Notices by josef (jk@mastodon.social)

in firefox, tab groups are a thing that happen to me occasionally. they're not a feature, since i don't use them, or want them, but sometimes a tab group occurs. getting rid of one, when it emerges, is moderately annoying, i right click on each tab and have to read through all the options in the menu, and there's nothing there. eventually i try the cyan square itself, and then it says "delete group" and im like great. and then it closes the tabs too

a small toy is called a Toylet

one thing you can say about LLMs is they sure can tell people things

when something is about aliens its usually like. "suburban normalcy. but. what if. Your neighbor. was an alien?? imagine extraterrestrial life in your neighborhood!!" instead of like. "we are hanging out with the extraterrestrial life. finally the extraterrestrial life showed up and lent us a new board game to play that isnt settlers of catan. we are all sitting round on the rug. we are passing round a joint. we are having a deep heart-to-heart with the extraterrestrial life"

zebra is a lot cooler than a horse in my opinion:

- name begin with Z
- dazzle camo
- oppositional defiant disorder

i think the way computers are going, virtually nothing about this will be true or relevant anymore. even now, everything seems way less grounded, less focused on where the data is materially and your own ownership and use of it. the programs are transient, at best temporarily cached on your computer but really residing on some server. the files aren't in your own folders, they belong to each app, or they exist everywhere and nowhere, and it doesn't matter what they are or where they are

the way i learnt to use a computer is this: you have a hard drive with files on it, like pictures and sounds and documents in folders. you can look at these using a program called a file manager, which shows icons representing each one, and lets you move them around. programs are also files, which end in 'exe' and you get them by copying them off shareware CDs your uncle gave you onto your hard drive. most programs are just a single 'exe' but some (bad ones) include a bunch of other files too

i feel like the desktop user interface for computers is kind of over now, which sucks

i also feel this same lack of control and alienation when using free or open source software and operating systems, because the culture now is not only to never finish working on software, but to intertwine every piece of software on the computer with every other, requiring even more systems to keep everything up to date, and ensure the computer is always constantly changing under me, the sands shifting, soil turning to liquid, sinkholes opening up, swallowing all my configurations and programs

these are very technical types of issues to talk about but i'm not talking about how any of this is actually implemented technically, because obviously it's such a broad set of trends that there's tons of exceptions to everything. i'm more talking about the general 'feeling' of 'the computer being a thing you own and have understanding and control of' going away, even on the most basic levels like 'where are the files'

??????

the latest tech? oh you just HAVE to use it. you won't be able to stop yourself. that new tech? you'll just have to buy it as soon as you see it. you won't be able to live without it. the new device? yeah as soon as you get it, it's almost like you won't be able to go back. yeah! you'll just HAVE to check it out. now we all have it, you'll never be able to go back to the old way

after 15 years, iOS has finally caught up with all the main android features, such as
- very mid ui design
- kinda floaty feeling
- unpolished vibe
android itself has progressed little, although it is rapidly achieving feature parity with iOS on "locked down user hostility". overall both ecosystems look very appealing, energetic, and healthy, for shareholders

oh SHIT it's htlcsmroa240605hh1944. ohhh yeah!! it's a htlcsmroa240605hh1944. they've even got a htlcsmroa240823hh0758. amazon is amazing tbh. its crazy what you can get on there

people will tell you that your code having State is a sin, so you will rewrite it, creating all these nested functions and callbacks so that all the state, which could have been an enum or a few bools somewhere, is instead packed into the path the instruction pointer takes through the code, and can only be seen as a faint squiggle on the doppler radar trace

instead of any so-called “App’s”, you could just put “the garden of earthly delights” on your phone. when you’re bored, just zoom in and pan around looking at stuff in the painting

Phone Phreaking - a fascinating hobby
(Saunders, 1972)

something it took me a very long time to figure out, like, embarrassingly long, since the way they teach you about it at school avoids this uncomfortable part, is that 'peaceful protest' is fundamentally a threat of violence. people out in the streets holding objects, currently placards, imply later they might be holding something else. it is called a 'demonstration', in the same way that testing a nuclear weapon is a demonstration, it is deterrence through communication of capability and intent

part of the reason that old people will line up to get arrested at protests is they're retired so they don't fear a criminal record. but i think maybe another part of it is like, once you're old, authority is no longer a bunch of grownups who have power over you, most if not all of the people arresting you, trying you, sentencing you, and so on, are younger than you are. so, if you're old, you can look down your nose at them, perhaps rightly, as a bunch of stupid babies who don't know anything

in the last 5ish years i've seen a pivot from "Terrorism is the reason we need people with automatic rifles at airports and cameras everywhere spying on you" to "Terrorism is a word that means doing anything for political reasons other than voting. in a democracy, you vote. politics is voting. everything else, like protesting or direct action or even publishing the wrong thing, is Terrorism. you must only vote, that is all that is allowed"