(Because this is the Internet, add a /s to the end of the previous message for full comprehension.)

What kind of a maniac comments Makefiles? It was hard to set up, so it should be hard to read and alter, dammit!

Alipay.

That's what it does.

What is the intent? WHY does it do this?

I'm baffled as to what the entire point of this is.

I don't get it. What's it supposed to do beyond making me repeat letters? Do you have something that actually explains the intent somewhere?

Any chance of you clarifying what "LPT" means here? Which of these: https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/LPT

My favourite IDE is a shell, Textadept for editing, and gdb for debugging.

Time to break out the block cannon. Ain't no way that I let anything Zuck touches touch my stuff.

This headline is badly punctuated. There is a period which belongs there. After "Wrong".

The divorced dad energy in this one is off the charts.

This. This right here. For anybody to embrace anything they have to perceive and advantage to them to do so. If you can't persuade them of such an advantage they won't do it.

The name is a really weird one. Sounds more like a spreadsheet than a social media application.

Chrome too.

A whole lot of misdesigns are only a "small amount of brain power" to use. As your language accumulates these, however, the load builds up.

This also has the extra problem that overloading in general brings with it. What is the result of 3 + "string"? What is the result of "string" + 3? You have to have rules for this. These rules have to be learned. They have to be kept in mind. There is room for error. And of course the way different languages react to them will vary strongly.

For example in Rexx, Python, and Ruby these are errors (and with the latter two the error changes depending on which order). In Awk and Perl the result is 3 in both cases.

Format strings are better than + as concatenation, to be fair, but are still not very good compared to separate concatenation operators. It's hard to make them type-safe. They separate the value from its location in the string.

Using actual concatenation operators has the advantage of format strings, but add the possibility for type safety. For example in Ada:

...
    Put_Line("Distance: " & Distance_Value'Image & "km");
...

See here, & will only concatenate string types. If you want to print something that's not a string, you have to convert it to a string. This means you can't accidentally mix types. Further, it's immediately obvious where a given value will show up in the output. Compare and contrast with the C equivalent:

...
    printf("Distance: %skm\n", distance_value);
...

Not only is location of the value obfuscated—trivial to spot here, but in a complicated string it's very difficult to spot at times. And it's easy, too, to have the format code not match the value. As this example illustrates. Again, easy to spot in trivial code like this, but horrifically hard in real-world code, especially if the variable type changes.

String concatenation with + is evil. Well-designed languages (Lua, for example, among many others—I'm not calling PHP well-designed!) doesn't do this.

Why?

Because +, in every other context is commutative, but suddenly, in the case of concatenation, it is not. This is an unnecessary cognitive burden for no material gain.

Concatenation can be accomplished by juxtaposition (e.g. SNOBOL4, Rexx, much of the C family tree), by .. (Lua), by . (Perl, PHP), by || (PL/I, Rexx again), by & (Ada, some BASIC dialects), etc. without this added cognitive burden of overloading + for no good reason.

No.

ActivityPub is a protocol. It has no agency.

People can save the Internet. Perhaps with ActivityPub, perhaps with something else.

And here we see the seeds of IRC'sthe Fediverse's irrelevancy being planted and lovingly tended.

What you just said could have easily been put into the mouths of any number of IRC advocates 20 years ago. Where is IRC now? Remind me.

Because it's sometimes a ludicrous demand?

Common pattern I see in Mastodon's ... more strident, shall we call them? ... advocates:

Poster: I just took a picture of a <insert bird>. Note the red and yellow flash of plumage, in contrast to the more usual green and red. I caught this little darling hopping along the charcoal grey slate walkway I've got running through my garden, right next to the <insert flower> you can see at the right side of the frame.

<put picture here>

Strident Twit: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT!?

Or, worse:

Strident Twit Bot: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT FOR OUR BLIND USERS!?

So what, precisely (providing details), would you put into alt text that's not already in the post? Would you just copy and paste the alt text? When I ask the strident twits this, I generally get vague homilies and blocks.

Best for what purpose?

There's no universal "best" because different people want different things from their spaceship combat games. Myself I like quick resolution and simple record-keeping so I always kit-bashed something with the old Starfire wargame to warp it to the RPG setting. If you're not into kit-bashing, though, that's not going to be "best" for you.

For spaceship combat that was tense as a suspension bridge truss, the one that was made for Traveller:2300/2300AD was really, really good, but it was very much glued with cyanoacrylate to the setting.

The original Book 5 for Traveller had a ship combat system that was very much about capital ship combat in large fleets (and could barely scale down to smaller conflicts like individual ships). It was "perfect" for that kind of thing, but again was glued to the setting (albeit more with some contact cement rather than superglue).

The Jovian Chronicles (game, not Mekton Zeta supplement) space combat system was rather nifty and came with a nifty spaceship design system (albeit one that had a "dreaded" cube root in the construction rules that made people panic). And while it was made for a setting, it was much easier to kit-bash for other settings.

For more generic games, if you want the scope and glory of space opera, the game, well, Space Opera is hard to beat. It's an old design, so filled to the brim with odd, crunchy, ornate bits, but it was a whole lot of fun when I played it. Just ... be ready to fill out a lot of papers and roll a lot of dice many, many times.

