agiacalone

Not to mention a common malware vector

Love the ASCII version, but totally buying to support the devs.

I've consider myself fairly proficient with chopsticks, but this got me thinking: would reverse pincers be an improvement? Ones that have a spring to hold closed, versus holding open. My one beef with chopsticks is that it requires somewhat more holding strength to retain something between the two ends than a fork.

I didn't realize this was hosted by SDF. Sorry to see it go, but hopefully it'll return on Mastodon.

Edit: I misread the first Tweet reply...but if it is eventually hosted at SDF, great!

> Exactly. It's the world wide web, people. It's about discovery and distribution and linkage.

Yes! I usually try to avoid posting "me too" replies, but this is what the WWW should be, IMO.

Remember webrings? We should bring that back.

> I found that 16GB on my laptop provided only enough memory for two app VMs

That seems...not right. I typically have 8-10 app Qubes running and don't have a problem, although I only use web browsers in a couple at a time, truth be told, which are my typical RAM use offenders.

Qubes, like most *nixes, will allocate all available RAM when it's free, so maybe that is where you are seeing the problem? When you run additional Qubes, the OS should balance and re-distribute RAM so it isn't typically an issue. I find that it works quite well for my uses.

> This is nice but misses one vital step IMO: Do your basic web surfing in a disposable VM.

This cannot be emphasized enough. :)

Running Qubes 4.1 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T460s i7 6600U, 12GB DDR4 RAM.

VMs (Qubes) work like a snap. I typically run 8-10 with various utilities/browsers and wouldn’t even be able to “tell” that it’s running in a VM if I didn’t know any better. The entire OS feels very lightweight and snappy. I also prefer minimal UIs, so that helps a bit. I can see where the UI might “put off” some modern users, as it reminds me a lot of the old CDE interface without the bottom status bar that CDE used to have (I believe Qubes uses GTK-2, IIRC). The included Linux Qubes (Debian, Fedora, Whonix) all work well and provide a “seamless” enough experience, considering that you are always working with multiple virtual machines.

Others in the thread have echoed concerns about the funky copy/paste feature, but it works well for me once I got the hang of it. I sometimes now even accidentally do the two-step copy/paste even when I’m not using Qubes.

Windows 10 in a Qube, on the other hand, is only okay-ish. It’ll get the job done running Office 365, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a pleasant experience. It’s a bit sluggish and will only run in full VM mode, which is a resource hog.

Although I don’t really call Windows a pleasant experience in most cases. ;)

I used Spark for a while, as it supported Exchange/O365 out of the box which was one advantage over Thunderbird. It also has decent mobile support.

But Thuderbird is a superior email client, IMHO

Looks neat! Going to give it a try...

iOS user here.

I forgo the on-device ad-blocking and use DNS blocking. It's a decent catch-all for most things I'm worried about.

NextDNS is one of the better hosted DNS blocklists, IMO

Or ZZ if you want to save and exit. Saves a whole second!

Also, for those of you who think vim is old, it’s got nothin’ on Ed.

https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard...

As many have said, it stands for Interactive Fiction.

Since there seems to be some interest in it, the assignment I give my students is on Github here: https://github.com/agiacalone/cecs-342-lab-inform7

I have more info on IF/text adventures there as well.

I use Inform 7 as the very first case study language for a class I teach in programming language design theory for a uni CS program.

* It's very well documented. The entire compiler design and language grammar is detailed to near text-book standards.

* It's a language that none of my students have ever heard of before

* The syntax of the language is an English-like syntax which weirdly trips up most CS students the first time they see it

* It's a great example of a language used for specialty purposes. No kitchen-sink language here.

Students at first hate it...but many have told me later that they really like coding an IF game using Inform 7 once they get the hang of it.

This reminds me of RFC-2549 in all the best ways.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549

Romanes eunt domus

I read this a long time ago, too! It's great.

Downvote, eh? Okay then.

> Cosmopolitan Libc does come with some tradeoffs as well > (static compilation, C codebases, no multithreading > (Update 2022-07-27:, no multithreading yet, > the pthreads API takes a while to fill

Toy.

> Regarding python packages with C extensions, the build > process for adding them to the APE is rather unwieldy > (2022-07-27 adding C extensions to the APE is much more > elegant now because of the Cosmopolitan monorepo

Horrific malware. Unchecked C (even libsafe) is bad.

Edit: Nevermind that each app using this software will need to be individually updated every time a new security patch for Python comes out.

I can't help but feel this will be either a useless toy or an absolutely horrific malicious software injector.

Shameless self-plug here.

I wrote about the potential for this problem in 2014 for my graduate thesis.

https://search.proquest.com/openview/cd06aab6e06951ba6cdc064...

Edit: to the parent, I shared many of the same concerns back then, too. I tried to speak to those anxieties in my final product.

> But I Need To Code on a Plane?

I flew across the US two weeks ago, and every flight I was on had WiFi. It wasn't free, but it was available.

But I mostly agree with the author anyways. Just take a break. We don't need to be working 24/7.

I got in trouble for doing this very thing in middle school on an Apple ][. :D

The article also says to do it too: > That email address, by the way, in case you'd like to contact him: jeff@amazon.com I tried it, just for the giggles. I was shocked to get a response only minutes later. > ?

That’s a pretty steep slippery-slope there.

Following that link on Firefox ESR led me to the following Bugzilla issue about a 10+ year old issue with Firefox not implementing Web-MIDI which was just resolved two months ago:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897

Needless to say, I went down the rabbit hole a bit. :)

I found it weirdly interesting to see the advocacy among musicians and music apps (I dabble with synths, and MIDI is pretty important) and the dismissal of the issue by a few maintainers.

Sorry, no.

What about the student loan "processing agencies" which take a cut from student loan interest? What do they owe society? Are you saying that there's no fault there?

What about the money that does go to uni? Did it just disappear?

What about universities that intentionally increase tuition because of the high availability of student loans? When you're 2-years in to a 4-year degree, and the uni increases prices...what happens then? Abandon the program? Not? Back when I was a student, my uni increased tuition fees nearly every semester.

This is nowhere as clear-cut as you make it out to be.

Edit: one more thing...how in the hell is a 17-year old high-school student supposed to figure all that out when every adult in their life is encouraging them to go to uni? We're essentially saddling our youth today with life-long debt before they're really capable of understanding the consequences of doing so.

This. For the parent, please don’t hold Thunderbird accountable for services like Discord being hostile towards users.

I took a criminology class in the late 90’s where the professor talked about how unethical stress interviews were (for police department hiring, of all things) and encouraged applicants to walk out of any PD that attempted to give one.

I think it’s sound advice then and now.

Edit: I should add that the professor was a former Chief of Police for an SF Bay Area city.

Slightly off-topic, but if you're looking something more hacker-like (not so-called-nerd-like), then I can highly suggest The Hacker's Diet: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet

Gibson Research (GRC) still runs an active news server, I believe.

nntp://news.grc.com

I also worked for a place in the early 2000s which used an NNTP server internally (large corp) for company communication and discussion.