@rodneylives@mefi.social

John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Jun 29, 2026

Seems bad, a mass surveillance act progressing through Congress, again in the name of "protecting children," bah https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require-age-checks-get-online

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Jun 09, 2026

Replying to @ajroach42@retro.social

@ajroach42@retro.social I feel like I should boost this entire thread but I've already visited three posts in it.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Jun 02, 2026

Replying to @vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net

@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net @philpem@digipres.club Two years ago I had cause to be in the very nice multi-story library in downtown Atlanta, and I noticed they still have a print edition of Microsoft Encarta on their reference shelves.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 16, 2026

Replying to @tildetown@tiny.tilde.website

@tildetown@tiny.tilde.website Does anyone reply to these? I was working on a script/game when Town went down, is there any way I could get a copy of it to work on locally? I've already tried scp, it's down too.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 14, 2026

I'll be getting a table at Vintage Computing Festival (VCF) Southeast 2026 this year in Atlanta! And it looks like I'll be able to present my talk on the history of Loadstar there too! https://vcfed.org/events/otherevents/vintage-computer-festival-southeast/

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 13, 2026

Hay eveybodie, They Might Be Giants is giving away a free download of Flood in America, a collection of songs from Flood as performed on live tours, for today and tomorrow only! Here: https://tmbgshop.com/collections/all/products/flood-live-in-america-download

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 13, 2026

Replying to @eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place @seldo@alpaca.gold All of this indicates that the underlying problem is stupid people have too much money.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 13, 2026

Replying to @seabass@social.seabass.systems

@seabass@social.seabass.systems @kde@floss.social Furthermore: the only reason you can't access files on your phone as easily as if they're on a computer is because of the stupid walls between programs they erected in the first blinking place!

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 12, 2026

I've been working on a silly little terminal game. Deliver the mail to the people in a small (one screen-sized) kingdom. Problem is, there's one randomly-placed live landmine left over from the recent war. Everyone has an idea of where it is, but not everyone is right.

It's not the kind of game where you deduce its location. It's the kind of game where you use what info you get and hope for the best. And if you lose, hey, it takes like five minutes to play.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 10, 2026

I mentioned Wrong People yesterday. I mean that, not just to mean people who say something incorrect, but people who, for whatever reason, _constantly_ say things that are incorrect. Of course different people will have different definitions of wrongness, but...

Often you'll find people who, for whatever reason, are _consistently_ wrong. Not randomly wrong, but you get the sense that they have ulterior motives for their wrongness. Maybe they're trying to push the discourse in some direction, for personal or professional reasons. Those are the Wrong People.

They cannot be right, because they have a vested, often hidden, reason for their Wrongness. Like, who in their right mind can honestly believe AOC is an antisemite? Yet some people push that line. They are the static before the signal. They are a fine target for the block button.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 10, 2026

WIRED: "Chrome users were caught off guard by a 4-GB Google AI model baked into Chrome, sparking privacy concerns. The good news: You can easily uninstall it. The bad? You might not want to."

PLEASE DON'T PRESUME WHAT I WILL AND WONT WANT WIRED MAGAZINE

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 09, 2026

Thinking about switching from Gmail to some other email. They've decided to move their purely Baynesian promotion filter under the same umbrella their AI features are under, so you can't have the first without the second, and I'm fed up. Any suggestions?

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 09, 2026

Replying to @256@mastodon.social

@256@mastodon.social While it's entered a period of neglect, Blogger and Blogspot continue rolling along.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 05, 2026

Replying to @mathowie@xoxo.zone

@mathowie@xoxo.zone Our watchgroup does the last episode of Murderbot tonight!

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 05, 2026

Replying to @bontchev@infosec.exchange

@bontchev @atoponce one company does a bad thing, so other company doing a similar bad thing is nothing

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 05, 2026

Replying to @xgqt@functional.cafe

@xgqt @mgorny @atoponce I've had phones where this would be one-eighth of its storage.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 04, 2026

Replying to @rodneylives@mefi.social

It looks though like it's only on its "Firehose," not its front page. Oh well!

