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• Post #4211149

  I am getting a clear message from somewhere far back in the 1994 days of our Caltech experience: reread Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. Who remembers that particular bit of #computer related journalism or investigation or whatever it was? That's the thing, Stoll (as I recall) remains uncertain exactly what he stumbled upon and cursed himself for being so wrapped up in chasing the miscreant. (cont'd)

• Post #4211148

  This is all I know of the film Fearless, written by Rafael Yglesias, father of Matt Yglesias the political...guy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless_(1993_film) I only know the plot summary, and the script sounds...strange to me. Peter Weir directed and he's good. He shot Paul Schrader's script for The Mosquito Coast...guess he liked edgy material. But Fearless seems edgy in a spectacularly unhealthful way going just from the description. I'm curious what others interested in...

• Post #4211147

  Pretty flower outside my house #flowers

• Post #4126732

  Movies like The Beginning of the End feel bizarrely like a preliminary approach to that appalling televisual manifestation from the days of my youth: "COPS" the #TV show. I'm sure that there's folks who are reasonably close to my age on the fediverse and can remember when "COPS" first pushed its way onto U.S. television screens. (cont'd)

• Post #4077750

  Here we go! #X11 window manager poll for #UNIX / #BSD / #Linux type systems. If I've made a mistake in listing something that doesn't actually have X11 support, please let me know.

• Post #4055943

  @liquor_american@universeodon.com oh hey! thanks so much

• Post #4053832

  One of the dirtiest of dirty secrets in the #tech sector is a very simple one: the "techno-optimism" and the "e/acc" and all the other ways of superficially honoring the notion that the technology corporations of the United States are guiding everyone into a future of abundance and high-tech miracles, the practical spirit of U.S. #technology is profoundly conservative, hidebound, stagnant, and focused only on an exceedingly thin assortment of hot topics...basically whatever t...

• Post #4052254

  RE: https://seattle.pink/@mxchara/116972462021660316 I'd like to take this specific matter up again, the Dick #Nixon problem. The U.S. public has been invited to be far more forgiving and charitable towards Richard Nixon than he deserves. This was a policy right from the start; the GOP scheme to insure Nixon's pardon has been considered a sound resolution to the whole affair and that is clearly wrong. An unholy fixation on executive clemency as a political weapon has invaded U.S. #poli...

• Post #4050621

  #Marketing has laid waste to U.S. culture and so-called "Western Civilization", which now teeters on the brink of dissolution largely because marketers have had at least a solid century of beating the collective minds of "the West" into pulp. The cynical social assumptions of the marketers are now mainstream. "Everyone knows" that the common herd are mere bundles of impulses to be driven about by advertising and corralled by The Rule of Law™, administered by strongm...

• Post #4048306

  We had a whole complex of curious insights yesterday, partly from the inspiration of watching Macross for the first time. A curious aspect of the Pnictogen Wing's lengthy relationship with Daria is how we fall on either side of a great transformation in U.S. pop culture: the great victory of #anime over the American animation. I knew anime already--from exactly two examples, Akira and the film of Ghost in the Shell that I only saw a piece of. #Caltech had an anime club and it was like three...

• Post #4040402

  I'm guilty of having watched the Dan Olson #NFTs video many more times than I can count; it's often something I play on my phone when I'm washing dishes or otherwise trying to do some chore--it hits a sweet spot of being familiar enough not to be overly distracting while retaining power to engage my intellect and give my wandering thoughts something definite to chew over. And also...it's all about #money, or more precisely the intense and dangerously infectious culture of chasi...

• Post #4026297

  RE: https://seattle.pink/@mxchara/116966886921480461 I have begun to suspect very evil things indeed about Clive Staples Lewis, and that reminds of me of why I've become perhaps too enamoured of writing in public, or the public-facing Internet anyway: I feel that it's a corrective force upon myself. I don't know very many people personally in whom I feel that I can talk about the wildest and woolliest aspects of my life, not the least because I've had such a bizarrely mixed ba...

• Post #4023198

  RE: https://masto.hackers.town/@maddiefuzz/116966421824885836 There's only three difficult problems in computer science: 0] undefined 1] array indexing 2] SEGFAULT core dump heehee

• Post #4022953

  #Science in "the West" has been afflicted by an especially bad tendency to what I've sometimes thought of as "magic pixie dust" thinking--one which coexists with an extreme degree of scorn and performative execration heaped upon the abstractions and intangible entities postulated by non-Western peoples. While Christianity does have its mystical side, that mysticism has slowly been beaten and squeezed and persecuted out of mainstream Christian practice. This started from...

