CaNaCl sounds like a card game you play with grandma.
Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
CaNaCl sounds like a card game you play with grandma.


Sometimes the only real options are “bad” and “less bad”. An uncomfortable echo of something else we’re all familiar with, perhaps.
This does not mean that we should not criticise the less bad option, only that we should not switch to the the bad option.


Largely because of music recommendations on YouTube: Holiday by Green Day, specifically the intro, and He’s a Pirate, the theme from Pirates of the Caribbean
At the same time. There’s a similar kind of bounce to both of them and I think my brain is trying to cram them in the same bucket.


Black and white 80x25 BIOS text screen with the IBM PC ROM font, not unlike the MS-DOS it sought to replace.
Everything else is fluff on top of that, possibly occupying different graphics planes available in whatever hardware is available.
Yes, technically modern PCs and Linux have moved beyond that 80x25 screen for the most part, but its immediate descendant is still in use, often during boot, but also on Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] on many distros.


There’s an ancient UNIX copypasta that’s basically the plot of this comic, but it’s troublingly hard to find the original online.
Here’s one version I found: http://www.anvari.org/fun/Web_Tina/CREATION.html
I don’t remember “technocrat” being part of the original, but it wouldn’t be the first time my recollection has been wrong.


I caught trouble the other day for saying this. Apparently there are themes for GNOME (even GTK4) that can mitigate the limited colour palette(s). Locked-in window layout choices are a different matter entirely, of course, but we can do something about the colour of them.
$ yes n
n
n
n
n
n
n
...
I kind of want to go back in time and make it so that the original yes always printed the first letter of the name it was called by. That way you could symlink any name you like to it and it would do the right thing. Called as no it would print ns, etc. The optional parameter would still be there for longer strings or alternate uses.
The reason time travel would be needed is that there’s bound to be, or have been, someone who has done something weird regarding symlinking yes that relies on it always printing y when it has no parameter, and the name trick would be a breaking change.


And then the LLM says something like “You’re absolutely right, there was an error in that code that is clear and obvious now it has been pointed out and despite the fact you gave the instruction to make no errors. Is there anything else I can help with?”
… and they’ll be too blind to take that as the warning it is and continue to ask even more of the LLM.
Do mine eyes deceive me? Some of those don’t even have the address bar merged with the menu bar and hamburger menu icon… although I can’t tell whether those are just the apps insisting on doing things the tried and tested way.
Nonetheless, I’ll add a note to my original comment.
Edit: The situation is more nuanced than I had been led to believe. This stays for posterity.
Irony. In GTK4 there literally are only two genders: Dark Mode and Light Mode.
Earlier GNOME was much more accepting of alternative window styles.


Yeah, I’d say us Xennials are out here looking for the early web, wherever it might spring up.
This part of the Fediverse definitely has that early web feel to it. Loosely moderated, no “algorithm” and little to no corporate interference or ens**ttification. Just like Usenet used to be. (And maybe still is. Still waiting on a smart person to build a bridge to whatever’s left of Usenet from the Fediverse. Were I 25 years younger, I might have even tried to be that person.)
Left Reddit with the API exodus. But I’m not on Lemmy. Most of the traffic and discussion does seem to have ended up on Lemmy groups like this one, so that’s where my participation ends up, but I’ll be on kbin/mbin for as long as I can be.


Imagine, if you will, the person who is wise to the effect on a floppy disk, but uses a CD instead (Or DVD). They use it a few times but then it too stops working. Why?
Repeated clamping between the fridge and the magnet scratches or destroys enough of the metal layer, which is on the label side, to the point that the disc becomes unreadable.
There’s also that leaving a disc out in daylight for long enough can destroy its readability, especially if it’s a user-written (burned) disc.
Note for second (or more) language speakers of English (and maybe a few first language folks as well): The plural ‘s’ is omitted when a sentence fragment is turned into an adjective. It’s supposed to have hyphens in it as well, though these are often left out.
So, for example, “My PC is ten years old and runs Linux” becomes “My ten-year-old PC runs Linux”.
In the case of this meme, it should be “My 10-year-old PC”.
You had me concerned for a second, but “mists of time” shows up on Wiktionary (easier to be wrong), Merriam Webster’s site (likely to be right) or the Oxford English Dictionary (practically canonical), whereas “midst(s) of time” does not.
Collins Dictionary and Dictionary.com don’t list either, but the existence of the former in other places would seem to suggest that that’s the right one.
You should have seen it when the typos were still in it. Now try to figure out whether the parenthetical was there before the edits.
Older folks might think you’re making a reference to Cliff Richard, a guy who is quite famous here, so expect that to come up every now and then.
Lots of people really don’t like the guy, or think he’s a bit cringe-worthy, but others regard him fondly.
Anyway, like yourself, Cliff isn’t his real name, but most people know him by it.
Do with this knowledge what you will.
You like cursed?
Way back in the mists of time I got a 32MB (not a typo) upgrade for an 8MB computer. In total: 40MB.
Since I knew it ran fine with just the 8MB, I set up a RAM disk of 32MB and put the Windows swap file in it. Windows absolutely insisted (and maybe still does) that there be a swap file, so why not put that back in RAM?
It worked perfectly, but that memory was better used for other things, so the cursed setup didn’t last all that long.
Edits: Typo city baby.


There are posts on Usenet from the mid-to-late '90s under my real name that are probably still around. I don’t go looking for them and hope they don’t come looking for me. About 50% of them are an embarrassment.


I feel like proponents of that calendar might be better off giving all the months completely different names. It would avoid some of the potential confusion during the changeover. Sol could keep its name, I guess, but the rest, no.
On the other hand, that still wouldn’t disambiguate numeric YYYY-MM-DD and the like.
You mean to tell me that such a database doesn’t already exist?