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mcc

@mcc@mastodon.social

glitch girl

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Wait what

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I have just learned something very important!!!

Via @tedmielczarek @natevw I have learned that the Apple // character set is preserved in Unicode (Except not the Apple logo, which is trademarked— this is in the PUA as , but that is not Unicode. But everything else).

Which means!!! The cute little running guy in the hidden characters!! Is in!!!

🮲🮳

So, if you are on Windows 10 or a modern Apple product, above you see two boxes

But, fricking inexplicably!!!
On Linux!!!
It actually displays!!!

weird little running guy

mcc , to random
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Remember when internet services used to have nines? I think that was cool. I think we should make services and websites with nines again

mcc , to random
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Just basically gonna have to assume for the rest of our lives that any cloud/content hosting service offered for free is at best temporary and at worst some kind of trap

mcc , to random
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My recommendation to you is that you never listen to the song "I am not a robot" by Marina and the Diamonds, because if you do, for the rest of your life every time you see this box on a webpage the song will pop in your head & you'll be singing under your breath "Guess whaaaaaat…".

Although on the other hand, it's possible you will like the song "I am not a robot" so much that getting it stuck in your head when you see the box will be like a little reward, in which case you should listen to it

mcc , to random
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Store that sells exactly two items

futurebird , to random
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The Quakers don't quake anymore and maybe they should bring back the quaking I think.

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird There was a second quaker-adjacent sect called the "Shakers"… what defined them was they had escalated from quaking to shaking. They seem pretty great

mcc , to random
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Is there anyone reading this who is in France and transfemme and would be ok to answer a couple questions about French medical stuff?

mcc , to random
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Alert: They still have Doritos 3D in France. They even have a bacon flavor

(Yes, I see this is not Doritos brand.)

Lays 3D Bugles. Bacon flavor.

mcc OP ,
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I'm passing all this grand architecture and sweeping vistas but I am not posting those photos. Posting only pictures of dumpsters and Doritos 3D and weird stone heads

mcc OP ,
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@sollat oh they'd love that back in Canada

mcc , to random
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Once again this is me trying to speak French

mcc , to random
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Computer things that frustrate me

  • Programs automatically switching me to "dark mode" after an update to indicate they have added a "dark mode", without asking if I want to use "dark mode".

  • Forms that accept addresses in Canada, but then reject postal codes containing letters. (Amazingly, this keeps happening.)

  • Some other things also I guess

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I decided to find out if any progress had been made on the science behind why some ants are attracted to electrical fields. After filtering out exterminators (it's so demoralizing to search for information on creatures you love and find nothing but people who know nothing about them boasting about how they will kill them all) I found what looked like a blog. But, who the heck is "James Brown"? Never heard of the dude. Maybe he could be my new friend if he likes ants enough to blog about them!

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird @mistergibson @wa7iut @wmd "Those trees you planted— do they happen to be on wood harvesting plantations? Are you literally planting them to cut them down in 30 years?"

mcc , to random
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Have you ever had an experience like, you're walking down the street, there's a piece of litter, and you kind of like, kick it by accident, your foot grazes it, and suddenly you feel a compulsion to pick it up and put it in a trash can? This is litter, it wasn't your problem, but then you accidentally touched it and it Became your problem, somehow the act of touching it tagged it as "yours" and now the superego says you're obligated to deal with it?

That's what open source contribution is like

futurebird , to random
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If you see a new youTube channel with a plain sounding name like "NatureView" or "BrightScience" etc. and there is what looks like a tempting video on a specific education topic "Most Active Volcanoes" or "Incredible Carnivorous Plants"

There is a 50/50 chance it will be a generated voice with stock footage and a script written by GPT.

I am now avoiding videos if I don't recognize the creator, or don't see signs it was made by a person.

So much spam!

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird For that matter, I do wish YouTube videos made by humans would cite their sources. But at least humans know what their sources were! The "AI" throws away that information completely (and I believe it's designed to do so on purpose… if they'd designed it to know where its content came from, someone might try to make them pay royalties…)

mcc ,
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@PTR_K @futurebird Perhaps it is impractical with the type of system that is popular now. But also perhaps someone who has traceability as a goal would have designed a different type of system?

mcc , to random
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When you are not Lazarus

mcc , to random
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So apparently the city of Portland is giving away free air conditioners this summer? You have to qualify under a household income threshold but it looks like you've got at least a 1 in 3 change of qualifying https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-free-air-conditioning-units-311/283-24361b3a-f195-4c31-82d6-481a6533345e

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

I gotta admit, "The new Star Trek TV series, starring Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti" is not a sentence I ever expected to type, but here we are.

https://www.slashfilm.com/1600274/star-trek-starfleet-academy-villain-paul-giamatti/

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@vampiress Hm

When is this set in the internal timeline?

mcc ,
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@vampiress Ah cooool, does this mean we get Tilly in the show?

mcc , to random
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Software Development Kult

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I HAVE RENTED A CAR THROUGH "EXPEDIA"

What I expected:

  • At my destination I walk up to a counter and wait for half an hour increasingly bored for them to give me keys.

