ManMachine
@max@manmachine.me
@jwz a deep and sincere thank you for making Dali Clock available as an iPhone app. I was away from the house and didn’t have my glasses. And I had to coordinate on an exact time to meet up with someone
I hate how the Apple clock app works to get to the time, all I want is the time in big numbers, but even in world clock it’s still kinda small
In a fit of inspiration I remembered Dali Clock. I downloaded it on a lark ages ago. Years later, my eyes suck, and let me tell you this app is perfect
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
@crazybutable Thanks! Glad you like it. I imagine you're one of about 7 people total using the app...
@jwz a few years ago it was my 4 year old’s favorite app
I think he called it glitch clock or something like that. He thought he had broken the phone and was delighted and slightly mystified when I told him it was on purpose
Thanks to my friend S. for providing the initial recording.
Reviewers noted that while Vim for Gameboy featured one of the deepest command systems on the platform, its soundtrack consisted primarily prolonged silence punctuated with occasional terrifying beeps.
@NanoRaptor Exiting is *so* much harder in this version. You'd think you could just turn the Gameboy off, but that only makes it very cross at you.
@NanoRaptor I accidentally thought I could play this game, but *still* haven't figured out how to get the cartridge out of my gameboy :’(
@NanoRaptor Tom Christiansen (one of the authors of the original "Programming Perl" book) once said that vim was a video game that also got things done
New version of “when ur soft but someone hurts ur friends” dropped #FarahDrawsThings #Procreate #StabbyChicky
when I was younger I used to think music production was mostly about inventing interesting mic techniques and it’s actually about just recording things really well and not fucking around with them too much
we should invent vegan leberkäse
@hades You would think that all the „mostly salt and fat“ foods could be easily replicated and yet…
from my link log —
mlibc: a fukk-featured portable C standard library
https://github.com/managarm/mlibc
saved 2026-06-25 https://dotat.at/:/QZR06.html
@fanf … ah, that was a typo for "full", not a weird hipster spelling of "fuck"! I was imagining "fukk-featured" being some horrid neologism for "fuck features, we're only going to do the simple stuff".
(Which in other circumstances is _also_ a kind of C library people want.)
"fukk-featured" being some horrid neologism for "fuck features, we're only going to do the simple stuff"Reminds me of what the suckless crowd is doing, but their neologism is arguably better (?)
if your article is headed with an AI image then i'm not reading your article
@eniko - and the same goes if any of the other articles in your sidebar/links are about how useful AI is.
@eniko @ThomHartmann keeps on tossing slop over the fence here and doesn't even read replies or do anything besides throw slop at us and people boost it right up.
@eniko The instant I notice some plagiarism machine generated content in a piece of art, exhibit, job posting, really anything. I walk away. It makes it abundantly clear to me that the rest of the thing was not executed with care, and I see no reason to give it my time.
@eniko but actually nobody invented AI this far. If I'll ever be the first and it will outperform my lost inspiration, it surely will create for me. And do not read or watch, I won't give a fuck :)
I’m on the puter
@heyheymomo i think i might need this on a t-shirt. you know for the days they make me go work in the office instead of at home.
@heyheymomo Isso resume exatamente meu estado mental desde 1994. O diskete ali no canto me deu uma saudade criminosa.
Saw the word "accessibility" referred to "A11Y" recently.
A shortening that only works in English.
About accessibility.
Let that sink in.
That's almost as bad as "internationalization" being referred to as "i18n"
@moses_izumi
he is real btw
@prahou
@ozzelot holy fuck
@tibi2
I've missed out on the ability to buy a few :D And not sure I want it now. I proclaim I'm done with phones, done!
@tibi2
also look up xelibri and the sx1 (though tbf the nokia 3650 isnt much better, and nokia's fashion line of phones...)
siemens went hard on the weirdphone market!
@ozzelot oh I remember these. I had a m65 around this time. not nearly as wild but it was an aluminium reinforced? phone with rubber gaskets fucking everywhere. I lost half of them by the time I was done with it
What is the platonic ideal of an IC package? or an SMT component?
The ideal LED shape? Those most True and Correct LCD elements?
I KNOW YOU ALL HAVE OPINIONS
Tell me this isn't the best package. It is an enormous ceramic DIP with a metal plate on it because shiny.
@NanoRaptor
The ideal IC package is the Rockwell zigzag package from the '70s and '80s. I will brook no dissent.
I made an approximation of notorious foodie tuna melt and I went to heaven and back.
