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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Can we? Yes. Immediately sending peacekeeping forces to prevent the IDF from continuing to engage in genocide and coordination with neighboring countries to figure out whether this is a relocation situation or a proper two state solution (and what that would require).

    Will we? No. Because if we cared we would have done it decades ago. The US doesn’t care because we decided Israel are our allies in the region and most of NATO falls along those lines. And neighboring countries don’t care because they don’t actually like the Palestinian people (and actively block refugees) and mostly just want to hurt Israel through them.




  • If you need an “off the shelf, low effort” IDE then you pick whether you are using VSCode or Vim/Emacs and then go to youtube and google “best plugins for ${LANGUAGE} in ${EDITOR}”. And you get basically a minute of copy pasting to have it set up to about the same level of optimization.

    Aside from that? The reality is that everything takes time to learn. It took you time to learn your preferred emacs config. It took me time to learn default vim and then what my preferred vim config should be and how to take advantage of it. Just like it took time to learn the editor that came with python on windows for years (still might?).

    Which gets back to this being a boomer ass article.


  • Yes. A much less boomer-coded article would be better.

    But as someone who has actually used a lot of the various IDEs over the decades and keeps coming back to vim (and is already expecting to go back to vim within a year because of invasive copilot shit…): Those niche editors? They are either genuinely bad ideas (think TempleOS levels of insanity) or they became plugins for every other IDE. I like vim a lot but emacs is the same (actually emacs is an OS with a text interface but…). And many of those plugins ALSO exist for vscode and atom/sublime and so forth.

    Because good (uncopyrighted…) ideas propagate. That is development and design.


  • I REALLY hate articles like this

    Saying we “lost” this software just shows that people don’t understand what software design/engineering is.

    Basically every screenshot of the “lost” TUIs look like a normal emacs/vim session for anyone who has learned about splits and :term (guess which god I believe in?). And people still use those near constantly. Hell, my workflow is generally a mix between vim and vscode depending upon what machine and operation I am working on. And that is a very normal workflow.

    And that is what we want out of software development. The good ideas move forward. The less good ideas become plugins for sickos. Because everyone loves vscode right now but… Microsoft is shitting that up REAL fast with copilot and just wait until every employer on the planet realizes that and ban it.

    And the rest just ignores the point of an IDE. Yes, taking your hand off the keyboard to touch the mouse LOWERS YOUR EFFICIENCY*. But it also means you can switch between languages or even environments trivially. Yes, it is often more annoying to dig through twelve menus to find what you want or talk a co-worker through how to do basic git operations that would be three commands. But holy crap I hate the people who “can’t work without my settings” that mean they are incapable of doing any “live” debugging or doing any peer programming where they aren’t driving.

    Back in the day we had plenty of people who were angry that not everyone was using vi and a bunch of tcsh scripts to develop because it clearly meant they didn’t understand what they were doing and were too dependent on compilers and debuggers. And it was just as stupid then as it is now.


  • I think these days most people use their video card as a sound card because monitors/displays generally have audio out as well.

    But yeah. I remember having endless problems getting one of the Splinter Cells to run (I want to say Pandora Tomorrow?). After literally weeks of googling and discussing the issue on forums with others with the same problem, we found out that it had issues with the onboard sound for certain motherboards. Went out to Best Buy, bought the cheapest soundblaster they had, and no problems.



  • There is.

    2FA. No, not the fucking “we’ll send you an SMS” bullshit that is increasingly used to just highlight an active phone number for spam purposes. Proper TOTP with the code backed up to a proper service (bare minimum, Bitwarden)

    Someone can steal your password and even your email account (unless you TOTP that too…). They still can’t get into your account unless you are an idiot who gets tricked into providing the 2FA key.

    In a perfect world? Have your TOTP credentials in one encrypted database/Bitwarden account and your passwords in another. In reality? Just use a trusted service. I used to be a big fan of Keepass but protecting that with a yubikey (or similar) is a huge mess.


    The recent push for passkeys (?) is a nice-ish middle ground. People don’t need to understand how to paste a TOTP code into Bitwarden but they still need to approve a login. That said, I hate it since so much of it is dependent on a single device that can generally be opened by just applying REDACTED to the screen and doing REDACTED to narrow down the lock code significantly.



  • The list of all the horrifically shitty things LMG has done over the past few years will fill up a thread on its own and I strongly encourage you to educate yourself before even thinking of defending them for… anything.

