I don’t know about your mother, but my mother is not even a power user – Windows, hunt-and-peck typing – and she taught herself to use IRC because that’s what the other people in her social group were using.

I assume she didn’t use any /command except /join – maybe not even that, because if you’re only using one channel then you can have your client autojoin – but that was enough to get her in. Presumably she learned group etiquette on the fly, the way most people do.

Coworker: the username was autofilling so I assumed it was correct. But you know what they say about assuming.

Me: That it is indistinguishable from making a mistake, only you didn’t realize you had even made a decision?

A smart contract can prove that someone who knew a secret agreed to the terms of the contract, but it can’t prove that someone who says they aren’t party to that contract is lying.

Pseudovalidation is a major goal of marketing and advertising. Actually validating a claim is expensive and often boring. Why not just make people feel like they’re important in some way?

But once you recognize it, pseudovalidation feels disrespectful: these people are lying to me and don’t even care if I know it:

In the last few years, email marketers have started sending streams of messages that reference each other, apparently attempting to induce a feeling of an existing relationship, and then shame that I am somehow not carrying my end of it.

This does not work anymore.

I began an entry in July of 2018 with this:

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2017) is the high-end tablet of their line. The hardware is mediocre and the software is quite bad. I do not recommend you purchase this or any other Fire tablet… unless you have some very specific requirements.

I can now say this:

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2019) is the high-end tablet of their line. The hardware is mediocre and the software is quite bad. I can recommend that you purchase this tablet if you are comfortable with the use of adb and command line tools. It is cheap ($95 on Prime Day) and capable of doing a number of useful things, such as…

In the beginning of my experience, it wasn’t that computers had fonts so much as each computer had A Font, and that was how the computer talked to you. All of them were quite low resolution; blocky and bad.

Now I expect every character to be drawn in an appropriate, smooth, curved, and informatively differentiated typeface.

When did that change start, and when was it complete?

How the RPG rules describe dice rolls:
this result on the dice is a critical success,
this range is a success,
that range is a failure,
this result is a critical failure.

How every RPG player feels about it:
this is a critical success,
this is nearly a critical success,
this is an excellent success,
these are very good successes,
this is a success,
that’s just a little failure,
that’s a failure,
these are failures too,
that result is a critical failure.

What’s running on the firewall? A big list follows, with discussion.

For every computer system, someone needs to know what they are doing, and check up on it when something goes wrong. That person is the sysadmin.

If you don’t know who the sysadmin is, it’s you.

It’s just like everything else in life: if you care about a thing, you are responsible for taking care of it. If nobody takes care of it, it decays and dies.

Today I replaced the last spinning root disk in the house. The media server still has 4x3TB spinning disks, but the old 120GB spinning boot disk has been replaced by a cheap 1 TB SSD. Boot times improved dramatically, and the database access for various things now feels instantaneous.

Process follows, but it’s nothing extraordinary.

One thing that UNIX users have that Mac and Windows users don’t: it’s generally quite easy to change their window manager theme – and to write/draw their own.

Window decorations – a frame, a titlebar, some buttons – are handled by the X11 window manager, which is itself a replaceable part. Window managers range from minimalist exercises in reductionism through gaudy feature-festivals like Enlightenment, the original perpetrator of shaped, translucent and transparent effects. But…

“Magic”, applied to technology, is an indictment, not a compliment.

– me, July 15 2020.

A departing co-op (student intern, paid) said that she had been told by another co-op that the company’s keywords were “clever, competent, and kind” and that she was amazed to discover that we all lived up to that.

Since I was the first person at the company to start using that phrase – in employment advertisements, where I was describing necessary traits of the people I wanted to hire – I am entirely chuffed.