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Re:Please Let the Internet Die. It's Time to Start Over on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:32AM (#50339347)
We already have Internet2, do we need Internet3?
Re:NetBSD adds a new beginner-friendly text editor called atto on Thursday October 29, 2026 @12:21PM (#50291556)
Okay, but now you have to modify the shell and configure a different shortcut for SIGINT without stepping on something else.
Re:NetBSD adds a new beginner-friendly text editor called atto on Thursday October 29, 2026 @12:08PM (#50291320)
> I can't imagine a beginner really knowing what is going on in nano.

When you launch nano without a file loaded, there's a notice at the bottom of the screen: [ Welcome to nano. For basic help, type Ctrl+G. ]

Press 'Ctrl + G' and it takes you to a help page that says, among other things, "Shortcuts are written as follows: Control-key sequences are notated with a '^' and can be entered either by using the Ctrl key or pressing the Esc key twice. Meta-key sequences are notated with 'M-' and can be entered using either the Alt, Cmd, or Esc key, depending on your keyboard setup."

You can't force a user to read docs or learn how the programs they're using work, but this is a reasonable attempt.

> some part of me sinks into depression when vibe coders say "I" turned/did/made something. why does this bother me?

My guess? It's like claiming credit for something someone else did.

It would be like me commissioning a painting and then claiming I painted it.

I have a couple of cheap VPS's because I'm too cheap to shell out for a business class internet connection, and my ISP gets grumpy if I start hosting sites and services from their 'residential' IP address. I use them for all kinds of stuff that I'm interested in. I have a fediverse server, a few personal websites, and icecast server, and so on.
Re:America.gov – Whatever you need from government, start here on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @12:07PM (#49910758)
> You have to measure that problem against the status quo, which is that current government websites are very hard to understand and leave people with very little idea of what’s going on.

The solution to that is to make the sites easier to use.

Anecdotes are not data, etc, but several years ago I worked for a mom & pop company that conducted interviews with people for a job that didn't exist 'just to see what was out there', so stuff like that definitely does happen. (That place eventually went out of business for unrelated reasons)
> If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.

How on earth am I, a potential job seeker, supposed to be able to figure out if your year-old job posting is still up because you: couldn't find anyone after a year, are constantly hiring and never take it down, actually hired your quota six months ago and HR forgot to take the listing down, the job listing isn't for a real job and is just a trap to collect resumes, the listing is for a ghost job to placate the overworked current staff, some other reason?

> Are you really buying and watching DVDs in 2026? > I got my 1080p copies on the high seas and that's just a whole different experience.

There's _a lot_ of stuff that has only ever been available in SD (or equivalent). Some of it was shot on film that could maybe be remastered, but that costs money. Some of the older/less popular stuff wouldn't be profitable if it was remastered (assuming remastering is even possible).

> even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player

You're allowed to rip media that you bought

Re:Aphantasia Beginner's Guide on Thursday August 27, 2026 @02:57PM (#49469575)
> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?

Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.

If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.

Re:Explain it to me like I'm ten on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @08:17AM (#49432674)
We were talking about how explaining something to a 10-year-old sometimes means that you use words that a 10-year-old doesn't know. And that a 10-year-old should have the ability to use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words.

I was also implying that you, and I assumed that you were more than 10 years old, could also use a dictionary to look up words you weren't familiar with if you aren't able to glean their definition from context.

Can a 10-year-old use a dictionary? That's approximately fifth grade in the US. By 10 years old, they should be able to use a dictionary and encyclopedias to look up stuff. At the very least they should be able to go to merriam-webster.com or wherever and type in an unfamiliar word to get a definition.

Re:Explain it to me like I'm ten on Sunday August 23, 2026 @10:26PM (#49414599)
If you can't glean the definition from context, anyone 10 years old or older should be able to use a dictionary.
Re:Why Aren't Smart People Happier? on Friday August 21, 2026 @02:39PM (#49392227)
You're asking me to enumerate the benefits of knowing what's going on the world around you? It's probably not relevant or beneficial if it's something like miners being trapped in a cave on the other side of the planet, but when you get down to your local community you might want to know about things like:

- Road closures - Boil orders - Product recalls - Neighborhood breakins - Weather forecasts and alerts - Updated laws and court rulings that might impact you - Public safety notices - Health inspections - Public works projects - and a zillion other things that happen as a consequence of living in a complex society

Re:Why Aren't Smart People Happier? on Thursday August 20, 2026 @08:27PM (#49382137)
> It really isn’t. I haven’t watched the news on tv in probably 20 years

It's frequently beneficial to know what's happening in the world around you, even though possessing a sense of empathy can make knowing what's happening in the world around you unpleasant.

