angst_ridden

Tell me you don't understand the point of Mastodon without telling me you don't understand the point of Mastodon.

Do non-Europeans not let their children outside? Or are you suggesting that non-Europeans make everyone else keep their kids inside out of fear?

You can't control a society without keeping them afraid, so roll that tape of predators, kidnappers, gangs, and drug pushers!

What? A child doing something without adult supervision? Next thing you know they'll start thinking for themselves, asking uncomfortable questions, or looking for forbidden books in the library. Better call the cops and accuse them of vandalism or something.

The the tar tar pits.

(La Brea means "the tar").

A bit west of downtown, too, but I'm an annoying pedant.

Ha. My first job in '89 was working for an FFRDC reviewing IBM's Jovial code that was going to "revolutionize ATC" by modernizing everything.

I'm gonna guess that code never went into production. The problem seems easy until you start looking under the hood.

A lot of the restricted stuff is cargo-cult fear of symbols that could be used in SQL-injection or XSS attacks.

A properly-coded system wouldn't care, but the people who write the rules have read old OWASP documents and in there they saw these symbols were somehow involved in big scary hacks that they didn't understand. So it's easier to ban them.

contagi-yawn

It was earlier than the 90s, and came with popular 8-bit CPUs in the 80s. The Z-80 microprocessor could address 64kb (which was 65,536 bytes) on its 16-bit address bus.

Similarly, the 4104 chip was a "4kb x 1 bit" RAM chip and stored 4096 bits. You'd see this in the whole 41xx series, and beyond.

Ignoring all this drama.

But I've always found Paul to be a good guy, who was helpful and honest and provided a great product. Teensy is a great platform, and it's too bad these other players will have a negative impact on it.

How hard would it be to extend this to support bulk export of Apple Notes?

Those who know how to fix the messes made by AI today will replace those who don't tomorrow.

Agreed. Prince also has a lot of good features for headers, footers, page numbering, etc, that make it very powerful.

It's not like Imgur didn't finance with ads. They did that for a long time. Dunno if it paid the bills. The latest kerfuffle is because they were bought and the new owners fired all the moderators in favor of "AI moderation."

If you're not part of a group that will suffer under a white-supremecist theocracy they look very similar.

If you're part of a group that will, there is a visible difference.

Picking the lesser evil is actually a good thing if you can reduce harm. It doesn't solve the problem of it being a lesser evil, but it may make space to change that.

Any idea how long Experts should take to import/index data? I pointed an expert at a big directory of source files on a M4 iMac with 32G RAM, and it pinned a CPU at 100% for 24 hours but was not finished.

A single file seems to finish quickly, but folders (even with just a few files) seem to be very slow.

Never ask ol' Chesterfield about his fence.

They're now owned by "copyright trolls".

They hit up a company I know because their web-crawler found a PDF that someone generated using their library over a decade ago.

https://beemanmuchmore.com/software-licensing-trolls-apryse-...

I'd avoid it.

Of course, the Space Shuttle (and SLS, for that matter), are bad designs and inefficient not because NASA teams design them that way, but because of the way Congress funds things. They add mandates, and require the contracts to be spread across lots of organizations and states to "budget proof" the projects.

For example, NASA's original space plane was a much better design that the shuttle, but they were forced to make it a joint project with the Air Force to get budget. The different requirements added up, and eventually we got the system we've all seen.

In the early aughts, I spent a lot of time writing and maintaining Open Source software. I burned out on that because of rude users. I had one guy track me down offline and phone me at all hours to demand that I drop everything and fix a bug for him. When I pointed out that my day job came first because I have to pay bills, he went on an online screed accusing me of holding him hostage unless he paid for fixes and listing my cell number so people could "encourage me to be a better developer."

In those days, I was part of a core development team for a project with a fairly large community. A few bad users and a few bad development team members is all it takes to poison something like that.

Now I barely even contribute to Open Source projects even when I fix them for my own uses.

There is also a known phenomenon of "starvation euphoria." I don't know at what point of caloric deficit that kicks in, but it probably varies dramatically.

Many years ago, I built http://legacy-labeler.com so people could label their photos for posterity. It's admittedly clumsy, and nobody uses it.

I just walked a mile in Los Angeles for lunch.

I had the following near misses where I would have died or been severely injured if I hadn't been alert: a Tesla coming out of an alley (driver was on his phone, never saw me), old diesel Mercedes running a stop sign (couldn't see the driver), a Ford F150 in a parking lot (guy was fixated on a spot that just opened up).

This does not include the woman in the Lexus who intentionally crawled up on me because I had the temerity to be in the crosswalk when she wanted to be someplace.

I live in the US half the year, and elsewhere for the other half. Movie rights go in and out of availability even when staying in one place, but when you cross borders, you find your access changing pretty frequently. So for movies, I have a VPN which works much of the time.

There are still plenty of good/interesting films whose rights issues prevent streaming. There is also a significant collection of films that are just not commercially successful, and which may never be digitized commercially. I go for physical media for those when possible.

With music, a fair amount of what I listen to isn't available over streaming services. I buy physical media when I can and digitize it to keep with me.

I haven't pirated in a long, long time. I remember having to hunt down The Star Wars Holiday Special for a friend back in the day. It ended up being easier to buy a home-made dvd from a shady place. I'm sure there's more out there now, and it's easier now, but search time is at a premium.

Oh great. NextDoor was bad enough. Now we get a map version, where anyone can post their inchoate terror of people who don't conform exactly to their ideas of appearance or behavior.

I once had a very frustrating battle with a new reviewer who told me my utilitarian app did not offer an "innovative experience" and wasn't "interactive" enough.

So I had to add a completely useless feature where a user could partition their database by marking some items as "favorites" and have a separate "favorite" view.

This was then approved, with the assertion that "it's now the magical kind of experience users expect from the App Store."

I'm pretty invested in an Apple ecosystem for some very specific software, but that was nearly enough to make me ragequit (unfortunately, the specific software is not something I could develop/imitate under Linux without a huge financial investment).

Same here! And yet the only time I placed it was for an image I'd created in Strata Studio-Pro.

Same here! I still have some fairly simple 320x240 images that took all night to render.

If this were the only article, my judgment would be unfair. But have you read the web site of late?

Amazes me that Popular Mechanics used to be a (mildly sensationalist but sort of) decent magazine. Now, it's straight up ancient aliens and after-death experiences.

"I cannot recommend X too highly. X always served as an example to their colleagues. The quality of X's code was unequalled in our department, and X's work always merited special attention." (etc)