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 using Finnish keyboard layout (same as Swedish basically).

I like how AltGr+7/8/9/0 gives me { [ ] }, it's a very nice grouping. The key next to Z is < > and you get | with AltGr, which is very handy.

Only thing that's mildy annoying from programming viewpoint is that for tilde and backtick, the keys do diacritics - you need to press the diacritic key and space. Backtick is especially fun, because it's shift+acute, space. Meanwhile, the key next to 1 does § ½, which aren't that handy most of the time. I often just stick backtick on that key if I'm particularly assed to customise keyboard keyouts. Similarly, shift+4 is ¤, which is another not a particularly useful character (but I don't mind that, because £ $ € all need to be produced with AltGr, which is at least consistent).

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!

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.