I didn’t take pictures. But man, this was sublime. I substituted his spices for just plain chipotle as that all I had:
My brother in computation, name one other media player that survived, much less that you have not had to relearn every 18 months, over that time span.
https://cloudisland.nz/@rmi/116785962750864812
It is June 2001. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2006. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2011. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2016. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2021. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2026 …
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
@mhoye VLC is, like, the platonic ideal of open source software. The low level bit-banging parts: absolutely top notch for decades, frequently updated. Human-facing parts: hasn't changed appreciably since the Nineteen Hundreds, weird, confusing, 40,000 configuration options, makes designers drop to the floor in tears. Might as well have "TBD, WRITE ME!" at the top of the window.
@jwz @mhoye Also it has a terrible name: originally "VideoLAN Client", a TLA embeddeding a TLA in classic nerd form, it is now just VLC which doesn't stand for anything except possibly Very Loud Cone, after its logo, which is also a terrible placeholder but somehow so instantly recognizable that remote tribespeople who've never seen a traffic cone and toddlers who can't reliable identify the Coke logo can tell you it's the "pointy video thing".
does religion imply belief in the supernatural?
| yes: | 35 |
| no: | 17 |
| [heavy sweating]: | 10 |
Portable cassette players found at the ReStore today!!
@themaritimegirl I have a fancier model of that Panasonic with a digital tuner and VMSS (Virtual Motion Sound System), which originally came with headphones that vibrate your ears along with the bass notes in the music to make it feel/sound like "subwoofers for your head". Yeah, it's super gimmicky and the novelty wears off quickly.
@purpleidea ok so I am trying to use tabs instead of spaces for indentation and within two days I've already found a failure.
yaml rejects tabs as indentation. lol
Of course I fucking find this.
RE: https://retro.pizza/@mrencyclopedia/116767709992953410
Hi it’s me, “English speaker who learned grammatical nightmare Dutch and then randomly decided it was time to get serious about Chinese, and did in fact learn to read Chinese”
Make your own flash cards. Write your own notes. Ideally with pen and paper, but if that’s not an option, type it letter by letter or use speech-to-text. Don’t copy-paste. Don’t autocomplete. Don’t generate with AI. You need to use YOUR hands or YOUR voice if you want to change YOUR brain, YOUR own inner neural network weights.
I’ve been trying an Obsidian plugin called HiWords. You select a word, right click, and add a definition; from then on, that word will be highlighted in Obsidian notes, and you can hover to see your definition. Elegant, helpful, I like it.
They have a (completely optional, opt-in) functionality to shell out to an LLM for filling in the definition. I imagine that a lot of students requested this functionality, and it wasn’t hard to implement, so I understand why they added it. I can see why the students want it; it sounds so much more efficient, so much more ✨data✨ per effort to get the vocabulary collection up and running. But it’s self-defeating. It’s drowning your senses in noise that won’t stick in your memory. Two or three words you took the time to look up and write down yourself are vastly more helpful than a paragraph churned out by a machine.
Do it by hand, learn it by heart. 📓💖
Another AI argument: "I'm studying Japanese and asked Claude to make flashcards based on the grammar points in my Japanese textbook, and it did in minutes what it would have taken me hours"
What if I told you that the act of making the flashcards is studying? When I went through the Naval Nuclear Program I went through a very similar process of making flashcards for all the things we would be tested on. I never actually had to use the cards. Making them was all I needed to do to sufficiently remember.
There is no way to optimize your way out of the learning process. It always takes the same amount of effort in the end.
@0xabad1dea This is why writing cheat sheets before exams was always helpful even when they were not used in the exam.
@0xabad1dea I'm curious? Why do you consider Dutch grammar as a nightmare?
@agturcz take the weird edge cases of English and turn up the knob, because Dutch is in even more of a half-eroded Indo-European state. And the rules about word order in complex clauses remain mystifying after speaking it daily for years.
@0xabad1dea @agturcz I do like "our" (I'm Dutch) flexible word order though, it adds another dimension to what is said in a sentence.
Also: I've been doing Chinese in a language learning app (I really do not want to discuss the app itself) so I'm reading your comments on Chinese with great interest!
You know why I can read Classical Chinese? Because I have spent the last year slowly but surely making a complete handwritten copy of my favorite textbook. Every explanation. Every example sentence. With my own original translations and margin notes. On nice sturdy paper with a pen I find comfortable to use. I’m at 183 handwritten pages so far.
(Gonna repeat again that a lot of people who think they hate writing by hand actually hate cheap ballpoints that hurt their hands.)
@0xabad1dea ¿Is that a Jinhao 82?
@Illuminatus it’s a Pilot Falcon with a gold nib, my most expensive pen that isn’t an antique. But I also have some five dollar Jinhaos I’m happy with :)
@0xabad1dea The shape is so obviously similar.
