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  A cacodemon that the 14 year old drew on a paper bag to use as wrapping paper for her present for my birthday. Yes, I very carefully removed it to keep it. #Caco #doom #art

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  The teen has discovered DVDs and is now highly interested in obtaining them for her favorite movies. She was talking about how cool the extra features and additional content was. She was also excited to find extremely cheap used DVDs and sent me a photo of a The Matrix: Reloaded DVD she got for $1. #DVD #PhysicalMedia

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  I hate it when people say that being online, or social media or interacting with people online "isn't real life". I will concede the quality of communicating primarily through text is different and somewhat stunted compared to face-to-face human interaction. There are limitations to that, too. It just has a different quality. It is still people interacting, sharing ideas, connecting, getting inspired, etc. It is real life. This is real. I am real. You are real.

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  @vie@hachyderm.io Every time something dumb happens in software engineering, I feel like my value goes up. Other people losing braincells from LLMs? More braincells for me. I think that's how it works. Among my coworkers, very few seem to be advocates so much as cautious adopters. Not a lot of class consciousness or solidarity in this industry.

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  I've made more progress with getting #NetBSD running and mostly usable on my Thinkpad T580. I started a document with my notes on how to set up a usable desktop. Some of this information is missing from the NetBSD Guide, Wiki, and FAQ & HOWTOs pages. Some of it was buried deep in man pages, or found by extensively searching pkgsrc repository. https://codeberg.org/thezerobit/public_notes/src/branch/main/netbsd_notes.md I have yet to figure out how to automatically disable the touchpad wh...

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  If you really need to load a Chrome-only webpage, I would not suggest using Chrome or Chromium, both of which talk to Google's servers unbidden. "Ungoogled Chromium" is a great alternative: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium As far as I can tell, it doesn't talk to Google's servers at all and doesn't have any "AI" integrations. It has no default search engine, which is nice, pick your poison. Windows buil...

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  I installed #NetBSD on my #Thinkpad T580. Amazingly, it works. If you select to install XDM (X Display Manager) during installation, then you boot to a graphical login that loads a very primitive X environment with CTWM a window manager for X that gives off distinct 1992 vibes, which happens to be the year it was created. It's an austere #UNIX environment. Perfect, honestly. There are modern desktops in the package repository. My first impressions are A+.

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  I just want an slop-free open source operating system, preferably Unix-like, that has a kernel and software package repository free from slop. I know it won't be perfect, but with just a bit of ethical fortitude, we can create a human-centered operating system. I don't think I'm owed that, but I'm willing to pitch in and help build it. #os #slop

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  What's better than fancy webpages with things popping in and out as you scroll? #Accessibility is better. It also requires a bit of effort, but the result is a webpage that more people can use.

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  Starting to swing from #PureData back to #Csound for a large project I'm working on. The #Pd patches get pretty wild pretty quick and while the visual interface is nice to see all the patch cables, it gets exponentially more difficult to wrangle things as the patches grow. I end up spending a lot of time arranging things visually with precision mouse clicks. Csound is plain text code so rearranging it can be done very fast with the keyboard + Vim style model editing.

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  TIL #analog #modular #synthesis was inspired by digital modular synthesis and not the other way around. Max Mathews made Music III which came out in 1959 had modules called "unit generators" that could be connected in a graph to produce digitally synthesized sounds and music. This was inspiration for early analog modular synths by Moog and others which didn't begin to appear until 1964.

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  Two equivalent abstractions to convert a linear value in the range (0, 1) to an exponential range. #Csound code (user defined opcode) vs. #PureData diagram (subpatch). Csound is certainly quirky and a tiny bit arcane, but it took a tiny fraction of the time to create. #Pd

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  I love weird books. I picked up these weirdos at a tiny bookshop called David Morrison Books in Portland. It's my dream to one day write or edit a weird book myself. Generally, weird books aren't created to be weird, they come into existence because people have different values and interests. Weirdness is relative and hard to force. I guess you can write a book on your least mainstream interests and that's likely to be considered weird by most people if you are an interes...

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  Hell, yes, comrade Rich Hickey: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/ea94e3741ff0a4e3af55b9fe6287887f #Clojure #AntiLLM #Lisp

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  Every post on LinkedIn: "I haven't written code in months. I started prompting new projects into existence. I haven't touched a keyboard in weeks. I just yell prompts at my laptops and it starts new businesses for me. I haven't eaten in days. I have to feed the algorithm tokens, and it's doing a better job than I ever could have at building the future (tm). I didn't get out of bed today. I made an anguished cry and the machine created 7 new AI sta...