Digital Mark

Most languages respond something like “it’s nothing”, de nada. English is a little weird saying “welcome”.

Joke’s on them, I’ve never been “well rested” in my life or my digital afterlife.

It’s still a surviving working copy. “I” go away and reboot every time I fall asleep.

If you can’t afford an iPhone, that’s tough, but I live in the US where it’s 56%, and around the world it’s 28%, which is not “doesn’t exist”. And in any case Signal exists for the others. Yes, if you use a freecycled GNU/Linux phone with not-sold-in-Shenzhen wireless chipset not supported by any carrier so it has to be hardwired to ethernet, you’ll have a harder time.

And if you do try to do everything at once, you fail at everything. Which is what happened after Google EEE’d and crushed XMPP, it’s unsupported in full by anyone. There’s no money in open source networking, it’s near impossible to fund the people who work on critical infrastructure, let alone new toys.

Meanwhile, there’s a system that’s been working for 35 years.

I have two.

Scheme. It’s a fantastic language, you can cleanly switch from functional, procedural, or weird time machines (macros & continuations) solutions to any problem. Most Schemes (esp. Chez, CHICKEN, Gambit, Gerbil) compile to very fast binaries, close enough to C even with dynamic typing and garbage collection. C FFI depends on impl, but usually it’s pretty simple; in CHICKEN you can just write inline C code. SRFI vary from essential libraries to angels-on-pinheads nonsense, but there’s something to pick from.

Down side is the fractured, infighting community. R6RS was a practical batteries-included spec, which pissed off the teaching-only fans, so they made an inferior R7RS, and now committees are trying to make R7RS-large which is just bad R6RS. But if you pick one, and mostly stick to the spec language, it’s not a problem for the developer.

BASIC. I know, ridiculous, right? And I mean line-numbered, Atari or TRS-80 BASIC. But there was never a better language for teaching programming, or for banging out a small interactive program. Turn on any 8-bit computer (or start an emulator), it prompts READY, and you can write something small & interesting. Your modern 64-bit giant machine is not READY.

Of course not. I am the guy in long coat, hoodie or toque, big black boots, and face mask.

Crime rates have dropped massively, you’re being driven into a panic by pro-police, racist media manipulation.

You don’t have to solve every problem in a single application. If you need privacy, use iMessage or Signal.

Public chat is by definition not secure, anyone can be sitting in the room logging, so it’s not that essential as long as client-server uses TLS. Modern IRC does have SDCC chat, but not all clients will use it, so stick to secure messengers.

Don’t use either, they’re unreliable services and not enough people use them. Stick to IRC.

https://xkcd.com/1782/

There’s about 8 billion Humans, and about half of them suck more than any friendly domestic animal. The worst? I’d create an emergency.

“She”. The gag of SwiftOnSecurity is it’s Taylor Swift, posting infosec. Tho these days she mostly trolls like this.

If they had “fixed” it, there would be a “My Computer” icon. No such thing exists, go TRY the Infinite Mac I linked above.

Yes your uncle who works at Nintendo ^W Apple told you about it.

No such demo happened. They unveiled the 128K with that System 1.0 on stage at a special event. The Lisa has a different UI, but also can’t do what’s described.

This story is a lie.

There’s no “computer icon”. Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can’t be deleted.

You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac

After one accident long ago, I have a policy of all drinks on the right, on a lower level than the electronics. I’ve splashed a few keyboards & mice, but never again a computer.

I posted on fedi

This corporate takeover shit is why you can’t trust penguins.

and immediately got reply-guyed from someone defending federation with Threads.

I grew up during the Cold War, I had zero expectation that I’d live to adulthood, and I’m still unconvinced the world after 2000 exists. The way to cope is nihilism and/or activism.

Nuclear war, global warming makes the Earth uninhabitable, new plagues wipe out everyone, AI poisons us or creates nanotech grey goo, fascists take over and gas everyone who isn’t them, a dinosaur-killer meteor hits the Earth again, eventually the Sun expands and fries the planet. You personally are going to die, probably long before any of those.

So you can either say “fuck it” and do your usual stuff anyway, or get involved in trying to stop or delay one of the disasters. Have fun with it.

Or as Morty says: “Everybody’s going to die. Come watch TV.”

The purpose of Air Force is to monitor the skies, project power at a distance, and provide air superiority.

The purpose of Navy is to put a floating fortress off your shore and bombard your cities, carry around materiel, men, and aircraft, and patrol a vast volume of ocean.

So Navy structures fit the mission better, and this has been true since early SF.

It’s clearly secondary to correctness: A program that is well-written but doesn’t work right is worthless. Many hairy balls of mud have shipped to great acclaim.

Human readability & comprehension is nice for maintenance, but you don’t get to maintain something that never worked right to begin with.

… Of course, Windows is existence proof that you can be successful with neither.

Aggressive dialogs begging for my email = close tab. I don’t care what your excuse is.

Also, 404 (Not Found) is the dumbest name for any site ever, so I’m just as glad to see it go away.