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

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

/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

Well this was Vista era, they were probably doing that to ensure some sort of expectation from particularly tricky legacy apps. Windows prefers not to break old apps if at all possible.

Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).

This was so long ago that I unfortunately don’t remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.

I can’t remember it, but I read one Microsoft blog post (in Vista era?) about how one team at Microsoft would develop some amazing new Windows component. They’d proudly name it AmazingNewService.dll. And then the operating system team would come in and say “that’s all fine and good, but you have to conform to the naming convention.” 8+3 filenames. First two letters probably “MS”, because of reasons. …and 15 years later, people still regularly go “What the fuck is MSAMNSVC.DLL?”

Maybe! Or maybe this whole new concept of dogness actually is something that needs rational consideration. Given no forthright consideration at all, it could be rejected at face value in every possible scenario! It is not at all unreasonable for the Homemade Dog to point out that additional time should be spent to consider their merits.

And that their rejection is still a sad fact, because they were a homemade dog and as such they were made with love. Nothing really changes that fact.

The song that made me a metalhead. Didn’t know SID could do that much epicness. 🎸⚡

My fave remix is by Lukhash - though there’s one pretty damn radical remix that I need to hunt for later because it predates YouTube. Also, Matt Gray’s own remix of the song is pretty epic and trippy!

Hey, comparing Debian to a snail and its shell is unfair.

It’s more like a turtle and its shell.

Turtles can actually be surprisingly fast sometimes!

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.

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.