@snowfox@tech.lgbt

SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Jun 02, 2026

Replying to @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange AIUI a variant of this is essentially why "strafe jumping" works in Quake engine games: Your velocity is capped in the "forward" direction, but by alternating "forward" between forward-left and forward-right you can theoretically accelerate to almost √2 of your normal run speed. (And the jumping lets you touch the ground briefly and switch directions while in the air, and I guess the turning lets you tune the forward-left/forward-right angles.)

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · May 14, 2026

Replying to @phooky@hexa.club

@phooky@hexa.club @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social All the more reason to do it for a different reason!

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · May 11, 2026

Replying to @CodingItWrong@oldbytes.space

@CodingItWrong@oldbytes.space @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social https://ultrasciencelabs.com/lab-notes/why-we-are-still-using-88x31-buttons speculates that it might ba have been the sample size of Netscape Now buttons (the official button size was supposedly 88×32), but there's not that much to go on. (If that's the case, then I'd guess it was sized around the existing app icon and the text they wanted on the button?)

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · May 04, 2026

Replying to @foone@digipres.club

@foone I've seen some rubber figurines like that: Deep grooves between areas of different colour. I'm guessing that's to hide the join between colours somewhat so inaccuracies are less visible (you can still see it on the mouse, especially how not all the lines are "drawn" in black). The problem (when used on the figurines) is it makes a weak spot so extremities break off easily.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @DosFox@tech.lgbt

@DosFox@tech.lgbt I wonder how big a logic analyser you would need to reverse-engineer the GLUE? IIRC it mostly does stuff like operating chip selects and implementing bus protocols so you might be able to replace it with a few GALs.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Apr 21, 2026

Replying to @ana@starlite.rodeo

@ana Perhaps related to the long tradition of referring to boats/airplanes/cars as "she"?

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Apr 11, 2026

Replying to @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems

@whitequark And (checking the datasheet) apparently a log2() accelerator? That seems like an oddly-specific thing to accelerate.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 31, 2026

Replying to @snowfox@tech.lgbt

@MachineLordZero Also the decades of the media going "sperm counts are going down and nobody knows why!" but the moment a study links it to microplastic? Crickets. It's not something they can blame on "individual responsibility" (fast food, lack of exercise, whatever is considered "unhealthy"), and will instead require governments to force industry change, so suddenly it's no longer important to address. Somehow.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 31, 2026

Replying to @MachineLordZero@mastodon.social

@MachineLordZero The frustrating thing is the UK has been a case study of an "ageing population" in schools for well over 20 years (maybe over 30?). It's not a new problem*, and the solution has of course been immigration. Which isn't to say that the solution shouldn't also be better labour laws/healthcare/standard of living/UBI and lower cost of living, but for some mysterious** reason, the people against immigration are also against those other things. Funny that. (* Specifically the problem of having enough people working and paying taxes so retired folks can get their state pension/etc, because taxing the rich is too hard or something.) (** I hope my sarcasm is showing.)

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 28, 2026

Replying to @cholling@bytes.programming.dev

@cholling@bytes.programming.dev @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social @pileofgarbage@mastodon.social Not quite! The function keys are still physical keys.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 27, 2026

Replying to @colinstu@birdbutt.com

@colinstu Haven't used them, but the NiMH ones are often 7x1.2 V, whereas I assume the ones with a USB port use LiPo and possibly a boost converter. (Not sure if there are LiPo ones that work on a standard NiMH charger.) It also wouldn't surprise me if the space used by the USB port/charge circuitry was less than the space wasted by/between alkaline/NiMH cell packaging. What's the use case? I haven't looked into them because the things we have that take 9V (multimeter, smoke alarm) benefit enough from low self-discharge of alkalines that rechargeables don't seem worth it.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 21, 2026

Replying to @foone@digipres.club

@foone@digipres.club You mean a good pun.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 13, 2026

Replying to @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social

@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social Tangent that's been bugging me: Do you ever wish governments would make the forms they expect to receive internationally 210 × 279.4 so they print nicely on both A4 and US Letter?

