Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Dorsey left Bluesky precisely because the other people there felt they had to implement the old-Twitter-like checks and balances that caused him to leave Twitter in the first place. As such, it’s completely out of his influence.

    Yes, it’s still one monolith waiting to be gobbled up by someone with a lot of cash, or to spiral down into what would seem to be almost inevitable enshittification, but it hasn’t done either of those yet, and both the good and bad there mean it’s the closest there is to old Twitter at the moment.

    Please note that I’m not saying that everyone should go jump on there and use it, or even that we have to like it. Just pointing out that Dorsey has nothing to do with it any more.

    Speaking of Dorsey, he went back to endorsing Twitter for a while, but now he’s started Edit: endorsing yet another platform called Nostr. Probably the better candidate for being avoided right now.

    I have no such “but actually” about Threads. Definitely worth avoiding, even if it is supposed to be able to Federate.






  • If you accept Pluto, you have to accept at least half a dozen trans-Neptunian objects as well as the asteroid Ceres, in which case planet nine already exists and would be Neptune. Well, most of the time anyway. Sometimes Pluto passes inside Neptune’s orbit.

    Or maybe you’d like to consider Triton, Neptune’s retrograde moon as a planet as well, on account of how it was probably a dwarf planet in its own right until Neptune plucked it out of its orbit. Once a planet, always a planet, right? Neptune even tried to do the same to Pluto which is why it has such a weird orbit.

    Be team dwarf planet. Lots of new friends outside the regular eight, and Pluto’s a founder member.




  • The whole ring -3 / MINIX business a while back put a serious amount of FUD into the market and Intel has been on the wane ever since.

    This is not necessarily unfounded FUD either. MINIX is literally there, lurking inside all modern Intel processors, waiting to be hacked by the enterprising ne’er-do-well. (NB: This is not to say that there aren’t ways to do similar things to AMD chips, only that MINIX is not present in them, and it’s theoretically a lot more difficult.)

    Then bear in mind that MINIX was invented by Andrew Tanenbaum, someone Linus Torvalds has had disagreements with in the past (heck, Linux might not exist if not for MINIX and Linus’ dislike of the way Tanenbaum went about it), and so there’s an implicit bias against MINIX in the data-centre world, where Linux is far more present than it is on the desktop.

    Thus, if you’re a hypothetical IT manager and you’re going to buy a processor for your data-centre server, you’re ever so slightly more likely to go for AMD.


  • I’ve been around just long enough to suspect that this will be part of a cycle going back and forth between tactile controls and touchscreens.

    That is, give it a decade and touchscreens will be the in-thing again. And another decade and someone will have the “fantastic new idea” of bringing tactile controls back.

    And there’ll be a combo breaker of some sort where a new technology comes along (probably no screens, or controls, only voice control) which a small few will absolutely love - due to sunk cost fallacy mostly - and no-one else will buy (compare: 3D TVs), and the cycle will begin again.

    Bonus points for: 1) Manufacturers managing to have cycles out of step with others because the market forces aren’t quite enough (people not having the money to buy new cars) to bring them all into line. 2) External factors like, say, the world ending, breaking the cycle.


  • Christianity of all denominations is losing followers at a church-worrying rate. Yes, you’ll always get those who are zealous or make it part of their identity and will never quit, and of course, the quiet - if you’ll pardon the pun - masses who are ever faithful, but the churches don’t fill up quite how they used to.

    By getting the kids hooked on an ideology through a relatable, maybe even exciting, child-like character, they’re hoping to (eventually) get people back into churches and get business booming again.



  • William would become king, but then things get weird. I strongly suspect there’d be a rushed act of parliament on behalf of the dead Charles, to whom the parliament was loyal, in order to - ahem - reign in this inexplicably power-mad William and perhaps even try to seek to apply some kind of punishment.

    I could see a cross-party vote to not recognise William as king because of the grievous act and instead choose to recognise the next in line who was not in favour of that grievous act. This might mean that parliament chooses to recognise George as king and seek to appoint a regent in his stead until he was of age, for example.

    Whatever was to happen I don’t think there’d be a civil war over it, but there’d probably be a referendum on becoming a republic fairly soon afterwards so the whole thing could be sidestepped.

    If it turned out William wasn’t acting alone then I still think there’d be an investigation as to who was in favour and maybe expunge William’s line from succession altogether… but then I don’t think the powers that be would want Harry as king either. Or Andrew.

    Edward would be unwilling, but I think he’d make a good, if quiet, king.

    Anne would be f**king hilarious.

    But all of this is moot. The chance of Wills becoming a homicidal maniac is about as likely as his gran coming back from the grave and doing the job herself.





  • Among other problems, this fails to account for non-typing activities performed by the monkey, such as damaging the typewriter or attacking the researcher.

    285 years increases to a few thousand if you alarmingly frequently have to clean the contents of a monkey’s colon out of a typewriter.

    And at some point you’d want to further “refine” your selection process by “repairing” the typewriter to have fewer keys and/or causing the typewriter to jam after the required key press. Monkeys like to press the same key over and over again. Good luck getting them to stop once they’ve pressed a key once.

    TL;DR monkeys are chaos, and this will not be easy.