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 04, 2026

Replying to @rodneylives@mefi.social

Yeah, it's been a long time since Slashdot was huge and sites could be taken down by "the Slashdot effect," but it's still a nice thing. Now I have had a total of two submissions published on Slashdot.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 04, 2026

Remember Slashdot? Long long ago i submitted an article about a new Nethack version to its front page and they published it.

Well, on a whim, I went back and submitted one about Nethack 5.0, and not only did they publish it this time also, but unprompted by me they also linked to my @Play column about it. https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/05/04/0137222/nethack-50-released

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 03, 2026

Replying to @rodneylives@mefi.social

And then, a new world opens up to you. It has its quirks too. You learn to keep your filenames short so more will fit on screen when you use ls, and not to add spaces to them because those multiply your hassles. But there's so much power there, especially behind the two-letter commands. ls. cd. cp. mv. rm. df. dd. if. vi. Linux pros love the command line but, humorously, they hate typing. Modern shells also have search and even autocomplete, and scrolling through previous commands with up and down arrows. You don't HAVE to use any of this, pretty much ever. But it's there if you need it... or if, someday, you want it. An excellent way to dip your toes into this world is with Julia "b0rk" Evans series of one-image explainers: wizardzines.com/comics/

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 03, 2026

There are two poles of Linux use.
There's people who use it like they used Windows, as a GUI with settings and knobs. You usually get your software out of a repository, and if you don't a .deb now looks just like a .msi installer. If you're using Mint or Ubuntu, it'll look very familiar to you.

But it's a lot easier than on Windows to drop down to the underlevel. The terminal prompt. It's like the old DOS prompt, but far more powerful, and actually easier to use.

An example. Last night I needed a way that would take screenshots of my desktop every minute. To do that, you can either find a premade slab of program with knobs and dials that won't even quite work exactly how you want it to, or, if you have a command line tool that takes a single screenshot (the one I found was called grim), you can open a terminal and just do:

while true; do grim; sleep 60; done

A single line that replaces a dozen miscellaneous bespoke tools! Stop it with Ctrl-C.

That's the power of a command line

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 03, 2026

Replying to @Monzz@elekk.xyz

@Monzz@elekk.xyz I personally don't think Nethack is nearly as formidable as its reputation suggests, I think DCSS is harder, personally.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 02, 2026

Replying to @going_to_maine@mastodon.social

@going_to_maine@mastodon.social Yes, auspicious! I think they skipped over 4.0 because a substantial variant took up the 4 number.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 02, 2026

Replying to @funcrunch@me.dm

@funcrunch Thank for you for reporting on this. I have begun to inform the world.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 02, 2026

NETHACK 5.0 is out. https://nethack.org/

I am literally crying right now.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 02, 2026

Replying to @rodneylives@mefi.social

I kind of want to show the world, but I'm also wary of Youtube assuming it must be good by any traffic I drive to it.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 02, 2026

I just found an amazingly AI slop computer explainer video. It's awful! The illustrations hurt my brain! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIrwKuAwjZE

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · May 01, 2026

Replying to @foone@digipres.club

@foone@digipres.club There's no PR team pushing Mastodon on folk. People talk about organic publicity. Well, ALL of Mastodon's publicity has to be viral, because no one with money is backing it. Also, there's no articles to write on how Mastodon Boss has made some stupid decision.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 30, 2026

Replying to @ajroach42@retro.social

@ajroach42 Yay, Andrew! Your posts are always interesting! I have an electric bike, and I've thought about taking a road trip somewhere with it. You're pretty far, but in-the-same-state far. I'm still mostly a beginner though.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @Bodling@deacon.social

@Bodling @karlauerbach I also know such people.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 23, 2026

Replying to @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

@WesternInfidels Wow, that opened in mefi-social's interface, and is officially the longest "Mastodon" post I've ever seen.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 23, 2026

Replying to @rodneylives@mefi.social

...introduced whole new categories of things to hate computers for like how AI security systems have caused Target to falsely accuse people of shoplifting, and caused countless companies to replace their usual shitty customer service chatbots with WORSE shitty bots... ...setting aside ALL of that, they also threaten to destroy entire categories of freelance work, making it even harder on people who already have a difficult time surviving. BUT NO I'M A HATER. Phooey!

