Better content.

I think this might be the new Turing Test right here: If you can’t shitpost to the level of six-sided ursines, you’re not human.

Realistically, it’s a counterprogramming game. Content farms either want to sell you something, or drive you in endless circles to make ad revenue. That inherently steers towards certain kinds of messaging, which have a distinct smell.

When that’s the competition, the audience burns out. We all have our mental or technical block lists-- this site never actually delivers ehat it promises-- and they’ll grow over time.

The content-farm only works for low stakes scenarios, where people don’t mind scrolling into an endless void. But that’s basically the web equivalent of turning on the TV and listening to the random sitcom noise while doing something else. For anything more important, the bloxklists go up and people still end up looking for real resources.

This seems like something that would be effectively enforced by applying state pressure to payment networks. I know some banks just deny any transaction coded as gambling, although that could be personal moralization or chargeback risk fears, as well as actual legal rules.

If there’s some fraud factor involved (I recall at one point seeing some scheme in the US where people would buy wildly overpriced items from a “seller” where the $500 golf balls were really a $500 deposit to a betting platform) you might not even need new rules to intervene.

Hell, you could weaponize the players: if there’s a bounty on firms and people that middleman the money, you incentivize anyone who lost money to help the state slash the operators’ tentacles.

Can’t imagine the business staying afloat if they had to resort to players mailing wads of physical hundred-yuan notes to a purser every time they needed to replenish their account.

Next one that comes to the door, I’m telling him he can have $20 if he humanely escorts the Latrodectus Hesperus living in our cupboard out. Let’s see if he has any tricks up his sleeve other than poison.

Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

Imposed multipkayer content can be toxic.

I played Revelation Online for a while and one feature of it was that you needed to play some 5/10 man raids for desirable upgrades. These were timegated to once a week, so if you weren’t there at 00:00 server time on Sunday, everyone else had already done the run and the place was dead.Hard to stsy committed when you couldn’t progress effectively.

What about Mouser?

Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.

I go to RMA and they ask “If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?”

Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I’m going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.

I sort of understood the premise for chain-of-custody style use cases, but the other side of the coin is that these usually, or always, have a final arbiter of validity. Typically it’s a court system or an end purchaser who decides if the data is valid.

For example, an obvious use case is “record a will or deed on the blockchain, cryptographically signed and timestamped, to eliminate any disputes about ownership.” Except the same problem is trivially solved by a scheme where I could register my will/deed with the legal system itself, which is already pretty good at storing documents, and no need to cart around a big, heavy blockchain. Most of the problems in that space come from spotty, inconsistent record keeping (why aren’t these documents centrally registered in the US?) and more centralization solves them.

That’s why the fixation on decentralization is often a waste. I suspect the real appeal is fear of human institutions. A banking or legal system subject to laws and social norms might refuse to honour the documents you file, but soulless decentralized code will dance as it’s told to. For example, I could imagine wiring a smart contract triggered to irrevocably pay on the event of someone’s death, while writing “hitman fees” in the memo of a paper cheque probably raises a few eyebrows at the bank.

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

Yes, although I personally prefer “central planning enthusiast”.

I think we’re approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "

It originally I saw the mention of repairable “brainds” and it was 2AM here. :)

Okay, this typo needs to become a direct-to-streaming movie.

So we open on the usual cyberpunk future. Worldbuilding scenes establish that Chinese brain implants are favoured because they’re cheap, they work, and they’re repairable. A popular model offers auxillary memory to get everyone’s neopronouns right.

Various Western nations get all panicky and paranoid, waiting for Xi’s-head-in-a-jar-atop-a-500-metre-Gundam to do something with them. Surely the Big Mind Control Button is right next to the Big Communism Button. We see invasive scans at border crossings and forcible internment; a B-plot involves a character dying from mandated removal surgery and exchange. Turns out nobody can afford Western augmentations, and they’re made with General Motors quality anyway.

The main story gets kickstarted by the surprise synchronized mass murder of landlords across Manhattan, now a Nevada Limited Liability Corporation. Joe Biden, serving his 17th term as an AI hosted on a Commofore 128, orders the war machines to spool up, as this was clearly coordinated foreign-brand mass terrorism of doom. Just waiting on a suitable piece of evidence to pull the trigger and start WWIII. Cue frantic law enforcement chewing scenery interspersed with comic terror as the characters start to panic over everyone and everything that wss ever within 3000km of Beijing. After the obligatory dead ends and viloence, the stock white-coat nerd character walks out of the crime lab and technobabbles thst the implants did nothing. The killers developed class consciousness all by themselves.

I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

“Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.

The interesting thing is this was apparently the portrau=it that won the original design conpetition in 1932.

I thought the goal was the two nuzzling with ^ . ^ faces. So cute.

What specific inks are you using?

I’ve gotten surprisingly decent results with dry-erase marker ink on a cheapo 1.5w laser, but the black is by 10x the best colour at adhesion. Would love to expand the palette.

I wonder if it might be an unreproducible moment in history.

I suspect the Cambrian explosion of X11 window managers came from two things:

• Propriatery and former-propriatery systems with unique look and feel (see, for example, Open Look/olvwm) There was also a tendency to copy any style you could (WindowMaker copied NeXTStep, IceWM mocked OS/2, and when those cute QNX demo discs came out, within days there were lookalike themes). It feels like the last major outside inspirations, MacOS and Win1,1 are converging on almost intrrchangeable insipidness.

• The 1990s/2000s customization era. Machines were finally powerful enough to do mildly nifty things, but still attainable by hobbyists gluing together pixmaps and this bred stuff like Enlightnment E16 or Afterstep

Do these forces still exist in 2024? It seems like Unix Porn today is a bunch of neokvetch windows without even a titlebar to provide a personal statement.

In a world of blood-drinkers, would we eventually have the “Coke” or “Bud Light” of blood, a mass-produced consistent product, or eould we go straight to craft-beer and elitism?

Amtrak was historically a lifeboat. By 1971, passenger rail service was haemmoraging money. This was the year the Penn Central formally went insolvent (an all-but-foregone conclusion from its inception, but still, at the time it was the biggest bankruptcy in history at the time).

The government promised the freight railways they’d take the burden off their hands, and they mostly all lined up and said “sure, take our ancient coaches and obsolete E8s!” They never controlled the rails outside the Northeast Corridor and a few other corner-cases. Perhaps there was a bit more good-faith cooperation earlier on with the freight carriers, but it was never a big priority for them.

I find any claim of short-term viability questionable: it would take them years just to refurbish and retire obsolete equipment. The only possible angle for savings would be by combining redundant routes from different private operators. However, they probably had to quote optimistic situations to paper over the legitimate real reasons we need passenger rail. (among other things, it’s scalable to rural communities in a way air isn’t)

I think I’d be a lot more excited about Wayland if I felt like I can get a compositor that matches my tastes.

I want to iconify things to the desktop, not relying on a taskbar-alike. Nothing seems to offer that. Hell, the taskbar is often a third party program.

I want to double-click to shade. Labwc just added this, a feature that X11 window managers have been offering since the 90s.

I want an aesthetic that’s got real depth and skeumorphism, rather that flat and featureless. Maybe something offers that, but there are plenty of X11 choices that have beveled buttons out of the box.

The charm of Unix systems used to be flexibility, buy Wayland seems to be an extinction-level event for traditional window management. Nothing fills the gap of FVWM or WindowMaker. But gosh, I can get 92 flavours of tiling compositor and windows that ripple when dragged.