neotek

I saw the mechanism in person recently on a trip to Greece and it was a strangely electric experience. That such a thing could have been made two thousand years ago is hard to believe. It seems almost supernatural, an artefact of time travel or something. I watched it for more than an hour, but it didn't do anything.

Seems to me there are quite a lot of people for whom the cruelty of what they're doing really is the only point, whatever other arguments they might make.

That's called the naturalistic fallacy, and there's a clue in the name that should indicate how reliable an argument it is.

And re "nutritionally inferior", every dietetics and nutrition peak body on the planet agrees that a fully vegan diet is suitable for all people throughout all stages of life. In fact, billions of people have already lived perfectly normal, perfectly healthy vegan and vegetarian lives throughout history. If your diet — any diet — is nutritionally incomplete it's because you made the wrong choices.

"Now" as in "all of those things are true now, but they weren't when this project started ten years ago."

How do you figure? Is distrust of the CIA anti-Americanism?

First thing I used to install on macOS was Binaryage's superb asepsis utility, which intercepts the creation of .ds_store files and redirects them all to a local container folder, until SIP killed its development.

It always seemed suspicious to me that Apple, a company that is famously obsessed with UI/UX, would settle on such a ridiculous process for storing file metadata.

So many fond memories of building eggdrop bots with Tcl scripts in the good old days of IRC. Trivia games, quote dbs, channel management, nick squatting, all sorts of shit.

WACUP can!

Seconding WLED, it's fantastic. Super easy to install and operate, compatible with HomeAssistant, the built in effects are great, the web app / native mobile apps are powerful but straightforward, and the community offers plenty of help and other resources.

You missed the point spectacularly.

"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

— Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45

I did the same thing, only my program pretended to be a DOS-based Novell Netware login screen.

It was just a simple QBASIC program (that's all that was available on the Computer Room machines) running under my own login, which would write usernames and passwords to a text file in my user directory. I figured that I'd harvest a few passwords until someone got frustrated enough to call for the IT admin, at which point he would try to log in and reboot the PC when it failed, apparently "fixing" the problem and erasing any evidence of my dastardly crime.

I was right, and for a few glorious days I got away with it... until one particular arsehole picked on my best friend during recess, and I used his stolen credentials to log into his account and trash his files.

Long story short, I ended up getting expelled, which by a curious confluence of events put me on an unorthodox path that completely changed my life. Funny how things turn out.

>pman

Oh man. I didn't know just how badly I needed this in my life, thank you!

Why does it seem like every single crypto company inevitably engages in shady business practices and ends up collapsing in a scandal? How hard can it be to just make a shitload of money taking your skim from trades or lending at appropriate rates for an appropriate return?

Microsoft puts ads in the file explorer, pre-loads its OS with bloatware and unremovable (other than by using third-party hacks) system tray icons for software nobody wants or cares about, spies on absolutely everything all of the time, and sometimes surreptitiously re-enables all of the above when you've gone out of your way to disable them - and it's Apple you think is pushing their services into your face all the time?

I feel like Windows users have become hostages without realising it, trapped in an endless cycle of abuse designed to mentally beat them into submission until they just stop noticing the horror of what Windows has become. Even the UI is an insane hodge-podge of bizarre interaction paradigms and half-finished flows that make it seem like everyone on the design team suffers from split personality disorder.

If it's what you have to use because you need Windows-only tools or you have games that won't run under Proton or WINE or whatever then I get it, but I will never understand people who consciously choose to use such a hateful, abusive OS.

And for what it's worth, I can't think of a time that macOS has ever mentioned Apple Music or Apple Arcade or any other Apple service other than iCloud to me, and even then it's only been when I've run out of cloud storage space and needed to upgrade anyway.