You are <so> right on the ball-point thing. I've never conventionally written with them, because I always "carved" the paper and never felt comfortable with them. I wish I had got regular with fountain pens much earlier, but I got used to write with dipping nibs back at the start of uni for my personal stuff and I for everyday stuff I used liquid ink Pilot V-balls. Cannot even conceive having taken so many notes in uni with regular biros.
@0xabad1dea that looks like so much more fun than the not very constructive (or effective) activity on various chinese language apps that I has been my not very well thought out 'strategy' over the last years.. Would you mind sharing what your favourite textbook for Classical Chinese is ? Does it assume any level of knowledge of modern Chinese ?
@joost_rekveld unfortunately yes, every serious full-length textbook of Classical Chinese I’m aware of presumes a strong working knowledge of modern Mandarin. In fact, that’s why I started working on my own website that approaches it from the angle of people who are interested in ancient languages in general, but there’s not much there yet. https://厄.net/classicalchinese/
The book I’m working from is “Classical Chinese: A Functional Approach” by Kai Li and James Erwin Dew. The orange edition is typeset in Simplified, the green edition is typeset in Traditional.
@0xabad1dea many thanks for the pointer to the book, and what a good idea to make such a site ! I certainly feel part of your target audience...
I'd like to hear more about your thoughts on choosing a pen, is there anything more to it than 'try a lot of pens until you find one that works for you?' 
The three most important factors in finding a pen that's comfortable to use are:
1) Barrel thickness. Cheap ballpoints tend to be very skinny, and adult hands cramp up holding them. A chunky pen can be much easier to hold for long writing sessions.
2) Softer grip area with no sharp faceted angles. I have found that if I use a wider pen, a rubber/foam grip is not necessary, but many people find them a lifesaver.
3) Smooth, flowing ink. Ballpoints are the WORST for this. Their grease-based ink has many virtues, such as waterproofness and being very cheap per page, but you have to press hard and drag the pen like a knife to get a clear line. IMO fountain pens are the best for this, but if that's too much fuss, a nice gel pen from a serious brand is the best all-around option.
Unlearning a painful death-grip acquired from ballpoint use may take some time and practice.
Here are some specific model recommendations from a serious pen fan. https://www.penaddict.com/top-5-pens
@0xabad1dea so much of my hand pain disappeared when I when from cheap ballpoints to realistically sized fountain pens - or at least a good ballpoint pen made by a company that also makes fountain pens. Trying to write with a Bic Stic is unthinkable to me now.
@0xabad1dea @einsiedlerspiel just throwing out there that pilot g2s are available most everywhere. Come in various ink colours and line thickness. And they’re not very expensive.
ya that makes sense, having this enumerated is helpful thanks!
(I learned my death grip in school with a probably ill-fitted fountain pen, and have mostly experimented with different tips in a thick (and heavy!) ball-tip housing. That's tolerable -- but it still takes discipline not grip and press too hard; maybe I should try fountain pens again)
@0xabad1dea @einsiedlerspiel I'm quite a big fan of liquid-ink rollerballs. Bit of a halfway-house between fountain pens and gel-inks
@0xabad1dea @einsiedlerspiel I'm curious if left handers have differing opinions on pen ink from right handers.
Personally I go for good quality #2 pencils and a manual sharpener for my note taking purposes, which has the fun of slowly making my hand appear silvery the more I draw and write at a time
I'm curious to know how many chinese symbols you were able to learn in that time!
@abhayakara I started studying (modern) Chinese at all about four years ago, and got serious about Classical specifically, which has some different vocabulary, about a year ago. I stopped keeping formal count at about two thousand characters, because at that point, you know all the common ones and flash card drilling doesn't help much. The number that I can recognize in-context in a sentence is probably between 2500-3000, which is the low end of fluency. (A highly-educated Chinese person will know 4000-5000).
In the Chinese public education system, they take a tactic of pushing 700 crucial characters in the first year and then slowing down a bit, with a target of 3000-3500 by the end of 6th grade. I think I did about 600 in my first year, which feels fair because I wasn't a full-time schoolchild.
@0xabad1dea that's fabulous! Did you in fact use any tools like Anki?
@abhayakara I used Skritter, which has an expensive subscription but I recommend it over Anki because it's specifically designed for Chinese/Japanese characters and has you hand-write the characters in stroke order (on your phone/tablet, with finger or stylus)
@0xabad1dea do you have any recommendations for studying modern Mandarin, as a precursor to to Classical? Integrated Chinese seems popular.
I would love to be able to truly understand this some day, but it seems so daunting: https://cbetaonline.dila.edu.tw/zh/JB137_001
@0xabad1dea Using AI to help learning is like doing athletic training by using machines to lift weights.
🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦 [Honestly I don’t care but no one will understand if you use she/her.] » 🌐
@grumpybozo@toad.social
@0xabad1dea Like medieval monks learning Latin on the fly…
@0xabad1dea I had exams where we were allowed to bring one single sided A4 page of notes. The act of trying to write the entire course on one page meant nobody actually used their notes in the exam.
@0xabad1dea oh this is so true. In ye olde school days, I used to prepare cheat sheets for class tests; they were made so that I could potentially use them for cheating (Poland in the 90s had a bit of a different approach to cheating than some other countries :D it was very normalized), but the mere process of making it, digesting information into small portable form and writing it down was always enough to actually... teach me the material. And pass the test without cheating.
@0xabad1dea @quixoticgeek Ooh, HiWords (minus the “AI”), sounds very useful! I want to try it for adding hidden furigana to my Japanese grammar notes. Any other Obsidian plugin recommendations?
@0xabad1dea This is what I try to tell anyone learning Chinese characters. Even if you never plan to write any character in a "real" situation, writing them by hand makes it easier to recognise them, because you don't truly know the character if you don't know how to write it.
And even copying characters is such a great skill to have when put in a real situation. You can get away with a lot if you're just able to copy your address or whatever onto a form.
@0xabad1dea Better to chose Dutch and not German. Dutch has much easier grammar than German, and much more consistent pronunciation than German and especially English.
I'll give HiWords a try, that seems useful for learning 日本語 :)
@0xabad1dea I like the way Field Notes puts it in their marketing materials: I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it *now*.
is this good or bad advice
quote 'Make your own flash cards. Write your own notes. Ideally with pen and paper, but if that’s not an option, type it letter by letter "
hard to say
on the one hand, abadiea appears very gifted, so what works for her might not work for others
OTOH, there are probably entire shelves of books about best practice, so a citation would be nice
some of us have trouble with pen and paper (ahem, me)
but this might be best practice; asfaik, the idea that people have different learning styles is contentious, at best
@0xabad1dea what makes Dutch a grammatical nightmare? what study i've undertaken tells me it's quite a lot like German grammatically
@drolltergeist like globally notorious for nightmare grammar German, yes
@0xabad1dea haha fair enough. i hear Mandarin grammar is actually pretty easy to wrap your head around, and hey! no case system ;)
if you have a 4 functions (act, item, draw, willpower) arranged in a cross pattern (one at the top, left, right, and bottom) and two of which can be disabled, how should the arrangement be?
| always available left/right, disabled top/bottom: | 88 |
| always available top/bottom, disabled left/right: | 55 |
Closed
@eniko oh instinctively id split it diagonally (like controller face buttons, A/B is essential stuff and X/Y is usually more exotic stuff)
@eniko I'd pick neither, and use the most accessible buttons as the always available and the others as possibly disabled.
oh no not again
@eniko Given that the first option in a poll is biased to get more votes, I think if this was the final result, it means the second choice would have won by a small margin. 😆
Depends on the screen I'll be using, I guess! The screen's supporting surface (hand/table) and dimensions (can be held in hands of various sizes) etc. are going to shape the exact experience.
...Could just say "PC vs Mobile" but listed out the *reasons* up there...!
Anyway: I voted for **Disabled L/R Buttons** because *no matter* you're on a touchscreen, ONE OF the top/bottom buttons is always going to be accessible...!
On a phone, I find my fingers' vertical movement easier.
@eniko the correct solution is "do it like CSS reflow, where you end up with all 3 commands in a row but the 3rd one is 80% off screen"
must i run all modern software in individually customized docker containers?
what if said software uses docker as part of its functionality? is there a way to install a meta-docker?
@tubetime that’s just Incus - you can run Docker inside Incus containers.
Docker was a mistake.
@tubetime I hate it so much and I extra-hate that all Docker containers assume they're running as root because setting up rootless Docker is such a pain in the ass (and effectively impossible to do when requiring any kind of device access).
Oh yeah. And the mirror assembly pin is just as broken as on my previous 300D (leads to loss of autofocus.) On the plus side, now if I fuck up the repair on one 300D, I have another try.
"which is the parts one"
"they're both the parts one"
On the plus side, now if I fuck up the repair on one 300D, I have another try.
I love fountain pens but you do have to be aware of things like “weather decided it’s a leaky pen day”
(Sudden changes in air pressure can cause fountain pens to blorp) #fountainpen
Sun Quan mentioned!
As someone with a passing interest in Chinese history, instilled in me from playing way too many Koei games over the years, I was delighted to see a name i recognised!
@ishambard yeah Sun Quan, show that desk who's boss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJms1CGHjn8&list=RDLJms1CGHjn8