Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

what do you call a tiny model of an alstom coradia train?

pocket lint.

Saw someone elsewhere assert that Britain is “one of the least corrupt countries in the world”, and couldn’t let that go unchallenged, so here’s what I said:

Only because of this one weird loophole, which I will explain below:

For the last decade, the previous government has been awarding public contracts for infrastructure, etc, to what are essentially shell companies run by their mates. These companies then do the bare minimum for as long as possible, which if you drive round the UK, is why you see all those road “improvement” works which do nothing and take forever and never seem to have anyone working. It took two years to replace a roundabout with a set of traffic lights near my apartment, for example. Other examples: large amounts of “PPE equipment” during Covid which turned out to be useless junk.

Obviously they aren’t actually spending anything but a trivial amount going through the motions, so what happens to the rest of the money, which let’s remember, was raised by taxes.

Well, it gets donated back to the ruling party as “political donations”, and then if the pretend contractor does a good enough job of this, they get an knighthood, or even a seat in the House of Lords for “services rendered”.

Now you might think that this sounds corrupt, and you would be right. It sounds deeply corrupt, but apparently it’s not because a lot of the global agencies which work out corruption indices are based in, checks notes, London, and are probably in on the scam, and get to define what “corruption” means, and define it to mean, “not this”.

Et voila! You have a country with one of the biggest wealth gaps in Europe funnelling vast amounts of public money to populist spaffers in government, all legal, laundered and sanitised.

The whole of UK society is like this. It’s how it works, and once you see it you either join in, or walk away in disgust.

Can I just say again to everyone in tech doing DEI: It is immoral and unethical to recruit women to a fundamentally unsafe environment

The fact Dwarf Fortress is decades in development shows that a great work can be a labour of years.
So don't beat yourself up if you can't manage something so great in the span of months.
Or something.
It's reassuring, in a way.

Language drift is an interesting thing. It used to be, twenty to thirty years ago, that "media" was just the plural form of "medium". Now "media" is its own (uncountable) thing and the plural of "medium" is "mediums".

There is a realistic chance that Google's funding of Firefox/Mozilla through default search engine deals will be struck down by a court in the current antitrust case.

If that happens, I do not think Mozilla can survive financially on their own, at least not at the scale they are operating at right now, despite their half-assed attempts at "creating other revenue streams" over the years. I also question the maintainability of their existing browser codebase.

So. If you've been contemplating whether to start building a new browser engine... now's the time to start. This is your advance warning. Make sure it's one you don't need millions of dollars for to maintain.

It's going to take a while, most likely, for all of this stuff to go through the courts, so there's time. But building a browser engine is a big task, too, and ideally it should be started *before* things implode over at Mozilla.

chat i request the following from you:

information about dutch folklore/tales/myths/legends whatever, especially characters/entities from such stories (regardless of the region of NL it comes from)

i shall cook

Coole Aktion von #Rewe.

managers don't look

"Noah Lyles' collapse underscores our collective COVID denial"

"The 2024 Olympic Games are serving up some less-than-subtle metaphors for how poorly we handle public health. "

https://www.salon.com/2024/08/10/noah-lyles-collapse-underscores-our-collective-denial/

Is there a term for “digital anachronisms” like this: in 2010 I used an iOS app named Elements to edit text notes on my iOS devices. It stored the notes in a folder called “Elements” on my Dropbox, and now 14 years later my notes folder is still named “Elements” even though I have not used that software in at least 10 years.

@joepie91 while I think the codebase/engine will take a long time to go from idea to a working product, I think the sooner that project starts building a community is the key factor in surviving. Right now the level of uncertainty with Firefox has people looking for alternatives so starting to build that community now will probably be easier than after people have been forced to settle for a Chromium based browser.

It is actually wild that the Steam Deck has probably been the first "full fat desktop Linux" device for over a million people. I've heard many stories of people using the KDE environment on it, being happy with it, and eventually moving their main desktop away from Windows. Thank god the Deck cuts a good first impression.

Masks keep you safe.

Vaccines work.

Never Again means Never Again, no matter who does it.

Global Warming is real.

Billionaires are an existential threat to society.

This is just your periodic reminder that you are sane and the gaslighting isn't working on you.