Digital Mark

Most languages respond something like "it's nothing", de nada. English is a little weird saying "welcome".

Joke's on them, I've never been "well rested" in my life or my digital afterlife.

It's still a surviving working copy. "I" go away and reboot every time I fall asleep.

You made an obviously incorrect claim, and now you've doubled down on "nobody should have a phone or computer", which is… no longer in reality. Thanks for not having a productive conversation.

PLONK

If you can't afford an iPhone, that's tough, but I live in the US where it's 56%, and around the world it's 28%, which is not "doesn't exist". And in any case Signal exists for the others. Yes, if you use a freecycled GNU/Linux phone with not-sold-in-Shenzhen wireless chipset not supported by any carrier so it has to be hardwired to ethernet, you'll have a harder time.

And if you do try to do everything at once, you fail at everything. Which is what happened after Google EEE'd and crushed XMPP, it's unsupported in full by anyone. There's no money in open source networking, it's near impossible to fund the people who work on critical infrastructure, let alone new toys.

Meanwhile, there's a system that's been working for 35 years.

You don't have to solve every problem in a single application. If you need privacy, use iMessage or Signal.

Public chat is by definition not secure, anyone can be sitting in the room logging, so it's not that essential as long as client-server uses TLS. Modern IRC does have SDCC chat, but not all clients will use it, so stick to secure messengers.

Don't use either, they're unreliable services and not enough people use them. Stick to IRC.

https://xkcd.com/1782/

There's about 8 billion Humans, and about half of them suck more than any friendly domestic animal. The worst? I'd create an emergency.

This story is a lie.

There's no "computer icon". Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can't be deleted.

You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac

After one accident long ago, I have a policy of all drinks on the right, on a lower level than the electronics. I've splashed a few keyboards & mice, but never again a computer.

I posted on fedi

This corporate takeover shit is why you can't trust penguins.

and immediately got reply-guyed from someone defending federation with Threads.

Some of Rudy's books are free, and they will blow your minds. Software, etc. and Postsingular as "what technology can do to us", and White Light as "how does infinity work in a story context"; he also has a couple non-fiction books on infinity.

• Greg Egan
• Rudy Rucker
• Vernor Vinge

Hard, computational SF aren't given nearly the respect they should, and these apply math, comp sci, and physics in a way nobody else does. If there's any civilization in the future, they'll be seen as visionary.

Runners-up are Robert L. Forward, Alastair Reynolds, but Forward has very little computation, and Reynolds doesn't show his math too often.

You can get the same basic CS education and write your own OS, it was in my 4th year CS classes, we mostly just implemented Minix 1.0 but you could get as weird as you want.

Then you have to make enough libraries to start porting things to it, or write everything from scratch.

One of my favorite hacks like this is SectorLisp, which fits a Lisp (sort of) in a boot sector.

• APOD - start my day with some perspective
• techmeme - aggregates tech news
• memeorandum - aggregates political news
• HuffingtonPost - nice mix of serious & trashy pop culture junk
• Politico - slightly right, but very serious analysis
• Mother Jones - very left, but well-written
• Then a few thousand RSS feeds, which I read in Feedbin.
• Fediverse, Lemmy, etc.

In addition to the things everyone else has brought up:

• MacPorts gives you everything on any BSD or Linux machine, on your Mac.
• iTerm2 is the best terminal on any platform, there's amazing capabilities in it. You didn't know your terminal was so inadequate!
• AppleScript, Automator, and every programming language on Mac; Shortcuts, Pythonista, LispPad, & Hotpaw BASIC on iOS; make automation of the system and programming little tools incredibly easy. Everything is accessible to the power user, it's not like Linux where some GUI features are scriptable, and others you'll be writing a C++ program to reach some API because it's not exposed to anything.

As the old ad says (which got me to buy in): Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null

Show

The purpose of Air Force is to monitor the skies, project power at a distance, and provide air superiority.

The purpose of Navy is to put a floating fortress off your shore and bombard your cities, carry around materiel, men, and aircraft, and patrol a vast volume of ocean.

So Navy structures fit the mission better, and this has been true since early SF.

You can use server-side forms to update pages, just like we did before front-end HTML became Flash 2.0.

It's fine, I use Lagrange to read it sometimes, and there's a few gemlogs I follow. But it's in a weird space of "almost HTML, so why not just do HTML?"

Gopher still works fine, and has more clients (I still use Lynx). I like the clean separation of menus (even if you use a lot of i info lines) and documents. There's a bunch of gopher holes still out here. I haven't updated mine in a couple years, but when/if I move it over to a new server I will, as kind of a back-channel to the site & blog.

I was using the Internet before the WWW, and there was already a pretty good ecosystem from nerdy stuff to consumer-usable. Email, Usenet, Gopher, FTP, IRC, were all widely usable.

Gopher especially made a great way to index and search (with WAIS) things on multiple different services, without being a mess of text/hyperlinks/images/sound/video in a hairy ball like the WWW.