Troy Dowling

Vim, or neovim if you want to put some leg work in for vi with modern features.

Problem: ambiguity of date terms like saying “this Wednesday” on a Thursday. Is the speaker referring to yesterday or the coming Wednesday six days from now? Not always clear.

Solution: I propose standardising our understanding of the week as beginning Monday, ending Sunday. At any point in the current week, “this whateverday” refers to that day in the current week, no matter if it’s past or future. “Next whateverday” refers to that day in the upcoming Monday through Sunday week.

“This Wednesday”, on a Thursday, is referring to yesterday.

“Next Wednesday”, on a Thursday, is referring to a day six days from now.

(I also suggest adopting ISO 8601, writing dates in year-month-day order to avoid that ugly ambiguity.)

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Thanks to Britain, we now have swearing on the Internet.

I bought a popcorn bowl that turned out to be terrible. It came with a leaflet coupon saying if I left a 5-star review, they would send me another bowl for free.

The comment I tried to leave was a short, fair, polite statement along the lines of 'this bowl doesn’t meet the claims X and Y on the description, and came with an offer to trade a good review for another bowl for free." That review got flagged by the automod and was ultimately rejected. If I recall, the rejection message wasn’t even specific on what rule my review broke.

I have heard it front to back, back to front, up or down, but never have I heard of a left-right wiper.

When I hitbthe B button instead of spacebar on my tiny, touchscreen cell phone.

Root access should be available from the moment my purchase payment clears. I paid, it’s my device.

The dietary illuminati hid their food pyramid atop the unfinished pyramid of the one dollar bill! It’s pyramids all the way down!

The perpetual year of the Linux desktop.

The very last thing the Internet needs is more ads.

You need a touchscreen to open the glovebox?

Wow, this game was incredible! Apogee did a tonne of great work, but this may have been my favourite. The music and intro cutscene especially stand out in my mind.

Cool ideas. I like the idea of an accessible, global democracy. But I wondered about two things:

One, I think the complexity of such an identity database would be so great, it would preclude any means of reliably identifying false connections. And if that complexity wasn’t boggling, would it really capture anything more than our present distributed (inefficient) system of records? You would wind up with a, admittedly more sophisticated, statistical model for identifying bogus individuals.

Another thing I wonder is how much help it would actually be. Lots of issues are more complex than “is clean water good?” If and when a decision needs to be made on something outside your expertise, or with no clearly altruistic option, you have to look for help in understanding your choices. And that makes you vulnerable to influence by someone else’s interpretation. Which leaves you where we are now.

So I guess it raises some problems to solve. Can you really create a perfect record of identity without sacrificing privacy? Could you meaningfully interrogate it? How do you provide an unbiased education of every vote and referendum? How do you solve the influence problem or stop organized political machines from springing up again? Does any of this address the root cause of unbalanced wealth and power?

I have no idea how these work, but one hack idea off the cuff:

You get the light for free. At least when your lids are open; that’s how vision works. A cheap digital watch lasts ages on a tiny coin cell because the polarisation of the LCD, which passes or blocks polarised light, takes minimal energy. Stack up a passive polariser, and the active LCD-like layer, (and maybe a second passive layer?) and you can cast selective shadows on the retina.

This gives you monochrome “smart vision” in the same sense as a monochrome Casio wristwatch. No idea how to tackle issues of focus at such a short focal length, or achieving any sort of active display let alone colour.

Maybe the whole thing is a pipe dream crackpot idea.

You might be interested in the story of Luigi Galvani’s experiments with frog muscle tissue. It was seminal work in anatomy as well as physics.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631069106000370?via%3Dihub

One of the frustrating things about Signal is its extreme compression. I hope WhatsApp laxing up a bit will be the final push to the Signal devs to allow me to send a 30 MiB photo if I want to. Just give me a damn opt-in option buried in a settings menu for Pete’s sake.

Annoys me to no end that I’m forced to crunch image quality down. The reasons I heard in discussion were to save disk space and network bandwidth. I have no sympathy for either of these points. Have a modicum of digital hygiene and delete old files, and pressure your ridiculous governments to invest and regulate ISPs, then join the rest of the world in the 21st century.

Telus? What a bunch of crooked hosers.

“an unknown (mobile?) client”

Well, nice try anyway.

Hack.

It doesn’t mean someone guessed your Facebook dictionary-word password.

It doesn’t even mean some black hoodie-wearing, bad actor remotely broke into a secure computer system.

It’s a clever trick. Whether it’s in code or concrete. Some creative, elegant, unexpected, solution to a problem.

“I know a menu hack. Order the kids burger and add cheese to save a buck.”

“We ran out of conductors in the cable, so we’re transmitting power via a differential pair. I know it’s a hack, but we need to ship by end of month.”