Recent submissions

Comment · 10 days ago
Dragon Age 2 wasn't 15 years ago... looks it up Oh, it was... What's happening...?
Comment · 1 month ago
Ah, vBulletin. I confess I don't recall if there was any important difference to me. And looking on https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com, which I like, it seems to run a thing called XenForo? Anyway, the look-and-feel of all three are similar.
Comment · 1 month ago
Attempt by who? Responsibility to do what? Not snark, just not following.
Comment · 1 month ago
I keep thinking of phpBB.

I loved posting on phpBB forums back in the day. Checking in every so often to see if anyone had replied to my posts. Often recognizing the same people, but also a healthy flow of new people.

Oddly... there was no such thing as push notifications and yet you could reliably count on people to check back. I guess because people were not coming from a feed or Reddit-like aggregator, they'd entered the conversation more intentionally?

No, it's probably more that a given thread was one conversation, like a GitHub issue, not a tree of comments with nested branches. Linear forum threads are great like that, posting is like joining a group of people by the vending machine, you're now in the group because you interrupted everyone else when you chimed in with your two cents, but that also means you belong there now.

Oh, and even more relevant: upvotes have zero effect on what post gets seen first! So it's not a popularity contest for the most pithy one-liner that gets upvoted to the top. You can write long-form posts and people will see them and engage on a human level.

I guess you can boil this down to "the absence of an algorithm": nothing has attempted to optimize what to put in front of their eyeballs, and so they engage with your long-form post. But when we talk about "opting out of algorithms", remember it's not just ML/AI algorithms: even Reddit/HN style upvotes are already an algorithm! It's obviously powerful enough that it has quite an effect.

Not sure why modern alternatives to phpBB, like Discourse, feel so impersonal and boring. I rarely feel the urge to check back on a Discourse thread, but that may just be me.

Comment · 2 months ago
> you can detect `curl | bash` server-side

Oh wow, ok. So if anything, manually do `curl` and `sh` separately?

Comment · 6 months ago
Appreciated this storytelling, it exposes some real procedural knowledge about using the Internet Archive.
Comment · 8 months ago
The prompt is the code :) The code is like a compiled binary. How long until we put the prompts in `src/` and the code in `bin/`, I wonder...
Comment · 8 months ago
Consider your biases about the word "hobby". It's easy to average way more than 40 hours per week on a hobby, and to spend those hours with as much deadly seriousness as the hours at work. Especially if you don't work full-time or don't work at all.
Comment · 8 months ago
But you can be a software dev even if you do not work in software dev. Plenty of those individuals in open source, for example.
Comment · 8 months ago
I, too, appreciate the clarification in the term "write-only code".
Comment · 8 months ago
Still, isn't the forecast for one hour from now more useful than literally now? You can see that through the window (and feel it on your face by opening the window).
Comment · 8 months ago
I don't see that TFA claimed any cost savings. That is not the reason people go for e-paper.
Comment · 8 months ago
TIL a built-in

   (zone &optional PGM)

   Inferred type: (function (&optional t) t)

   Zone out, completely.

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