this is very tempting (alas, can't afford it atm)

Alt...

Pioneer rack-mounted Hi-Fi from ca. 1978/79, consisting of stereo receiver, power amplifier, cassette deck, reel-to-reel tape deck and equalizer, in a matching rack; everything is silver-fronted and has giant silver handles

• Build 77 should have fixed the markdown rendering issues
• Build 78 should have fixed the GoToSocial char limit issue

#MastoBlaster

mystified by how the very long wikiquotes page for Spinoza is 10% quotes from the works of Spinoza and 90% quotes of modern authors mentioning Spinoza in passing

one of those quotes is "Spinoza is a thinker far more famous than known."

You know what UI/UX option I'd like "put that fucking window back to where it was before it was accidently dragged"

Happy #Marchintosh to those who celebrate.

#MARCHintosh #notesart #mastoart #art #illustration

https://www.folklore.org/Mister_Macintosh.html

Alt...

A simple line drawing of a person with a large body and a small head. The person is wearing a hat with a brim. Their head is the blue Mac OS logo: the classic one that looks like a smiling face logo divided into two blue halves. They are carrying a suitcase with an icon of a small compact Mac on it. On the front of their shirt is a minimalist, colorful painting of a compact Mac. For the most part, though, the composition is a canvas-colored tan. This, as some might recognize, is Mr Macintosh, a drawing initially commissioned by Steve Jobs from the Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon. He wasn't carrying a System suitcase in the original version, though. The painting is signed "Chris Silverman".

Ah yes, the forgotten ELP speed of VHS video cassette recording.

Alt...

Table from a 1982 magazine showing the different tape speeds of Beta and VHS video cassettes, including VHS's EP speed (a.k.a.) misprinted as "ELP".

capitalists: "without a profit motive, nobody would do anything. society would collapse."

my friends & acquaintances: "I implemented a SPARC emulator in pure CSS"

pov: you wake up to receive a package with a vacuum chamber and discover that the vendor is a crackhead and a menace to society

this is a vacuum chamber. the power supply that comes with it has a type-C connector and it puts 12V on Vbus unconditionally. the pump works off both 5V and 12V, so it can pull vacuum off a normal type-C power supply. but the solenoid release valve (that lets you open the chamber once you're done) requires their illegal type-C-shaped power supply. also, not only does the chamber not support PD negotiation, it does not even have a CC pulldown.

to add insult to injury, it's using a NEMA 1-15P plug.

"If confidence was torque, he'd have no drivetrain left."

Europeans: do you plan to boycott the World Cup/FIFA?

Your snac posts can be fancy

Line breaks are respected and output as you write them.

Prepending a greater-than symbol in a line makes it a quote:

This is quoted text

All angle-prepended lines are grouped in the same blockquote

  /* this is preformatted text */
  struct node {
      struct node *prev;
      struct node *next;
  };

• One level bullet lists
• are also supported,
• by starting a line with a hyphen or asterisk followed by a space.

Links can also be written in standard Markdown style.

Some emojis: 😆 ❤️ 🍺 🤷 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Image URLs written in standard Markdown style for images are converted to ActivityPub attachments.

Three minus symbols in a line make a separator:

header level 1

header level 2

header level 3

These acrobatics are better documented in the snac(5) man page.

WHAT IS THIS SNAC THING?

Alt...

susie, snac's girl

One thing we know about the mass tech layoffs attributed to "AI" is that they follow a trend of mass tech layoffs that firms were formerly forced to admit were the result of their businesses contracting sharply after the lockdowns ended, when users didn't need nearly so many cloud services. By blaming the continuing layoffs on "AI," companies whose business continues to contract can tell investors that they are on the bleeding edge, not the contracting tail.

1/

Business idea that I’m working on:

Home appliances that are as analog as possible while being efficient.

My washing machine doesn’t need wi-fi.

My stove doesn’t require a subscription.

My fridge doesn’t need to have a screen shoving ads in my face.

And all of them should be trivially repairable.

I know there are enough people who have guns pointed at their printers in case the printer develops an attitude; I’m certain there are people who would go for this.

What if I could convince you that taking the same time to explain detailed requirements and carefully validate results with a junior colleague instead of a chatbot would not only give you two people who understood the code instead of zero, but if you do it a few times in a row you eventually get a senior colleague out of the deal for free.

