Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word?
I make knives now, too. Why not buy one at flightlessforge.com?
My old Galaxy S5 would work without the battery, including bootup. So it’s not entirely unexpected that other phones could also do so. I would say I can’t imagine who would take the time out out of their day to just talk out their ass and claim something like this wouldn’t work without trying it first. Except then I remember this is the internet, and people do that all the time.
Regardless, good on you for making this all work!
The key is that there can be no “slowly leaving.” I went absolute cold turkey. I maintain that there is no other way. Not only do most people not have the self control to be able to moderate themselves, but reddit’s structure and algorithm are specifically designed to try to suck you back in, keep you enraged, and keep you scrolling. Because Enragement is Engagement™.
But reddit and its various decision makers went out of their way to piss me off multiple times, as well as tons of other people, so I left. I consider myself a pretty rational and level headed bird, and I made plenty of contributions. But the message there was clear: They don’t want people like us there. They want vacant eyeballs they can market at with bots. That’s what the new shareholders demand.
I have not found that my life has been significantly less enriched without reddit being present in it. Rather, much the opposite. All the inevitable bickering, the arguing with idiots, the whole thing about having to walk on eggshells or appear to espouse a particular approved dumbass point of view or else you’ll be brigaded with downvotes or randomly banned; it turns out none of that is productive. It’s not even, if we’re honest, really engagement.
I find I have more hours in my day to do something else instead. I’d rather do something tangible, and here I can share it without having to be concerned about whether or not my contribution will be approved by the hivemind.
Raymond Chen’s oft-reformatted and revived blog, The Old New Thing, contains the occasional fascinating peek behind the curtain at just why Windows it the way it is sometimes.
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.”
Since enforcing conformity on children is something that always gives authoritarians a big old woody, there are absolutely plenty of schools here in the US that also mandate uniforms. Mainly they’re private and religious schools, but some of our public schools do, too. And many others have dress codes so strict they basically just amount to a uniform anyway.
Before Japanese culture and media was mass exported to the West as it is today, the uniform nationally associated with young girls here was the Catholic schoolgirl uniform. And its appearance in pornography was just as incessant.