⭒˚。⋆ 𓆑 ⋆。𖦹

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • This article does a great job of articulating a lot of the uncomfortableness I have around passkeys. I’ve always said they make a lot more sense in an corporate environment but the level of control you lose in a personal setting is not commensurate with the protections and possible lock-in they offer.

    I just don’t like passkeys. They are an overly technical solution to what is mostly a human problem.



  • I keep saying this myself. I feel bad because there is a real problem they are solving (phishing) but ultimately it is an overly technical solution to an extremely human problem. They’re only as strong as their weakest recovery method and the inability for the average user to understand the technical implementation and ramifications takes power away from a personally held secret (problematic as that may be) and shifts it towards more platformization.

    It all just makes me vaguely uncomfortable in ways I have a problem fully articulating.


  • I was a teen at the time and while a lot of this is personal taste, I think Offpsring’s Americana just really nailed it for me. The whole album, but the titular track in particular, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtzKW_ONjJ0

    9/11 wasn’t a surprise in a lot of ways, we really felt it coming. Afterwards, in the early 00’s that followed, I remember less of the alt and punk rock and a lot more of the cleanly produced emo pop punk taking over. Stuff like Alkaline Trio (From Here to Infirmary), The Ataris (So Long Astoria), Something Corporate (Leaving Through the Window), and Saves the Day (In Reverie). Appealing to angsty teens has always been like shooting fish in a barrel (see Sonic Youth or Nirvana) but in retrospect, it’s hard not to see that widespread, mainstream appeal of emo as a reaction to something.

    EDIT: The Kids Aren’t Alright



  • I remember paying $30 USD for a DVD with 3-4 episodes at most of an anime series. 26 episode Cowboy Bebop season? ~$120 USD.

    Sure I downloaded that episode of Excel Saga once (❤️). It was 320x240 and took more than a day on my 56k dialup.

    At some point I remember going on ebay and buying the entirety of Witch Hunter Robin (which at the time, I chose over Naruto that had just started airing as well, this would turn out to be an important tone setting point in my life …) and getting it for ~$20 USD. Basically just the cost of someone else to download it and burn it to CD for me. Did the same thing with Wolf’s Rain.

    Good memories. Of the anime. This shit always sucked.




  • I grew up largely in the PS1 era and have a nostalgia for the affine texture warping. I’m not going to necessarily defend it as good in its own right, but I think a lot of older games play into that same “temporary suspension of disbelief” we get with movies. When something is less realistic, we are forced to invest more of our own imagination into it, an I believe that in a lot of ways this can form a stronger connection. You see this a lot with the whole analog horror trope, it’s the fear of the things hidden between the pixels that you’re not seeing and lets your imagination run wild.

    Striving for realism only has one of two results: success of failure. Success is hard, and the numerous, subtle failures pile up until it distracts you and separates you from the illusion it’s trying to achieve.


  • I don’t have the time to write out the full response to this I want to right now, so I just want to say there is an almost immeasurable gulf between someone like Linus Torvalds using AI for debugging vs a coked out techbro junior engineer vibecoding the next Spotify but for access to water.

    In my heart of hearts I still wish he wouldn’t touch the stuff just for the message this is going to send to all the wrong kinds of people but here we are.



  • Appreciation of cheese pizza comes with age.

    Don’t get me wrong, it’s only a sometimes thing, I still love my monstrosity kitchen sink pizzas, but there’s something nice about the simplicity of a good cheese pizza. Seriously order one from your favorite pizza place and get a nice sour ale (preferably not a fruity one, one of the Flanders red or oud bruin styles if you can). No four+ cheese, that’s cheating! The greasy cheese cuts the sourness of the ale while the sourness helps cut the greasiness of the pizza, it balances amazingly well.

    Uncluttered pizza, uncluttered mind.

    EDIT: Depending on your pizza place, you may want to go 2x or 3x cheese, that’s also acceptable.




  • I absolutely agree with you but I think that take is a bit short-sighted and undercuts just how evil this stuff is.

    Tom Nicholas did a Youtube video on the metaverse a while back (oh my god it was 4 years ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM00M-dRMBk) and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. The pivot towards VR was an attempt to get even deeper ahold of our attention and what better way to do that than with goggles that are constantly in front of our eyes? The same with AI as it attempts to insert itself as a substrate layer of all technologies, and again with the smart glasses.

    It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as hilariously misguided but they’re not. They’re extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it, and I think there are others that realize this as well. We just gotta keep praying that these efforts burn him out before they strike it big. I’m neither a praying nor gambling man, but praying is all we got right now to stand in his way and I wouldn’t put money on the certainty of Facebook’s failures …



  • It feels stupid to say, but of all the things that got me to move to Linux and never even install Windows 11, it was that stupid Start menu. Windows 10 was kind of perfect. You had your full list of alphabetical apps if you needed it, but you also had the ability to pin nicely sized tiles for frequently used apps, sort them into groups, and even make folders. Windows 11 gives you a little grid of icons. Just a huge step back.

    I don’t have the energy to rice my desktop anymore and KDE has been perfect.

    The thing is, though, is that Microsoft is literally incapable of solving this problem when you think about it. So much of Microsoft’s current business model is centered around being able to subtly direct you and your actions and maintaining tight control over the UI experience is key to that. People aren’t stupid and they’ll always feel that friction, so it’s just a push-pull of how much they think they can get away with at any point and slowly nudging it until it pisses you off again.