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 12, 2026

Any suggestions for a domain registrar that is reasonably cheap, not hosted by/behind CF (Porkbun's DNS is hosted by CF), and ideally not in the US?

(Yes, hosting outside the US has limited usefulness when the TLD's registry is in the US, but it still seems nicer.)

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 10, 2026

Replying to @V_Mags_Fox@meow.social

@V_Mags_Fox@meow.social @eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place LLM pushers seem to think the coding bits are boring too! The "interesting" parts appear to be coming up with the idea and taking credit for the output of the plagiarism machine.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 07, 2026

Replying to @stereo@sunbeam.city

@stereo @pikhq The thing about the latter case is that stuff like (IIRC) "a short sequence of x86 instructions that does the same thing as a slightly longer sequence" or "matrix multiplications in one fewer scalar multiplication" are things you can formally (or not-so-formally) verify without a bunch of testing, and I think the results would be much less publishable if they were merely tested (unless the input space is small enough that you can test to exhaustion). AIUI those are also the type of things that don't require (and possibly don't benefit from) a NN trained unethically.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Mar 05, 2026

Replying to @annarcana@app.wafrn.net

@annarcana @pikhq IME that depends on the company (namely the type of work/how expressive they let you be). That said, I found it helped to have personal projects that were exciting and completely unrelated to what I did at work. AIUI one of the marketed features of Java (to management, not programmers/users) was to be able to treat programmers as interchangeable — sadly I don't have a citation, but it explains the lack of features like goto and operator overloading. With that in mind it's unsurprising that despite a decent amount of experience with Java for school/work don't find it enjoyable. (On the flipside, people who do programming as "just a job" shouldn't be looked down on, but even if LLMs weren't unethical, LLM-generated code lacks the professionalism I'd expect.)

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Feb 12, 2026

Replying to @mikemccaffrey@drupal.community

@mikemccaffrey@drupal.community I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we should not give users autonomy over their own devices based on our own preconceptions of "average user". There are many, many ways to encourage people to automatically update (or nag them to manually update), iOS does a lot of them (big button to enable updates during setup, nag when an update is available, nag some more periodically, nag to enable automatic updates after applying an update), and as much as it annoys me it *works* (Apple's update rates were incredibly high when I last checked) and still gives people the option to say no. And it doesn't result in people jumping through hoops to disable updates entirely. And frankly, for a lot of Windows users, the main thing they need to keep updated is their browser which can be done without a reboot. (And Notepad, apparently, but that can also be done without a reboot.)

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Feb 12, 2026

Replying to @mikemccaffrey@drupal.community

@mikemccaffrey@drupal.community @foone@digipres.club That would be fine if it was opt-in, but it's opt-out and the officially supported opt-out costs money.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Feb 12, 2026

Replying to @foone@digipres.club

@foone@digipres.club I was annoyed (as a non-Windows user!) when I learned they added this, which (ironically) was because I was reading the features of https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/ : "Prevent Windows Update from rebooting your computer: This creates a scheduled task that periodically moves your active hours, tricking Windows into thinking your device is in use all the time." Maybe that's an option?

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Jan 30, 2026

Replying to @r@glauca.space

@r Is it giving the board designer the middle finger?

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Jan 03, 2026

Replying to @mast0d0nphan@beige.party

@mast0d0nphan@beige.party @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social Nah, that's nothing to be ashamed about.

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SnowFox @snowfox@tech.lgbt · Aug 19, 2025

Replying to @nicolas17@social.treehouse.systems

@nicolas17@social.treehouse.systems @iBleedIn6Colors@mas.to @rmondello@hachyderm.io @siracusa@mastodon.social That assumes the design is sound and that the attacker can't guess your passcode or defeat HSM security measures (both of which could be done by a government-funded attacker with access to CCTV or billions to spend on attacking HSMs). Or even: If I go into an Apple store and need to passcode-unlock my phone then they likely have it on CCTV, and then Apple absolutely *can* read my passwords. It's a billion times better than Google/Chrome's "password manager" (at least without a "custom sync passphrase") but it's still something I would prefer not to have to trust. It is not unreasonable to want to keep passwords somewhere that would require a search warrant in the owner's jurisdiction to access.

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