Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 57 Posts
- 87 Comments
51·13 days ago
6·18 days ago
The rest of me is all, “It’s still 2025!! If we have the Bell Riots now we’re still on-pace for a Star Trek future!!”
The Bell Riots were in September 2024.
Our universe’s lack of Eugenics Wars in the 90s was already pretty strong evidence that we’re not living in the prime timeline.
Due to the Norwegian language conflict there have been various competing forms of written Norwegian over time, two of which have been officially recognized as equally valid by the Norwegian parliament since 1885. Both apparently changed their spelling of “slut” to “sludd” in the 21st century, Bokmål in 2005 and Nynorsk in 2012, presumably in an effort to encourage English speakers to make jokes about Swedes and Danes instead of them.
511·2 months ago
2·2 months agothis guy knuths how units work
9·2 months agoThe network never went down.
You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan’s later OStatus site
Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.
https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan’s own first post is “still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.” … but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren’t worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.
Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/
As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan’s URL shortening service
ur1.cawhich is also now long-dead.
imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.
🪦
The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else’s domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don’t know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢
thanks i hate it
Do tech journalists at the New York Times have any idea what they’re talking about? (spoiler)
'We’re going to talk about these stories.'
The author of this latest advertorial, Kevin Roose, has a podcast called “Hard Fork”.
Here he and his co-host attempt to answer the question “What’s a Hard Fork?”:
kevin roose: Casey, we should probably explain why our podcast is called “Hard Fork.”
casey newton: Oh, yeah. So our other names didn’t get approved by “The New York Times” lawyers.
kevin roose: True.
casey newton: And B, it’s actually a good name for what we’re going to be talking about. A “hard fork” is a programming term for when you’re building something, but it gets really screwed up. So you take the entire thing, break it, and start over.
kevin roose: Right.
casey newton: And that’s a little bit what it feels like right now in the tech industry. These companies that you and I have been writing about for the past decade, like Facebook, and Google, and Amazon, they’re all kind of struggling to stay relevant.
kevin roose: Yeah. We’ve noticed a lot of the energy and money in Silicon Valley is shifting to totally new ideas — crypto, the metaverse, AI. It feels like a real turning point when the old things are going away and interesting new ones are coming in to replace them.
casey newton: And all this is happening so fast, and some of it’s so strange. I just feel like I’m texting you constantly, “What is happening? What is this story? Explain this to me. Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”
kevin roose: And so we’re going to try to help each other feel a little bit less insane. We’re going to talk about these stories. We’re going to bring in other journalists, newsmakers, whoever else is involved in building this future, to explain to us what’s changing and why it all matters.
casey newton: So listen to Hard Fork. It comes out every Friday starting October 7.
kevin roose: Wherever you get your podcasts.
This is simply not accurate.
Today the term “hard fork” is probably most often used to refer to blockchain forks, which I assume is where these guys (almost) learned it, but the blockchain people borrowed the term from forks in software development.
In both cases it means to diverge in such a way that re-converging is not expected. In neither case does it mean anything is screwed up, nor does it mean anything about starting over.
These people who’s job it is to cover technology at one of the most respected newspapers in the United States are actually so clueless that they have an entirely wrong definition for the phrase which they chose to be the title of their podcast.
“Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”
But, who cares, right? “Hard fork” sounds cool and the times is ON IT.
what surprises me more is that Netanyahu seems to be fine with it?
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herzl’s_Mauschel_and_Zionist_antisemitism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_antisemitism
8·3 months agoas a mod/admin, i would appreciate being able to edit post titles. there have been a fair number of times where i asked a poster to do so, and then waited a while for them to before deleting the post if they don’t.
and/or, it would be nice to have a way for us to temporarily semi-delete a post while waiting for OP to make requested changes to it; that is, to hide it from the community view but leave it visible to people with the URL, or people who find it via the user profiles of the poster or commenters in it.
editing titles would be a awkward without an edit history or, at the least, a way to see that some 2nd party had edited it, and editing post bodies would be even more so. but it would make sense and be useful with an edit history, i think.
i would also appreciate having content addressability, portable identity, composable moderation, and… perhaps a pony 😂
cross-post of my comment elsewhere:
I immediately knew this was going to be from Microsoft users, and yeah… of course, it is.
Binaries distributed under this EULA do not meet the free software definition or open source definition.
However, unlike most attempts to dilute the concept of open source, since the EULA is explicitly scoped to binaries and says it is meant to be applied to projects with source code that is released under an OSI-approved license, I think the source code of projects using this do still meet the open source definition (as long as the code is actually under such a license). Anyone/everyone should still be free to fork any project using this, and to distribute free binaries which are not under this EULA.
This EULA obviously cannot be applied to projects using a copyleft license, unless all contributors to it have dual-licensed their contributions to allow (at least) the entity that is distributing non-free binaries under this EULA to do so.
I think it is extremely short-sighted to tell non-paying “consumers” of an open source project that their bug reports are not welcome. People who pay for support obviously get to heavily influence which bugs get priority, but to tell non-paying users that they shouldn’t even report bugs is implicitly communicating that 2nd and 3rd party collaboration on fixing bugs is not expected or desired.
A lot of Microsoft-oriented developers still don’t understand the free software movement, and have been trying to twist it into something they can comprehend since it started four decades ago. This is the latest iteration of that; at least this time they aren’t suggesting that people license their source code under non-free licenses.
Wikipedia says:
But know your meme attributes its meme status to this tumblr post from 2013:
Contrary to comments in many places like this reddit thread from 2018, I suspect the phrase wasn’t actually used in many textbooks or very commonly known prior to that tumblr post.
(If you search on Google Books you can find numerous textbooks using the phrase. Range-based search on Google Books appears to be broken so I’m not sure, but all the ones I checked were published well after 2013.)