What I got:

  • After paying, I find out I have to download an "app"
  • The "app" will take in scans of my drivers license, and it's too late to object to this except by cancelling the car reservation
  • The "app" utilizes a previously unknown-to-me Android feature to sniff one-time codes from my SMSes and authenticate me (1/2)
mcc , to random
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Kids, just say no to Smishing

mcc , to random
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Wait so like… there's going to be a Windows 11 update that just removes WordPad? Like you have a program on your computer and Microsoft just straight up deletes it? https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/tech-general/news/goodbye-cortana-wordpad-tips-apps/

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Via toothedgoose on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/futurebird/752672809471377408/image-description-two-pie-charts-divided-into?source=share

[Image description: Two pie charts divided into equal quarters. It's a "motivational" poster but it's been clearly edited. All of the things in the second chart have been typed over in a slightly different font to be about bugs. "Nobody Will Remember" orange - Your Salary darker orange - How "busy" you were red - How many hours you worked Green - How many Gucci bags you owned "People Will Remember" orange - How much you knew about bugs darker orange - The time you spent learning about bugs red - If you knew facts about bugs that made them smile Green - If they learned to love bugs because of you ]
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    mcc ,
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    @futurebird oddly in addition to being true of etymology fans it is also true if you are a professional programmer

    mcc ,
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    @futurebird one way to look at it, i do a lot of computational art and in the genart community we LOVE our bugs. like we domesticate our bugs and keep them around as new features

    (…on an unrelated note there is also a very interesting cellular automata adjacent algorithm named Langton's Ant. So I personally refer to all single-cell agent algorithms as "ants" but I can't seem to get this to catch on.)

    mcc ,
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    @futurebird Ah, I was wondering if you had encountered it before. This makes me so happy to hear, that's a great class project

    mcc ,
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    @futurebird @thedansimonson And 77 years later the mammals just WILL NOT SHUT UP ABOUT IT

    mcc , to random
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    I'm having a technical problem. This would be a great time to have access to services such as Reddit and Stack Overflow as opposed to those services now being traps that exist to sell your words to sketchy businesses so the sketchy businesses can eat the delicious statistical relationships therein and use them to sound more plausibly like humans when they're telling you to eat rocks

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    A THING I DO NOT LIKE ABOUT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE ERROR MESSAGES

    Language: NullReferenceException, the object was null on line 37

    Me: Which object?

    Language: The one on line 37

    Me: Yes, but which of the objects on line 37?

    Language [patronizingly]: It was null

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    A funny thing about Google's terrible "AI" is that sometimes when people try to defend it, they say "but if you don't want Google to use 'AI', wouldn't that mean they'd have to remove 'Featured snippets' also?", and this is extremely humorous because featured snippets are also consistently terrible and I've been watching people make fun of them constantly for like ten years

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    An intrusive thought I return to often is how "I want a pony" is the canonical example of an unreasonable request but, like, if you look into it even a little you'll find it's not hard at all to acquire a pony. On raw purchase price a pony is far cheaper than a car and probably not much more than a good ebike. You're gonna have to invest time and money into pony upkeep but, of all the aspirational goals you could set yourself in life "a pony" is one of the more attainable ones

    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    I have similar unproductive kneejerk reactions to "the sky is blue" as the canonical example of a undeniable, basic factual truth (the sky can take many different colors, varying in both time and space; someone insisting "the sky is blue" as an axiomatic, unchanging truth is necessarily denying someone else's lived experience) and also the cliche "you can't have your cake and eat it too" (eat half the cake now and save the other half for later. Don't you have a refrigerator?)

    mcc , to random
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    I don't know if I can communicate to cis people the horror of going through the wrong puberty. Your body is being turned against you from the inside and it goes on for years. The transphobic wedge strategy decrees there are no legitimate trans folk under 18, so puberty blockers are a kind of compromise— freezing the poison in your blood in place until you turn 18 and are allowed medical self-determination. The Conservatives have made even this half-mercy a criminal act. https://lgbt.io/@gendercensus/112564150066141141

