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  I fixed another long-time annoyance today: the missing window icon of the Slack desktop app (also missing from my pager). This is a common problem with applications that come from outside the traditional Linux ecosystem and are a bit half-assedly integrated, especially with pre-XDG standard environments. Like Fluxbox, which is what I use. The issue is that the app doesn't set a `_NET_WM_ICON` property on its window. In an environment that supports XDG, you can work around this by settin...

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  I really really don't want to make complaining about dumb LLM stuff my entire online personality, but dumb LLM stuff keeps happening. I regret to inform you that not only do some people not check whether the LLM-generated "summary" they get when they do a web search is correct; not only do they have zero comprehension of what they're even looking at and how it differs from the way that a web search worked ten years ago; they may *literally be unable to understa...

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  Random blast from the past: in my sewing stuff I found a folder of handouts I made for a local Society for Creative Anachronism class about the St Birgitta's cap. It's just one double-sided page -- here are the grayscale PNGs, and you can get the PDF here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dhlGto7INi9ptzDEQYWLgR8rxFw0GIIo/view?usp=sharing This is a nice beginner project. It's a small item, so it doesn't use a lot of fabric, and is feasible to hand-sew if you don&a...

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  Parts of Cape Town are experiencing severe flooding, and this is hitting poorer areas especially hard. Now is a good time to donate some money, if you have some to spare. Decision paralysis? My suggestions: Gift of the Givers -- they're my go-to organisation for disaster response donations. You can make a general donation or specify where and how you want the money to be used. https://giftofthegivers.org/donate-online/ PEP Stores Lay By Buddy -- not disaster-specific, but a lot of peop...

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  The LLM word vomit has spread to online cooking instructions, which is exactly what you want to see when researching how to prepare a new kind of seafood without getting food poisoning.

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  I recently listened to the Well There's Your Problem episode about the Therac-25. It's from a few years ago, so it predates the current moment of mass psychosis in the software world. I immediately wondered what the new "AI"-enabled Therac-25 was going to be, and then I remembered that we already have at least one, and probably more that we don't even know about: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/ai-enters-operating-room-reports-arise-botched-surge...

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  It's Wednesday; time for Firefox to break my workflow again. Want the old search bar back? Set browser.search.widget.new to false.