Oh content from this blog has been popping up in random places. Methinks it’s le epic trole.

So yeah, Xfce looks the same as it did 10 years ago.

And?

Desktop environment is meant to launch apps and give me windows and maybe have a file manager. Xfce does that. It’s a desktop environment.

Hey, “modern” desktop environment enthusiasts, if you bring Compiz back from the dead, give us luddites a call, will you? Ohhhh you kids should have seen it back in the day. Windows and Mac users saw Compiz in action and were, like, “wat.” You don’t get them to react that way to modern Linux desktops, no. And all that is lost now. Thanks Wayland.

Yeah, the thing is, “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors” is kind of a meme among non-Haskell developers. Personally, I think Haskell is a very interesting language. The mathematical jargon, however, is impenetrable, and this particular expression is kind of the poster child. I’mma go look at Erlang if I want my functional language fix without making my head hurt, thank ye very much.

It’s a thing! Sadly it won’t rewrite Haskell codebases for you, though.

Reminds me of another old joke: “My doctor said I have the lungs of a little old lady. The upside is that I know that little old ladies never die.”

This is literally the old EA stratagem. Give the “independent” developer basically an impossible goal and then go “well you failed to meet the goal, looks like you need a little bit of help from us, and by little help, we mean from now on, you do exactly what we tell you, or else”. EA pulled this off with Origin Systems and (to a different extent) BioWare to name just a few examples. It ended with complete sadness.

To EA’s credit, that charade usually took a long time to come to completion. Sony is trying to pull this this so soon after acquiring Bungie.

The difference between wolves and dogs: wolves eat the grandma, dogs eat everything else in the house except the grandma

Funny thing, in ISO 8601 date isn’t separated by colon. The format is “YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+hh:mm”. Date is separated by “-”, time is separated by “:”, date and time are separated by “T” (which is the bit that a lot of people miss). Time zone indicator can also be just “Z” for UTC. Many of these can be omitted if dealing with lesser precision (e.g. HH:MM is a valid timestamp, YYYY-MM is a valid datestamp if referring to just a month). (OK so apparently if you really want to split hairs, timestamps are supposed to be THH:MM etc. Now that’s a thing I’ve never seen anyone use.) Separators can also be omitted though that’s apparently not recommended if quick human legibility is of concern. There’s also YYYY-Wxx for week numbers.

32-bit software is still absolutely supported on amd64. Just go to C:\Program Files (x86) and be amazed.

It’s funny, the only Linux software I’ve ever used that was only shipped as binaries was Loki games. Also, the only software that broke after binary compatibility went south. There used to be a giant tarball of old libraries and jiggerypokery that enabled the Loki games to sorta kinda work.

I was kind of sad to see that Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri didn’t run too well, but then I tried to play the GOG version on x64 Windows 11 and there are occasional weird issues. So, eh.

Windows: Can you run 25 year old binaries? Yes you can.

Linux: Can you build 25 year old software from source? Yes you can.

I was about to say “this reminds me of the Hot Dog Stand”.

…but someone actually made Hot Dog Stand. Shit.

Look, I’m a Linux nerd, and there are very few things that scare me. Linux Kernel programmers, maybe - you don’t meddle with them unless the hour is truly dire and we form a delegation to seek their aid after a complex debate as the world burns around us and we climb their mountain together. …And the other thing that scares me are some particular brands of Microsoft ultra fans, for thereover lies madness like we have not seen before.

Oh you fancy PC people and your fancy syscall instruction.

I still don’t know why I could remember jsr $ab1e. I didn’t even write that much assembly.

Oh how quaint, someone has discovered that Wikipedia can be vandalised. I’ll have to have you know that that came to us a a real surprise in 2001. Things are more manageable these days. People usually notice these things.

Switch to Chrome? Never! I take my chances with the gargantuan planet humping fire elemental vulpine.

God clearly failed, then. George W. Bush kept bombing places that he couldn’t pronounce.

There’s been plenty of recent developments on plastic-free coffee cups. Even ones that have very thin layers of biodegradable plastic. A few years ago someone came up with fully carton based cups that hold coffee.

But I think that reusable cups are probably more viable. The €2 deposit sounds pretty hefty, so it’s going to strongly encourage people to bring their own cups and actually return the reusable ones. Mini-thermoses are cool, I like them.

That’s not weird at all. Here’s how neo-nazi mindset works:

“We should label these other people nazis, because the public knows that the nazis were the bad guys. It’s a powerful analogy that resonates with the public.”

…

“Why are you calling us nazis? Are you saying we are the direct political continuation of the NSDAP? You, sir, are factually incorrect!”

Almost every situation can be made hell by introducing an enthusiastic sales person with lots of options to market to you

Or:

Software has a Linux version and it only comes as a .deb

Depends on a load of packages exclusive to Ubuntu and installing it on stock Debian is bloody impossible

Yeah I remember when Steam came to Linux. Never got it to work. I hope it is better nowadays? (Sadly can’t check. My only pure Linux box at the moment is a Raspberry Pi, I don’t expect Steam to run on that either)