dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Maybe we just ought not to freak out about somebody carrying mankind’s oldest tool like a bunch of sissy babies, hmm?

I know: Zeppelins.

This is one of the single most accurate and succinct analogies of a tech space I have ever read, save possibly for the one that Neal Stephenson wrote about operating systems being car dealerships.

This is just, like, the Counterstrike loadout store but in real life.

When I’m king, my army is going to work on Gun Game rules. Whenever our guys cap someone on the other side, their gun randomly changes.

I think the main impact here is that there are plenty of embedded system-on-a-chip sort of things specifically designed for industrial applications not only still out there in the world, but still being actively manufactured that are based on the 486 architecture.

For retro gaming nerds, their 486 machines would all be running some variant of DOS anyway.

“Proprietary software bad.”

Agreed. I need Corel Suite to work in order to do my job. Once this happens I can move to Linux full time.

No, Inkscape and GIMP are not “good enough,” before someone pipes up about it.

It’s on the tip of my tongue. Starts with an M?

And not to mention those goddamned Anglo-Saxons.

Not until somebody shuts off the investor money faucet for AI. Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.

But hey, look at the bright side. We’ve already had the cryptocurrency mining boom and bust, and “AI” boom and soon to be bust. There’s still time for some idiot to invent the next tech scam fad which will conveniently require a shitload of hardware for no recognizably useful purpose.

He also imposed an import tax on motorcycles because Harley Davidson was deathly afraid that riders would rush out to purchase a Japanese bike that didn’t drip oil everywhere and reliably starts when you press the button.

You must not live in an area where dumbasses paying tons of money to ruin their cars with crackle “tunes” is popular yet, then.

There’s one asshat with a Mustang around here that he’s got deliberately set to backfire about twenty times every time he takes is foot off the gas, and he goes ripping up and down the main drag all night. I’ve timed him and you can quite literally hear him coming from about two miles away.

I’m a pretty live-and-let-live sort of bird, but damn, bro. Give it a rest after midnight, will you?

Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X that “no one in Minnesota is above the law.”

That includes you and your goons, dumbass.

Douglas Adams, apparently ever prescient, was on top of this long before the rest of us. This is from The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, which I will remind you was published in 1988 and in the foreword says it was typeset on a Macintosh II:

There was a pay phone in one of the dark corners where waiters slouched moodily at one another. Dirk threaded his way through them, wondering whom it was they reminded him of, and eventually deciding it was the small crowd of naked men standing around behind the Holy Family in Michelangelo’s picture of the same name, for no more apparent reason than Michelangelo rather liked them.

He telephoned an acquaintance of his called Nobby Paxton, or so he claimed, who worked the darker side of the domestic appliance supply business. Dirk came straight to the point.

“Dobby, I deed a fridge.” (At this point in the book, Dirk has recently been punched in the face and is talking funny due to a broken nose.)

“Dirk, I been saving one against the day you’d ask me.”

Dirk found this highly unlikely.

“Only I wand a good fridge, you thee, Dobby.”

“This is the best, Dirk. Japanese. Microprocessor-controlled.”

“What would a microprothehtor be doing in a fridge, Dobby?”

“Keeping itself cool, Dirk. I’ll get the lads to bring it round right away. I need to get it off the premises pretty sharpish for reasons I won’t trouble you with.”

“I apprethiade thid, Dobby,” said Dirk. “Problem id, I’m not home at preddent.”

“Gaining access to houses in the absence of their owners is only one of the panoply of skills with which my lads are blessed. Let me know if you find anything missing afterwards, by the way.”

I’ll bet if you tried it the dealer would refuse to take it back.

I’d like to be a fly on the wall in that court case.

It probably does. And in e.g. such a headless system, it makes sense as the default. Or more likely, whoever set that system up set it up in the way they want it to behave, hand-editing config files be damned because that certainly wouldn’t have been the only config file they had to edit.

From a home desktop computer perspective, however, it’s baffling. At minimum that should be one of the questions in the graphical installer: “Would you like Debian to make your routine installation of software updates annoying? Yes/no. You cannot change your choice on this later without doing a bunch of scary commandline shit.”

Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password to install the updates it’s blinking at me about in the tray all the time. In this context, demanding a password at all is rather silly (Windows doesn’t require your password to install updates in a single user environment, and it doesn’t even pop up a UAC prompt) and this is going to be yet another one of those things that prior Windows users will moan about, declaring that “Linux is complicated and hard” and drive them back to the comfort of the devil they know when they feel like their own computer is actively trying to stymie them at seemingly every turn.

My user account is a sudoer so there is absolutely no technical reason my own password shouldn’t work. And, in fact, if I run updates via apt in a terminal it does. But allowing updates to install from the desktop environment, something ostensibly ought to be a routine userspace kind of operation, requires everyone using the system who might want to do this to know the system-wide root password. This is a monumentally stupid idea.

I am well aware there are myriad ways around this but they all involve hand-editing config files and come with stern warnings about “this may break your system so proceed ‘carefully,’” as if anyone who is not already an experienced Linux nerd will know just what the hell “proceeding carefully” is supposed to look like.

The inevitable XKCD comic succinctly sums this up:

The UNIX permissions and administration model may have made great sense on glass teletypes in the '70s and when nobody knew any better, but it’s certainly long outmoded now. It’s going to make a lot of people very angry to read this, but that’s actually one of the few things that Windows does much better, at least starting from NT onwards.

Yes. And also while we’re at it, just remember who has been whispering in Trump’s ear all the goddamn time.

Nobody cares about mining anything in Greenland. Nobody actually cares about any resource in Greenland, or even the people in Greenland. Not strategically, anyway, before anyone gets it twisted. Rare earths, fine, whatever, that’s just a marginal distraction.

Greenland is the fence post on one side of the gate which allows NATO to control Russia’s potential naval passage into the Atlantic. At present Russia functionally cannot project any naval force to western Europe without literally going the long way around, all the way around Asia and Africa and past the tip of Cape Town, etc. Not at all coincidentally, the vestiges of the Cold War are why the US has always been so keen to maintain a military presence on Greenland in the first place.

With Greenland out of the picture and the US theoretically also on Russia’s side rather than NATO, Putin stands a much greater chance of being able to get his warships into the Atlantic by hugging the coast of Greenland and then subsequently threaten the rest of Europe.