It's also fun buying tickets from the Belgian airline, when they tell me that my family name contains illegal characters. Really? Tell me they're invalid or better yet unacceptable, but not that.

I love the discourse here, it's so nice to see. Not only because I, too, am a Mint user for practical purposes (MATE flavour, even, in spite of running on pretty modern hardware).

By the way, I am obligated to commend you on your username, cap'n. It's not much, but it's enough, right?

Accrued brittleness

I really like the signalling here: "things might break unless we address it, and we did it to ourselves."

Or maybe "superfluous cost of ownership" to speak to the bean counters, but yours is way better.

Who are we kidding, "tech debt" is what we're stuck with. But have an upvote nonetheless.

There's a neat plugin (for Firefox, the only browser in existence 🤭) that redirects everything to the old URL, so I don't even know if this would be my experience as well...

But yeah today is the first day that I was forced to log in to even browse the site, in spite of using the old version.

Bluntly, where would Mozilla be without Google's funding?

Gone, probably.

So while I agree that it is poisonous and there is something very wrong with Mozilla corporate structure, it is a necessary evil.

I'm glad you ask about things you don't know. You're a smart person.

A dead name is a person's given name, in the context of a person having transitioned to a different gender and also changing their name to match the gender they identify as. It is bad form to then continue to call them by their birth name.

As well as the yeet keyword, I'm really friggin' diggin' this. [modernisation required]

Just TODAY I generated a text file via a bash script, and when attempting to open it in Notepad++ Windows insisted on warning me about potential hazards because it couldn't verify who created the file. A text file! Heavens. I wonder how long I'll last in that blasted Windows centric environment.

There's a lot of humour in there, but this:

CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies
Discuss and dissect historically significant products, including VisiCalc, AppleWorks, Robot Odyssey, Zork, and MacPaint. Emphases are on user interface and creativity fostered by hardware limitations.

I'd take that course in a heart beat. I've read some of Atkinson's ideas and thoughts, and the man was deeply sane.

It must be decades now that my LinkedIn background banner is a screen shot of Zork source code.

Very. And he was going blind, too. I read a marvellous interview with him not too long ago, I'll see if I can find it.

Ah, here it is: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time

You know, if you want to replace Slack, look into Mattermost. It's foss but otherwise pretty much exactly what Slack does so well.

Honestly, this is the most heartening thing I've read about US politics in recent years. (PS. Am not American, and not in America)

Seriously, how do you even get the data to make such graphs?

On another note, I don't have much sympathy for people who clearly "swipe right on everyone". I am aware that it's a numbers game, but have some standards, man.

Cars should just come with a big open socket up front, where I can buy (or build) my own infotainment system to install there.

...which is precisely what we used to have, before auto makers decided to insist that they should be enclosed in a swooping dash.

The solar powered bins in Denmark aren't lighted, but they have built-in trash compactors so they don't need to be emptied as often.

Read it again. This self-proclaimed man uses 'women' to describe some people, and also uses 'females' for how some other people describe them.

This is related to the "airplane on a treadmill" myth (go watch).

Preservation of momentum

I wanna say it's incorrect, but really I'll say it's exaggerated. The man on the diving board is going to continue moving forwards just like the rest of the gear, he's not going to suddenly stop in relation to the road surface. However, he is going to be affected by wind resistance (which scales exponentially quadratically with speed) so he will need to make a good forward leap in order to not fall behind because of that. If he doesn't, he would be effectively jumping backwards - but not as far as depicted (unless the car is travelling really, really fast).

If the pool (and indeed, the man) were encased within an envelope to protect from that wind resistance, he would be entirely unaffected. So there.

So many people believe that Covid was a way to scare us all indoors, so they could change batteries in all the birds.

That's preposterous.

Birds use rechargeables, that's why they're always sitting on the power lines. Like, duh, wake up sheeple.

Honestly, that's a caricature. Of course that is utterly overwhelming.

Most poly is nowhere near that, but just a person dating a person who also happens to be dating another person. End of story. The "quad dates" are ludicrous, and the foxy cat(?)'s explanation shows she's way too involved in relationship that don't, uh, involve her. Back off, be happier.

Unironically continuously breaking new ground on how close I can get to landing a job, without landing a job. It's frankly astounding.

Just last week, had a great series of interviews, bossman says he'll send me a contract. Monday morning, I text him to ask if there's a problem with email or some other hold-up, am told a system is hung but I'll get it. Tuesday morning get a text from a completely different bossman informing me that bossman 1 has been fired, and he'll pick up from there. Had another interview, with him now. Last word, I'll get the contract this coming week. Uh huh.

I have, of course, other things in the pipeline but they're not as far progressed. Plus, that is not even an outlier, that's how every fucking thing in my life goes.