Chant it with me, friends!

Stop 👏 using 👏 Chrome 👏!!

More old trivia is that the original OK Cupid system was written in C, including the actual web server that served the pages. They wrote it in C so that the matching thing could run real-time, which is super impressive, even if writing your own web server is actually pretty dumb.

I loved the days when people just wanted to make fun, useful, quirky stuff on the internet and not just peddle thirst traps and Chinese merchandise.

Bram obviously gave so much to the global community, and directly to Uganda through his persistent charity efforts, and no more need be said about what a devoted and generous person he was. We’d all truly be worse off without his contributions and I say that as a devout Emacs user.

Still, it always rubbed me wrong that his stated plan for the project was immortality.

How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future?

Keep me alive.

Bram was notoriously possessive of the Vim project and consistently avoided bringing in other lead maintainers or adding widely demanded features (like async processing). Maybe that changed while I wasn’t paying attention, but it had a lot to do with the very successful neovim fork. Bram eventually added an async feature but not before neovim exploded in popularity.

It’s tragic to hear of Bram’s passing, and at such a young age. I will be interested to see what happens to the Vim project now, in his absence.

It feels like realizing that WhatsApp is a terrible Meta privacy nightmare, but you can’t wake up because you can’t convince your whole family to use Signal.

I support Pocket Casts because it’s made by Automattic, the makers of WordPress, Tumblr, and WooCommerce. Their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, is someone who seems to really care about the freedom and diversity of the internet. As far as players go, it’s got all the features you’d want for an Android app.

I seldom listen on my PC, but if I want to I can usually find the stream on whatever service the podcast has chosen (their own site, or whichever embedded player they elect to use).

I wonder if these battles will shake loose the circuit split on de minimis exceptions to music samples (see https://lawreview.richmond.edu/2022/06/10/a-music-industry-circuit-split-the-de-minimis-exception-in-digital-sampling/).

Currently, it is absolutely not “cut and dried” whether the use of any given sample should be permitted. Most musicians are erring on the side of “clear everything,” but does an AI-generated “simulacrum” qualify as “sampling”?

What’s on trial here is basically “what characteristic(s) of an artist’s work do they own?” If you write a song, you can “own” whatever is written down (melody, lyrics, etc.) If you perform a song, you can own the performance (recordings thereof, etc.) Things start to get pretty vague when we start talking about “I own the sound of my voice.”

I think it’s accepted that it’s legal for an impersonator to make a living doing TikToks pretending to be Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise can’t really sue them saying “he sounds like me.” But is it different if a computer does it? It may very well be.

It’s going to be a pretty rough few years in copyright litigation. Buckle up.

Louis Rossmann is a bit of a provocateur, but what he’s saying in this video is the bare and unvarnished truth. If Reddit cared about its users and its moderators, the CEO’s internal messaging would be less like “this will blow over” and more like “what should we do to meet these people in the middle?”

There is no meeting in the middle when you’re up against institutional investors who have put literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to fund your operation. I almost feel bad for Steve, he really has no choice, it’s just a shame to see him falling into line and reciting exactly what the board wants him to say.

And by the way, this is why Beehaw has so much promise. The incentives of the operators and the users are aligned. There is no third party with outsized power waiting for the chance to pull the rip cord and enshittify the whole thing.

That’s only true when you use a generally accepted definition of the word “improving.”

When you use the capitalist robber baron definition, he’s spot on!

I won’t drop any spoilers because it’s a wild ride, but there is one obvious overlap (not in a main plotline or anything) that’ll make you chuckle.

Reddit was dead from the day Conde Nast bought it. Every day since then was a roll of the dice as to whether they’d attempt to seize more profits and ruin it, or not. This happens to essentially every public or aspiring public company eventually. The need for perpetual growth warps decisions and guts the original mission in the end.

We call it “autosarcophagy” or “self-cannibalism.”

As I understand it, Reddit also took on a lot of external capital investment, which only makes the pressure to perform financially even greater. I can’t fault them for making the decisions they have to make to keep their jobs, keep their executive salaries, and so on.

Long live the sustainable, community-driven, community-funded future! Nobody can screw this up for us if we are the ones footing the bill.

Dishonored was the first game I played on the Deck; a replay for me (played on PC the first time) and daaaang was it fun to relive that adventure!

I still think they kind of ruined the Blink ability in Dishonored 2, but the clockwork soldiers are among my favorite video game enemies of all time.

That one part, with the music, with the Walkman (you know what I’m talking about) is one of the top emotional moments in gaming history for me!

Have you played the “predecessor” game that sort of exists in the same universe, “Alan Wake”? Also runs perfectly on the Deck and I quite enjoyed it. It’s weird as hell.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus was so much fun on the Deck. Constantly impressed at what this thing is able to run.

I played Death Stranding on Playstation and it kind of changed me; that first moment when you go out into the landscape and that Low Roar song starts up will live rent-free in my mind until I die.

I’m at like 60 hours of Dead Cells now and I still haven’t beaten the thing. Can’t get past the Hand of the King, but dang is that game satisfying to play.

I was never a roguelike fan until I played Hades and now I guess I’m an addict.

I read that there was a pretty fatal map rendering bug that could be fixed with some mod or patch that sounded a little arcane to apply… Any problems?

For sync a la Dropbox, check out Syncthing! I run it in Windows, Linux, Mac, my Synology NAS, and Android. Works amazingly well.