Digital Mark

Even original Nolan Bushnell’s Atari, was bought by Warner Brothers, then (mostly) bought by Jack Tramiel after leaving Commodore. So it’s not an unbroken line. Infogrames Fr’s new management has quit with the NFT nonsense, and is making Atari-related stuff that isn’t awful.

“She”. The gag of SwiftOnSecurity is it’s Taylor Swift, posting infosec. Tho these days she mostly trolls like this.

Safari’s fast, less crashy, highest privacy protections, and uses less memory per tab; I often have hundreds of tabs so that’s important. It also has the best inspector, much better than Firebug. Add in StopTheMadness and an adblocker (currently using Ghostery), and it’s pretty great.

Degoogled Chromium is useful for sites that don’t work in Safari, or as a sandbox I don’t mind crashing in development.

I’ve given up on Firefox, it’s too fat and bloated.

I play a lot of MineTest, using the Asuna “game” (big modpack) and a huge custom set of mods, and have a game that’s like MineCraft but utterly different. Others play the MineClone2 game, and it’s fine, like MC 1.12 + some stuff. Repixture is an adorable mini-minecraft-like. There’s a lot of people who use it more as creative, and many servers with various games.

It’s definitely a little harder to set up the specific thing you want, but it’s incredible how much variety there is.

I’m very interested in the “floating giant 4K screens” part, especially paired with a tiny MacBook Air, and some other uses seem fun. Real uses of AR passthru can be amazing, tagging everything around you with information. At $3500, it’s half the price of a single XDR display.

But I’m waiting for gen 2 or later, there’s no way the current weight & battery life are usable for my needs. It’s a dev kit right now, and while I’m an iOS dev sometimes, it’s too small a market to be profitable for me.

In the good old days, you had to learn assembly/machine language, C, and OS-level programming to get anything done. Even if you mostly worked on applications, you’d drop down and do something useful. At the time, this was writing machine language routines to call from BASIC. This is still a practical skill, for instance I mostly work in Scheme, but use C FFI to hook into native functionality, and debug in lldb.

Computer Science is supposed to be more math than practical, though when I took it we also did low-level graphics (BIOS calls & framebuffers), OS implementation, and other useful skills. These days almost all CS courses are job training, no theory and no implementation.

Younger programmers typically have no experience below the application language (Java, C#, Python, PHP) they work in, and only those with extensive CS degrees will ever see a C compiler. Even a shell, filesystems, and simple toolchains like Make are lost arts.

The MIT Missing Semester covers some of the mid-high levels of that, but there’s no real training in the digital logic to OS levels.

Aggressive dialogs begging for my email = close tab. I don’t care what your excuse is.

Also, 404 (Not Found) is the dumbest name for any site ever, so I’m just as glad to see it go away.

RCS is not end-to-end encrypted, so their bubbles will remain green.

Google’s proprietary extensions add E2EE, and Apple’s not going to pull a Beeper on Google.

To misquote John Waters,

If you go home with someone and they have LinkedIn in their browser history, don’t fuck them!

Videogame companies literally did use “megabit” when the truth was “128KiB”, because it sounded better. Actual computer companies were still listing binary power numbers, because buyers had more to invest and care about accuracy.

You say “sensible”, but it’s lying for profit.

It’s a scam by HDD makers to sell less storage for more money.

iPhones have like 8-20 hours of charge now, depending on what I’m doing. My old iPod is <4 hours, maybe <2, but it’s enough for a walk. And if I’m out, where would I be charging it? I don’t usually carry a phone charger and wall wart. If I was out for days, I’d use my laptop to charge it, while listening ON THE LAPTOP, which has analog headphone jacks.

So, it’s a pointless conflict.

I have a lightning-analog dongle on my phone headphones, that works fine. I have another analog headphones on my iPod classic for walks. The terrible catastrophe of taking out the headphone jack is nothing. There’s no situation where I’d be listening to my phone and want to charge it, if it’s on the charger I have a computer with speakers.

I have a lot of lucid dreams, and they’re often in a specific city, and sometimes I even go to work in these dreams. I haven’t lived in a city and worked in an office in over 10 years, so it’s some kind of reverse escapism. I can always leave, and weird stuff happens anyway. I wouldn’t trust any of my work output there.

But to let a company try to take over your dreams and never let you escape, you need to stand up and fight that shit. Put them in a never-ending nightmare where nobody gives them money.

Apple Reminders, which I now keep in a widget on my phone & iPad home screens. This is mainly for repeating items, like shopping, since I can turn on “show completed” and then uncheck them to put back on the list.

Or paper notebook, which I normally have in my pocket. This is for more serious things where I need to write some procedure or notes.

Used to use Things, which is great, but it’s overkill for my current needs.