LocalSend. It’s exactly like Apple Airdrop

This may be super-nitpicky (and I lose LocalSend and use it a lot), but there is one difference between LocalSend and Airdrop. LocalSend requires network connectivity (and requires the devices to be on the same network), whereas Airdrop can work without any network connection (using Bluetooth).

I recently discovered that he believes it’s theft if you watch one of his videos with an adblocker. Just out of spite, sometimes I put one of his videos on in the background (muted) with an adblocker.

Something something broken arms

Edit: Wow, thank you for the gold, kind stranger!

To be honest I’m more concerned by language-humor. Like not even saying what kind of humour, just any type of humour at all. Jokes are for adults only!

“But you already have a queen on the board”

“Have you heard of a sex act called ‘the ladder mate’? You’re the bottom bitch”

Yeah during the reddit exodus, people were recommending to overwrite your comment with garbage before deleting it. This (probably) forces them to restore your comment from backup. But realistically they were always going to harvest the comments stored in backup anyway, so I don’t think it caused them any more work.

If anything, this probably just makes reddit’s/SO’s partnership more valuable because your comments are now exclusive to reddit’s/SO’s backend, and other companies can’t scrape it.

According to here, Vermont and Utah do not have any titled players. At least Oregon has a FM.

Why the quotes?

If you ever see quotation marks in a headline, it simply means they’re attributing the word/phrase to a particular source. In this case, they’re saying that the word “security” was used verbatim in the intranet document. Scare quotes are never used in journalism, so they’re not implying anything by putting the word in quotation marks. They’re simply saying that they’re not paraphrasing.

Heads up for anyone (like me) who isn’t already familiar with SimpleX, unfortunately its name makes it impossible to search for unless you already know what it is. I was only able to track it down after a couple frustrating minutes after I added “linux” into the search on a lark.

Anyway it’s a chat protocol

If you pump out enough research papers, maybe Microsoft won’t move you over to the Office team.

The eval bar of the last 30 moves when I’m playing someone the same level as me

Linux is the only platform to get native WebGL, too!

It’s in Proverbs 11:20

The C++ developers are an abomination to the Lord,
But the Rustaceans in their Rust-based OSes are His delight.

Are zip and 7z really that much easier?

tar cf foo.tar.xz wherever/
zip -r foo.zip wherever/
7z a foo.7z wherever/

I get that tar needs an f for no-longer-relevant reasons whereas other tools don’t, but I never understood the meme about it beyond that. Is c for “create” really that much worse than a for “add”?

If go is “round chess”, I feel like chess should be “pointy chess”.

Out of curiosity, were you born roughly in the early 1990s? I asked because I could have written very much the same stuff as you, except shifted back 10 years. By the year 2000, in my view, the Internet was already locked down and was a completely shitty version of what I felt “the real Internet” was like. Technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s was (from my view) hopeful and optimistic, constantly getting better (computers doubling in speed and memory and getting cheaper every year), and by the early 2000s, it was just shitty AIM and MSN Messenger and Windows-only KaZaA garbage with MySpace and shitty centralization like that. MySpace completely shit all over the early web rings.

I’ve come to realize that it’s always been shitty. That’s my conclusion after going on a nostalgia trip and watching old Computer Chronicles shows and reading old computer articles from my golden age, now through adult glasses. I just didn’t understand all the politics and power manoeuvres at the time because I was a stupid kid who just saw cool things. Look at all the cool and exciting and great stuff that was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I thought was so wonderful, and realize that it was mostly just shitty attempts by shitty power-hungry companies trying to lock down something cooler that had happened earlier.

The difference in the early days I think is that companies wanted to control us and make our lives as terrible as possible. They just couldn’t because computers weren’t powerful enough yet.

PGP itself is a bit of mess.

For one thing, there’s really only one major/popular implementation of it these days, which is GPG. The codebase is arcane. Pretty major security vulnerabilities pop up constantly. It doesn’t have stable funding. Several years ago the entire project almost collapsed when the world discovered it had been maintained for several years by a single person who didn’t have any time or money to maintain it. The situation is a little bit better now, but not much.

(For this reason, people are starting to use age instead of gpg, as the code is much smaller, cleaner, forces safe defaults, and doesn’t seem to have security problems)

But the bigger problem that was never properly solved with PGP is key distribution. How do you get somebody’s key in the first place? Some people put their keys on their own personal (https) webpage, which is fine, but that’s not a solution for everyone, and doesn’t scale very well. Okay, so you might use a key server, but that has privacy implications (your identity is essentially public to the world) and centralizes everything down to a handful of small “trusted” key servers (since there would be no way to trust key servers in a decentralized way). We should probably just have email servers themselves serve keys somehow, but nobody’s put that into the email standard protocols.

The fact that keys expire amplifies all the problems with key distribution, and encourages people to do really unsafe things with keys, like just blindly trust them. You can sign other people’s keys for them, but that also does not scale very well.

The key distribution problem is something that things like Signal have “solved” with things like phone number verification, but there’s really no clear way to solve it on something totally distributed like email.

It was, but it was (and still is) a Unix tool. I believe POSIX still requires that more be provided (even if it’s just less secretly).

The original Unix more could only go forwards. Someone wanted to make something like more that could go both forwards and backwards, so he called it less as a joke (because “less” is a “backwards more”). For the past 40 years, everyone’s realized that less is much better than the original more, so nobody uses the original any more.

(MSDOS took the idea of “more” before “less” caught on).

When Elon Musk wants to see your top 10 most salient lines of code.

This one incident has had so many variations and urban legend-ish twists. This article itself even incorrectly lists the date as 1945 in one place, which is a common twist on the story, but incorrect. (This computer didn’t even come into existence until 1947, so the bug couldn’t have been found in 1945). For any know-it-alls who like to one-up people with the correct facts, here’s the truth behind the story, best I can figure out:

• This is indeed a real log entry book from September 9, 1947 (not 1945, as is sometimes reported)
• Grace Hopper did not write the log entry book
• Grace Hopper did not find the bug. She wasn’t even there that day
• Grace Hopper did make the story famous, though. Even though she wasn’t personally involved, she found it funny, and liked to tell it, which is how she got associated with the story
• This was not the first usage of the word “bug” (obviously, since “First actual case of bug being found” wouldn’t have been funny). The earliest recorded usage of “bug” (in an engineering context) was Thomas Edison in 1878, but it surely predated him, as well. It was in common usage among engineers in the early 20th century
• It was not the first usage of the word “debug”, as is often attributed. We have a record of the word “debug” being used in 1945. (Maybe this is why some versions of the Mark II story are sometimes given as 1945). “Debugging” was used in the aviation industry before the software industry
• The earliest recorded usage of the word “debug” in the context of software is 1952, but again, it probably predates its first record. Who knows if the word was already in use in 1947!