From our Sugar & Sloth calendar, as if anyone on the fediverse needs a reminder:

Alt...

Multicoloured bubble writing saying “be extra weird today so other weirdos can find and befriend you”, written around a cartoon of a pink face inside what seems to be a goblin shark custom, surrounded by doodles of flowers, little creatures, and a domino

pentagrams per password

RE: https://scholar.social/@gedankenstuecke/116140098318631474

«Technology culture used to celebrate technical competence. Not as gatekeeping, not as elitism — as genuine, infectious enthusiasm for understanding how systems worked. The BBS scene in the eighties ran on self-taught systems operators who understood their hardware and their network protocols well enough to build infrastructure that had never existed before. The early web had a “view source” ethos: you saw something interesting, you looked at how it was built, you learned from it, you made something of your own. This was the entire pedagogical model of the early web and it worked extraordinarily well.»

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras » 🌐 2026-02-27
@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social

«This is not about purity. Nobody is asking you to reject every managed service on principle or run Gentoo on everything. It’s about maintaining enough technical competence that you are a participant in the systems you depend on rather than a permanent subject of them. It’s about being able to make informed choices instead of having choices made for you by systems optimized for someone else’s revenue»

The Slow Death of the Power User — fireborn
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

The modern mind is not able to comprehend how the Roman Empire was able to administer an territory all the way from Egypt to Hadrian's Wall without making use of Jira Sprint Planning.

I have an old mac mini intel box that I can wipe and do whatevs with.

What can I do with it that is in line with #permacomputing / #neighborhoodfirst / #solarpunk

My skillset for coding/dev is firmly in the “your worst cowboy QA engineer nightmare” but I am willing to learn to do things better.

Current aspirations would be to set up one of those digital prepper systems that could provide weather, agriculture, knowledge system/archive.

Thoughts? pointers? and even “learn to set up a linux server at tutorial N” etc is welcome.

[mysterious music intensifies]

I hope this email finds you interesting as a human being.

Tbh even if AI wasn't harmful for the environment, and not built on stolen data and actually worked well... I still wouldn't want to chat with a computer as if it's a person.

Check my latest album out on Bandcamp, it's in Pre-release there's like 6 tracks you can check out on it right now!

https://limneticvillains.bandcamp.com/album/delusion-illusion

#activitypub #fediverse

Push the means to production

Have I told you lately how much I love my Dirtywave M8? 😍

Today's stream is all about the sweep! Filter sweeps and beyond, in theory and practice. Come hear me expound on the how and why of one of my favorite sound types. Starts in minutes (12:30 PST/Pacific/Los Angeles time)!

https://youtube.com/live/AlNP0TQmUmc?feature=share

None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.

The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.

The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.

And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".

You are The

#poll #fantasy #scifi #anime #manga

Your regular reminder that at his wedding to Iman, Bowie had a group photo taken with Bono, Ono and Eno.

I refuse to believe this was an accident.

Alt...

Photograph of David Bowie and his new wife Iman from 1992. Either side of the couple are Bono, Yoko Ono and Brian Eno.

I once consulted for a fortune 100 and 10% of the time was writing software (it was finished). 90% was meetings. And then they scrapped the project and spent 10x on an off the shelf solution.

So no I don’t think most companies will now build everything themselves.

on linux: what arguments do you use with netstat or ss? (and what situation do you run it in?)

the only thing I can think of is `netstat -tulpn` to show all processes that are listening on a port and the PID (so I can kill the offending process) but I feel like there must be one or two more useful ones

(I say "linux" because linux netstat is a bit different)

"Oh, you want me to avoid technology created by immoral people?? I guess you have to give up THE INTERNET hurr hurr!!"

Nobody cares that you use a technology invented by bigots who died half a century ago, my brother in TELNET. Just maybe don't lend rhetorical support to the technology that's funding and empowering the people who are currently commiting atrocities.

Radio Shack's "Easy Home Video Editor" from the mid-1990s. A Videonics product in disguise? @themaritimegirl

Alt...

1994 Radio Shack catalog listing for the "Easy Home Video Editor", a small device with composite video input and output and some buttons on it, including "thumbs up" and "thumbs down".

the future is still old news

#unix_surrealism #technomage

Alt...

girls and machines