• 7 Posts
  • 56 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • Does PDF actually allow some objects to be invisible on screen but visible on print? Because that’d be cool.

    It’s 2225. Archaeologists discover yet another long forgotten university library storage facility. Inside, they find stacks of Elsevier journals that have never been opened. They then find puzzling coffee stains that somehow appear to be result of the printing process, and conclude that the cultural significance of these markings was probably lost to the ages.


  • A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that “once you start playing, suddenly it’s 3 hours later” factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.

    Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. (“Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4”) Can’t really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. (“Man, I’ve got to get back to Mirror’s Edge”) Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. (“Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it”)


  • When things go wrong in Windows at an app or third party software, stuff is often fixable. At worst you might need to reinstall the damn thing. But if the OS itself starts doing weird stuff, things often go to the headache territory really fast. Get a weird error, log says some OS component is going boom, no idea how to fix it, official instructions are along the lines of “Well if DISM and SFC are not going to fix it, looks like you need to reinstall the entire damn OS.” Which usually wouldn’t be a cause for anxiety, but blergh, muh preschus licence key, hope I won’t screw that up.

    Meanwhile, I ran one Debian install for over 20 years once. Stuff is usually very fixable indeed. There are good logs. It’s rarely a complete mystery why some program is doing what it doing. At absolute worst you might need to look at the source code, which is actually rare.


  • I have a sports watch and the corresponding fitness app. I can confirm. “Sitting on one’s ass at the restaurant” is not a fitness activity. HOWEVER. Some of my activities (e.g. walks) do terminate near fast food jonts. …I dread what that kind of data analysis would yield on a major political figure.


  • Well cron is “really easy” as long as your requirements are really easy too.

    Run a task at specific hour or minute or weekday or whatever? Easy peasy.

    Run a task at complex intervals? What the fuck is this syntax. How do I get it right even. Guess I’ll come back next week and see if it ran correctly.

    Actually have to look at the calendar to schedule this stuff? Oh lawd here come the hacks, they’re so wide, they’re coming

    Run a task at, say, granularity of seconds? Of course it’s not supported, who would ever need that, if you really need that just do an evil janky shellscript hack


  • Well, systemd developers made one of the classic blunders a software developer can do: make a program that has to deal with time and dates. Every time I have to deal with timestamps I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”.

    Anyway, as I understood it the reason this is in systemd is because they wanted to replace cron, and it’s fine by me because cron has it’s own brain-hurt. (The cron syntax is something that always makes me squint real hard for a while.)



  • But it would have been great for a Shakespearian minor joke character bit.

    GUARD: “See, milord, how in this year’s almanack the booba hath been veil’d, compared to last year’s edition.”

    KING: “Greatly?”

    GUARD: “Yes, greatly indeed! Two inches of cloth more!”

    KING: “Thou art a nutter and I ought to throw thee in the madhouse.”

    GUARD: “But you wouldn’t dare, sire? Tales of your treachery and oppression already circle widely.”

    KING: “Thou shouldst consider thee lucky that we have to get the Hell onward with our plot.”



  • Some of the things that helped me:

    • Regularity. I also have ADHD so actually getting me to catalog daily/weekly things that I need to do was hard enough. But now that I have like 5 todo lists things are looking up.
    • Cataloging things. I love photography and writing down interesting ideas. Someone looking through my photo collection might wonder why I take photos of random shit. Simple reason: Something managed to brighten my day and I just had to put it in on the record. I feel happier when I know that those moments won’t ever disappear if I can at all manage it. Similarly, if I have cool ideas that made me happy for some reason, I write them down.
    • Crap social media is the worst. Be on the social media to fearlessly shout your cool ideas to the void if you have to. Don’t be there to passively and silently afraid to speak up and stick around with people you barely know and watch them slowly turn nazi yes-men. (Yes. It has happened. Before Elon bought Twitter. Can’t even imagine how shit things are nowdays over there.)



  • umbraroze@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldFear
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    29 days ago

    I’m getting old. I get anxiety from phone calls if people don’t text me days in advance that they’re calling. But if they do, I’m fine!

    (I used to have this one cheapo phone that worked fine on WiFi but would randomly stop working on cellular and there was no way to tell until I tried to use mobile data or whatever. So if I was expecting a call, I was constantly rebooting the damn thing.)

    (Edit: Oh yeah, I have to pay extra for voice mail to the phone company. Yet, the only people who regularly call me for legitimate reasons are, like, the employment office people, and they don’t do voice mail. Dammit, another scam!)



  • Reddit’s backend is absolute junk and not designed for efficiency from the ground up, they just keep throwing more servers in and solve the efficiency bottlenecks with a shitload of caching. A site whose meat and potatoes is text comments and links just shouldn’t be this crap at it.

    Lemmy has the benefit of hindsight in design and the fact that each server is only really responsible for a subset of all Lemmy users.


  • When I was a kid, on a trip to Paris, I went to the zoo, and the highlight of the whole trip was seeing an Aldabra giant tortoise (listed as vulnerable by IUCN). Now, even when this was 1990, I was still like “ooooooo cool turt”. I didn’t expect the buddy to jump around and munch pizza. Just a tortoise doing tortoise things slowly.

    (The other highlight of the trip was seeing a public Minitel terminal. Holy shit guys, we were only mildly approaching that level in Finland.)


  • I’m actually fine if the subtitles have to be truncated to communicate the same meaning in less space.

    I actually find it harder to comprehend the subtitles when someone tries to be as accurate as possible, especially if the subs transcribe every little stuttering. I’m here to learn the stuff they people on screen are trying to say, I’m not interested in the subtitler’s scholarly digression into the finer points of what they’re hearing.

    Some person in reddit once did a hilarious thing where they whipped out a full blown IPA transcript and started analysing the finer dialectual points of a viral video, trying to pinpoint the origin of the speaker. It was hilarious. Probably even more hilarious to linguists. But the point is, that whole thing was not what we were there for, we were just discussing a viral video.


  • Fuck, 2020 would have been so much more bearable if our food had been delivered by The Deliverator. You know, a highly qualified professional.

    …Instead, in this region at least, the app economy bros employed a bunch of befuddled immigrants and also screwed them over contract-wise. So it’s the sad kind of cyberpunk, not the funny kind of cyberpunk


  • 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