iOS user: "DUDE have you seen [new iOS feature]? This is the bee's knees!" [10 minutes of gushing omitted for brevity]
Android user: "...Yeah, we've had that for 15 years."

Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I'm not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.

I used to watch iilluminaughtii several years ago, probably because I've been grabbing popcorn and enjoying watching someone dunking on multi-level marketing since, uh, 90s at least. Then I watched some video that was about some topic that I was kind of in middle of a deep dive, too (I can't remember which exactly. Elan School, probably?). And the video was bland as hell. And then I was like "yeah, most of these other videos are kind of forgettable shallow pap too".

...and this year we found out about the whole landlordy corporate town fancier backstabby financial abuser helicopter-CEO situation. And the content mill situation. And the plagiarism thing. Can't forget the plagiarism thing. ...I was like, "oh this all just makes sense now."

One of the perks of owning these NFTs was that you could attend exclusive events. What those events were going to be about was anyone's guess. Eye burn, apparently.

Elon: "I'm going to delete this thing."

Everyone else: "NO! Why would you do that kind of thing?"

Elon: "O-o-okay! B-b-but I'm going to delete something today! That other thing, then!"

(Elon continues to read the hypothetical The Best Of Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss book and gets so many ideas, folks)

Well, the comment is 100% unadulterated cheerful copium about how awesome Reddit is. And encouraging other users to keep using it. The second comment is 100% r/TotallyNotRobots.

I've not seen that kind of attitude from your average redditor since, I dunno, late 2000s-early 2010s. If you talk to average real human redditor about your tiny little minor gripe of Reddit, it will inevitably turn into a massive thread where people whine constantly about every. single. little. thing. that has gone wrong over the years.

That's what organic engagement is supposed to look like on Reddit.

Yup. The robots.txt file is not only meant to block robots from accessing the site, it's also meant to block bots from accessing resources that are not interesting for human readers, even indirectly.

For example, MediaWiki installations are pretty clever in that by default, /w/ is blocked and /wiki/ is encouraged. Because nobody wants technical pages and wiki histories in search results, they only want the current versions of the pages.

Fun tidbit: in the late 1990s, there was a real epidemic of spammers scraping the web pages for email addresses. Some people developed wpoison.cgi, a script whose sole purpose was to generate garbage web pages with bogus email addresses. Real search engines ignored these, thanks to robots.txt. Guess what the spam bots did?

Do the AI bros really want to go there? Are they asking for model collapse?

Reminds me of that time when some Christian website had put an RSS news feed on their home page, but of course the owner had insisted on putting a word filter on it.

So the website had a headline about "Tyson Homosexual" winning gold.

People immediately started wondering what kind of headlines the website would have on the anniversary of the historic flight of Enola Homosexual and the Hiroshima bombing.

Brief history of YAML:

"Oh no! All of these configuration file formats are complicated. I want to make things simpler!"

(Years go by)

"...I have made things more complicated, haven't I?"

YAML is generally good if it's used for what it was originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data). Problem is, people use it for so much more. (My personal favourite pain example: i18n stuff in Ruby on Rails. YAML language files work for small apps, but when the app grows, so does the pain.)

The Walt Disney Company is not ready for the amount of Steamboat Love ❤️🛳️❤️🛳️❤️ that the Rule34 folks will throw at them. Hot Steampipe Action is on the menu, folks.

The cyberpunk mouse from the dystopian sucky cyber future where the megacorporations have abandoned the research into ergonomics in search of greater profits...

...what do you mean it's a product on market today?

You can still format a 1 TB card FAT32 though.

That's right! However, remember that bananas have potassium-40 in it, which is radioactive. Not much, though. So be very very mildly careful around bananaphones! /old joke

Well of course it has a picture of his parents fighting (???) in it. Dude's a severely messed up right-winger.