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Since roughly 1998 my go-to site for checking whether my Internet connection is functioning properly has been cnn.com . This worked well for a long time but somewhere around 2012 either CNN or American culture itself started getting kinda weird and now my Internet tests have become harrowing as every time I open CNN there's something on the front page that appears to be a dispatch from an alien planet

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    In Europe as in America there is this dizzying legal disconnect where neighboring states are either trying to protect or eliminate trans people. For example here we find the EU pondering* banning conversion therapy at the exact same time the government of Britain next door is forcibly detransitioning every trans minor in the country

    https://terrible.city/@wolfe/112548420519325207

    • Admittedly only a petition initiative here
    mcc , to random
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    Gonna upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 24.04… expecting that, like everything else I have done on this laptop involving Ubuntu, I am going to regret this

    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Oh no… I'm going to lose support for cheese…

    No longer supported by Canonical aisleriot - GNOME solitaire card game connection avahi-autoipd - Avahi IPv4LL network address configuration daemon branding-ubuntu - Replacement artwork with Ubuntu branding cheese - tool to take pictures and videos from your webcam gnome-mahjongg - classic Eastern tile game for GNOME gnome-mines - popular minesweeper puzzle game for GNOME gnome-sudoku - Sudoku puzzle game for GNOME
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    • mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    I like how GNOME looks better than KDE, but it just has so many strange unnecessary quirks!

    Case in point:

    • If you have a touchscreen, simply touching the screen will often bring up an on-screen keyboard.
    • This will cause all windows to move upward to make room for it.
    • But when the keyboard moves back down, the windows don't move back down, often leaving them half-offscreen and stuck.
    • You can't turn this "feature" off.
    • There's a GNOME extension to force it off, but it breaks in 24.04.
    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Now, you'd think a solution would be "so don't touch the screen", but every hardware designer has been bizarrely obsessed with "all bezels must be as small as possible" for the last decade or so so it's actually very difficult to adjust the screen position on my laptop without touching the screen briefly

    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Oh

    Oh hey, about 24 hours after upgrading Ubuntu I finally found the thing that broke. It was—

    —are you ready? are you ready, I'm going to say the line—

    My Python environment is broken

    Sinjo , to random
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    OH “If you’re the person who donated items containing radioactive sources to the swap shop, we’d like to talk to you. You’re not in trouble, we just want to know how many more there are.”

    #EMFCamp

    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @glyph @Sinjo I'm Not Angry I'm Just Irradiated

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    Side note: I watched "The Fall Guy" last night.

    If you know ANYTHING about the geography of Sydney, Australia do NOT watch that film.

    4 of us, Sydneysiders all, were going "wait WHAT? How did he get THERE suddenly!” every damn cut during some of the action scenes.

    I recognise that perfect geography can be stifling to a director and liberties often need to be taken to compress space, but these cuts just made NO sense.

    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @Cdespinosa @vampiress maybe if an NYC moviegoer sees someone getting around NYC improbably fast, it is wish fulfillment. like we go to movies to see and vicariously experience things that we cannot do ourselves in real life, such as get from one side of Manhattan to the other

    futurebird , to random
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    Why do I have to have a cat clinging to my butt behind me in my chair????why?

    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @futurebird Due to this post I have just realized Wikipedia has an entry for "Making Biscuits"

    mcc , to random
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    I think my favorite program in the entire linux/unix toolchain is "file". Did you even know about this program? It's on every system including MacOS and it's magic. You run it on any file and it just tells you what it is. Any file. I don't know who keeps this updated but it supports surprising things. Like it knows Windows file formats. If it's a executable it tells you if it's 32- or 64- bit. If it's an image it tells you the size and channels. If the file extension lies it just figures it out.

    futurebird , to random
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    I have a powered ant vacuum for emergencies. Bringing it today feels pessimistic— not bringing it is tempting fate.

    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @futurebird @u0421793 Now sincerely wondering if you could use the statistics of brownian motion to prove this mathematically

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Incidentally I'm thankfully still not seeing any of this Google "AI results" stuff. It sounds like nearly everyone else is. I don't know if the difference is because I'm on a Canadian IP, or because my feedback when they briefly opted me into the early beta tests was so aggressively negative they put some kind of "AI Hater" flag on my account

    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Finally getting the new Google Shit Flavor. Just really floored that even if you report an AI result it just leaves it up there. Just such a total loathing for the customer being expressed in this feature

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