Notices by josef (jk@mastodon.social), page 2

all the other classic software mascots are on the level of "a planet with a face" or "this is the window manager gremlin Hehe" or "our distro is represented by The Boot from Monopoly" or something. at some point they started either getting motivational, like "we all stan Software Project-chan and want her to succeed!!" or just becoming abstract logos, rather than characters which is a shame. like, when i boot up the gamecube emulator i want to have a chat with a fully-animated dolphin, please

keep coming back to the realization that tux is like one of the best character designs of all time. something about his facial expression. he looks so Head Empty. and the way his feet are faced towards the viewer really emphasizes how he's just sitting on his ass and not doing much of anything. all of that combined with the bold, high-contrast black-and-white with the bright yellow-orange accents? it just screams Yeah Sure It Doesnt Work. What Am I Gonna Do About It? Nothin :)

whenever theyre trying to sell like some fucking amazon delivery drones as the solution to something remember this. in the old days, you would simply send your familiar to go down to the supermarket wouldn't you. "yes of course m'leige, of course" he would splutter, "a single tin of canned pineapple. coming right up" and he'd already be away, flapping limply from your high-tower and struggling to push through the choking fog like a bat-shaped plastic bag caught in a gale

imagine if it turned out intel's performance problems were because they kept putting management engines inside management engines and having a kind of rocket-equation freakout where 99% of the die area was just for a succession of increasingly secret nested departments inside the NSA to spy on each other

five new ways to boost your goose

theres triangles all over my games. how to fix game triangles - triangles - games all made of triangles? if i look carefully i can see all games are made of triangles. how to fix. i doubt theres actually a way of fixing it. its just one of those things you have to get used to

local news article. road closed due to a 'hazardous substance'. traffic diverted. what is the substance? my theories include

- oil
- fuel
- asbestos
- hydrofluoric acid
- an entire shipping container of loose prions
- VX

i used to think pennsylvania was where they made pencils. i mean there probably was a pencil factory at some point. so was 5-year-old me wrong? no, no they weren’t, they were actually correct

i think theres just a lot of things which cannot be done anymore, since while there are people who want them done, and people willing to do them, the amount the thing is actually worth would not cover the amount of money that person must send their landlord each month

they were 'music fans' to some extent, but by the replies you can see they're struggling to grasp just how MUCH music is out there, how for every big-name band now immortalized in the popular canon, there was 9 or maybe even 90 others writing similar songs that were literally exactly as good, and the only difference was mostly dumb luck! they couldn't really 'get' this, and kept insisting "it must be an unreleased Dire Straits song" or whatever

a while ago there was that "mystery song" which nobody could identify. in fact there have probably been a few of these. the one i remember was from 80s german radio or something. i have no idea if it eventually got identified, but the interesting thing for me was watching all these people on reddit saying "this song is amazing! it sounds like <famous band>! no, it sounds like <other band>!" and many of them were missing a crucial piece of information wrt their outlook on the entire problem:

@zens yeah, you could tell a lot of the people i was taught by had all these ancient fears of chaos and barbarism and gotos that were bubbling up under the surface. "we need to tame these 19 year olds" etc. "java is a civilizing influence"

like, maybe later on you might swap out one data structure or an algorithm which turns out to be faster given the data you're actually working with. but most of the time it's like, oh, actually our abstractions are wrong and we need to move all this stuff over there and remove this thing and split it into two things. and all the Code That Actually Does Things is still just sitting there unchanged. maybe i'm weird and this doesn't happen to anyone else though

when i was "taught to code" the prevailing wisdom they kept going on about was that to create software, first you designed a rock-solid Architecture, and then when that was set in stone the implementation could just be whatever. you could keep swapping out the implementation details, those didn't matter. but in my experience of the actual world, the architecture is always the thing that keeps changing and being restructured all the time

theres this local pizza place i like. the pizza i order is the Hot Pizza. i like the Hot Pizza. im not into really spicy food really, and this pizza isn’t especially hot, its just a bit hot, nice flavor etc. But one time we ordered it, it was like nine times hotter that usual. i was in physical pain. it was incredible. i think they fucked up something in their recipe. anyway every time since then it’s been normal again. and ive been disappointed, to be honest

as far as im concerned really theres only two types of software: game engine, or static site generator. your task is to work out which one of the two your idea fits into

recently ive started listening to my music library using an app i call "an html file in the root directory of my music library which is regenerated using a shell script and just consists of a js searchable/sortable table of all the tracks which switches the content of an audio embed at the top" and honestly its better than quite a few of the so-called apps out there

one of the perverse incentives of the ad-supported web is that for every product or service that may solve your problem, there is at least one idea, skill, recipe, approach, tradition, workaround, or hack which almost every commercial source of information is incentivized to not only ignore, but actively suppress

when someone writes a self-replicating computer program that uses large language models to parse web pages and send requests recursively in a way that causes a trillion dollars of damage and/or kills people, the geniuses that decided that everything valuable in the world should be accessible by web pages will get off scot free

i remember the memes. the old memes, you remember them. you remember the old internet culture. it wasnt that long ago. lets say the 2000s. then social media got a lot bigger, it was already there, but things changed. the memes changed. suddenly the memes were different, wrong. the vibe shifted. and then suddenly one day, i saw it. it was called skibidi toilet. i felt so Relieved. Finally. the memes are back to normal