"Has our company ever made bad business decisions? Well, we once bought advertising from Twitter. Don't do that. In the calm, rational, well-weighed opinion of our company, Musk is a massive crybaby and dealing with him is such a fucking fucking headache." - overheard in a business seminar, 2024

I'm so glad Xbox One toned down some of the always online rubbish before it actually launched. It wasn't that bad, fortunately. I have to say Xbox One user experience was pretty meh compared to Xbox 360 in the first year and half or so.

These days, Xbox One and Series S/X are pretty great, but unfortunately ever since the Xbox One launch I've adopted the "let's not get too hyped up about this because Microsoft just might drop the ball a little bit" mindset. Especially as a Halo fangirl.

Reporter: "Mr. Putin, how is it possible that you got 132% of the vote?"
Putin: "It is merely the byproduct of our superiour domestic mathematical sciences. The numbers are simply greater than the ones produced by foreign-made axioms. Do think of all of the great achievements our mathematicians have done over centuries, such as proving the Poincaré conjecture."
Reporter: (gasp) "Your ballot results were tabulated by Grigori Perelman?"
Putin: "No, we looked at his qualifications but we figured he was out of our reach, unfortunately. We had the results tabulated by some other weird mathematician with a massive case of cabin fever. We saved a lot of taxpayer money this way."

I was about to comment on this, but my Android phone spontaneously rebooted.

Anyway. Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was about to say: Firefox. It is a thing. An awesome thing.

Yeah, the thing is, "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" is kind of a meme among non-Haskell developers. Personally, I think Haskell is a very interesting language. The mathematical jargon, however, is impenetrable, and this particular expression is kind of the poster child. I'mma go look at Erlang if I want my functional language fix without making my head hurt, thank ye very much.

I was a reddit user for ages. Reddit search always sucked. Heck, Reddit could barely make their own data available to the users (which is why their user histories are so limited and why the GDPR takeouts take a week). Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, used external search engines.

Do they want to block external searches? Literally enshittify their shit further? Are they willing to hold back progress?

Just today I was thinking of Reddit Gold - back when I actually paid for it, the marketing spin was "you get to test new features before we add them to everyone else!" Literally none of the Gold features I've ever used made to the unwashed masses. I take it back, saving comments did.

So yeah, they will hold back progress. In fact, progress isn't on the cards. It's just regress. AND you can be a premium user and PAY for it.

Yeah, basically unsubbed from AvE over this too.

I can't remember who this was, but there was another engineering YouTuber who, during the pandemic, basically twittered about being frustrated with the lockdowns from business perspective and whingled about being scared talking about his political beliefs because apparently being anything anything right of a model leftist is a crucifiable offence in the bird site, according to him. And how the horse paste actually works. I was like "...oh shit, maybe this dude is a magahatter?"

Thousands of people got severely exposed to Dihydrogen Monoxide during 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and 2005 Hurricane Katrina, and subsequently died! It's frankly baffling that people don't talk more about this!

Oh you fancy PC people and your fancy syscall instruction.

I still don't know why I could remember jsr $ab1e. I didn't even write that much assembly.

This is literally the old EA stratagem. Give the "independent" developer basically an impossible goal and then go "well you failed to meet the goal, looks like you need a little bit of help from us, and by little help, we mean from now on, you do exactly what we tell you, or else". EA pulled this off with Origin Systems and (to a different extent) BioWare to name just a few examples. It ended with complete sadness.

To EA's credit, that charade usually took a long time to come to completion. Sony is trying to pull this this so soon after acquiring Bungie.

Awww crap I guess I forgot to comment somehow. As the other commenter says, it's from Jim Carrey's bio. I don't think he's a thoroughly bad person necessarily, but the whole vaccine scepticism is a huge negative. And I do have a bee in the bonnet about rich people who align with "socialism" and do NFTs, I mean, what the fuck are you doing, just stop, think about what you're doing dammit.

So yeah, Xfce looks the same as it did 10 years ago.

And?

Desktop environment is meant to launch apps and give me windows and maybe have a file manager. Xfce does that. It's a desktop environment.

