Debian girl here. We may not have updated anything in 5 years but boy howdy are things stable or what.

“We” didn’t stop using Firefox. Open source boycotts are complicated because the software is separate from the developers. You can keep using the software even if you disagree with the development organisation.

Mozilla organisation is getting problematic for a whole lot of reasons. My issue with them is that they seem to be in the “more money than they know what to do with it” phase. They’re flush with cash, but it’s not reflecting to the product. If they buy an ad company and plan AI stuff, maybe things aren’t going well.

Problem is, there’s no viable competing organisation. Protest forks of software don’t really work that well unless you can actually guarantee the development support. Compare this to what happened when OpenOfficeOrg successfully moved to LibreOffice - developers saw the old organisation didn’t work, so they made a new one that did.

I’m an amateur writer. One of the worldbuilding things I wanted to explore for my fantasy/steampunk word was the fact that the life of vampires who originate from commoner class must really suck, pun very much intended. You’d end up as a “high functioning” undead who gets even the few rights you previously had stripped from you. Fertile ground for social commentary.

So in this setting there’s an autonomous vampire state that’s essentially communist. In other nations, vampires are, if not persecuted outright, at least constantly struggling for recognition, and are exploited as night shift workers in the emerging industry.

I wish I could find the urban fantasy story that inspired me to explore this. It was also based on the “hey, not all vampires live glorious lifestyles” premise. I think this was in some Humble Bundle.

GIMP didn’t “just figure out non-destructive editing by 2025”. You’re talking as if it was something that the GIMP development team just decided to randomly add recently, after previously ignoring user demands.

The foundation for that functionality (GEGL) has been in development for ages and was also used for some functionality in 2.6 for a long time. The reason why it took this long is that it’s a pretty fundamental change to how the app works. Also, that meshed with other upcoming changes at the time. Also, small development team.

Well I do use Linux on various devices and on my Raspberry Pi, it’s just that my laptop is Windows. No, don’t throw rocks at me, I use WSL too.

Also, I’ve somehow yet to post on Mastodon from Emacs. The existence of such Emacs addon didn’t surprise me, because I’ve posted to identica and twitter from Emacs. You know, back in the day.

If I go to a prominent government building, and there’s posters of people on row, my first thought would be that these are either candidates or the freshly elected officials.

[looks closer and squints]

Ah, being a foreigner I don’t know much about the details of American politics, but these must be the “Senate”, right? A drug lord here, a kiddy fiddler there.

Me, I’m old, so I just keep using apt-get, because that’s all we had back in the day, and I never bothered to learn what’s the big deal about apt. It’s just a frontend, isn’t it?

I think it wasn’t even an OCR bug per se, it was a bug in the image compression algorithm implementation. “Yeah these squiggles on the paper look basically the same, guess we’ll save space here.”

OCR would have at least been mitigated by the fact that you could see if the text didn’t match the image. And since OCR isn’t perfect anyway, you could even anticipate that. But if the image is screwed up, well, what do you do then?

These days both Twitter and Reddit have wacky UI messages written by completely different teams. One team is all business-like as in “Here’s some stern warnings you’re not going to like.” The other team is all casual and wayyy too friendly and fellow-kidsy, like “Did someone say MEMES?” (to which most reasonable people respond “fuck you Elon/Spez, you’re not funny”)

Joker poster
Fight option

She should don Catwoman costume, gently pummel the dude to submission, and say “How’s this for a BOTTOM TEXT”?

I’m a random amateur fantasy writer. One day, long ago, I was working on an interactive fiction game which was billed as a dating sim where you get to have a night out with one of my characters, who is an alchemist.

Bulk of the game was supposed to involve helping her examine various ingredients on the shelf of her shop and seeing which had gone bad. You know, dating the stuff can be crucial.

It’s a single car company. World economy doesn’t depend on Tesla’s success. Not even the American economy. If Tesla dies, it’s just a canary in the coalmine for much, much bigger economic problems. Like, you know, how they put dipshits in the White House, or something. So it’s kind of interesting that Elon has a moment of lucidity here, because no one around him seems to realise how screwed they are.

In the days of yore, Roman generals, upon conquering new lands for the Empire and receiving highest cheer and adulation from the crowds in Triump, would specifically assign a slave to whisper to their ear, at the height of the ceremony, “remember that you’re but a mortal.”

Spez is like “fuck that nonsense. If I keep kissing enough asses at bigger tech companies, maybe I’ll get a blood donor virgin dude of my own. And then I’ll live forever!”

I left Reddit after the API broke down, and it took me a while to get a client because I first went with Kbin and it didn’t work with Lemmy clients. After I got to Lemmy I kept waiting for Sync to get good. Nah, sadly not. Switched to Connect, and later Voyager, and I think this is where it’s at.

It has! At least on the web, if you view user profiles - but most of the time they’re pretty useless because in the comments they’re scaled down to text size. And the Lemmy clients don’t bother with them at all. Communities do have icons which are at least more widely used and supported.

Mastodon is my go-to “shout in the void about my goings-on” platform.

Pixelfed is where I post my original photography and artwork.

Bookwyrm is for my book nerdery, mostly.

Edit: Oh and I have a Matrix account but despite the fact that I mentioned it to literally all of my friends, nobody uses it. I keep it around in case someone actually wants to send me private messages because Mastodon is kinda badly suited for that.

Welcome to Lemmy. We don’t have collectible avatars on blockchain. Sorry if you were into those. But you can make your own avatars if you want, which I think is even better!

train cars only for women

Good thing nobody can actually suggest that in this day and age. Because that’s a concept that makes everyone immediately go “Ooooh, how delightfully 1800s. Wait, why are we doing this, I thought we were better than that.”

…If someone actually suggests that, have them be detained by a few chimney sweeps until the police arrives by horse carriage.

Notepad had one job. Operate on a damn text file. Operate on the damn text files I choose.

I knew it was going down the drain when I reopened Notepad and it opened the files that were previously open. No. Don’t do that. That’s overly helpful. You were only supposed to operate on the damn files I chose. These files I’m about to work with aren’t necessarily the files I previously worked on. If I want this functionality I might as well open it in vscode.

I’m, like, screw it, might as well keep Emacs running if I need random temporary text editing.

I am definitely going to need my morning coffee. I see the word “Y’all” and I’m somehow thinking “shouldn’t it be Xall if we’re taking about X11? Wait what’s wrong with my brain”