Notices by damon (damonism@aus.social)

@_elena Yeah, I won’t pretend to know why that works. But I do sympathize because I’m doing my own experiment with living with Linux (again), which I’m occasionally documenting here: https://damonism.net/tags/the-year-of-linux-on-the-desktop/

@_elena Also there is an app (I think it’s gnome-tweak-tool) that, if you’re using a gnome-based desktop, will let you swap ctrl and cmd keys, so in apps that have somewhat sensible copy and paste keys, you can use cmd-c and cmd-v instead of control. This makes life much easier as a Mac user.

@_elena I suspect it comes from a legacy of Unix being a bunch of small terminal programs with a graphical interface, and concept of a Universal clipboard, only coming much later. But what it means in practice is I have used Linux on and off for 30 years and I still have no idea how to copy from Emacs and paste into another app (see, for eg https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CopyAndPaste).

@_elena It’s not just you – copy and paste on Linux is a nightmare (wait until you find out how many apps have their own copy/paste buffers which they don’t share with other apps by default). But full points for persisting.

It’s almost unheard of these days to read an article about the media and smile, but this long interview with the new people who are running The Onion did that for me. https://www.theverge.com/24225592/the-onion-new-owners-print-newspaper-digital-media-gawker-ben-collins-decoder-interview

This post reminded me of one of my favourite stories from my old job. I was working at a research library and got a call from a librarian at a departmental library. She said, essentially: I know it’s a long shot but I’m looking for this specific document that was used for this one-off event 25 years ago and which never had any official status and which we know exists but doesn’t seem to be mentioned publicly anywhere.

An hour later I called her back: I don’t have a copy of the document but the guy who wrote it is currently driving back from Bunnings and when he gets home he’ll email it to you. Is there anything else I can help you with?

I could hear her jaw hit the floor over the phone.

Sometimes when you’re good at your job it can look like magic. Finding out shit is literally my job, but it’s nice when people appreciate it. https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/112453470424319654

It occurs to me that you’d only use AI to write for you if you believe you’re not good at writing, and if you’re not good at writing you have no way of discerning if the AI is wrting well for you, and in the process you’ll never get any better at writing yourself.

Christmas birb came to visit

@NanoRaptor Say what you like about the Surreal Port, but at least you get the plug plugged in the right way first time every time.