grishka

Also don't CD-Rs need a more sensitive detector in the drive to read? I remember seeing somewhere that early drives have trouble with them

Fun fact: Rutracker is one of the few remaining places on the internet where random Russians and Ukrainians talk respectfully to each other, and do so in Russian.

Related: different people think of time different ways. I myself have never liked analog clocks because they require a conversion to make sense. Technology Connections made a video about this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NeopkvAP-ag

And another thing: I considered trying 28-hour days because my sleeping schedule always drifts. A 28-hour clock that's in sync with me sleeping would be nice if I ever do try that.

Afaik they aren't manufactured any more

Getting someone else's preexisting code to meaningfully run on a thing you made from scratch is quite rewarding. I haven't made an OS but I did make a Game Boy emulator. It runs most of my childhood games just fine, which made it totally worth it for me.

The use of AI is still optional.

Can't Chromium-based browser developers work together to fork the entire thing? Ideally becoming independent of Google altogether.

I wonder what will Vivaldi do. They say that their built-in content blocker is "good enough" that you supposedly don't need uBO (I very much disagree) but they also keep MV2 extensions working to this day.

TSPU isn't for spying, it's for censorship enforcement and everything else that makes the experience of using the internet here miserable without a VPN. It's SORM that's for spying. And Roskomnadzor is very much part of the government.

Yes, that's another law they have. Can't access the internet anonymously, basically. And yes, foreign phone numbers do work.

Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...

Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.

I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).

As a Russian: huh, you guys could still just buy a sim card without any kind of identification? Impressive. We had that ID requirement introduced way back in the 00s.

Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.

There's this: https://codeberg.org/fsphil/hacktv

It's not "VHS footage" though, but it can generate all kinds of analog video signals, some of which my decoder can decode.

Well I made this: https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/tree/master/AVDecod...

Relatedly, I recently made a software decoder for SECAM and PAL: https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/tree/master/AVDecod...

Though in my case the purpose was to digitize my video tapes and teach myself about DSP.

USB-C port to receive firmware updates.

So do you mean that even camera lenses now ship unfinished?

So weird to me to realize that for some people, email providers have a UX, and enough of it that they could consider switching.

I've been using email through a client for decades. My primary email is Gmail, but I have no idea what Gmail is like on the web these days. Save for providers like hey.com, whose entire selling point is their unique web UX, I never understood why would someone use email in their web browser.

Instagram is blocked in Russia so everyone here uses it through some sort of VPN. No one I know has ever got banned for that.

HN has this thing where it would automatically "fix" submission titles.

I always enjoy it when someone makes "obsolete" hardware natively talk to modern network services that it was never meant to talk to. And bringing an entire browser to a system this old is a serious achievement. I don't own any hardware that can run classic Mac OS, but I'm gonna try it on an emulator later, really curious how it handles several of my own websites.

Though the fact that the author uses AI is kinda meh.

Or Alisa

Thankfully, once something is on the internet, it's here forever.

So is it really a book about something like

    #включить <стдвв.з>
    
    цел главная() {
        печататьф("Привет, мир!\н");
        вернуть 0;
    }

I've seen a meme where someone did that with a bunch of #define's

I've been using Mac for ages but I use the layout Apple calls "Russian — PC". These characters are still not really that available. There are some alt-shift-whatever contortions you can do to type them, but it's easier just to switch to English and back again. Apple's default Russian layout is even worse at the very least because the period is shift+7 instead of the key between Ю and shift.

My notification setup is more elaborate (for one, I do keep social media notifications on, but silent) but yeah I agree in general. It frightens me seeing some other people's notification shades where they have 20+ spam notifications from all kinds of things that I wouldn't even consider installing an app for, and they're somehow fine with it.

Hm. That must be new, I was taught Turbo Pascal

By the way, there's one Cyrillic programming language still in wide use today. It's part of 1С (1S), an ERP system that's absolutely everywhere in Russia.

The language itself is quite similar to Visual Basic. It's awkward to write with a regular Russian keyboard layout, but I was told that there exist special layouts just for it.

You still sit at home, alone, in front of a screen to talk to these people. It's still really depressing.

I sincerely miss working in an office, but with my current job it would've been impossible anyway (everyone is remote in different countries). I've only once met some of my coworkers irl a few years ago when we went to a conference together.

Smithereen, my fediverse server, contains a bytecode VM for the `execute` API method: https://smithereen.software/docs/api/methods/execute

I plan to eventually use it for things like automatic spam filtering as well.