• Post #4022500

  When I was younger, for quite a long time (going back to a ridiculously early age probably because I was mimicking my father's attitudes) I was dead against the use of electronic calculators in the teaching of #mathematics, or at least any calculator more complex than a standard four-banger that lets you do the basic operations and square roots and little else. Now...there's a genuine accessibility issue here, one that's earned me a lot of heat in the past for my dogmatism on calcul...

• Post #4022041

  So I'm gonna try to be a LITTLE systematic here, and go through the replies to my #UNIX / #Linux / #BSD poll about desktop environments, and run another poll maybe for 2 days rather than 1 Also I think I'll put in an option for "no graphical environment" because surely there are users who prefer only sparing use of graphical applications. I wonder, has anyone ever written a command-line only method for, like...launching X11 applications that does some horrible trick like usin...

• Post #4020148

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@sjvn/116965490229311725 oh wow, yeah, there was a time once when I cared what John Dvorak thought of Macintosh shit

• Post #4016529

  RE: https://seattle.pink/@mxchara/116960344230661314 Really heartened by the enthusiastic responses to this poll. I feel like I've learned a lot and there's so many things to try! maybe I should get into running virtual machines or something like that to try out stuff in a more facile manner.

• Post #4005506

  Pfft. YouTube shuffle decides to serve this up after a lot of basically serious or moody music. https://youtu.be/63ZV3Okt3gw?list=RDJOU42Y8J4eg Allan Sherman. May he live forever in our hearts. Somehow he condenses an entire social rebellion getting snuffed out by mainstream success into one song. A really groovy song.

• Post #4005079

  Peter's been active on Twitter again, learning how to be more measured with it, trying to get an idea as to why it's so durable. "Elon Musk" isn't a good enough answer to that question. Yes, this is about Elon, but it's about some very very specific detail in the life of Elon Musk which he still clutches. It really is like in #KamenRider Wizard. Unbelievably that series, which I came to late because it was one of those "sleeper hits" as a Kamen Rider show (i...

• Post #4003443

  RE: https://seattle.pink/@mxchara/116961601090287076 I'll just say it outright because it's eating at me. It's been eating at me for years—back to childhood when I didn't understand anything about anything. In My Dinner with Andre, André Gregory says something about Le Petit Prince that is astonishing to me and I think must have astonished Wally Shawn, who does a better job of facing off against Gregory's torrent of chaotic recollections and wild predictions about the futu...

• Post #4003164

  In the #FateGrandOrder multiverse and supremely profitable gambling-game franchise (oh dear how are we even going to THINK about digging into that squirming mass of curses) the spirit of the #Voyager missions is represented by the Heroic Spirit seen below, nicknamed "Boyager", and clearly he's been infused with the undying and insatiably curious powers of Le Petit Prince, a favorite of mine in childhood...I know I'm not alone in regarding that text as almost...holy writ. Almost...

• Post #4001995

  not one single vote for twm. I used twm. it was fine! #unix

• Post #4000006

  @stuartl@mastodon.longlandclan.id.au ooh fvwm

• Post #3998322

  @nev@status.nevillepark.ca LXDE, I would have listed that one if I'd remembered it. I thought of listing Cinnamon too but isn't that GNOME basically? (I don't keep up with these things well)

• Post #3998106

  RE: https://seattle.pink/@mxchara/116960344230661314 If you use something way out there, I would like to know about it! I'll boost any mention of a desktop environment I don't know =D #UNIX

• Post #3998053

  OK let me run up this flagpole. now I KNOW there's so many UNIX-style desktop environments that I can't possible make a really comprehensive poll but I'm genuinely curious as to what folks use. We first experienced Xfce quite a while ago (late 1990s when it was new) and after spending a while with KDE and other things instead we settled back into Xfce. It gets the job done and that's what matters. So, your #Linux / #BSD / #UNIX desktop environment!

• Post #3997102

  maybe I should write some silly little Xfce widget as a thing. I remember on the Mac, when they introduced a strip of buttons at the bottom that could pop up menus and stuff (very familiar stuff these days) I tried to figure out how to get a plugin into their deskbar (whatever it was called, this was late System 7 into 8 days) to display something other than a popup menu. I was hoping to get it to pop up something slightly larger, like a small game board. but I failed. with #Xfce it ought to b...

• Post #3990452

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn I've sort of know about this for a long long time. I'm not well educated on leftism but I do at least know that in South America, leftist movements saw great possibilities in computing technology. So this system was actually up for a couple years! I am now more certain that my father must have seen this room at least once. I know almost nothing about his scientific work in Chile but I do know at one point he wanted to flee the United Stat...

• Post #3990168

  Returning to #GhostBSD after a while away feels so relaxing. Napstablook has good taste in operating systems and I am sorry that I ever doubted their judgment (but you know me, I have to find out for myself) #Haiku almost won out as my second boot option. One can do actual work on HaikuOS and I intend to do more myself but I think it's good enough to have it on a laptop.