Oh crap. Reminds me that for some reason or other (Mostly just time issues I guess, and because dualbooting Windows was pain I guess) I never completed Max Payne 2. As a giant fan of the first game I loved it.

Wonder if I need to go dig out the discs. Wait wait what, I already have MP1&2 on Steam? How? When did I get them? Never mind. Hope these aren’t a massive headache to get running

“We’re building the Eschaton Immanentising Machine, from the famous theological treatise ‘Don’t Immanentise the Eschaton’”

(Also, using LLMs sounds a lot less efficient than the exhaustive search described in The Nine Billion Names of God)

One of my recent software projects has an “ignore” list feature, but I guess I have to update the terminology to “include/exclude” if that means chuds will stay away.

Come to think of it, the Covenant have a lot in common with American brand millennial Evangelists. Leaning really hard on immanentising the eschaton.

Heh, I’m getting back to physical media, and this big 4K TV is literally the first time ever where I’ve actually constantly noticed that DVDs might get a bit pixely.

(And even so, I usually blame not so great digitisation. Some transfers of old obscure titles were really sloppy, you really didn’t need a great TV to see the problems. Original was a black and white movie, the DVD was a bunch of grey mush.)

Funny thing, over here, OSM actually got weird rural stuff for a couple of rural towns I visited frequently about a year before Google Maps (and other proprietary services) was usable there. I think it had to do with some open-data drop from the government.

And seeing the services grow side by side also kind of gave away what their priorities were. Google: putting the local businesses and services on the map. OSM: document every single cool and convenient foot and bike trail.

I’m a girl. I’m not interested in Haskell, that’s too frigging endofunctiorific. Erlang! That’s what all the cool guys are doing.

I’m fed up with the streaming services, so I’m getting back to my big pile of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.

I was randomly reminded of the “BD-Live” thing that I tried long ago. One of the most janky joyless things I had ever seen. Some marketing person had decided to do a marketing thing for movie promos and trailers and had forgotten that the thing was to be visited by actual people.

This sounds like it was cooked up by the same people. Looks like marketing people building a Thing.

I’m not working as a developer right now, so most of the stuff I write are supplementary for my creative projects. If I have a problem involving too much manual work, I want to figure out a solution to minimise it. Mostly done in scripting languages like Python and Ruby. Also doing number crunching and plots in the R programming language.

For example, I’m working on tools to help my photography workflow. I sometimes get weird ideas like “I wish I could have a better idea where I have taken photos in”, which turned into a script that takes coordinate metadata from photos and spits out a .kml file a mapping software can read.

I don’t really copy/paste code much. Sometimes the tools you use in the scripting language land spit out automatically generated stuff which you then develop further.

Like I said, the AI companies are not on the same side. The AI companies in the fight for their own selfish reasons. They’re eventually just going to make the copyright situation even more byzantine. They also make the copyright reform/abolition people look bad.

It’s like if I say I’m an Anarchist and then I have to constantly say “well actually I don’t advocate for looting and vandalism nonsense, those dipshits don’t know shit about Anarchism”. Do you know how hard it is to advocate for more reasonable copyright policy reflecting modern times, when the current big crisis in the mind of artists and creators are the dipshit companies blatantly violating the law?

(Imagines a timeline where absolutely everything is still written in PHP)

Oh hell no

I used to use Reddit, and I remember when collectible avatars were introduced.

The experience paraphrased:

“Hey, click here to claim a free collectible avatar!” *open in new tab* “Here it is! However, you first need to set up crypto wallet—” *close tab*

AI companies are not on the side of copyright reform or abolition. They just want an exception for themselves. They very much believe in trade secrets. They probably want copyright to eventually cover the current grey areas so that they can stop pretending they give a damn about open models.

It’s not unreasonable to demand AI companies to play by the same rules as everyone else.

Lemmy (and Piefed) have avatars and bio, and Piefed also has the custom fields thing that Mastodon has, but not all clients show this stuff. Voyager is probably the best Lemmy/Piefed client that basically has no support for profile details.

One of the things that bug me about Fediverse is that the amount of profile features varies so much between the services and it’s kinda inconsistent too.

Oh good, the current profile management is a little bit clunky. Having the option to launch random profiles wherever and whenever would be nice.

Well it’s an art film. The purpose of art is to evoke emotions, to inspire dialogue. Yours is one possible interpretation. Ultimately, who’s to say it’s not valid?

One day I was thinking of Andy Warhol’s film “Empire”, which is basically one continuous 8 hour shot of the Empire State Building.

I thought it’d be cool to make a similar art film about your average programmer’s work day. 8 hour shot of a programmer staring at the screen intensely, drinking coffee, scrolling through the code, and occasionally muttering “why the fuck doesn’t this work?”

Astrum makes space stuff videos? I dunno, been a while.

Fireship makes videos about programming. Has series about “(Programming language/Framework) explained in 100 seconds”, for example. I think people are complaining that the channel is slipping into AI dudebroery.

Hoog is a history/explainer type channel, I think.

Dunno, I saw GNOME 3 run like molasses on my PC, went “ok, this might be lost cause”, went with LXDE and then XFCE, and now I’m like “if it’s a beefy proper PC I’ll go with KDEPlasma and if it’s, like, very obsolete system I’ll, dunno, go with XFCE”.

GNOME is just opinionated. I get it, it was kinda vaguely modeled after Mac OS, which is kinda an opinionated desktop environment, but the thing is, it’s even more opinionated than Mac OS ever was. The thing about (early!) Mac OS X was “hey, we have this slick desktop environment but also some power user features you might want to use. But we’re not forcing you to!” (Kinda like GNOME 2!) …GNOME has been kinda sweeping those under the rug, in my opinion.

I use Debian 13 on my shitty junk desktop computer.

Problem is, it has VGA and DisplayPort, and my monitor only has a DisplayPort input, and all of the bootup shit defaults to the VGA. No way to change it in the BIOS as far as I can tell.

I installed my favourite GRUB theme, such a great tool to manage my depression (it was a great way to start the day on my work laptop back when I had work), but I never actually get to see GRUB menu on this system. 🙁