Troy Dowling

Vim, or neovim if you want to put some leg work in for vi with modern features.

I prefer my accolades in the form of bonus cheques. I’ve got a git history for anyone else that matters

ToonStruck, remastered, or the shelved sequel ressurected. I’d like Burst to (exist again and) handle the development because they did a fantastic job the first time around!

Strangely topical for me. I wasted yesterday telling myself I was smart enough to make SwayWM on Wayland work well with my 1070. Should have trusted the warnings in the documentation; hubris cost me a weekend day!

I noticed I was blocked today when connecting via the same VPN I’ve used for years, including back when I was a user. That’s fuck up enough for me.

If you don’t mind me polling your opinion: do you recommend Graphene for someone previously used to Cyanogen / Lineage? I recently upgraded to a Pixel 8 from quite an old handset and I’m not particularly fond of the stock ROM. Much has changed since the last time I had to think about this stuff! I primarily care about privacy, and use my cell for little more than phone calls, messaging, and its camera.

Problem: ambiguity of date terms like saying “this Wednesday” on a Thursday. Is the speaker referring to yesterday or the coming Wednesday six days from now? Not always clear.

Solution: I propose standardising our understanding of the week as beginning Monday, ending Sunday. At any point in the current week, “this whateverday” refers to that day in the current week, no matter if it’s past or future. “Next whateverday” refers to that day in the upcoming Monday through Sunday week.

“This Wednesday”, on a Thursday, is referring to yesterday.

“Next Wednesday”, on a Thursday, is referring to a day six days from now.

(I also suggest adopting ISO 8601, writing dates in year-month-day order to avoid that ugly ambiguity.)

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Thanks to Britain, we now have swearing on the Internet.

I have heard it front to back, back to front, up or down, but never have I heard of a left-right wiper.

When I hitbthe B button instead of spacebar on my tiny, touchscreen cell phone.

What a Barclay.

The very last thing the Internet needs is more ads.

Oh, of course. That explains the coefficient output in the terminal. Thanks.

Is that about 20 degrees of swing on the hotend? Might need to recalibrate that loop!

Cool ideas. I like the idea of an accessible, global democracy. But I wondered about two things:

One, I think the complexity of such an identity database would be so great, it would preclude any means of reliably identifying false connections. And if that complexity wasn’t boggling, would it really capture anything more than our present distributed (inefficient) system of records? You would wind up with a, admittedly more sophisticated, statistical model for identifying bogus individuals.

Another thing I wonder is how much help it would actually be. Lots of issues are more complex than “is clean water good?” If and when a decision needs to be made on something outside your expertise, or with no clearly altruistic option, you have to look for help in understanding your choices. And that makes you vulnerable to influence by someone else’s interpretation. Which leaves you where we are now.

So I guess it raises some problems to solve. Can you really create a perfect record of identity without sacrificing privacy? Could you meaningfully interrogate it? How do you provide an unbiased education of every vote and referendum? How do you solve the influence problem or stop organized political machines from springing up again? Does any of this address the root cause of unbalanced wealth and power?

You might be interested in the story of Luigi Galvani’s experiments with frog muscle tissue. It was seminal work in anatomy as well as physics.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631069106000370?via%3Dihub

I have a whole desk full of calculators. The two I use most are:

Sharp EL-W516X A very capable little dot-matrix device, with some limited programming / macro ability. Performs all of the calculus, stats, matrix, and combinatorics functions I use regularly. This was my go-to calculator until I started using the…

Casio fx-115ES PLUS At some point, I had to write some exams which only allowed a few calculators off an approved list. This was the one I picked from the list. It is a very competent little device which can do anything the Sharp unit above can. After getting over the novelty of having to learn a new keypad, I found it nearly identical to the Sharp in usage.

I think that both calculators are effectively identical in terms of function, but the Sharp may have a slight advantage in terms of its interface. I would wager it takes slightly fewer keystrokes for the same operation on average as compared to the Casio. I also didn’t really take advantage of the programmable aspect, instead using the four keys for the common multipliers I use in my work: kilo, milli, micro, nano. I liked how the display would read in “natural” terms like “2 * pi * 10k * 100μ” instead of having a tonne of “10^n” terms in the line.

The Casio has the advantage that it is typically on just about any approved calculator list; if you’re taking exams down the line, consider getting used to an approved calculator now so you’re not wasting time searching for buttons later. It’s also the more popular choice, I think. I saw plenty of students, TAs, and instructors using this calculator which could make it easier to give and receive help on it.

Outside of IM, in the mid-2000s and earlier, the Internet was more of a space of personal expression and burgeoning e-commerce.

There was Geocities and Anglefire where anyone could create a personal homepage with rudimentary HTML skills. You could show off your personality and share your interests, and (some) others would be excited to find you and sign your guest book. You’d be excited every time the hit counter on your page went up.

Talking in real-time, over IRC usually, was the first taste of true globalisation for many. There were other, older forums around like BBSs, but these were even more techno-niche nerd havens. The web forum (PHPBB) later came along and created what I consider to be the protoweb of what we have today. Profiles, display pictures, post counts, threads and boards, etc.

Another large difference was that the Internet was still a very collaborative space. Services usually had open APIs, so that you could write or use software that brought the services you wanted into the format you prefer. Think: all of your IM accounts in one messaging app, all of your website news feeds delivered to an RSS reader, and data that easily flowed from one space to another. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before these same services saw the business sense in restricting users from exporting their data, thus confining them to “walled gardens” where they were readily subjected to ads, and without recourse to leave. And thus the API died.

There was essentially no presence of celebrity on the net as we know it today. Before MySpace, at least, you would be required to go out and search for Sean Connery’s personal blog, or Paris Hiltons fashion tips. Today, it’s difficult to avoid these things being pressed upon you. At this point in time, you chased people, now it seems the web has them chasing you.

Commerce was a commonplace part of the net as early as the 90s, depending on your idea of commonplace. Nobody trusted computers with their financial data like credit cards. Giving your address to a seller felt wildly reckless… until it didn’t. A little bookstore called Amazon started the novel idea of efficient online sales with less of the burden of storage, eBay rose seemingly overnight, Elon Musk made his fortune selling PayPal, we all collected Net Beans like they’d be worth anything.

Video playback and other multimedia features bled their way into the web from the millennium onward. Online journalism felt like it was in it’s fittest shape.

There was a huge culture of shareware in every market. Shareware games, file utilities, media players, everything. It was how you hoped to be discovered as a software author. We’d load diskettes with BonziBuddy and cursor themes and trade them with friends in break rooms and schoolyards. The coolest among you know how to find pirated games and bootleg software.

Comment sections were truly, deeply, disgusting hives of scum and villainy.

EDIT: Some typos. Thanks, Ace!

Hack.

It doesn’t mean someone guessed your Facebook dictionary-word password.

It doesn’t even mean some black hoodie-wearing, bad actor remotely broke into a secure computer system.

It’s a clever trick. Whether it’s in code or concrete. Some creative, elegant, unexpected, solution to a problem.

“I know a menu hack. Order the kids burger and add cheese to save a buck.”

“We ran out of conductors in the cable, so we’re transmitting power via a differential pair. I know it’s a hack, but we need to ship by end of month.”