Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

i took a walk to the university this morning.

almaty is a very different place now than when it used to be 60 years ago. it's vibrant, energetic. a place where the new and the old meet.

today i was looking at those soviet-era panel blocks, from as low as five stories in height to towering highrise residential buildings. they were everywhere, sticking out of the ground, like the ribs of a dead beast buried in the sand, once existing but no more, in the heart of which we have woven a nest.

for fun, i used ebay's Personal Data request tool to extract out my ebay purchases from 2001 to 2010, so i could get a picture of how prices have changed over the decades when it comes to old computer/video junk

Aug 26, 2003: Ultima Worlds of Adventure: The Savage Empire
$13.49 USD
Currently: $100 USD

May 23, 2003: LC PDS style Ethernet adapter $5 USD
Currently: $50 USD

Apr 12, 2003 Druid: Demons of the Mind $2.99 USD
Currently: $40 USD

Apr 07, 2004 1988 Interplay Commodore C64 / C128 Game Neuromancer $9.99 USD
Currently: $150 USD

Apr 23, 2004 ULTIMA THE SECOND TRILOGY IV V VI BOX SET PC GAME $11.86 USD
Currently: $150 USD

Nov 10, 2004 PRINCE OF PERSIA (SEGA CD) EXCELLENT CONDITION $5.00 USD
Currently: $50 USD

As you can see, it's approximately a 1000% price increase on retrocomputing products since 2002. Without having to show you the entire history, the price stayed relatively flat until about 2010, when it started to creep slowly, and then went up several orders of magnitude by 2015-2020.

It's a silly, bad time to buy old computer games on ebay. prices are still hyperinflated (starting to drop, very slowly).

i've bought almost everything i have locally, for $5-10 each, just by keeping an eye on local listings - and ignoring the people trying to sell at ebay prices.

if you want to see your entire ebay history, you can request it here. it takes about a week to get your history.
https://www.ebay.com/help/account/requesting-personal-data/requesting-personal-data?id=5089

#retroComputing #retroGaming

Hey, does anyone know if there's a way using the itch api to go from a store link like https://yongjustyong.itch.io/catsanddice to the result of https://api.itch.io/games/2884343 without scraping the meta tags from the html?

is there a good comparison of the server resources required for running different #activitypub servers somewhere? i'm interested mostly in cpu, ram and network traffic

can't tell what's broken since the dashboards are also broken

"The dream of thinking everything out before we act, of making certain we have all the facts and know all the consequences, is a sick Hamlet's dream. It is the dream of someone with no appreciation of the seamless web of causation, the limits of human thinking, or the scarcity of human attention." - Herb Simon (1971), Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World

I’m not even “anti-AI.” I think there are some really good uses for AI!

However, I think AI should:
-only be trained on information that it has permission for, and those creators should be compensated
-be carbon-neutral
-be required to disclose when & where it’s used

United we stand, divided we fall.

Why have people not learned to cough in their fucking arm instead of their fist ffs

Also wear a mask instead of coughing at me dipshit

This is a graph from a Dutch news article about changes in revenue (blue) and sales volume (red) in the Dutch retail industry. Above 0 means it went up, below 0 means it went down, compared to the previous year. The massive dip in volume are the years in which there were COVID measures.

But I want to draw your attention to the "revenue" line. Notice how it doesn't meaningfully dip compared to previous years, and revenues continued to climb, *even though* the sales volume decreased?

Next time someone tells you that ever-increasing consumerism is necessary to keep the economy running, remember this graph.

(The CBS, which is the data source for this graph, is the Dutch governmental statistics agency.)

as an anarchist, we're, like, really annoyed about this proposed US legislation that would make it possible for the White House to revoke non-profit status due to ideological disagreement

but not for the reason you may think

no, we're annoyed because so many organizations over the years took the route of accepting something from the state, a special tax status, without adequate recognition that this makes them dependent on the state

we're pleasantly surprised how many people are reading this thread despite it being behind a CW. thank you very much for that! we're committed to CW'ing this topic no matter what it costs in visibility, because to do otherwise would be to be willfully oblivious to harm; it's a relief to know the cost is bearable.

statism is an empty world view because it postulates a world that is not about people. preserving the institution is the highest ideal, no matter how much murder is required to do that. anyway, yeah.

these concerns seem super abstract, to the point that most people, if pressed, will argue loudly that they're not worth worrying about, not worth taking a stand over, not worth changing anything material to account for

until the moment they are suddenly very concrete and far too late to do anything about

I hate just chucking perfectly good stuff away, that’s why I have a huge stockpile of electronic junk that is worthless up to precisely 3 seconds after I dispose of it, at which point a perfect use for it emerges

Look. I use two spaces after every period. It's what I do. It's who I am. It's how I space my sentences.

If your software 'automagically' hides/erases that second space while I'm typing, I just assume my keyboard is breaking. This is good for no one.

I’m thrilled that Healthy Debate picked up my Disabled Ginger article on masks in healthcare.

“A Plea to Maskless Healthcare Workers from Vulnerable Patients” is a personal appeal to each and every HCW.

Until we mandate masks in healthcare - do the right thing & put one on.

This publication is read by many HCWs - so fingers crossed some of them start masking again!

I will be publishing the next 2 parts (patient stories and HCW stories) with Healthy Debate & on Disabled Ginger.

Never forget that you don’t need a mandate to do the right thing. Wear a mask and show you care about keeping patients safe from COVID.

https://healthydebate.ca/2024/11/topic/plea-maskless-health-care-workers-vulnerable-patients/

If you missed the original article in Disabled Ginger - it was dedicated to @Tinu who passed away a little over a month ago. You can read here: https://www.disabledginger.com/p/a-plea-to-maskless-healthcare-workers

#keepmasksinhealthcare #CovidIsNotOver #CovidisAirborne #SARSCov2 #maskup #wearamask #N95 #ableism #disability