Count Regal Inkwell

Nerd|Furry|Linux User|Ace|BiRomantic|Taken <3

Leftist with an incorrigible love for fancy aesthetics (mostly Renaissance Italy/Victorian England) that might be incorrectly read as a monarchist because of that.

en.pronouns.page/@vinesnfluff

Unicorn, but also occasionally gryphon.

  • 7 Posts
  • 398 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Hate is too strong of a word. AI art is sometimes freaky to look at, sometimes it’s pretty. It is usually devoid of a certain intangible thing that you can get from human art, even shitty human art. But it’s occasionally a fun toy too? I can’t conjure up any strong feelings for AI images unto themselves.

    I do have intense loathing for the capitalists who want to use that AI art to replace human work. And for the AI “Artists” who are enabling them by acting like this is the next evolution of art and anyone with concerns is just holding back “DA FUTER”.

    I also have concerns about the environmental/energy costs of AI – Just in general. Not just AI Images or Chatbots or whatever. AI can be a good thing, a tool to help us. And even when it’s useless, it’s kinda fun to mess about with. But the energy and environmental costs of all that computing, especially the amount of it that is wasted because even if AI ultimately becomes a part of our lives, it is DEFINITELY a wasteful investment bubble right now – THAT sucks. And THAT seems to have no obvious solution.


  • I only learned what pacman -Syu meant, after literal years of typing it in not knowing anything other than “this updates the packages”, because I got curious and googled it.

    To me it was just an adeptus mechanicus incantation.

    EDIT: And I still have no clue how ‘y’ translates to ‘refresh the database’. Like. Sure. S to synchronise from the server to the computer. And u to mark for update all the updatable packages. But – Why the fuck is ‘y’ the refresh?




  • But you don’t need to be following the news personally.

    Many people around you are.

    Those people have this perception, and so they act accordingly. You are looking at memes? Well it’s a matter of hours until you see a meme about wanting to die on 196 or whatever. You watching TV Shows? Yeah TV Shows are entirely drunk on the zeitgeist and the zeitgeist is one of despair.

    Ergo. You are surrounded by people who think everything is fucked ™ – And therefore you’ll also feel like everything is fucked ™


  • Because you are staring at the pain rectangle and being bombarded with every bad thing that is happening in the entire planet nonstop.

    Your ape brain was not meant for this. Imagine if you lived in the 1300s – Plague, famines, wars, pogroms. They had it all. But any one human being would only ever hear about whatever bad things were happening near to them.




  • Just one. JUST. ONE.

    Communities almost wholly moderated by an automod bot, that is extremely strict about nonsense, and where 99% of posts are strictly forbidden.

    “ALL QUESTIONS SHOULD BE IN THE MEGATHREAD!!!1111111111one” and then you peep the megathread, it’s months-full of unanswered questions because no actual community member READS the fucking megathread, and then the excuse is “BECAUZ WE WANT QUALITY CONTENT!!!” and you check the sub itself and the “quality content” is one post every 3 months by the powermod that has the power to override the bot.

    This was the most annoying thing about Reddit and made getting conversations going nearly impossible. PLEASE do not bring that over.


  • Brazil is a very large place with each state/region having its own type of food.

    So if I may make a suggestion of my hometown’s favourite snack (which I think originated in the state of São Paulo)

    We call it Prensadão – It’s a Brazilian take on a hot dog, and like everything Brazilian… It is very extra.

    The hardest part to get outside of Brazil is probably the bread. It uses a bread that is a bit like a hamburger bun in texture, but instead of being round, it’s a rectangle and it’s large.

    You start with hot-dog sausages. Cook them up, then slice them in half longitudinally (so you get two long half-sausages). Get like three or four of those and put them in the bread.

    Then you add Potato Straws, Cheddar Cheese, Little Tomato Cubes, bacon (fried until crispy), and optionally some chicken (grilled and then cut into tiny shreds)

    (Other optional additions: Calabrese sausages, sweet corn, ham, mozarella, cream cheese)

    You know you reached ideal Prensadão density when it looks like you CAN’T CLOSE YOUR DAMN SANDWICH.

    So now you put it in a hot pan, get a large piece of metal, and squish that bitch down using your body for leverage (our local restaurants have dedicated presses for doing this, but you can and I HAVE improvised with just. ANOTHER PAN.) – Flip. Press again to toast and squeeze on the other side.

    Serve with a sauce made of mayonnaise blended with garlic and chives for added flavour.

