Yup. The robots.txt file is not only meant to block robots from accessing the site, it’s also meant to block bots from accessing resources that are not interesting for human readers, even indirectly.

For example, MediaWiki installations are pretty clever in that by default, /w/ is blocked and /wiki/ is encouraged. Because nobody wants technical pages and wiki histories in search results, they only want the current versions of the pages.

Fun tidbit: in the late 1990s, there was a real epidemic of spammers scraping the web pages for email addresses. Some people developed wpoison.cgi, a script whose sole purpose was to generate garbage web pages with bogus email addresses. Real search engines ignored these, thanks to robots.txt. Guess what the spam bots did?

Do the AI bros really want to go there? Are they asking for model collapse?

Oh content from this blog has been popping up in random places. Methinks it’s le epic trole.

So yeah, Xfce looks the same as it did 10 years ago.

And?

Desktop environment is meant to launch apps and give me windows and maybe have a file manager. Xfce does that. It’s a desktop environment.

Hey, “modern” desktop environment enthusiasts, if you bring Compiz back from the dead, give us luddites a call, will you? Ohhhh you kids should have seen it back in the day. Windows and Mac users saw Compiz in action and were, like, “wat.” You don’t get them to react that way to modern Linux desktops, no. And all that is lost now. Thanks Wayland.

I love watching Let’s Plays of Telltale games and similar games like Life is Strange. But usually, the first episode is hardest to watch through, because in these types of games, the first episode also serves as a very drawn out tutorial and has the most of the lore dumps.

Yeah, there’s an important distinction. Just because you could use Linux doesn’t mean you can at any particular moment.

I don’t really do music production; I’m more into writing and visual arts and photography. I could do all of those things on Linux and be perfectly productive. But there’s a difference between being productive and being optimal. My current process happens to be based on software that runs on Windows. (Heck, a lot of the software I use already runs on both Windows and Linux, anyways.)

The key here being that you shouldn’t lock yourself too much to just one tool and one approach, and that actually goes both ways.

Probably some other NPC that does some highly specific thing. Like the name rater, or whatever.

Not important in the grand scheme of things, but people all over the world come for that one weird task I can do, and that’s enough for me.

Yeah, the thing is, “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors” is kind of a meme among non-Haskell developers. Personally, I think Haskell is a very interesting language. The mathematical jargon, however, is impenetrable, and this particular expression is kind of the poster child. I’mma go look at Erlang if I want my functional language fix without making my head hurt, thank ye very much.

It’s a thing! Sadly it won’t rewrite Haskell codebases for you, though.

You got a 5 pack of VHS tapes? When I was a kid, I once got one VHS tape as a Christmas gift. And it was awesome. Because it had a plastic cover and everything.

Still sits on my childhood home shelf, with that Christmas episode of Garfield and Friends at the beginning. Can’t remember what else I recorded on it.

I’m from Finland. This is how it usually goes in the winter:

During the 2 hours of daylight we get at this latitude:

• Ooooooh this is pretty
• Bet I can get some nice photographs
• …or I would, if the sky wasn’t overcast goddamn it

Other times:

• Rummaging through the closet for wool socks and more clothing
• Put on the headphones, hit the metal music collection on my Nokia, and face the Darkness with a grim stare
• Would hit the beer, but not in this economy

I literally just looked at Reddit for the first time in ages.

What the fuck.

Here’s the thing: Reddit’s UI design has always been shitty. Old Reddit was fucking garbage, so admins cheerfully asked RES folks to fix their shit. (Instead of, you know, hiring them.) New Reddit? Always been shit, and nobody’s going to fix it.

This Newer New Reddit? I… I don’t think they even know at this point. What. What’s going on.

If they ask critique from the community, some AI bot will AI-pat the admin’s arse and AI-splain the remaining AI-users that things will be just fine. (Now, “things actually getting better” has literally never happened as far as Reddit or its user interface has ever been concerned, as you should well know if you’ve ever been a human Reddit user.)

They don’t have to be legal. In Finland we are getting YouTube ads for a sports betting website. That’s illegal. (Only the nationally regulated gambling monopoly can do that, and even they have massive restrictions on what kind of advertising they can run.)

In the off chance that you can report the ad to YouTube (can’t do that on TV or Android), YouTube has nuked the ad. Doesn’t matter. The ad has been submitted via bazillion different advertiser accounts.

The skip button was already too small, so of course they had to make it even smaller. YouTube’s usability on Android is already terrible enough, which is pretty spectacular considering YouTube and Android are made by the same company. The seek bar barely works. The video end screen hides the de-maximise button. Nobody at Google has heard of the concept that controls at the edge of the screen are harder to aim accurately at. Just to scratch the surface!

…we still have teletext on digital TV. Heck, we have teletext on the Internet now.

32-bit software is still absolutely supported on amd64. Just go to C:\Program Files (x86) and be amazed.

It’s funny, the only Linux software I’ve ever used that was only shipped as binaries was Loki games. Also, the only software that broke after binary compatibility went south. There used to be a giant tarball of old libraries and jiggerypokery that enabled the Loki games to sorta kinda work.

I was kind of sad to see that Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri didn’t run too well, but then I tried to play the GOG version on x64 Windows 11 and there are occasional weird issues. So, eh.

Windows: Can you run 25 year old binaries? Yes you can.

Linux: Can you build 25 year old software from source? Yes you can.

Error in Moderation

Could have been worse. Could have been an Error in Excess.

Basically, it’s the same thing as buying a “permanent” ticket to a local sports team’s home matches. What? Your local team doesn’t sell “permanent” tickets? Exactly.

One of the perks of owning these NFTs was that you could attend exclusive events. What those events were going to be about was anyone’s guess. Eye burn, apparently.