In the early days it seems pike Stack Overflow tried to regulate engagement from trolls. They encouraged support for dumb/newbie questions and discouraged obnoxious behaviors.

I’m guessing that’s just a losing battle. I don’t think there’s much hope of keeping a good moderator for free. It’s a tough, thankless job. Troll/poor moderators are free.

My bowels have been questioning a lot lately, so it’s not entirely without precedent.

Easy.

The dog on the right is wearing pants. Two covered legs = Pa(ir) + nts = ‘Pants’.

The dog on the left is wearing quants. Four covered legs = Qua(d) + nts = ‘Quants”.

Two different clothing items.

When looking for a new web browser, which feature would you prefer most and which would you prefer least?

• A color palette that matches Danny DeVito’s armpit hair.
• Play the theme to Annie at startup.
• Take up all computer resources.

I don’t want any of those. Can’t we just have a browser that filters all of the popups, junk and advertising?

Nope. You can’t progress through the survey without picking one thing you really don’t want and at least one of two things you couldn’t give a shit less about.

A: “We really need this super-important and highly-technical job done.”
B: “We could just hire a bunch of highly-technical people to do it.”
A: “No, we would have to hire people and that would cost us millions.”
B: “We could spend billions on untested technology and hope for the best.”
A: “Excellent work B! Charge the government $100M for our excellent idea.”

What ever happened to micro transactions? Weren’t they supposed to be the way we compensated web producers? Instead we got ads.

I printed some 1.5u proto keycaps for Cherry MX keyswitches. I’ll try printing the “fat” keycaps next.

Yes, I’m building a custom board. I’ve been using the Ergo Pro and I like those fat key caps. I do not like the reliability of their key switches., so I’ll be sticking with Cherry MXs for the new board.
I just cranked out a batch of 1.5u keys for keyboard prototyping. They turned out “good enough”. That’s got me cocky enough I just might try printing some of those far keycaps.

That gives keys that are wide in the X axis. I’m looking for keys that are large in the Y axis.

Decades ago, a collegue of mine (who once worked in hard drive design) said, “Oh, hard drives stopped reading 1’s and 0’s years ago. Now they compute the probability that the data just read was a 1 or a 0.”

I’ll try that.

Been using a Matias Ergo Pro for several years now. Love the chonky CTRL, OPTION, CMD and Spacebar keys.

Before purchase, I read reviews that some of the keys would tend to stick. Indeed, after a few months, the ‘F’ key decided that it was going to work according to its own plan. So the reviews were right. A good keyboard if they would just fix their d*mn key issues.

Working on building a new custom keyboard to replace it.

Yeah, for a short time there the word ‘java’ was very ‘in’. Marketing hipsters at the time wanted to use it in everything, just like the word ‘AI’ now.

Love this feature. Wish they did this on more cars. Hot, sunny days that heat tue cabin are perfect for driving the solar-powered fan that helps cool the cabin.

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Big endiant is great for intellisense to quickly browse possibilities, since it groups it all in the same place.

If only someone would train a program… we could call it a Large Language Model… to knowingly group the names together so we wouldn’t have to choose between human-readable format or dB format.

Guess that will never happen because instead we’re stuck using “AI’s” to inflate stock prices instead. /s

I remember seeing a proposed language that would allow each programmer to choose what name to use for each item. Don’t like ‘open_file’? Choose to see it as ‘file_open’ every time you review the file in the future.

While we battle with each other endlessly, we keep forgetting that the computer doesn’t care.

“Every journey turns the vehicle into an advertising opportunity!”

Yay?

Can we please ban animated signs visible to traffic, please?

One day, someone’s going to have to debug machine-generated Bash. <shivver>

Remember “Monster Cables”? Everyone had to have car-battery cables to connect their speakers? Remember when somebody asked “audiophiles” to compare “Monster Cables” and alternatives? Their preferred speaker wire was just a straightened-out metal coat-hanger?

I’m going to take a somewhat different tack to describing this.

There are many ways to motivate large groups of people. You’ve likely seen this a lot and not really noticed or paid attention to it. Some examples are tribalism (“Hey! They’re not one of us!”), nationalism (“Those dirty foreign people!”), religion (“Do what I say and go to heaven!”), money (“Do this and I’ll give you something valuable”), etc.

One of the best motivators is fear. (“Do this or I/they will do something you really don’t like”).

Political groups need something to motivate large groups of people. When done well, they appeal to the better sides of humanity. When done by the lazy, the dumb and the craven, they go with the simple one: fear.

That’s what Conservatism has been hammering for a while now. They don’t really have a way to appeal to people’s better sides, primarily because their platform isn’t to make humanity better off. They platform is to make a few people better off to the detriment of everyone else. So they try tribalism (“Those brown people are trying to take your money!”), nationalism (“Those foreigners are taking your jobs!”), religion (“Those non-Christians are trying to install sharia law!”), etc. The most effective one is still fear. So getting their followers scared and angry is the best way to motivate them, get them to stop thinking rationally and build moats that will isolate them from people that might talk them down.

This is used to motivate people to vote in certain ways, as well as motivate them to watch advertisements. In other words: power and money.