Notices by Tokyo Outsider (337ppm) (tokyo_0@mas.to)

Somehow Japan has turned me into someone who sees a news report and says "oh, it's just a volcano at risk of erupting" and then goes on about my Saturday.

I feel sick.

Was just checking some links I used regularly last time I was working hard on kanji study.

One didn't load at all - an incredible blog full of homespun charm and 1990s styling, which featured most of the over 2,000 kanji taught in Japanese schools with illustrations and descriptions from the work of Shizuka Shirakawa.

There was a time when I referred to that blog every day.

Now it's just...gone. All that time. All that effort. What must've been years of someone's life, vanished.

From another perspective: You can think you're achieving nothing with what you post or share online, when you're actually changing someone's life.

We're used to thinking everything online will live forever. It's not true 😔

I can find the information elsewhere. I have the source texts authored by Shirakawa. And parts of the site are archived in the Wayback Machine (although the character encoding isn't quite right, and the images don't all load).

The content isn't so much the point.

The point is... that site helped me so much. And I never said anything. They never knew. They must've worked so hard. And everything they built is gone.

Perhaps they, too, are gone.

(I'm making jokes but I'm really quite pissed off about this. Fed up of seeing the bad guys winning. The only reason anything is being age-gated is big tech lobbyists and politicians who would rather damage those they are elected to protect than hold platforms accountable for the harms that go on there. Going to have to try to think about something else for a bit.)

Maybe teenagers will rediscover IRC and make it great again 😈

They wonder why people are tuning out from news. It's literally all bad news! Even when it looks like good news, someone or later you find out it was bad news. I don't think people are unwilling to know things. I think they are just unwilling to play a repetitive game where powerful people make their lives worse and they're supposed to act surprised.

@dalias They think it won't affect them. They will continue to think this until they have to start verifying their own identity, at which point some will proudly say "I have nothing to hide" (knowing they've hidden the things they have to hide elsewhere or can shelter via their privilege) while the rest will say "why didn't anyone tell me" despite the fact that various organisations and people have spent literal years telling them.

That "9 in 10" British parents support age-gating social media doesn't really tell you anything about whether it's a good idea given that a majority of British voters supported Brexit.

Maybe it's time we revisited web directories.

@lakelady @gbargoud @deirdrebeth @stux Nothing about a stadium no one can walk to "makes sense".

@baronvonj @tristan @stux Except they do, because they're one car further forward for every cyclist or pedestrian walking past them as they're stuck in traffic in their air conditioned car ☺️

@baronvonj @tristan @stux I can understand them wanting that. What I'm struggling with is how that would prohibit putting a lane less than half the width of a vehicle lane alongside it.

@tristan @stux What is the basis of their objection?

Thinking about how high skilled, experienced technical specialist rates are going to be when everyone's figured out AI not only doesn't work as advertised but is actively destroying their business-critical systems 💸

@glyph @dalias Yes. And even if some people do manage to circumvent the rule by making their violation of it impossible to detect, there is still value in the rule existing to aid handling of all the situations where this is not the case, and those skillful circumventors are still personally liable for any consequences of their own violation of the rule that emerge later simply because the rule exists.

"Some people might still avoid the rule" is not and has never been a sound reason to not have a rule. "Some people might get away with murder so we won't do anything about the people we actually saw commit murder and who are still stood there holding the smoking gun" makes clear how ridiculous a position it is.

They didn't get him again.

(Third time lucky?)

@ItsePerkele @janeishly @neil In Windows 10 it was still possible to set up a local account. On Windows 11 you can, but you might need to create one with a Microsoft Account first -- not 100% sure. But it is worth looking into whether you can. I *think* you can. The option is just not presented to you in a straightforward way in the setup dialogues.

My favorite recent Microsoft Windows discovery is that the full antivirus scan runs for about 8 hours at full CPU use. There's no option to pause, and the process cannot be deprioritized in the task manager. It basically makes the machine unusable for the duration of the time that it is running and once it has started there's nothing you can do about it.

My switch to a new operating system will not come a day too soon.