I think he's a bit over-hopeful at the fediverse's prospects, sadly. People will give up so much (like all of their privacy!) for a small amount of convenience.

It's not Twitter that Mastodon has to seize the moment from. It's all the other commercial offerings that will inevitably pop up in its place as Twitter crashes and burns.

"This web site uses cookies. Accept them all or fuck off."

I fuck off.

Pattern-matching.

When you talk like a right-wing ignoramus (RWI), using almost exactly the same words as they do, you pattern-match as an RWI and are dismissed accordingly. This is horribly unfair, I know, I'm sorry, but I have way too little time in my day to go into your entire network history to see if you're in the hypothetical 0.56% of people who use the phrase you did without being an RWI.

The existence of the 99.44% who are RWIs just too overwhelming a volume for me to concern myself with the (as yet hypothetical) 0.56%.

Disinformation isn't a genuine thing of concern? That's a fascinating take, to put it mildly.

Literally every person I've heard make this statement are also the first to dogpile on social media any perceived Chinese person holding them personally responsible for the actions of a government they have little say in. (Bonus points if they—as is almost invariably the case—can be found disclaiming any responsibility for actions of their own government which they do have an actual say in!)

So, apologies if this offends, but I simply don't believe your hogwash. You check off too many boxes for me to take your position seriously.

(And all this is aside from the fact that I'm not talking about specifically "the Chinese people" here, but rather the diversionary tactic of pointing at others that crooked shitheads use to distract people from their shitfuckery.)

LOOK AT THOSE PEOPLE OVER THERE! DO NOT LOOK AT WHAT WE ARE DOING! THOSE PEOPLE OVER THERE ARE THE PROBLEM!

sigh

Because tech companies are companies and thus, by mathematical necessity, both incompetent and evil.

The particular evil being expressed is the evil of the notion that only the people at the top of the techbrodude pyramid deserve the fruit of a myriad of people's labour.

The particular incompetence being displayed is the inability to comprehend that demotivated employees make slipshod product and undermine the whole every chance they safely get.

Posted: Sep 08, 2022 1:33 PM EDT

Right on top of the news cycle, I see.

Is there a version that's not behind a paywall?

Anything he’s gotten behind has succeeded.

Like Twitter.

Ah. Kind of like how the Chinese now are on the one hand incredibly subtle with foresight making plans for decades ahead on how to attack the free world while on the other hand are bumbling idiots.

Othering. It's an ancient tactic.

Which Parenti quote? Sounds like I need it in my arsenal.

With this addendum: "It's sometimes hard to figure out who the oppressor is and who the oppressed."

This is nonsense.

I've seen more young'uns whining that it's "too hard" to choose an instance. It's the young'uns that are used to things being all in one place: one Facebook, one Twitter, one Instagram, etc. The elder Gen-X/younger-Boomer crowd are all very familiar with having to make choices in service providers (because we had choices!). We had to choose telephone service providers, Internet service providers (who weren't our telephone guys for AGES!), email service providers (often our ISPs, but not always: also our work environments, and third-party suppliers once we'd gone through the change-the-ISP-email dance often enough), etc. etc. etc.

The young'uns are the ones that flock to wherever their friends are flocking this week and have ISP choices they can count on one hand, even after a bizarre gardening accident sheared off a few fingers. Choice has been systematically removed from people in the tech sphere since I was in my teens. Fewer choices in phone configurations, fewer choices in ISPs, fewer choices in email providers, fewer choices in chat systems, fewer choices in ...

... until we have the situation where people think of social media sites instead of social media platforms.

Bitcoin and its alternatives could never have been a currency. It's eminently unsuited to that role. (It's great for Ponzi schemes, extortion schemes, and other criminal enterprises mind.) And how does "using more energy than a medium-sized nation while doing three orders of magnitude fewer transactions than even ONE payment processor" translate to "energy reform"?

Please, dude, stop being a cryptobro. It's a really bad look.

US companies not obeying laws in other countries, even when operating there, is by now just a sad cliche.

Public speech has no expectation of privacy. Nobody would find anything wrong with recording a public announcement. If you want to have a private conversation, it’s up to you to hold that conversation privately.

Please let me know where you live and which cafe you frequent. I'll just stand there while you have a quiet conversation with your SO, my phone recording everything you say. You won't object, naturally, because it's a public space and if you didn't want your romantic conversation broadcast live on Twitch you'd have had it elsewhere, right?

Scraping public text, which is something that’s been widely accepted on the web for two decades ...

Saying that "she asked for it; she was dressed like a slut" was widely accepted in the world at large for THOUSANDS of years (and still is in some places!). Until it suddenly wasn't. In some parts of the world.

Hell, pounding the shit out of someone for being "rude" was (and is) widely accepted for thousands of years. Not all that long ago, in human historical terms, killing someone for talking back to you was not only acceptable, it was required to preserve your "honour" (or whatever other term was used in that space).

Maybe—and just hear me out here—maybe things that are "widely accepted" have turned out to be shitty things, not things to be emulated and amplified.

(Please wait until I'm in your cafe and recording before you respond, though. I want to make sure that thousands of people are listening in.)

If the author is telling the full story...

Key word is the first word there. Everybody who has ever been banned from a site or server in all of the Internet's history was innocent when they tell the tale.

Spotted the Russian op.

Noice! I'll be grabbing that to look over.