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 23, 2026

'pparently now some people are starting to call No AI No Matter What folk (pretty much people like me) haters.

I mean setting aside how this economically benefits terrible companies, how the great push for building datacenters for these things will consume resources...

...how they're all made possible only by the outright theft of data from countless websites, how they're profiting off the kindness and generosity of people putting information on websites...

...how AI slop is making the web worse, how it is fueling misinformation and propaganda on a massive scale and how that will get much worse over time, how Claude makes for brittle code that's harder to maintain, lets companies licensewash open source projects...

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 23, 2026

Replying to @gamingonlinux@mastodon.social

@gamingonlinux Microsoft Entertainment Pack™ Slop Edition

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 22, 2026

Replying to @andy_warb@mastodon.social

@andy_warb Oh it looks awesome!

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 21, 2026

Replying to @ComicContext@mstdn.social

@ComicContext "Ha ha! Behold my clever ruse! This robot is actually not trained to smash your camera! It's... "...okay, it IS trained to smash your camera. But this OTHER robot... "...is also trained to smash your camera. "That's all I got. Camera smashers. It's not my fault, the electronics store was out of a lot of things!"

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 15, 2026

Replying to @fluttergirly@chitter.xyz

@fluttergirly Yay, congrats! I'd offer to test but I'm not sure I could give it the time it deserves.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 14, 2026

Replying to @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io

@skinnylatte It's, um... cock-a-noodle-soup?

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 04, 2026

Replying to @mavica_again@computerfairi.es

@mavica_again Yes! It's great!

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Apr 01, 2026

Replying to @cmconseils@mastodon.social

@cmconseils@mastodon.social "Well doctor?" "I'm sorry to break it to you... you have brainleaf."

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Mar 31, 2026

Replying to @sue@glasgow.social

@sue Blanothy and Doroche

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Mar 27, 2026

Replying to @ipaschke@cyberplace.social

@ipaschke @me_ Yay! Is this available anywhere?

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Mar 26, 2026

Replying to @mhoye@cosocial.ca

@mhoye@cosocial.ca Agreed.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Mar 14, 2026

Replying to @LRRRonEarth@beige.party

@LRRRonEarth@beige.party @BionicBeth@beige.party YOU CAN DO ANYTHING AT ZUUL.COM. THE ONLY LIMIT IS YOURSELF.

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Mar 13, 2026

Replying to @matdevdug@c.im

@matdevdug@c.im I saw that linked elsewhere! I think you're right!

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Mar 08, 2026

Replying to @derickr@phpc.social

@derickr@phpc.social I could stand to do this with "really." @bagder@mastodon.social

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Mar 03, 2026

Replying to @c_reider@sonomu.club

@c_reider@sonomu.club What gets me is my big Trumper cousin is a Star Wars fan. What does he think Star Wars was ABOUT?

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Mar 03, 2026

Replying to @MostlyHarmless__dup_1995@thecanadian.social

@MostlyHarmless Be careful! Parrots aren't easy to care for!

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Mar 01, 2026

Replying to @davep__dup_4@infosec.exchange

@davep@infosec.exchange AUGH

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John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social · Feb 14, 2026

Replying to @noelle@mastodon.noelle.dev

@noelle@mastodon.noelle.dev @ratfactor@mastodon.art Yay, I'm the first person to log this page into the Wayback Machine!

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