umbraroze

There’s two kinds of crypto scams: Ones that actually involve crypto and ones that don’t.

Vague, possibly impossible to implement promises about proposed future functionality are an integral part of the crypto sphere!

Damn, OneCoin was bad. Ruja Ignatova was the first crypto scammer I’ve seen talked about in national news and she was also made fun of in a news comedy show over here. A true scam pioneer.

Brief history of YAML:

“Oh no! All of these configuration file formats are complicated. I want to make things simpler!”

(Years go by)

“…I have made things more complicated, haven’t I?”

YAML is generally good if it’s used for what it was originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data). Problem is, people use it for so much more. (My personal favourite pain example: i18n stuff in Ruby on Rails. YAML language files work for small apps, but when the app grows, so does the pain.)

Yup. The robots.txt file is not only meant to block robots from accessing the site, it’s also meant to block bots from accessing resources that are not interesting for human readers, even indirectly.

For example, MediaWiki installations are pretty clever in that by default, /w/ is blocked and /wiki/ is encouraged. Because nobody wants technical pages and wiki histories in search results, they only want the current versions of the pages.

Fun tidbit: in the late 1990s, there was a real epidemic of spammers scraping the web pages for email addresses. Some people developed wpoison.cgi, a script whose sole purpose was to generate garbage web pages with bogus email addresses. Real search engines ignored these, thanks to robots.txt. Guess what the spam bots did?

Do the AI bros really want to go there? Are they asking for model collapse?

If musk pulled the same kinda shit, he’d be mocked for it too

Yes, it is funny how more people are not calling out the Electric Car Jesus for swooping around in private jets and single-handedly undoing any positive effect his customers can have…

I’m, like, OK, nuclear power isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
But power plants like that should probably serve wider municipal needs.

Building a private nuclear power plant just to power a data center? Well that’s clearly stupid.
Building a private nuclear power plant just to power a data center focused on a niche application? Well you know how that goes.

Also, look up SL-1. Disturbingly few Americans I’ve talked to have heard about that. Generally a good argument about why not every single thing should be powered by a tiny dedicated nuclear reactor.

In middle of a couple of worldbuilding projects. Haven’t really had much good ideas for the fantasy project lately.

Ah HA! Maybe I’ll do some mild subversion of expectations.
Maybe one of the most famous sites in this world, where people come to visit from far and wide, has a tiny old withered tree.
…I mean, there could be a lot of legitimate logical reasons why this site could me important. Maybe the tree has a really fascinating story behind it.
Heck, there’s probably many such places on our world too! Can think of at least one from the top of my mind.
I should write this down.

Last year I felt really crappy as far as my writing projects go, but in the last few months, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that even smallest ideas can sometimes break the writer’s block. Keep writing them down!

The Walt Disney Company is not ready for the amount of Steamboat Love ❤️🛳️❤️🛳️❤️ that the Rule34 folks will throw at them. Hot Steampipe Action is on the menu, folks.

Oh content from this blog has been popping up in random places. Methinks it’s le epic trole.

So yeah, Xfce looks the same as it did 10 years ago.

And?

Desktop environment is meant to launch apps and give me windows and maybe have a file manager. Xfce does that. It’s a desktop environment.

Hey, “modern” desktop environment enthusiasts, if you bring Compiz back from the dead, give us luddites a call, will you? Ohhhh you kids should have seen it back in the day. Windows and Mac users saw Compiz in action and were, like, “wat.” You don’t get them to react that way to modern Linux desktops, no. And all that is lost now. Thanks Wayland.

I love watching Let’s Plays of Telltale games and similar games like Life is Strange. But usually, the first episode is hardest to watch through, because in these types of games, the first episode also serves as a very drawn out tutorial and has the most of the lore dumps.

Yeah, there’s an important distinction. Just because you could use Linux doesn’t mean you can at any particular moment.

I don’t really do music production; I’m more into writing and visual arts and photography. I could do all of those things on Linux and be perfectly productive. But there’s a difference between being productive and being optimal. My current process happens to be based on software that runs on Windows. (Heck, a lot of the software I use already runs on both Windows and Linux, anyways.)

The key here being that you shouldn’t lock yourself too much to just one tool and one approach, and that actually goes both ways.

And that there is the real crime. It’s a real shame no one’s making a tape drive at the consumer market price point. Tapes are a hell of a lot more convenient for backups and archival than the giant weird pile of storage formats we’ve seen over years.

Turtles are such underrated creatures and most people don’t realise how important they are to computer science. Turtle robots! Turtle graphics! Not to even mention the very concept of shell access! And yes, turtles are probably very happy that Secure Shell was invented.

I used to watch iilluminaughtii several years ago, probably because I’ve been grabbing popcorn and enjoying watching someone dunking on multi-level marketing since, uh, 90s at least. Then I watched some video that was about some topic that I was kind of in middle of a deep dive, too (I can’t remember which exactly. Elan School, probably?). And the video was bland as hell. And then I was like “yeah, most of these other videos are kind of forgettable shallow pap too”.

…and this year we found out about the whole landlordy corporate town fancier backstabby financial abuser helicopter-CEO situation. And the content mill situation. And the plagiarism thing. Can’t forget the plagiarism thing. …I was like, “oh this all just makes sense now.”

Probably some other NPC that does some highly specific thing. Like the name rater, or whatever.

Not important in the grand scheme of things, but people all over the world come for that one weird task I can do, and that’s enough for me.

Well of course it has a picture of his parents fighting (???) in it. Dude’s a severely messed up right-winger.

Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.

Technically, SQL is case-insensitive.

Practically, you want to capitalise the commands anyway.

It gives your code some gravitas. Always remember that when you’re writing SQL statements you’re speaking Ancient Words of Power.

Does that JavaScript framework that got invented 2 weeks ago by some snot-nosed kid need Words of Power? No. Does the database that has been chugging on for decades upon decades need Words of Power? Yes. Words of Power and all the due respect.

/serious Well, yes, most APIs are meant for system-to-system interaction, that’s kind of a given. But since this particular API is clearly meant for human-to-system interaction, returning a human-readable response is adequate. Yes, a better design would probably allow the client to specify additional parameters about the desired response.

/back-to-jokes Yeah, well this kind of sums up most of my job applications. I send an application and the recruiting people are all like “OK”.