Hey, "modern" desktop environment enthusiasts, if you bring Compiz back from the dead, give us luddites a call, will you? Ohhhh you kids should have seen it back in the day. Windows and Mac users saw Compiz in action and were, like, "wat." You don't get them to react that way to modern Linux desktops, no. And all that is lost now. Thanks Wayland.

I use Firefox and I'm kind of old school, I don't usually leave tabs open.

I just have a bookmark folder for temporary bookmarks. All 500 of them.

Why not both? Nobody says you can't be both, right?

[edit: sp] Hi! Also a trans girl. (But only high on caffeine, and not drunk because it's end of the month and I'm broke.) Let's get to the question that really, really defines the future.

What are the best and coolest locomotives? (don't need to be the same! and often aren't!) 🚆

Here in Finland we have a really extensive and efficient plastic bottle and aluminum can recycling system. Every bottle and can has a deposit (0.40 € for large bottles, 0.20 € for small bottles, 0.15 € for cans) and you can cash them by returning them at any store. Just toss them in a machine.

There's even some hypermarkets where you can just pour in a giant bag full of bottles or cans and the machine sorts and prices the things automatically.

It's super annoying we still can't really do the same for rest of the single use plastic, but at least trash sorting and recycling what can be recycled is a thing everywhere. We have a lot of projects that aim to reduce those. Probably the coolest recent thing was that someone came up with all-carton coffee cups. (I hope they catch on so we can get rid of the cups that have the Sad Turtle Warning. I don't want turtles to be sad, they're awesome.)

The skip button was already too small, so of course they had to make it even smaller. YouTube's usability on Android is already terrible enough, which is pretty spectacular considering YouTube and Android are made by the same company. The seek bar barely works. The video end screen hides the de-maximise button. Nobody at Google has heard of the concept that controls at the edge of the screen are harder to aim accurately at. Just to scratch the surface!

You wanted deregulation, and ya got It, biiiachezzz

Personal homepages. What we used to call 'em in the nineties.

Freedom of Speech War doesn't mean Freedom from Consequences!

I recommend one of my favourite CRPGs of all time: Neverwinter Nights - for the modern hassle-free experience, get the Enhanced Edition. The first single-player campaign is pretty meh by Bioware standards, but the expansion packs (included in the NWNEE) are pretty great. Heard a lot of good about the premium modules (a few of the original premium modules come with NWNEE, the rest are available as DLC).

The official campaigns are set in Forgotten Realms, the same D&D setting as BG3, but you really don't need to worry about diving headlong into horrors. More fantasy vibes and less visceral stuff. (the second expansion pack is a bit more in the direction of subterranean spooks, but not, like, excessively so.)

However, the real big strength of NWN was not the campaigns. It was deliberately designed for player-created adventure modules created with the included Aurora Toolset. There's loads of them and some of them had really great production values and writing. They're currently hosted at Neverwinter Vault and NWNEE also has a custom content browser (though the latter doesn't have much stuff). Custom modules also have a whole bunch of genres and settings, as expected.

Oh and it's a game from 2002 so it runs on any ol' potato. (Well the EE needs a vaguely modernish machine, but not anything unreasonable.)

It's a thing! Sadly it won't rewrite Haskell codebases for you, though.

That's not weird at all. Here's how neo-nazi mindset works:

"We should label these other people nazis, because the public knows that the nazis were the bad guys. It's a powerful analogy that resonates with the public."

...

"Why are you calling us nazis? Are you saying we are the direct political continuation of the NSDAP? You, sir, are factually incorrect!"

Really?

Has NOBODY told Ubisoft that everyone else has figured out what their grand plan is?

"Same stuff, new box"? Hello? Anyone at Ubisoft heard of this?

If people get same stuff in a new box that's not a surprise, Ubisoft

Just boomers trying to desperately ignore the fact that the generation after them is not only adult, but hitting the middle age. That can't be true, right? That'd mean that boomers are the objectively becoming old farts? Naah, the whinge must go on!

Elon: "That's not fair! There's no gambling or porn on X!"

Indonesia: "But there will be, right? X is supposed to be an app for everything, is it not?"

Elon: 😯 "But... But..." 😡