Running on underpowered hardware somehow reminds me of the good (or bad) old days of PC gaming where individual settings could make a huge difference.

Shadows off: Smooth

Shadows on: Unplayable

KDE has almost perfect fractional scaling, that was the real chadfeature for me.

~$10/mo currently but since I recently switched to Linux, and it’s working very well for me, I feel like upping it a little.

I’ve long considered donating to Mozilla since Firefox is by far my most used open source software. But they don’t seem to lack money. So, huh.

Yeah, same. Previous years it was cars driving around with flags, posters for events, etc. This year I saw absolutely nothing. Feels a bit glum tbh.

I never really used Skype as a VOIP platform, but it was a great tool for many years for calling international phone numbers affordably. I’m sure it helped many people saving a lot of money calling their friends and relatives. For that I remember it somewhat fondly.

Yeah this is a great writeup. First time I noticed it. I’d follow your blog on RSS for sure.

Open sourcing old games is awesome for video game preservation.

I agree. E-mail is the original federated service. And 50 years later e-mail spam remains a big problem. I hope Fedi projects can get spam mitigations on-par with email before spammers start getting serious about this place.

Moving from C to C++ would also not solve any real problem. C++ of course adds OOP which I think can be nice (not everyone agrees with this!) but it also adds an insane amount of language complexity and instability. Mentally reasoning about C code is hard, reasoning about C++ code is nearly impossible.

Rust however brings a novel solution to classes of problems like ownership and mutability with the borrow checker. It’s now accepted to be a great tool for writing high performance code while preventing a substantial amount of common, but often subtle, bugs from slipping through. It’s not arbitrarily the first non-C code to be accepted in the kernel. And it’s used in other operating systems like Android and Windows already.

Fresh clear water when you’re alarmingly thirsty.

Yeah, that must be it. It’s a real shame because the core technology seems to be solid. Streaming 1080p videos from other instances just works. But finding channels to follow seems impossible.

I was about to leave a snide “Eww, crypto” comment here, but this “Interledger Protocol” seems like the most good-faith approach to digital currency I’ve seen yet? I’m not knowledgeable enough to fully understand it, but I hope it will actually turn out to be a good thing.

Beer-drinking European living in 'Murica here. For certain styles, the US has fantastic beers available. In particular IPAs (which don’t always have to be mega hoppy!), pale ales, pilsners, amber ales, and stouts. Plenty of great choices to be found here, if you discover the right breweries. That’s key, because there are a lot breweries with imo questionable taste.

What’s harder to find are good beers of other styles, such as Belgian or German beers. US breweries try, sometimes, but they aren’t succeeding.

Ok, sounds cool. So I downloaded a .xdc file and… now what? I think they should’ve started with a paragraph on how to actually run one of these files.

inoreader seems very ergonomic, thanks!

I’ve been interested in trying out RSS again but I don’t want to self-host. Can anyone recommend a RSS client (hosted, local, or whatever) that they like?

If you don’t already have some combat boots, look for some new or used ones at an army surplus store. They’re usually cheap and look great.

Vintage band shirts can often be gotten from Ebay

Put on Tom Lehrer’s We Will All Go Together When We Go

FWIW I have never been bothered by a little cosmetic wear.

And people pay extra these days to get a "relic"ed guitar. Make of that what you will.

I unfollowed Alec on Fedi because every other post would be him complaining about his interactions on there. Reply guys. Trolls. Lack of algorithms which raise some of the better comments out of the drek. Insufficient moderation. Etc. This got boring and depressing to read about honestly.

However I think he’s totally right. Mastodon/Fedi works well for certain kinds of people. People with limited engagement, people posting mostly uncontroversial things, and perhaps people who just don’t give a shit. But for high-visibility folks like Alec the old-school unfiltered discourse seems really uncomfortable.

It has little to do with federation itself, I think. But if Mastodon ever added the choice for users to enable “modern social media algorithms” for their view of their feed I suspect it would work a lot better for many people.