Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.

But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?

…In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don’t do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely

I was politically ambivalent as a young voter.

Now, I’m pretty much convinced the rich people (and the parties that represent them) are just out there to screw everyone else over. And every single year just adds more evidence to the pile.

I don’t think there is any conceivable scenario in which anyone can convince me that free market will magically fix all problems. It’s nonsense.

Gets even weirder in Finnish, because it’s “kilpikonna”. Someone in ye olde times just straight up translated the Swedish name. Got none of the Indo-European roots in sight, but it still makes sense. Vaguely toady creature that has shields!

(Only problem are the homonyms. “kilpi” also means registration plate, and “konna” also means “villain, thief”. So every time some random person goes around nicking plates off cars, the journalists think they are very clever again, even when the joke has been made before numerous times. Poor turtles! They don’t deserve this!)

Yeah, I was about to say.

Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.

PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.

Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.

Never mind the old flippediroo of the day and month. What I want to know is why is there a dash in front of the date. I thought the separators went between the things to be separated.

I’m, like, yeah, some of the stuff Mozilla has done has been worrying, but I’ve seen far worse happen to some other open source projects and their corporate branches.

I’m not worried about Mozilla projects’ future. If LibreOffice survived corporate calcification, I see no reason why Mozilla projects wouldn’t, if the push comes to a shove. But the thing is, in my opinion, push hasn’t come to a shove yet. There’s red flags at best, which is a cause for concern, but that’s it.

Gotcha. Summary:

Group name: Some shit that 12-year-olds would be embarrassed to use as a gang name, but surprise, the guy who came up with this shit was 60+ or something
Ideology: The same ol’ shit, you’ve heard it all before
Identifiers: Well, this kind of shit, they kind of stick out from the crowd
What to do: The usual

Anarchists do believe in board game rules. Just that they think that using house rules everyone agrees on is a great idea.

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

Finland is basically “File a report if your income changes enough to affect your tax bracket. You’ll be issued a new taxation statement. Send it to the employer. (If unemployed, don’t bother, the agency who pays you already knows.) Your employer/the agency will send the taxes owed to us. You’ll be sent an annual tax proposal - If you have no deductions, you don’t need to do anything, if you do, then it gets mildly interesting. If you get tax returns, you don’t need to do anything if we have your bank details. If you owe us, oh boy, we’ll let you know, don’t worry.”

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

Have any regular users actually looked at the prices of the “AI services” and what they actually cost?

I’m a writer. I’ve looked at a few of the AI services aimed at writers. These companies literally think they can get away with “Just Another Streaming Service” pricing, in an era where people are getting really really sceptical about subscribing to yet another streaming service and cancelling the ones they don’t care about that much. As a broke ass writer, I was glad that, with NaNoWriMo discount, I could buy Scrivener for €20 instead of regular price of €40. [note: regular price of Scrivener is apparently €70 now, and this is pretty aggravating.] So why are NaNoWriMo pushing ProWritingAid, a service that runs €10-€12 per month? This is definitely out of the reach of broke ass writers.

Someone should tell the AI companies that regular people don’t want to subscribe to random subscription services any more.

/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.

To me this doesn’t sound like a massive amount of work went into this, it’s just a sidebar that displays a web page.

Pretty much the same thing happened with Pocket. “Why is Pocket integrated to Firefox?” “Well it’s a project wholly owned by Mozilla. If you don’t like it, you can just remove the button.” “Well I still don’t like it at all - can I remove it entirely to reclaim some of the bloat?” “What bloat? It’s just a button and a few web API calls, disk/memory saving would be negligible.”

One problem, if it even is a problem, is that NaNoWriMo uses a honour system for the word counts. They had word count verification in past but it accepted “obfuscated” manuscripts (each letter replaced with random letters, or something similar). They don’t have any way of assessing the quality of the writing, and that absolutely goes against the spirit of the event anyway.

(For a lot of writers this could be the first time they try writing a novel. Last thing they want is an algorithm rejecting their work if it sounds too much like AI. That’d be fucking horrible.)

Ultimately, NaNoWriMo isn’t about quality of writing, it’s about getting into the habit producing text for 30 days. Using any AI to create novel text goes straight up against that idea.

I’ve always said it’s OK that you’re not producing your 100% best prose in some NaNoWriMo days. Or just come up with tangentially related ramblings. It’s, uh, a postmodern composition technique. But try to use a brain, OK? AI will just produce irrelevant nonsense. One of my fave technique is that if I’m really desperate in NaNoWriMo, I fire up lipsum.com and generate a day’s worth of lorem lipsum nonsense. I can do it once. Then I must remove words from that block if I exceed the daily quota.