It’s America, so the answer is probably “No”.

Do you not have consumer protection laws?

We’ve had digital price tags for decades. But you couldn’t do this in NZ. Stores are obligated to sell you a product at the price they advertise it for AND have a reasonable quantity of units at that price… you couldn’t sell 1 TV for $1.

So these systems would need to track what price you saw it at.

(Caveat: Our stores are still cunts and have been found to overcharge people)

They are also IR controlled. A lot of them have a little window on the front of the unit, and an array of transmitters in the ceiling.

Because that’s the way the legal system works.

“Oops, had some harmful/illegal content on there? Nobody was /really/ hurt, or at least, we weren’t directly causing harm. I’ll take it down and eat a small fine.

Vs

“Oh I’m sorry, I’ll take down the 30s clip of your 90s movie. it has caused you 3million in damages? I’m so sorry, here’s some tools that will automate detection and removal of your property. I’m so sorry”

Is “The Algorithm” just “we stuffed all our GPT responses into a Lucene index and look for 80% matches”?

Because that’s what I’d do.

I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.

What are the icons for?

I know gnome, and the 3 that have their name in the logo (xfce, sway, tty).

I’m going back to Slackware. Can’t keep up with this shit any more.

I thought everyone decided “jfgi” in online discourse was a toxic years ago. It’s the same attitude as :

chemtrails make you sick!

How so?

go do your own research

If you’re going report on something, provide a little more information than just “no”. It’s more helpful, better for the community, and in 5 years time when the facts are different, there’ll still be a reference of what was factual in the past.

Let’s not get carried away.

I’m old, I have other shit to do, and I don’t have the time. If I’m writing code, I’m doing it because there is a problem that needs a solution. Either solving someone else’s ‘problems’ for $$$, or an actual problem at home.

If it’s a short term problem like “reorganising some folders” I’m not going to (re)learn another language. I’m going to smash it out in 30mins with whatever will get the job done the quickest, then get back to doing something more important.

If it’s an ongoing problem, I’m going to solve it in the most sustainable way possible. I might fix the problem now but 100% someone’s going to drop support or change an API in 2 years time and it’ll break. Sure, doing it in Chicken would be fun. But the odds are, I won’t remember half the shit I learned 2 years later. It’ll be unmaintainable. A forever grind of learning, fixing, forgetting.

So without a commercial driver to actively invest in Lisps, there’s no point. It’s not profitable and It doesn’t solve any problems other tools can. Without the freedom youth brings, I don’t have the time to do it “for fun”.

I love lisp. Well, scheme and less so clojure. I don’t know why. Is it macros? Is it the simplicity? Or is it just nostalgia from learning it during a time in my life.

But I just can’t find a place for it in my life.

It’s not job material, effectively nobody uses it. It doesn’t solve basic problems with ease like Python does.

And because of this, anything I do in it is nothing more than a toy. As soon as i put it down, I have no hope of picking it up or maintaining it in 6,12,24 months later.

A toy I spend 2 weeks in absolute joy, but as soon as life gets in the way it is dead.

Move to NZ. It’s nearly all c# here.

My brother behaves weird with Linux (fedora 39 silverblue).

When doing multiple copies of double sided printing, it’ll print [1|2] [1|1] [2|2] [1|1] [2|2] and then repeat until you realise you now have onen copy of what you want and 10 pages of one side, and 10 pages of the other side.

It’ll also randomly refuse jobs, and then print them 30 minutes later (lmao if you printed multiple copies, gave up and went for a walk)

My Panasonic I replaced it with was better, but you had to download binary blobs to make it work.

But, Linux has gotten more and more complicated in the last 20 years I really can’t be fucked working out if it’s the printer, cups, flatpacks, the app that’s printing, or all of the above.

Now I just email myself a PDF and print from my phone. Fucking stupid but it works.

The host was stable. And I was compiling the kernel for hardware and vfio reasons anyway, so why not compile everything and it’s not like there was a lot to compile.

Tips: don’t

Performance was ok. Lots of fiddling required on both host and guest to get performance close to native.

I used to have Gentoo running a Libvirt hypervisor, which would then run multiple short lived isolated windows and Linux machines with GPU passthrough for all the different companies and projects I was working on.

Spent far too much time keeping the guest machine images up to date, and all the configs and stuff managed and synchronised.

Then my laptop died that I was using to manage everything so I gave up.

If I were building it, I’d do the watermarking on the individual assets & textures.

Your asset pipeline would publish these to the solution, which would pack it up ready for distribution.

Except, each beta tester logs into the game and the publishing system gives them a personalised set of assets with a unique noise filter thrown over the top.

Mr leaky beta player publishes a video or screenshot of the gameplay, and then the studio can just reverse the noise algorithm to get their unique ID.

Absolutely terrible for large scale content delivery. But for a small closed beta, probably not an issue.

Ditto… ish.

In my dream I mixed up some constraints of the real-world system. I still came up with an elegant solution that would have worked if the dreams constraints were true. Except they weren’t and the solution was useless.

Bonus was the dream-solution exposed a “front door” so to speak on the real problem and I felt dumb that I even spent 5 minutes thinking about it.

Providing it has tabs, I’ll use it.

Plug a USB-C screen into a USB-C port. Will it work?

Maybe? If the manufacturer has wired the port to the GPU for DP/HDMI alt mode it might.

… but you’ve used this display on this laptop before?

Try another port! Nope, still nothing.

Maybe it’s the cable? Rummage around through your cables and try a few out. Hope you don’t have any from the 2010s because there’s a good chance they’ll ruin your device.

The screen works! But performance is terrible, why? It’s running in DisplayLink mode.

You give up and suffer through.

This is too close to home.