I was born in '79. I know a lot of 1980s/1990s stuff that’s floating in popular consciousness right now is fictional romanticised bullshit, because it’s based on romaticised fiction made in that era.

For example, I knew most kids didn’t hang out at The Mall. I was a kid. We didn’t have a goddamn mall. American movies and TV showed kids hanging out at The Mall. Maybe hanging out at the Mall was an aspirational thing. Or something.

It’s a thing that happened for some people but it’s not the entire truth about the era. It’s not just that people tend to remember the good bits, they tend to remember the good bits that happened to someone else.

There’s a reason why nobody makes AI slop about the Finnish 1990s banking crisis and its wide systemic repercussions felt to this day. Edit: Sorry if none of this makes sense, just ate something other than cheap potatoes for the first time in a week

I should reread the book. It was hyped as a good book. It was a good book.

Then I went to see the movie. Came out of the cinema and muttered “well that was a bunch of unrelated nonsense”. Went home.

Oh wow, Elon figured out how we’ll finally get AGI. The key thing is to publish an automatic mobile client update every single hour of the day! That was the secret productivity metric that every single other company was missing. Thanks, big brain business boy!

Yup, Fallout Wiki has a pretty crazy history. I don’t remember if they were originally a Fandom wiki, but at some point they definitely went “well, we don’t want to go with Fandom, we’ll go with Curse wiki host instead.” Then Fandom bought Curse wikis and put all of them under Fandom banner anyway.

The independent Fallout Wiki is basically where the actual community is right now, the Fandom wiki is just there to confuse passers-by with their high search engine rank. Fandom has the policy that the community can fork a wiki and go elsewhere, but they will not close down the Fandom wiki, so good luck with your search rankings.

Last time Clock was interesting was in the Windows 3.0 days. Windows 11 clock is just beyond meh.

Since Windows these days can’t be arsed to have an analog clock with second hand (which is what I need for properly setting clocks on all of the devices that don’t have internet access), I just made one myself one day.

you asked for thoughts about your character backstory and i put it into chat gpt for ideas

If I want ideas from ChatGPT, I could just ask it myself. Usually, if I’m reaching out to ask people’s opinions, I want, you know, their opinions. I don’t even care if I hear nothing back from them for ages, I just want their input.

A couple of games from recent years: Chants of Sennaar (linguistic puzzles and incredible vibes) and 1000xResist (this game had something many big game devs seemingly have completely forgotten about, specifically, writing).

“Hmm. I wonder. I was thinking of dancing trees. Now I’m wondering what’s next. Screaming trees. Yeah. That’s got to be the answer. Screaming trees.” - private notes by Hans Reiser, filesystem designer and a convicted murderer

(OK, that’s a fake quote. This one is real:)

“Trees have their roots pointing up. And if you cut a tree apart, you get a forest. No, I’m not drunk.” - one of my computer science profs, on data structures

Original definition: using AI to create a small bespoke kinda-crap-but-it-works apps or games for personal use. It’s a shitty proto but it’s interesting.

(My reaction: ooo not my jam but that sounds neat I guess)

Modern definition: it’s a multi-quadrispillion dollar industry and it’s the future according to some very important board members.

(My reaction: …capitalism ruins fucking everything)

The problem isn’t that the data is already public.

The problem is that the AI crawlers want to check on it every 5 minutes, even if you try to tell all crawlers that the file is updated daily, or that the file hasn’t been updated in a month.

AI crawlers don’t care about robots.txt or other helpful hints about what’s worth crawling or not, and hints on when it’s good time to crawl again.

Android actually does have an operating system level option for this!

Go to the app settings: Settings / Applications / (Pick the application) - or: Long press on application icon / Application info

Then: Storage and cache / Clear cache

(I don’t know what the actual labels are in English version.)

My favourite part of Microsoft login experience:

Me: “Hi, I’d like to set up 2FA.”
MS: “Sure, you can use Microsoft Authenticator on Android.”
Me: “A separate app? (Grumble) Okay then.”

(A few years go by. I get asked to do 2FA absolutely zero times.)

Me: “…Damn, this 2FA settings page is hard to find. What happened to the app? It’s no longer in Google Play.”
MS: “What app?”
Me: “I believe it was called Microsoft Authenticator?”
MS: “Oh that app! It’s long obsolete. Don’t worry about it. You can now just use your favourite TOTP app.”
Me: “Sweet! Let’s set up Aegis.”

(Several years go by and Microsoft still hasn’t asked me to use 2FA for any fucking thing)

“Hey boss, about that load of bricks you asked me to haul here so that the protesters would grab them and we would then arrest them? Uh, some construction worker dude just showed up with a truck and stole all of them. …No we somehow didn’t catch the license plate. …Well the surveillance video is pretty bad, the dude just looked like a construction worker, not much to go by. …I mean, of course nobody did a thing, it was a construction worker, no one gives a shit if a construction worker picks up a pile of bricks. …No, I don’t know what he’s going to do with them. Build a house, probably, the bastard - none of them build giant walls, like they should.”

I can’t remember [Alphabet] having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded.

Oh come on, they made Google Wave, that was pretty neat! And… Um… That’s it I guess?

…Thanks for the clarification. Oh cool, all I got in my instructions was “here’s our crappy set-top box, you should plug it in the ‘ARC’ thing if you have one.” Does this set-top box have output options? Well it’s a crappy set-top box, what do you think. *sigh* One more reason I’m canceling that service the moment the contract allows.

Lemmy and Piefed support profile pictures. They show up in the web view. It’s just that the mobile apps don’t bother with them. (At least the good one doesn’t. I’m talking about Voyager)

Stereo racks like this? This is childhood home stuff.

Me? When I moved on my own for university, all I had on audio front was a CD/cassette boombox.

And it never got better. Had 4.1 speakers for my computer at one point. Now, not even that.

(Side note: I swear, people who came up with HDMI don’t know what they’re doing. Ethernet? Who the hell asked for Ethernet? We have Ethernet cables for Ethernet. Anyway: in a sensible design, televisions/monitors would have HDMI Audio Out ports. Which you then could wire to your brand spanking new digital input based amplifier in a giant stereo rack. Or a D/A converter box that feeds your ancient amplifier. Do any TVs and monitors work that way? Of course not, we have janky audio output nonsense. New TVs and monitors don’t necessarily even have headphone jacks. Why.)

(Edit: Apparently I was talking nonsense. I definitely should get my morning coffee now.)

I also thought that newer Halo games aren’t as good as the old ones, simply because in Halo 3 and Reach, the game said “Welcome!” in the beginning of the online matches. I was, like, thank you, happy to be here.

Doom did have text chat, much in the same vein as Quake later on.

However, Doom originally didn’t have TCP/IP, it only supported IPX/SPX networking on LANs. (Though, why use chat when you can yell.) It also supported point to point modem connections, for which the text chat was probably useful. Later versions of Doom and all modern source ports support TCP/IP though.

As a turtle fan it’s always cool when you can look at a diagram and suddenly spot a turtle on it! 🐢

It’s like looking at the H-R diagram and going “ooo, Discworld would be right about there, possibly”