Re:Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @01:29PM (#49349229)
> Post installation they were decompressed to wav files, I'm guessing so that they can squeeze some more performance out of the game

Maybe, but there could be other reasons.

In a former life I briefly worked at a game developer, and the PC port of a game we shipped did the same thing. The reason I got was that the assets were just barely too big for the game to ship on one CD-ROM and going to a second disc was going to cost too much. The solution was to encode all the sound assets into .ogg (because it was free and unencumbered) to put on the disc and then convert them all to .wav post-install because the in-house engine couldn't play .ogg files and there was no time to add support before publishing.

I'm pretty sure an AI wrote all or most of this article.
Re:How to Read More Books on Monday July 13, 2026 @04:09PM (#48898103)
Defend what? That reading and listening are two different skills?
Re:How to Read More Books on Monday July 13, 2026 @12:21PM (#48894961)
There are many reasons why someone might want to improve their reading, and the only solution to that is to practice reading.

Audiobooks are someone else's (i.e. not your) interpretation of a work. Kind of like how you might go watch a play or a movie instead of reading a script. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.

Re:How to Read More Books on Monday July 13, 2026 @08:01AM (#48891372)
> Look, it’s fine if audiobooks don’t work for you, and it’s fine to let your readers know why.

Listening to an audiobook is not the same as reading a book.

The whole point of the article was how to read more books, not how to have someone read books to you.

Re: on Friday June 26, 2026 @03:04PM (#48690610)
If your blog posts are one sentence or less, then they're not blog posts
Re:Reverse Engineering Crazy Taxi, Part 2 on Thursday April 02, 2026 @08:18AM (#47613431)
Yes, many times. For the few months it was in my local arcade I practically lived in the seat of the Crazy Taxi machine and got to be decent at it.
Re:Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @11:19AM (#46707775)
> How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art?

You don't. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, I guess.

> Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?

You can't quantify art that way. People work at different speeds. I can appreciate that something took some number of hours without knowing the precise number of hours.

> As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.

Maybe, but I'm not qualified to make that comparison. Both are beyond my level of artistic ability (I've never studied art nor practiced much). I don't know why one thing or artist gets more popular than another while another who's just as talented (or maybe even moreso) languishes in obscurity. Skill is a factor, sure, but there's no formula that I'm aware of.

> What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'

Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"

Re:Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @10:04AM (#46706670)
Creating art, even via using something like Photoshop, is a skill that takes years of learning and practice to do well. Most people who appreciate art appreciate not only the art itself, but the time and skill that went into its creation.

When someone short-circuits the whole creative process by putting a prompt into a machine and having it spit out an art, there's nothing to appreciate.

> I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.

Okay, but this isn't a news article, it's an opinion piece on some guy's substack.

Re:Text-Based Web Browsers on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @01:53PM (#46605836)
Text-based browsers are also great for just reading hypertext documents. I've been using a combination of a text-based rss reader and web browser to keep up with the sites I care about, and I can tear through my collection of articles pretty quickly
Re:A spider web unlike any seen before on Monday January 05, 2026 @05:01PM (#46505642)
My house has a problem with little black ants that pest control services never could quite take care of. Spiders kept trying to set up shop near a window, but I would always knock the web down. Once I relented and let the spiders do their thing my ant problem went away. All I need to do is clean up a few ant corpses in the fall, which is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
Re:I did 301,432 flashcard reviews in 2025 on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:44AM (#46500141)
His homepage says that he likes memorizing things. There is utility in doing something you enjoy for the sake of it.
Re:A website to destroy all websites on Thursday January 01, 2026 @04:45PM (#46458380)
> I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author.

Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text.

(It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)

Re:A website to destroy all websites on Thursday January 01, 2026 @04:39PM (#46458327)
> I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.

You can still do that right now. I highly recommend it.

> Hey team! I find journaling for a fictive audience to be more effective personally; since it forces me to try digest my thoughts for an external listener.

Okay, but I don't understand the benefit of writing to an entirely fictitious AI construct instead of writing to the ideal of the kind of reader you'd eventually like to have.

I mean, I get that it's frustrating to pour effort into writing something that effectively nobody reads (i.e. you never connect with a wider audience), but engaging with an entirely fictitious audience seems hollow to me.

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