Notices by David Nash (dpnash@c.im), page 2

@clacke @mrundkvist Nope - I only heard about that one via someone who had reviewuated the situation and posted a summary on a blog or something like that.

@seraph @pluralistic Good grief, it’s the Yahoo “medireview” bug all over again. You know the one: Yahoo replaced potentially dangerous JavaScript commands with more innocuous synonyms in emails. As a global search and replace, with no regard for context (like spaces or punctuation). “eval” got replaced with “review”, and all of a sudden, people interested in history from 500 to 1500 years ago were reading about “medireview” topics.

*Twenty-three years ago.*

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/medireview

@thomasfuchs “…expert systems…”

“…That’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time.”

@ShaulaEvans
1995: Cool, the latest print encyclopedia is out.
2005: Nobody prints encyclopedias anymore because they think Wikipedia and the web in general made them obsolete.
2015: What’s a “print” encyclopedia? Something like those legendary “paper maps” of yore?
2025: Oh. Right. It’s one of those things that might still be useful for finding basic introductory information that was well-understood in 1985 or 1995 or even 2005 because it was never contaminated with AI sploodge.

@0xabad1dea Ah yes, along with the Coicert Drids, there is “Blllld Thf Ths Mththsrllnd” and “Zlngszur Mlrch”.

@Jain @FloatingGhost

> gpostcode

Unpostcoded in bash/CLI with “gunpostcode”, of course.

@prefetcher This list needs to include YES and NO for maximum cursedness.

I recently posted about how I once worked with a language that aliased the strings "YES" and "NO" to Boolean true and false, and how this kept fscking up user account info from users who were coming from Norway.

@hosford42 @thomasfuchs

Also, the diameter difference between the Earth and the Moon is just under a factor of 4, so O and o don’t really represent the scale difference well. It’s more like O and the circle in Danish Å.

Given that, it’s hard to answer the question as written. If you assign “O” to Earth’s diameter, you’ll get a different answer than if you assign “o” to the Moon’s diameter.

So, boring but hopefully more accurate answer: The moon spans about half a degree in the (Earth) sky, which is about 1/120 of a radian, so the distance is approximately 120 Moon diameters, whatever symbol you choose to use for it.

@neuralex There is a lot of point to this, especially given the rather debased approach to quality many web and mobile app developers expect people to accept, but I did want to mention one thing:

>they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort)

Inadvertent data *erasing* through normal user operations wasn't super common, but much like today, inadvertent data *loss* was reasonably common, often through non-obvious means (i.e., not things like your cat dumping a cup of coffee onto the stack of floppy disks inhabiting your desk).

When I was a young 'un in the 1980s, my parents got an IBM PC (a true OG PC, not a clone). One of the first programs I wrote was a BASIC program to display the entire printable character set (ASCII + the DOS extended "high bit set" characters) one by one. This PC definitely only used the old 8.3 file name format, so I saved the file as "IBM CHAR.BAS" on a floppy.

Note the space. It seemed like a reasonable way to abbreviate "IBM CHARacters".

However, there was, at the time, no straightforward way to access a file in DOS with a space in the name -- at least, not to a relatively new user. You could create such a file, but not access it. (I remember trying at least a few possibilities, none of which worked. This now-bordering-on-vintage blog post suggests there really was no way in ordinary use: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090709-00/?p=17563.)

The file was effectively gone, through some action that was not obviously problematic.

A lot of us who were proto-computer nerds in the 80s and 90s ran into issues like this quite a lot with the old CLI interfaces of the day.

@jacobat @thomasfuchs These companies claim that their use of copyrighted material is just fine -- that it falls under the "fair use" exemption in US law.

This *may* be true (in terms of being found in court to qualify as such), but if so, the law needs a refresh. "Fair use" was historically a way to allow a person or organization to take a *small amount* of copyrighted material to comment on it, or cite it in research, or make a parody or other highly-legally-protected form of derivative work. It has not, up until now, been invoked on a scale of "essentially all copyrighted works available publicly on the Internet".

@thomasfuchs Yep. Here's an acronym to make us fellow very early web design/development geeks feel old:

"VRML"

It came and went back in the 90s, before the web was really all that popular, and when the hardware really was not up to snuff for that sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

@nblr @nyrath The sequel to “Don’t Invent the Torment Nexus” — “Also Don’t Invent the Torment Panopticon” — is also being misunderstood.

@NamelessCynic @aprilfollies This is an unambiguous case where the UK English name for this stuff (“washing-up liquid”) is vastly superior to the US name (“dish soap” or “dish detergent”).

@clacke @aprilfollies @NamelessCynic In the UK, yes, “washing up” is normally hand washing as opposed to machine washing, though I wasn’t fully aware of the usage till I visited about 5 years ago. I’ve never heard of people in the UK accidentally putting “washing-up liquid” in the dishwasher. The US, where I live, calls the machine version “dishwasher” liquid or detergent, which is fine, but the hand washing version is “dish” detergent, which, as many new apartment dwellers and home owners discover the hard way, is only suited for “dish” washing by hand and utterly unsuited for “dish” washing with a machine.

The #CatsOfMastodon remind you that if you stare too deeply into the laundry bin, the bin sometimes stares back at you.

@spacemagick @DM_Ronin Oxygen cat is probably pretty chill when stuck to a couple hydrogen cats (or whatever). It’s when Oxygen is by their lonesome self that they are an absolute bastard, looking for a couple (or more) other cats to oxidize.