baltakatei

A sternly worded Crunchwrap.

If my workstation goes up in value in 4 years, something is seriously going.

Ah, the Mel Brooks guillotine.

Not to be seconded by the Founding Mothers’ BL Library.

Shut off their water lines, cut off their power, cancel trash collection, and close their roads. Failure to abide by the laws regulating infrastructure means they don’t deserve infrastructure.

What’s Digg?

Something something revealed preference.

Student: “Hey, thanks for the Bash script! It didn’t know you could use the mapfile built-in to populate an array using standard input lines without a while loop. mapfile -t my_array < <(seq 1 10) is really handy!”

Vibe coding guru: “I have no idea what you’re talking about. That sounds like plumbing. You should let AI handle those details. Focus on the big picture.”

I thought Debian was as sluggish as Windows until I was forced to use the LXQt desktop environment instead of the default GNOME on an old Compaq laptop since that’s all it could handle. Turns out, GNOME looks nice but it kept my old laptop’s mid-2000s i386 CPU churning at 50% 24/7. LXQt? Barely a blip. Sure, it couldn’t run Firefox quickly, but at least its fan was silent when idling or when I was simply using the laptop as a dumb SSH client into a much more powerful remote server.

I now use LXQt on my main workstation because I don’t need fancy tilíng windows or Wayland.

Exfoliate that shit.

What about the Daniel Suarez Daemon, a decision tree designed to take over the world?

The HT in HTTP stands for HyperText, not HyperCode.

Look at score. Find key. Press key. Repeat a bajillion times until it becomes too bothersome to slow down to look at your hands.

For more retellings of US government atrocities, see the Relno the Storykeeper puppet shorts in Jason Steele’s Vulo Lives:

• The Shadow and João Goulart
• The Creature from the Northern Woods
• The Watcher and Juan José Torres
• The Hand that Guides the Butcher
• The Coming of the Valuable Fiend
• The Train on the Second Track
• The Falconer and the Dirty Bird
• The Story of the Midnight Hunter

Does it act as a dumb monitor? Can all smart TV features be permanently disabled?

Theoretically, it’s possible for the user to authenticate their age without either the site or service knowing the user’s identity. Quick and dirty example:

There’s a thing called a ring signature that allows one to prove that one of a large number of people digitally signed something. Let’s say a million people all have private keys whose corresponding public keys are registered to a database after they flashed their state ID at a post office or something to prove they are ≥18 years of age. So, John Smith uses his private key plus all 1 million public keys to sign a statement that he sends to a server saying he’s ≥18. The server then takes all 1 million public keys plus the signed message John provided and verifies that his signature is among the 1 million but cannot calculate which exact public key belongs to John. The verification process requires all 1 million public keys as input; you cannot, for example, try an omit each public key one-by-one to see which causes the verification process to fail.

Currently, there is ongoing research on how to make compact ring signatures since they can be very large the more public keys are involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

That said, even if you had scalable compact ring signature technology, I’d be more worried about advertiser deänonymization efforts once a user has logged in that check browser canvas size, IP address, user agent, font availability, etc. See https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Also, ring signatures for age verification don’t actually verify age, just that someone proved their age at some point in the past to the owner of the public key database; just like an adult can log into YouTube on behalf of their children and let the children go to town, John could give anyone access to his private key regardless of age.

“Hey, Uncle, can I use your age tokens to do my research homework? The rich kids all get to use the entire Internet because their uncles let them ride their age credentials. Thanks!”

That exception probably would be twisted into permission to add an “AI summary” section to each article.

So, instead of the length of their beard it’s the length of their socks we should be considering?

So… they removed Wordpad to push people into using Word… and now they removed Notepad to push people into… this monstrosity? Why does Notepad support hyperlinks now?

Back when I used Notepad, it was to strip out rich text formatting and reliably get consistently distinct text, especially if I configured it to use a monospace font. Now I have to worry about embedded hyperlinks sending me to God-knows-where?