Might as well share my weirdest proto social media thing.

9/11.

(I’m in Finland. This happened in the afternoon.)

I was leaving work. I distinctly remember a coworker being alarmed about news.

I turned to the usual news source. Slashdot. Massive bloody thread about airplanes hitting the World Trade Center.

OK, that’s pretty bad.

I finally turn to TV news. …OK, stuff is far more in flames than I expected. I think I caught one of the towers collapsing in live TV.

But the following days, my primary news source about 9/11 was, actually, IRC! There was a channel on Freenode where a bot posted headlines about 9/11 investigations. Because the actual news websites were bloody dead under the massive traffic.

Up to 2.x, GNOME used what was basically the MacOS philosophy: make things easy and simple and intuitive, but if the user wants finer control and power features, make sure it’s still possible somehow. GNOME 3 and later pretty much adopted the philosophy that there’s the GNOME path of simplicity and streamlining, and power user functionality is going to be removed from the core and relegated to extensions. And, of course, GNOME started requiring boatloads of memory to run, which to me didn’t go hand in hand with “simplicity”.

I eventually settled on using XFCE, because it didn’t have the bloat and still had enough customisability. Really good environment for old and underperforming systems. If I’m using a modern high performance system, I’m actually pretty impressed by what KDE Plasma is doing these days.

GNOME 1 & 2: The dock is in the bottom by default. It can be moved elsewhere if the user prefers it.

GNOME 3+: The dock is wherever we think the user is likely to find it. Maybe it’s in the bottom. Maybe it’s nowhere. Maybe it’s everywhere. Verily, who can even begin to understand the mysteries of the brain?

Debian’s Firefox is Firefox ESR, or Extended Support Release. It’s behind the bleeding edge, but gets security updates.

If you want the bleeding edge Firefox, you can add Mozilla’s own APT repository and install it. Doesn’t even conflict with Debian (firefox-esr vs firefox, it even uses a separate user profile by default). Instructions are on the Firefox download page somewhere.

I remember people joking about this just after the first LotR trilogy trailers/promo stills came out. Damn I feel old.

I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn’t a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn’t have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.

There’s still a few sites I deploy changes to using ssh+rsync. …which is made considerably easier by the fact that it’s just a static website generated with Jekyll.

I prefer this version: Wikihistory

When I was learning about GIMP key shortcuts I was like “Ctrl+A selects everything, Ctrl+Shift+A deselects everything. Makes sense.”

And then I went to most of the other apps. “Ctrl+D? Well it’s one less keypress, but… WHY?”

To be fair, I get it now, I’ve used plenty of image editors and I remember the keybinds wherever I am. Just that I sometimes find it annoying that The Other Software hasn’t adopted logical keybindings.

(I find it particularly annoying that a lot of image editors try to be fancy and sophisticated and Photoshop-compatible and think it’s at all appropriate to use Ctrl+NumpadPlus and Ctrl+NumpadMinus for zooming. Just use what GIMP uses! NumpadPlus and NumpadMinus. It’s not hard! What are you using the plain plus and minus for, anyway? Absolutely nothing! I just checked, I need to use Ctrl in Affinity Photo. Plain plus and minus are useless. I see you. …oh I can just rebind these. Done.)

I’ve been using GIMP since the very dawn, I use plenty of other image editors for variety of reasons (Affinity Photo, DxO PhotoLab, ArtRage, Clip Studio), and I have no problems with the UIs in any of them.

Yet every time I use Adobe software I’m like “why is it doing this? Why is it designed this way? Who thought that was a good idea? This is stupid.”

JavaScript is powerful

Old joke (yes, you can tell):

“JavaScript: You shoot yourself in the foot. If using Netscape, your arm falls off. If using Internet Explorer, your head explodes.”

Fun thing, the last time I used LimeWire was actually in Linux. So obviously I was immediately highly suspicious about .exe results. (Wouldn’t even have been able to run them anyway. Wine was far less functional back then.)

Tests as well.

In most programming languages, yes.

In Ruby? …eeeeeeeehhhhhhhhh.

Well aren’t the requests to backend by definition slow? Actually TCP protocol is pretty much turtle as opposed to UDP’s hare: slow, but it gets you there.

Edut: was drunk here, was very spitballin’ too

For data gathering? Pretty much anything that doesn’t fiddle with the values. Usually, bespoke apps or applications specifically designed for survey data. People actually use spreadsheet programs a lot, but those who do spend a lot of time on ensuring data gets entered correctly.

Clearly, the superiour mode is to just use keyword based scoping (à la Ruby do ... end). When I was a kid I read an OBSCENE MAGAZINE where I saw a Forth program go dup dup dup and I was like “ok so what’s the problem here? Things happen and everything is just keywords?” and my young mind was corrupted forever I guess

When I was taking my introductory courses in computer science over 20 years ago, they told me to not use Excel if you can avoid it, because it’s not very, you know, precise. So I’m well aware that this is an ancient joke. Excel will fuck your data up - AI is just another way to do it.

But it is a potential scifi plot point.

However, I will concede that it’s probably not a scifi plot point for too long. Worse things have already happened.

Uh huh. Interesting

(furious scribbling in the scifi worldbuilding notes) “In 2050, the names of the months got inadvertently legally changed when a megacorporation released a new version of their office suite and silently corrupted thousands of government document drafts.”

You’ve not understood to Existence until you’ve gone “oh good. foo-ood.”

Source: Been a student, subsidised, unsubsidised, employed also, then left alone too. Unemployed, Also an intern, and not as much.

Foo-ooood is goo-ood. Just grab it. If you can. Tacos are better than death.

Actually this reminds me, what is the deal with tar command recommendations to use or not use dash? I know GNU tar accepts both (e.g.) tar xvf file.tar and tar -xvf file.tar, but at some points people were like “NO! Don’t use the dash! It’s going to maybe cause issues somewhere, who knows!” and I was like “OK”. Something to do with people up designing the Unix specs?