umbraroze

There’s two kinds of crypto scams: Ones that actually involve crypto and ones that don’t.

Vague, possibly impossible to implement promises about proposed future functionality are an integral part of the crypto sphere!

Damn, OneCoin was bad. Ruja Ignatova was the first crypto scammer I’ve seen talked about in national news and she was also made fun of in a news comedy show over here. A true scam pioneer.

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.)

Oh content from this blog has been popping up in random places. Methinks it’s le epic trole.

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 love watching Let’s Plays of Telltale games and similar games like Life is Strange. But usually, the first episode is hardest to watch through, because in these types of games, the first episode also serves as a very drawn out tutorial and has the most of the lore dumps.

Yeah, there’s an important distinction. Just because you could use Linux doesn’t mean you can at any particular moment.

I don’t really do music production; I’m more into writing and visual arts and photography. I could do all of those things on Linux and be perfectly productive. But there’s a difference between being productive and being optimal. My current process happens to be based on software that runs on Windows. (Heck, a lot of the software I use already runs on both Windows and Linux, anyways.)

The key here being that you shouldn’t lock yourself too much to just one tool and one approach, and that actually goes both ways.

Probably some other NPC that does some highly specific thing. Like the name rater, or whatever.

Not important in the grand scheme of things, but people all over the world come for that one weird task I can do, and that’s enough for me.

My theoretical answer is this: in an ideal world, there would be no copyright at all. This is an artificial contrivance that was once dreamed up to serve physical-copy economy, and it was rendered obsolete by the digital age. Shit would be so much easier when we got rid of this shit and everyone could share everything by default without any profit motive. (Caveat: This will not work unless literally every jurisdiction on the planet gets rid of copyright laws all at once, otherwise this is way too exploitable due to power imbalance. So I don’t think this is a practical proposition. *cough* unless we all decide Anarchism is a good idea after all *cough*)

My practical answer is this: Welllllll we’re kinda damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. My personal feeling is that AI creations aren’t really copyrightable, and even suggesting they are copyrightable is kind of opening a huge can of worms regarding what exactly counts as “creativity” in the first place. The best we can do under current copyright regime is to regulate how the AI datasets are curated, because goodness knows the current datasets weren’t exactly ethically obtained.

Funny thing, in ISO 8601 date isn’t separated by colon. The format is “YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+hh:mm”. Date is separated by “-”, time is separated by “:”, date and time are separated by “T” (which is the bit that a lot of people miss). Time zone indicator can also be just “Z” for UTC. Many of these can be omitted if dealing with lesser precision (e.g. HH:MM is a valid timestamp, YYYY-MM is a valid datestamp if referring to just a month). (OK so apparently if you really want to split hairs, timestamps are supposed to be THH:MM etc. Now that’s a thing I’ve never seen anyone use.) Separators can also be omitted though that’s apparently not recommended if quick human legibility is of concern. There’s also YYYY-Wxx for week numbers.

Error in Moderation

Could have been worse. Could have been an Error in Excess.

Oh how quaint, someone has discovered that Wikipedia can be vandalised. I’ll have to have you know that that came to us a a real surprise in 2001. Things are more manageable these days. People usually notice these things.

Switch to Chrome? Never! I take my chances with the gargantuan planet humping fire elemental vulpine.

Technically, SQL is case-insensitive.

Practically, you want to capitalise the commands anyway.

It gives your code some gravitas. Always remember that when you’re writing SQL statements you’re speaking Ancient Words of Power.

Does that JavaScript framework that got invented 2 weeks ago by some snot-nosed kid need Words of Power? No. Does the database that has been chugging on for decades upon decades need Words of Power? Yes. Words of Power and all the due respect.

God clearly failed, then. George W. Bush kept bombing places that he couldn’t pronounce.

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.)

Almost every situation can be made hell by introducing an enthusiastic sales person with lots of options to market to you

I use Debian because it runs on everything, and XFCE because it runs on everything and I’ve never wanted to waste much of the oomph on the GUI anyway. Looks and feels and works well enough, and that’s all I care.

Ah ! TP-Link! Or, as I’ve always said, Toilet Paper Link.

[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!) 🚆