Yes, we have ghost communities. No, it’s not a problem. We’re not here to entertain you 24/7.

The Reddit communities that drove the most engagement were also the most toxic. The good part of Reddit was, and to some extent still is, the slow-moving communities that act as magnets for scraps of obscure knowledge.

Have patience.

I carry a spare usb stick and some low-capacity microsd cards, because sometimes its just easier to hand someone a file the old fashioned way.

Sometimes I do play games on my phone, but whenever possible I use a usb or bluetooth gamepad, because touchscreens aren’t supplanting buttons any time soon.

And of course the Steam Deck is my favorite gizmo, not just because it can run every PC and emulator game, but also because it doesn’t have any bullshit preventing me from installing mods. If phone modding was easy and accessible i’d be willing to spend more on a phone.

I’ve written about this on my blog: https://nycki.net/blog/2024-09-21-01-ethics-of-reuploading/

in brief: I think the right to keep one’s memories should usually come first over another’s right to be forgotten, but its ultimately a consent issue.

We need to build a space for them to migrate into. Most of what I see on Lemmy is, frankly, whiny. If we want to grow we need to set a better example.

I remember downloading grainy Quicktime video files from people’s homepages. We didn’t need YouTube then and we don’t need it now.

I like to say that Star Wars is to fantasy what Discworld is to sci-fi. Star wars is swords and sorcery in space, and Discworld is ethics and robotics in middle earth.

you may want to be careful how you word this; if you focus too hard on a specific culture then you inherit that culture’s biases. I don’t think english language sci-fi novels are known for their racially and sexually diverse fandom, for instance.

When dating people, I often ask “name a book that’s not Harry Potter”. Doesn’t even have to be one you’ve read. Pick any book at all (other than Harry Potter) and tell me why you thought of it.

I’m not gatekeeping people who do or don’t read books, and i don’t care if it’s sci fi, fantasy, fanfic, nonfic, whatever. what i do care about is that you are aware of at least one book and care enough to remember what it’s about. That’s a low bar, but not as low as you might think.

The “no Harry Potter” clause isn’t specifically due to jkr being a terf (although that too), but because it’s such an overused answer. Yeah, I do remember the books that were so popular that they had their own brand of jelly beans. I have run out of things to say about them. Pick literally anything else.

depending on your budget, consider the MNT Reform, a notebook computer designed to be as repairable as you can possibly imagine. Every plastic part is 3d-printable, every circuitboard is open source, and it uses off-the-shelf parts for its keyboard, batteries, and screen. really its only downsides are the entry price (around $1600) and the fact that it relies on a relatively low-power SOC (system on chip) for CPU, GPU, and RAM.

disclaimer: I don’t have one myself (yet) but I’m keeping an eye on them because it looks like an incredible hobby computer

physche

none of them. linguistic gatekeeping is just disguised contempt for the poor. let people spell however the fuck they want.

Good callout! I agree, don’t rewrite just for the sake of rewriting. By “barely works” I am referring to code that functions but where a small change to the requirements would make it incorrect. In that situation you should “break it” in order to add changes, rather than calcifying the legacy code by building around it.

I’ve worked in programming for the last ten years and the most important skill you might not have guessed: Bravery. People are going to say “if it works, don’t fix it”, but a lot of real-world code barely works, and you need to be willing to break it to make it better.

If you’re good at your job, you will spend a lot of time reading other people’s code and testing small changes to see what happens. Write “new” code for yourself, because it’s fun and its good practice, but also learn to read and repair “old” code.

In my experience, “making a new one” never works.

What we can do is hack the old one. Go back to old protocols that work, undermine anything proprietary. Scrape fandomwiki to breezewiki, mod your discord client, make websites on neocities and nekoweb, use RSS to follow and email to comment. All the tools are there, leadership is the hard part.

I think you’re just describing market forces. Good recaps are harder to write. You’re describing cheap news. If we want proper news, we need to subsidize it.

i dont care to play god. but i will play new super luigi u.

step one, defragment ram to free up space

step two, read the now-unallocated ram directly to the screen

That depends; whose side is Artemis Fowl on?

I used to have this problem and I’m not sure exactly how to fix it but I can say that it helps a lot if you consider what potential responses you might get before you speak. Don’t just say things because you want to say them, say things because they open up the conversation for interesting responses. This is not the same as “asking a lot of questions” because that’s exhausting, as anyone who’s dealt with a Sealion knows. Instead, try to say things that are open-ended. If your chat’s tone is comedic, try not fixing your typos so that someone else can chain a joke off of them. If the chat’s tone is serious, try making an analogy that connects the current topic to a previous one. If the chat’s tone is toxic, you can leave.

yep! the ascii standard was originally invented for teletypewriters, and includes four ‘blocks’ of 32 codes each, for 128 in total, so it only uses seven bits per code.

the first block, hex 00 - 1F, contains control codes for the typewriter. stuff like “newline”, “backspace”, and “ring bell” all go in here.

The second block has the digits are in order, from hex 30 = ‘0’ all the way to hex 39 = ‘9’,

The uppercase alphabet starts at hex 41 = ‘A’, and exactly one block later, the lowercase alphabet starts at hex 61 = ‘a’. This means their binary codes are 100 0001 and 110 0001, differering only in a single bit! So you can easily convert between upper and lowercase ascii by flipping that bit.

The remaining space in the last three blocks is filled with various punctuation marks. I’m not sure if these are in any particular order.

The final ascii code, 7F, is reserved for “delete”, because its binary representation is 111 1111, perfect for “deleting” data on a punch card by punching over it.