I don’t think I’ve had a single USB-C cable/connector/socket fail yet. Which can’t be said of Micro-USB.

But other than that, meh.

reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google’s own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community’s concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.

This was so long ago that I can’t actually remember the actual reason why things had to be done by hand. Part of it may have been a conversion snag, but there were probably some other reasons why it wasn’t as simple as writing a script to do the job. Because I distinctly remember I wrote some scripts to help with other data conversion jobs.

Flashback to my first job. Coworker designed a giant complex web app with bazillion UI messages. Another coworker (in the Management) sent me the UI messages. As an Excel file.

I was tasked to manually convert the messages to a PHP data structure of some description (because this was 2002 and Excel files didn’t exactly lend themselves to scripting in Linux). Surprisingly, the management person did acknowledge my complaint that the conversion process was far more painful than necessary. Not that this helped, because soon after the startup got acquired and as far as I know the tech currently only exists in conceptual level in some big corporate vault or other.

Plot twist: the “wolves” are just furries going to a major infosec conference, and will also talk endlessly about Linux

Dead turtles are the saddest turtles. This is why I never got to Mario games that much and went with TMNT instead.

A “hbox” in TeX is a horizontal box. In 99% cases when laying out text, it’s a line of text. “Underfull hbox” means “I couldn’t stretch the content of this line far enough, so it will look janky as f due to the increased spacing”. “Overfull hbox” means “Well, I tried my best to hyphenate and line-terminate, but this word will stick out of the margin and will look stupid as f.”

Most of the time this is caused by a word that auto hyphenation can’t deal with. You need to add a manual hyphenation exception. I can’t remember how to do that, sorry, because it’s been a while and also I’m mildly drunk, sorry.

The way I think it, it’s possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you’d just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.

Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there’s also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.

Back in 1997 I was like “Ooh, Debian is mildly easy to install (compared to Slackware). Just need to engage my brain a few times maybe.”

(The first Slackware guide I read in 1996 had an ominous warning about getting the ModeLines right in XFree86 or the monitor will catch fire. This, fortunately, was a little bit of exaggeration. Over/under refresh frequency protection was already a thing.)

Now? “Oh no I fucked up my password shit and can’t login. I’ll need 5 more minutes to completely reinstall this Raspberry Pi image. I should have engaged my brain!”

Shit, we’ve gotten to the point that your average desk jockey can probably install freaking FreeBSD on the first try. If that’s not a good sign I don’t know what is.

Not exactly boned but it probably doesn’t make practical difference to store “local time + tzinfo timezone” than just UTC time.

• You record an event occurring at local time
• You store it as UTC
• Local time zone definition changes
• Well whoop de loo, now you need to go through tzinfo to make sense of the past data anyway rather than relying on a known offset

Even if you store everything in UTC, you may be safe… but figuring out the local time is still convoluted and involves a trip through tzinfo.

DAM as in digital asset management. Fancy word for “image library organiser”.

Oh, everything works with Affinity. Thing is, Adobe is pretty much the only software ecosystem that is subtly (or not so subtly) making people think inwards. “I’d love to try that piece of software, but if it’s not running as a Photoshop/Lightroom plug in, is it even worth trying?” Whereas when people who use other software are more likely to go “Well my favourite software package doesn’t do thing X, but I have this other piece of software that does that, it’s not even a hassle.”

Also, when I switched from digiKam to ACDSee, at no point did I have to go “but what about my Adobe-locked-in catalogue, oh no!”…

I think it’s only a good thing they’re not trying to shoehorn DAM features into their existing apps. If they made a DAM software it’d have to be an external app anyway.

I did perfectly fine with digiKam in the past, and nowadays I’m perfectly happy with ACDSee. ACDSee even shows thumbnails for Affinity Photo project files.

Not “auto trust”, of course, but rather make adding keys is a bit smoother. As in “OK, there’s this key on the web site with this weird short hex cookie. Enter this simple command to add the key. Make sure signature it spits out is the same on the web page. If it matches, hit Yes.”

And maybe this could be baked somehow to the whole APT source adding process. “To add the source to APT, use apt-source-addinate https://deb.example.com/thingamabob.apt. Make sure the key displayed is 0x123456789ABC by Thingamabob Team with received key signature 0xCBA9876654321.”

Just today I heard someone whining about how in LinkedIn and other recruitment sites there’s like five bazillion profile tag options for RDMBSes and various dialects of SQL… when in actuality the recruiters are probably only concerned if the developer can do a bloody SELECT and stuff.

I’m a Debian fan, and even I think it’s absolutely preferable that app developers publish a Flatpak over the mildly janky mess of adding a new APT source. (It used to be simple and beautiful, just stick a new file in APT sources. Now Debian insists we add the GPG keys manually. Like cavemen.)

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.

Eclipse

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Will probably need to check this out.

Joke’s on you, Microsoft.

First of all, I already have Game Pass, so you don’t get any new sales.
Second, if I open the settings app in Windows 11, it just straight up crashes. (Can access the other tabs, e.g. through desktop customisation. But if I go to the front page, it crashes.)

It was broken by the update that supposedly added some other ads. But I’ve not seen them! I had to disable the “recommendations” in start menu because it made the start menu not work at all (due to the aforementioned crash, same deal).

This actually really sucks, though. Windows Store apps do not update themselves, Xbox services stopped working (due to being unable to update WS games), and I don’t know if Windows Update works or not. I guess I need to reinstall when I get arsed to.

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?