    Or if you want the meal traditionally associated with Brazil, you should try feijoada. Made with black beans, pork, and sausages. Served with some oranges to take the edge off.






  • Windows 95 was still just another dos program on top of a shell.

    That’s just straight up misinformation. Even 3.1 wasn’t really like that anymore (though, it was closer). Windows 9x uses DOS as a bootloader, and retains the original DOS components for backwards compatibility, but loads into a fully 32-bit kernel with preemptive multitasking and many features DOS couldn’t dream of touching. It is built atop the original 16-bit DOS, and inherits a lot of jank from that, which is why eventually they ditched it to use the developed-from-the-ground-up NT kernel everywhere instead (and broke compatibility with a lot of old hardware and software because of it, much to the chagrin of the users–)

    Huh? Coming from an Amiga it really didn’t seem innovative. Or OS2 or BeOS (which ran circles around Win 95) or Macs.

    OS/2 and Windows are siblings, with most of OS/2 being written by the same people within Microsoft. Windows NT is what happened when Microsoft decided to backstab IBM (again) to increase their profit margin (as I myself have said, Microsoft has always been bad from the ‘evil megacorp’ angle).

    BeOS was, at the time, an operating system only for Be’s own PowerPC based workstations (and workstation != desktop, especially in those days) – Though there were talks to bring at least parts of it to desktop as the basis for MacOS Copland, that didn’t go through (instead Apple vored NeXT and used its nutrients to make OSX). – It didn’t get a public, user-facing, desktop release that a mere mortal could buy until 1997 (on PPC Mac. 98 for the x86 PC version), which in mid-90s tech terms is like a geological epoch later. Are we also going to compare Doom 2 to Half Life and shit on Doom 2 for being behind HL?

    MacOS at the time was still using Cooperative Multitasking (which is what Win 3.0 used, and is unreliable af because any crashed program takes out the entire OS with it) and wouldn’t get true Preemptive Multitasking until OSX in '99.

    The amiga did get Preemptive Multitasking to the desktop first (in '86, even. Commodore seriously didn’t know what they had, or they would have ruled the roost), but preemptive multitasking wasn’t the only feather in 9x’s hat.

    DirectX was so good at doing what it did (acting as a layer of abstraction between gamedevs and hardware, allowing them to just ask the library to draw and play stuff, and it would figure itself out with the hardware) that alternatives like SDL took another 3 years to exist and much longer to catch up – And it was necessary, because the PC space, unlike the likes of the Mac or Amiga, was an industry standard rather than being controlled by one company, and users could have any combination of wacky third party video and soundcards, and DirectX just dealt with it.

    And Plug-and-Play, while buggy as fuck to the point that it really only worked when it wanted, was something that hadn’t been done before. Adding new hardware and the OS just figures that shit out, no reboot required? Unheard of.

    Edit: BeOS in 97, not 98. Still retains the whole ‘this was a geological epoch by 90s tech standards’ comment though.


  • That.

    I’ll add that a lot of the issues people have with the registry have less to do with the registry itself (it’s just – A database of settings. Nothing shocking about that) and a lot to do with Windows’ philosophy and the problems that creates.

    Like yes, the registry of a computer that has been running windows for a few years is a bloated mess which creates a bunch of problems of its own – But that’s not in and of itself because the registry is a centralised binary database.

    Rather it is because – Well. Microsoft. Tech corporations in general. Want computers to behave like magic boxes. Not machines you have to learn to operate. This means that whenever you install something or modify something on windows, you are left in the dark as to a lot of the stuff going on under the hood. Windows error messages are very obscure and nonspecific. When you install something, do you know what it has added to your registry? What dlls it has dropped around your machine? And with so many third party programmes and utilities dropping into the system, that shit builds up, and not even an experienced user will fully know what has built up unless they’ve been making a deliberate effort to keep track.

    Compare that to Linux, which is made by nerds FOR nerds… And so everything is thoroughly documented. With the general unspoken understanding that a. You will sooner or later go under the hood and mess about in there; and b. If something fucks up, whether it is directly your fault or not, you’re the one who will have to fix it, so here’s ALL the receipts on how shit works so you CAN do that.


  • People who don’t like Glass Themes can’t be my friends. Frutiger Aero looks like happiness and a better time when technology was exciting instead of alarming.

    You are otherwise entitled to your opinion (fwiw I never used those libraries and still don’t know what they were FOR) and I entirely believe your experience of having instability. Windows just be like that sometimes. No pooping here.