Fuck, 2020 would have been so much more bearable if our food had been delivered by The Deliverator. You know, a highly qualified professional.

…Instead, in this region at least, the app economy bros employed a bunch of befuddled immigrants and also screwed them over contract-wise. So it’s the sad kind of cyberpunk, not the funny kind of cyberpunk

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

I was politically ambivalent as a young voter.

Now, I’m pretty much convinced the rich people (and the parties that represent them) are just out there to screw everyone else over. And every single year just adds more evidence to the pile.

I don’t think there is any conceivable scenario in which anyone can convince me that free market will magically fix all problems. It’s nonsense.

Yeah, I was about to say.

Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.

PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.

Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.

I always liked “not the sharpest bulb in the tree”.

(Because it kinda makes sense. Some Christmas lights have pointy bulbs. But nobody picks them for sharpness.)

Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆

Digg’s biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That’s why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said “go right ahead”.

So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.

Now, to Reddit’s credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.

Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It’s all allowed unless it’s blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it’s just organic random users.

Now, you don’t see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I’m not sure they’re interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They’re this close to saying “fuck it, it’s a free-for-all” and going full Digg publicly.

I played Nethack. I was overwhelmed by my anxiety and depression. I realised I was not good at video games. So I quit playing Nethack and swore to get good at video games before returning. Been, what, at least 15 years? I’ve gotten better I guess. Should I return? Soon, maybe.

(Seriously, though, roguelikes are still a genre I struggle with, so I do need practice!)

Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?

I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.

Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn’t like got buried really fast.

Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn’t care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.

Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I’ll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)

So that’s what killed Digg. …that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (…insert comparison to modern Reddit here)

I completed TMNT as a kid… on Commodore 64. That version is admittedly a little bit easier than the NES version (some mechanics were missing, and an entire level is gone, as I recall). Still, I have no idea why people complain about the second level (river), it’s actually pretty fun. Compared to what’s to come later in the game.

To me, the definitive “hard” game is Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on GameCube. Dark Souls just makes me say “eeeeeehhhh this is probably doable, I’ll play this after I’m done with MP2E.”

(When I first played MP2E, I only got through the second to last boss. Then my MadCatz memory card died. Played through the game again, with the fury of million suns. 99% complete. Because I missed one optional scan. …One of these days I replay this bastard.)

Never mind the old flippediroo of the day and month. What I want to know is why is there a dash in front of the date. I thought the separators went between the things to be separated.

I’m, like, yeah, some of the stuff Mozilla has done has been worrying, but I’ve seen far worse happen to some other open source projects and their corporate branches.

I’m not worried about Mozilla projects’ future. If LibreOffice survived corporate calcification, I see no reason why Mozilla projects wouldn’t, if the push comes to a shove. But the thing is, in my opinion, push hasn’t come to a shove yet. There’s red flags at best, which is a cause for concern, but that’s it.

Anarchists do believe in board game rules. Just that they think that using house rules everyone agrees on is a great idea.

Free Software is Leftism because it has got us great software and maybe the only bad thing I can say is that release schedules aren’t a thing

Open Source is Capitalist Friendly because, ummmmm, extremely shitty Community Editions and putting everything cool in proprietary side, uhhhhh, random license changes to shit that isn’t actually OSD compliant, unghhhhhh, need of constant vigilance against license violations.

Like I am happy cheap hardware vendors have adopted OSS components but why are they frequently so shitty about everything

Finland is basically “File a report if your income changes enough to affect your tax bracket. You’ll be issued a new taxation statement. Send it to the employer. (If unemployed, don’t bother, the agency who pays you already knows.) Your employer/the agency will send the taxes owed to us. You’ll be sent an annual tax proposal - If you have no deductions, you don’t need to do anything, if you do, then it gets mildly interesting. If you get tax returns, you don’t need to do anything if we have your bank details. If you owe us, oh boy, we’ll let you know, don’t worry.”

This is a very cute thread. I love turtles and I like them for their vast computer science skills too.

I’m in middle of a Rust module of a course, so I’ll do some Programmer Friendly Error Messages:

Line 10: You do not need to dimension a dimensionless variable such as a standalone string variable. (This ain’t Visual Basic.)
Line 20: input doesn’t do parentheses, sorry
Line 20: Input accepts a string: Perhaps you meant prompt$?
Line 30: Concatenation is too modern, perhaps instead of + you meant ; just saying?
Line 40: Invalid syntax with play, maybe you meant play "g3c4e4"?

Well they train me in JavaScript frameworks and such. I allege this knowledge will be useless in a few decades. Or even less so, based on my meagre knowledge so far.

I’m literally on an internship training course where the Exercises Left For The Readers are implementing Number Guessing Games on the various technologies talked about on the course. I’m like “thanks, but I read about this particular exercise extensively the BASIC age. I’m not going to redo these things unless your training material will have little cartoon robots. Like, you know, in the Usborne books or something.”

The font is Revue! People often say that their first love-hate font was Comic Sans - well, this was the first font I thought was pretty damn cool and I saw it getting run to the ground with overuse in early 1990s. It was pretty much in half of the ads in early 1990s. (My theory: It was bundled with a popular graphic design passion package / clipart bundle, Arts & Letters, and everyone made their ads with it. I can’t wait for the day when I finally get arsed to install Windows 3.0 environment and my copy of Arts & Letters and prove the doubters wrong)

I half expected the first comment about the font to be about The Room to be honest.

Sorry for the potato photograph, my phone was a potato, I was a student after all