It’s like Moore’s law. The number of bytes for a basic app doubles every 2.5 years.

When I was young, we’d get a few different games games on a single 1.4 Mb floppy disk. The games were simpler, sure, but exactly the same games now would be far bigger in bytes.

I’ve just come back from a holiday which involved lots of hiking in mountains and woodlands. It’s rare to see bins out there, and yet somehow the places are clean. But please tell me more about human behaviour. Getting insulted by strangers on the internet is so fun.

I’m on board with this. Don’t bring rubbish into woodland areas; and if you do bring it - take it back with you.

I’m sure the bins were very convenient - but its a convenience that only helps you leave trash in the woodland for someone else to collect. And as others have pointed out, the rubbish can cause problems even if it is all put in the bin.

So yeah, I can see that it is mildly frustrating - but I don’t think ‘take your rubbish home’ is too much of an ask.

OpenTTD is a good game.

I feel some sadness in seeing Microsoft’s slow sludge of enshitification oozing forward and gradually engulfing github. There’s still a way to go before it become totally crap, but it is definitely getting worse and will continue to get worse as Microsoft does their best to mine whatever value they can from everyone passing by.

Knowing this, I think it is wise to start looking at alternatives.

I’ve stopped using github because I hate advertising and nags. Probably most people don’t care much about it, but for me github nagging and ‘reminding’ me about copilot is just so off-putting that I immediately want to leave the site. I don’t want my attention stolen like that.

My computer has a problem where occasionally it will become completely unresponsive. (Mouse cursor doesn’t move. Keys have no apparently effect. Whatever app is running freezes. I think its a hardware problem with the graphics card, but I don’t know what. Logs at the time it freezes say “the GPU has fallen off the bus”.)

Anyway… I recently learnt about Magic SysRq. And I’ve been able to shutdown the computer from this unresponsive state with SysRq, R E I S U O. Where as I understand it, the “E” tells processes the end nicely if they can; and then the “I” just ends them by force.

(At this point, I’m realising that the E is SIGTERM, not SIGINT - so that screws up the relevance of my story; but I figure I’ll keep going anyway.)

The point is, I’ve been using key combo with a nice pause between each key, thinking there was some chance that processes might be ending gracefully. But when I tried it while the computer wasn’t frozen, the computer was able to inform me that the E and I commands were disabled. (I don’t know why.) So even though I wanted to give a nice “please end” signal, in the end that just wasn’t happening.

[edit] I’d posted something to go into more detail. But I’ve decided that branch of conversation is not really the way forward.

I’ll just say that the software is not installed by choice, and it does things that people don’t want it to do… so it could be described as malware. But if you want it on your computer, then I guess for you it is not malware. In any case, it doesn’t look like we’re going to agree about this regardless.

Anti-cheat software is very clearly and explicitly spyware. That’s the entire purpose of it. It spies on how you use your software in the hope that if you cheat you’ll be seen by the spyware watching you.

This spyware is generally not something people want on their computer - as evidenced by people complaining about it. So effectively whats happening is that people are being spied on against their wishes. Spyware is a common category of malware.

So I think it’s pretty easy to see why people might describe anti-cheat software as malware.

I find Widelands to be slow and relaxing; but also challenging and engaging.

I find it amusing that they “use cookies to give you the best possible experience”, but then ask you to pay to not have them.

Using full names like that might be fine for explaining a physical rule, or stating the final result of some calculation - but it certainly would be cumbersome and difficult for actually carrying out the calculations. In many cases we already fill pages with algebra showing how things can be related and rearranged to arrive at new results. That kind of work would be intractable with full word names for the variables, partially because you’d be constantly spilling off the end of the page trying to write the steps; but also because having all that stuff would actually obfuscate what you are trying to do - which is algebra. And during that process, the meanings and values of the pronumerals is not as important has how they interact with each other. So the names are just a distraction.

For setting up an equation, and for stating the final result, the meanings of the variables are very important; but during the process of manipulating the equations to get the result you want the meanings of the letters are often ignored. You only need to know that it is something that can be multiplied, or inverted, or subtracted, or whatever. Eg. suppose I want to rearrange to get the velocity. I don’t care that I’m dividing both sides by the air density times the drag coefficient and the area… I’m just dividing ρCA, which is an algebraic blob whose interpretation can be saved for some other time.

In many ways, the silky-smooth convenience offered by modern computer software makes everything much harder to learn about and understand. For anyone that used zip files before this Windows feature, the problem is obvious - but for younger people it’s not obvious at all. Heck, a lot of people can’t even tell whether or not a file is locally on their computer - let alone whether it is compressed in some other file.

I guess its just a reminder that getting a PhD is often more about dedication than it is about practical knowledge.

I saw someone post this a few days ago, and someone else quickly pointed out that it is incorrect. This time I’ll point out it is incorrect.

In base-pi, pi would be represented as 10. The place value of the right-most digit would be pi^0, and the next digit is pi^1.

Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.

Forced accounts are evil - including Android. Here’s my Android story:

When I got my first Android phone, my intention was to not have an account - or at least have as much isolation between any account and my actual usage as possible. So I decline account creation when I first started using the phone, and told the phone to only store all contacts locally. That worked, and I was pretty happy with it. But later, I wanted to download a couple of basic apps from the app store - and that required an account. So I created a bogus account to download the apps. …

After creating the account to download stuff, I noticed that the contacts had automatically associated themselves with that new account had automatically uploaded all my contacts and personal info to google to sync with this account. This is precisely the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. So, I immediately logged into that account via google’s website and told it to not store any contact info, and to delete all existing info. Which it did.

But then some time later… the account again decided to sync with my phone - this time to delete all the contacts from my phone (presumably because I’d deleted them from the online account). So although I’d gone to some deliberate lengths to tell my phone to only store data locally and to not upload it, what i ended up with was all personal data uploaded, and then purged from my phone. I had to try to restore my contacts from an ancient sim-card backup from my old phone.

Since then, I’ve decided that I will not use a google account for my phone for any reason, ever. I’ve use F-droid and the Aurora store instead. (But actually I very rarely use any apps anyway.)

There’s a cool computer game that makes this point as part of the story line… I’d recommend it, but I can’t recommend it in this context without it being a spoiler!

I do.

I’ve got a piece of black tape over the power line on my computer, because it is too bright. And I have masking tape over the caps/num/scroll-lock lights on my keyboard; because they are also too bright. (The light is much gentler through the masking tape.)