Different worldviews, new ways to reason about existing issues, raised awareness of other problems, cultures, people. And straight out more knowledge about many things (even if you read only fiction). Overall, you can move forward from a perhaps more simplistic version of the world.

Also, just the increased ability to read and understand stuff should not be underestimated. Many people can read, as in putting letters together to form words, but not read in the sense of understanding anything beyond the most basic of sentences. You’ll get scammed less often. get better deals, etc.

Was going to post this as well. Just replayed it again, never gets old!

Jesus! Fucking! Christ!

As someone who fears bugs and is browsing Lemmy before going to sleep, my nightmares thank you, good sir!

1643 day streak here, and it still looks like it’s going to die on me any second now. I guess it was just an icon change (but… why?!)

How about, instead of spending millions on marketing and exercises or graphical virtuosity that do nothing in terms of playability, innovation and fun, focusing on what matters and do games where $70 still turns a huge profit?

I wish that would work. My Epson was always on and the ink kept drying. After it clogged the print head once too many times and I could not fix that in less than 10min, I just gave up on the piece of crap. I now go to a print shop to print what I need which, admittedly, nowadays is just a couple of times a year.

Nice try, Guybrush!

A rifle scope that can see through walls.

While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):

I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far. We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed. The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.

I trawled unintentionally.

99% Invisible - An excellent design/architecture podcast

20k Hz (“twenty thousand hertz”) - great show about the audio that pervades our daily lives, from notification sounds to movie special effects, passing through game sounds, sound history,etc.

Imaginary Worlds - in their own words, “ a podcast about science fiction, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction”.

All three are done by professionals in their respective fields, exceedingly well researched, and with superb production values.

The problem is that the concept of “user of a site” is still a thing. There should just be “fediverse users”. Everything gets federated, why not user credentials? Then it would not matter if you register on site X or Y. It would be the same. What we need is a federated identity service. It would still be completely decentralized, dependent on no single server, and much more resilient to server shutdown, defederation, etc.

Edit: typos

Estas certe bonaj kialoj por ne pagi per karto (ĉefe, privateco). Tamen, ĉi tiu artikolo estas iom fuŝa, ĉar (laŭ mi,la du plej gravaj fuŝaĵoj…):

• ne ĉiuj kartoj estas kreditkartoj. Fakte, en pluraj landoj, preskaŭ ĉiuj uzas debetkartoj. Do, oni ne devas pagi pli ol la veran koston de la varoj…

• ĉu ĝi vere diras ke oni devus ne pagi niajn Impostojn?! Ne nur pro baza justeco oni devas pagi (nepagantoj estas parazitoj de la pagantoj kaj la socio), sed ankaŭ ĉar, aparte de militoj, ĝi ankaŭ pagas niajn vojojn, malsanulejojn, lernejojn, ktp…

Still, El Niño happens cyclically every few years, and this dataset spans decades. There are no other years in there similar to 2023….

This takes many forms. A recurrent one is for the take place right out of college (or while still in it!), taking advantage of the naïveté of those just entering the job market, and often as a precondition to access any kind of paid job some months later. The employer gets free qualified labor, the intern eat lots of ramen… families put up with it as a natural extension of paying for college, for a few more months… it’s exploitation pure and simple.

A “joke” I’ve heard several times over the years (not recently, though) summarizes the level of assholery that’s going on (warning: some may find this offensive)

I guess someone should come up with an idea for config.sys next!

The ones with the rabbits are pretty messed up as well!

Yah, I can’t imagine finger being widely deployed nowadays, the huge security and privacy hole it would be!

As for nntp and email… I also remember using email relay proxies for FTP way back when! FTP access to some places was spotty at best, so I sent a GET request to an email server that would get the file, UUENCODE it, and send it multipart by email. Not that files were big back then, but not was it possible to attach more than a few hundred KBs at once, if that.

In fact, I just remembered a funny story from when I was using the Usenet. I used a client that ran on our VAX/VMS mainframe. While browsing the newsgroups, I would get a figure for the transfer rate at the bottom of the screen. It was usually in tens of bytes per second, sometimes a few hundred. Often it stalled, etc. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I see it is showing “1”. My immediate thought as the most plausible interpretation: “damn, one byte per second. this is especially slow today!” And then I noticed the units: one KILOBYTE per second. it was the first time I had ever seen such a fast transfer rate!

A few years later, mid 90s I was trying to download a video that accompanied a conference paper. It was 6MB in size if memory serves. It took me from Friday afternoon to Sunday to manage it. Not only was it slow, but it kept interrupting and I had to start over numerous times. But I did manage in the end, and walked away with it split into a few floppy disks 🙂.

We’ve certainly come a long way since!

So much this! I am old, I guess, but I was on Usenet for years before the web was even invented. When I became aware of the fediverse, I got serious Usenet vibes. A decentralized model, several servers, you access one and get what it sends you, but it syncs with all other servers. You‘re getting everything in the entire Usenet and what you post gets everywhere too… we’ve come full circle, I think, even if we now use ActivePub instead of NNTP… a shame people nowadays know of it as “that piracy thing” instead of what it once was (and was designed to be).

This is like saying “you can write ransomeware in C++” and implying it is the language’s fault, somehow. ChatGPT is a tool, it does what the user asks it too (or it should, anyway). It has no agency nor morals. The argument that it makes it easier to write ransomware is silly as well. From high level languages to libraries and IDEs, we’ve always been developing tools to make programming easier! This is just the latest iteration.