    But some highlights:

    1. Over the span of a week or two went from “Companies aren’t your friend. I am not your friend” to “Written warranties are worthless and can only hurt you so you shouldn’t want them. Also, if there were a written warranty and I were to die then my wife (who just so happens to be the CFO and second biggest shareholder in the company…) would suffer from harassment. So written warranties are bad and just trust me bro”. This was bad enough that his decades long crony (Luke) even openly criticized him
    2. Stole a GPU from a small company, shit on their prototype for weeks on end even after knowingly using it with the wrong card, and then sold the prototype cooler to a random third party. Proceeded to make claims (that the timeline doesn’t even work for) that they resolved this before anyone caught them and their main argument is they accidentally removed said company from those emails where they were “solving” it.
    3. Have increasingly openly acknowledged they will do big pieces on products they hate if the money is right. I think the most recent shitfests are a pool cleaning robot that barely functions and now sponsorshipps from one of the shittier VPN companies because the money is really really good.
    4. Responded to an “internal investigation” of sexual harassment and assault claims (where at least one perpetrator is literally recorded sexually harassing the entire company… during the all hands about sexual harassment… literally the day after his direct report left the company because of being sexually harassed) by talking about how they will sue any future whistle blowers or accusers for defamation.
    5. Went full “but the white man is the real victim” after even d-brand acknowledged a fuck up where they “roasted” an Indian guy because they thought his name was funny
    6. Basically turn every single accusation into “They are personally attacking Linus Sebastien because they are jealous of his success and genius” level cancel culture nonsense

    They are rapidly circling the drain and I for one am waiting for the “Well, these aren’t tech so we don’t have a conflict of interest and you should buy some joe rogan branded supplements” within the next few months. Likely because more and more actual tech companies don’t even want to deal with them for the PR boost.


  • I mean… plenty of youtubers and channels are doing exactly that. Ian McCollum (Forgotten Weapons) and the “educational” gun youtubers have History of Weapons and War. A bunch of creators did Nebula. Corridor Digital have their channel. That comedy channel that came from college humor have their own site? Same with those two channels that pissed everyone off in the past few weeks? And Linus Media Group have been trying to add “we run a shitty version of youtube” to their grift for years now. And Rooster Teeth and Giant Bomb had their own video site for basically the entirety of their runs.

    Let alone stuff like Utreon and the other one. And then there are the various successors to liveleak that are basically about spamming yu with an insane amount of spyware and ads in exchange for letting you upload faces of death.

    And while I think it is a fundamentally flawed idea that mostly just does the legwork for those sites to run the software: Peertube is a thing and there are plenty of instances that exist.

    So I am REALLY curious what evil organization you think is waiting to kill anything that is not made by Youtube. If you comply with DMCA requests and don’t host CSAM then it is just a function of whether you can afford it.

    Which… is the real issue. There is just a ridiculous volume of storage and bandwidth required for even a “small” youtube. Which is why almost all of the successful “alternatives” only really host a very small subset of videos.



  • “Time theft” is very questionable and more a topic for society as a whole but…

    Okay? Then don’t watch youtube. Rather than allow them to engage in “time theft” but calling yourself smart because you don’t watch ads.

    Also: As has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, the scale of Youtube (and Twitch) is massive and truly hard to comprehend. The only companies that even have a snowball’s chance of running that are Google, Amazon, and MS because they ALSO have giant “cloud” services. And… it is pretty clear none of them really know how to run a site like that (hence why MS just gave up entirely).



  • Sort of.

    The issue isn’t userbase size. Plenty of creators have tried to have their own private hosting over the years. The fact that the “successful” ones are Rooster Teeth (dead), Giant Bomb (basically dead), and Linus Media Group (unfortunately not dead, but shifting ever more toward right wing grifting) says a lot.

    The issue, as those channels learned, is discoverability. If your entire fanbase go to giantbomb.com to watch videos then you aren’t getting surfaced in the youtube/whatever algorithm. So as your userbase leaves (get pissed off, get older, die, etc) you don’t have a good way to replace them and you more or less wither and die. You could see this on the forums (and the threads on sites that still have forums) where you almost never saw a new fan show up and it increasingly became all about the more vocal members of “the community” as even the fans started to nope out of chat (because nobody gives a shit about the guy whose gimmick is that he kept saying he was a duck…) and forums (because we don’t care about the guy who can’t stop talking about how “kino” Snyder films are).

    And that is why stuff like Nebula, Gun Jesus’s latest side hustle, Corridor Digital’s site, etc are very much dependent on relying on Youtube for the “advertising”. It says a lot that most of us only even check Nebula when we see a new Legal Eagle or Nile Red video on youtube and want to watch the ad-free version.




  • Always worth pointing out:

    People were skeptical of toilet water but after Not Sure et al demonstrated that it was effective, they embraced it.

    We have people who were skeptical of… modern medicine. And when vaccinations were demonstrated to be effective they… shoved horse medicine up their asses and attacked medical workers.

    We are so far past Idiocracy.