ISTR having some hallucinogenic colour issues when Vulkan wasn’t properly installed.

If we can pick home computers that lean into cartridges, the Atari 800XL is a real winner. Nice two-tone finish, classy silver buttons with a plexi trim oiece covering the power light.

Trident TGUI9440 on a VL-bus card. Surprisingly peppy on a 486/66 overclocked to 80.

I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.

Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.

How about Delete, since I don’t see it on the layout.

Or the Most Scroll Lock Ever.

I figured systemd is a 90s-JRPG boss with multiple phases taking over more and more of the screen.

You hold up a Slackware CD like some sort of vampires-and-faith-objects bit.

I put out one of those big plastic storage units with like 30 little drawers recently, figuring although 2 were missing, someone could still use it. I stood it next to the dustbin, on trash day where it would be optimally visible for anyone who wanted to scrounge it.

The bloody HOA took a picture and sent a nastygram.

Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

• A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
• a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
• followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
• a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)

As a (non-game) developer, AI isn’t even that great at reducing my burden.

The organization is enthusiastic about AI, so we set up the Gitlab Copilot plugin for our development tools.

Even as “spicy autocomplete” only about one time in 4 or so it makes a useful suggestion.

There’s so much hallucination, trying to guess the next thing I want and usually deciding on something that came out of its shiny metal ass. It actually undermines the tool’s non-AI features, which pre-index the code to reliably complete fields and function names that actually exist.

I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P

Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?

So thry’re saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?

Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can’t requisition what they need.

As usual, service problem.

So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don’t overbuy.

Yeah, I’d suspect Rifas before dust when I hear “exploded on first power up”

Also on modern firebreathers.

I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.

I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.

I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.

I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.

I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.

If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.

I got a ~6k Dogecoin windfall a few years back. (Found the coins I bought in 2014 at <0.1c, sold at 25c)

I think I put like 1k into my more conventional investments, blew like $2k in indulgences (new GPU, collectibles), and set most of the rest aside for the revenuers.

We get, for some reason, a huge number of window replacement contractors coming door-to-door. Because I really want to be high-pressure sold $10k worth of low quality glass from the people who are running big enough marhins to put a full page colour ad in the local newspaper every day to go with their 6 hours a day of local TV spots.

I actually said to one “We’re a Linux household. Not interested in Windows” and slammed the door on them.

I now realize cocking a rifle would have made the effect even better.

No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.

I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.

Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.

Next one that comes to the door, I’m telling him he can have $20 if he humanely escorts the Latrodectus Hesperus living in our cupboard out. Let’s see if he has any tricks up his sleeve other than poison.