystem in “plz boot in single user and fsck with a toothpick” state. The day before my internship ended, the thing crashed hard for some reason and took the filesystem with it. (Never use btrfs I guess?)

Being a “thinker” isn’t exactly a high bar. A fish can do it (depending on the definition). I mean I suppose I can think, but I wouldn’t brag about it.

I was born in '79. I know a lot of 1980s/1990s stuff that’s floating in popular consciousness right now is fictional romanticised bullshit, because it’s based on romaticised fiction made in that era.

For example, I knew most kids didn’t hang out at The Mall. I was a kid. We didn’t have a goddamn mall. American movies and TV showed kids hanging out at The Mall. Maybe hanging out at the Mall was an aspirational thing. Or something.

It’s a thing that happened for some people but it’s not the entire truth about the era. It’s not just that people tend to remember the good bits, they tend to remember the good bits that happened to someone else.

There’s a reason why nobody makes AI slop about the Finnish 1990s banking crisis and its wide systemic repercussions felt to this day. Edit: Sorry if none of this makes sense, just ate something other than cheap potatoes for the first time in a week

I should reread the book. It was hyped as a good book. It was a good book.

Then I went to see the movie. Came out of the cinema and muttered “well that was a bunch of unrelated nonsense”. Went home.

Yup, Fallout Wiki has a pretty crazy history. I don’t remember if they were originally a Fandom wiki, but at some point they definitely went “well, we don’t want to go with Fandom, we’ll go with Curse wiki host instead.” Then Fandom bought Curse wikis and put all of them under Fandom banner anyway.

The independent Fallout Wiki is basically where the actual community is right now, the Fandom wiki is just there to confuse passers-by with their high search engine rank. Fandom has the policy that the community can fork a wiki and go elsewhere, but they will not close down the Fandom wiki, so good luck with your search rankings.

Last time Clock was interesting was in the Windows 3.0 days. Windows 11 clock is just beyond meh.

Since Windows these days can’t be arsed to have an analog clock with second hand (which is what I need for properly setting clocks on all of the devices that don’t have internet access), I just made one myself one day.

A couple of games from recent years: Chants of Sennaar (linguistic puzzles and incredible vibes) and 1000xResist (this game had something many big game devs seemingly have completely forgotten about, specifically, writing).

“Hmm. I wonder. I was thinking of dancing trees. Now I’m wondering what’s next. Screaming trees. Yeah. That’s got to be the answer. Screaming trees.” - private notes by Hans Reiser, filesystem designer and a convicted murderer

(OK, that’s a fake quote. This one is real:)

“Trees have their roots pointing up. And if you cut a tree apart, you get a forest. No, I’m not drunk.” - one of my computer science profs, on data structures

The problem isn’t that the data is already public.

The problem is that the AI crawlers want to check on it every 5 minutes, even if you try to tell all crawlers that the file is updated daily, or that the file hasn’t been updated in a month.

AI crawlers don’t care about robots.txt or other helpful hints about what’s worth crawling or not, and hints on when it’s good time to crawl again.

Lemmy and Piefed support profile pictures. They show up in the web view. It’s just that the mobile apps don’t bother with them. (At least the good one doesn’t. I’m talking about Voyager)

Doom did have text chat, much in the same vein as Quake later on.

However, Doom originally didn’t have TCP/IP, it only supported IPX/SPX networking on LANs. (Though, why use chat when you can yell.) It also supported point to point modem connections, for which the text chat was probably useful. Later versions of Doom and all modern source ports support TCP/IP though.

I’m usually like, ooh, I have a Swiss army knife in my pocket. And another on the keychain.

…Except when I’m home, the keys go to the tray and I switch to indoors pants, so when I actually need the damn things I usually need to take extra effort to go grab them anyway.