Notices by josef (jk@mastodon.social)

humans like to feed wildlife due to our natural hospitality. we water the plants so that they grow. we proudly make oil paintings depicting animals who are large, healthy, and rectangular

since the birth of agriculture there has been an inbuilt human need to see a pig fulfill the maximum extent of its potential bounding box. minecraft is a recent example of media designed to satisfy this need

@doctormo when i was younger, i loved how so much free software was, well, free-as-in-beer. i didn't value my time that much, so it kinda worked out. but nowadays i'd absolutely pay for a really polished distro that offered a cohesive, stable experience, with guaranteed software and hardware compatibility and some degree of included support

it's very difficult to explain to linux people that, i have a folder called "Software" with loads of nested subfolders containing programs, tools, games, etc, many of which are more than 20 years old. occasionally i need one of these programs, maybe once every few years, and i go in there and click on the .exe and it works instantly. next to the .exe are dlls, which are also 20 years old. no package manager needed. the whole thing works great - on Windows, and of course, on WINE

of course, since package updates are causing these problems, i've tried the obvious solution: just don't update packages. this goes about as well as ignoring your tamagotchi: eventually the system shits itself to death. depending on your chosen distro, you either become unable to install new programs at all until you agree to upgrade all the others, or if you wait too long, you get so out of sync that the package manager itself gets confused and tries to destroy your OS instead of upgrading it

i know a lot of linux fans get a lot of fun out of tending to their linux's daily needs, but i just want it to run programs and keep working the same way i originally set it up, without waking up on a regular basis to "sound output menu no longer selects correct sound output" or "desktop icon spacing now broken" or "SMB share which worked fine for the last 18 months no longer connects" or "your favorite font now has the wrong kerning" or "bluetooth xbox controller used to work... used to"

on Linux, is there a way to switch off "Tamagotchi Mode"? specifically i mean the thing where you set up linux exactly how you want, and every 2 weeks you run package updates and some obscure part of your system which you didn't even know existed now no longer works the way you set it up, and you have to spend 90 minutes fixing it, and it's always a different thing, and this happens every 2 weeks, forever. how do you switch that off? (ideally in a way where it won't switch back on after 2 weeks)

i think IDEs which allow you to use "AI" to generate code should always display those specific lines of code in Comic Sans

the whole "&knuckles" meme is kind of a redundant convention in my opinion. the & operator will give you knuckles' address, but in practice this should always be angel island, where he protects the master emerald

i really respect someone who can come out and say "i have the cast iron pan because i like to eat the dirt and im a goblin"

if you get the cast iron pan. its really good because you dont have to clean it. in fact, you can't. you have to eat the dirt. if you clean it, you'll die, so you have to just eat the dirt i'm afraid

@hazel i think these arent even all of the pythons i have currently

@hazel your python journey has just begun

manual: the power LED should produce a solid light

me: *after being on hold with technical support for 3 hours* the LED isn't producing anything solid, from what i can see, it's only producing photons. are photons solid?

support : uh

me: they can't be a gas. or plasma, right? they're not charged? no ions

support: ...

me: it's been a while since high school but i don't think photons are matter

support: what color is the light

me: it's about five hundred and .. hang on .. let me get my..

the telltale sign of AI art i find most prevalent isn't that smooth, saccharine, glossy sheen, the purposeless and incoherent detail, or the inadvertent polydactyly, but the uniformly uninspired subject matter. the problem originates not in the computer program, but the kind of user it attracts

i used a mac for the best part of a decade, and it was pretty annoying in a lot of ways. the mac had opinions about how computers should work, and i agreed with 20% of them and disagreed vehemently with the other 80%. as time went on, the 80% increased to maybe 90 or 95%, and i jumped ship back to windows. but you know what? one thing i can say. the words on the mac? all the words displayed on the screen? they looked great!

text rendering i like:
- printed text on non-glossy paper. the ink expands in a nice way. bold and comfy
- mac os
- windows before cleartype, displayed on a low-ish resolution monitor (let's say 9x on a 800x600 or 1024x768). no antialiasing. raster fonts. visible pixels. simultaneously chunky and precise. any blurriness you saw was on the rightmost side of the glyph, and was caused by inadequate shielding in your vga cable

whenever i use linux, i often find the text ends up looking kinda like this. some edges of glyphs are very sharp, pixel-perfect, pointy, whereas some parts are weirdly blurry. oddly non-uniform kerning, of course. and always slightly too thin. then of course the fonts themselves are often quite bad on top of that, but at least you can change those. you can't really change the other things

attempting to switch to firefox again (actually librewolf). it's crazy how the text rendering is just so much worse. some of it is personal taste of course (i prefer bolder text with smooth antialiasing rather than thin text with sharp antialiasing, maybe because i have an astigmatism so it looks clearer?). but some of it is just objectively bizarre. like i've only been using the browser for about an hour today and almost every single page i open i see something like this

@coyotes