Avi Greenbury

*actually reads tfa*

Oh. It's the customisation app that stopped working, so the "freak[ing] out" was presumably the mouse reverting to defaults in the absence of a running customisation app?

What. How does a mouse get out onto the Internet in the first place?

Oh, like Budweiser?

A photo of gift cards for sale at a store, with one that reads "HER" with a pink background, one that reads "HIM" with a blue background, and with someone holding up a third gift card that reads "ONLINE" with a yellow background.

my gender reveal party

Going down the rage warehouse anyone need anything?

Even without the AI there's nothing here to say this is the badge belonging to the person making the posts! At the very least I'd expect it with today's copy of a well known newspaper or something.

Microsoft Secrets: Converting a UNIX .COM Site to Windows

buff.ly/6xHLLD9

This white paper discusses the approach used to convert the Hotmail web server farm from UNIX to Windows 2000, and the reasons the features and techniques were chosen.

I know at least a couple of people who plan to fund their retirement based on Perl becoming our generation's Cobol

Oooh, I've wondered on and off about this and the inevitability of that migration since well-actuallying all over the internet about how "even ms run Hotmail on Unix"

Clearly not deeply or early enough to realise it was win2k they migrated it to!

It's a whole genre it's beautiful

Hah, this reminds me of my stepsister asking why all the lines I was writing ended with "crying faces" - the `);` that so many lines of Perl end with!

Because if you're going to give someone a general purpose computer it's only fair to let them run general purpose things on it.

I don't want to be banned from useful but niche features just in case someone else decides to use it to distract them.

That ... sounds like you're asking for another meeting

This will not go well.

What this will do is push teenagers, already more digitally literate than lawmakers, into using increasingly sketchy methods to avoid age checks.

Let me tell you how I know... 🧵

1/

Oh! We are the opposite - pureed potato is what you get in the shop bought ones, proper latkes are coarse gratings! But we are less fundamentalist about it and more into sampling and comparing and contrasting...

I think it's Computer People in general; I'm having exactly this experience right now with macos. When you care about how your computer works it can be baffling to see what other people unknowingly up with., while not really noticing what it is you are used to putting up with.

Learned today that “Galápagos” comes from a Spanish word for tortoise, meaning that “Galápagos Tortoise” is,

in fact,

a tortology

My kids woke up so excited this morning for the first night of Hannukah and now yet again we have a festival where I’m very conflicted about whether it’s safe to take them to synagogue to celebrate. Communities shouldn’t have to live like this.

Mmm, I've for a while now wished my corp laptop could be windows+WSL rather than a Mac, but as I hear more about Win11 getting in the way I'm changing my mind...

Yeah, I think the problem is probably that I'm now using the same keyboard for both with different maps. Hadn't occurred to me to move the Mac keys to feel like everyone else's!

My _mac_ on the other hand! I'm forever fighting muscle memory over it's unique keyboard shortcuts, and when I veer slightly into tinkering it's such a different system to Linux and one that really doesn't want to be diagnosed. Reading that piece I can't imagine him finding macos less frustrating!

My laptop is mostly a Firefox and file manager machine at the moment and I'm dimly aware that I should have Wayland problems, but I don't, for instance. I've never had to think about that scaling thing, I just set it in gnome and it's worked for everything I run.

I've wondered about a thing recently, where most Linuxes are great if you do 100% dull stuff on them or if you're a full on tinkerer, but are really bad at the slightly odd use cases (like RTL and LTR language mixing, mounting a phone on a laptop, running keepassx, whatever it is that's chrome-only)

Comic. Doing a task using a company or organization’s website: [flowchart] Go to website, try to log in → Did it work? → Yes → Try to do your task. → Did it work? Yes → Nice! Done! If logging in did not work → Spend hours troubleshooting account / login. If that works, go to Try to do your task. If no → Give up and call customer service. If spending hours troubleshooting doesn’t work, also give up and call customer service. After calling customer service: Hold message: “Did you know you could do all this more quickly and easily on our website? Just go to w-w-w dot…” → Throw phone and laptop into the sea.

Website Task Flowchart

xkcd.com/3175/

As someone who grew up without the notion of Santa I've often wondered what the norm is for when the kid realises - I guess normally the kid has doubts for a while and then by the time they're sure they don't want to admit to having ever believed, so there's not normally an actual conversation?

No, you guys had a whole revolution the last time we were allowed to vote on what happened over there, it was quite a mess and we've politely abstained since.

Image from Google News with an article about a motorway crash on the M65 with an image of an M65 Gemini plane

Twice in one week. Once again there was a crash on the M65 motorway and once again Googles autonews that clearly has no human editing throws up and image of the M65 Gemini aeroplane. Welcome to your dogshit AI generated future.

Remember when Google was good at stuff? How did they fall so far as to become the poster child for terrible AI products?

I use it near-daily and this is not my experience. I does a lot of "I don't know", which makes sense given the state of our docs, but I don't recall ever having had a useless answer from it.