DigitalDilemma

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • are we just amusing ourselves until death?

    Yes, exactly that. There is nothing afterwards, and the fact that we’re clinging to the surface of a rock flying through an infinite universe where we could be wiped out any second and never be able to do anything about it does rather make everything seem rather pointless.

    And whilst you could be depressed about that, there’s still a lot of pretty awesome things to do that amusing with. Nature is beautiful. The world and its geology is beautiful. Evolution is beautiful. Science is beautiful. Maths is beautiful (if you have the sort of mind that appreciates it). Learning about these things and experiencing them is beautiful. And so on. Even most people all over the world are pretty good most of the time, despite what some other people want you to believe.

    And honestly, accepting there’s no greater purpose is remarkably freeing. When something happens, it’s just bad luck. It’s not some greater power punishing you, it’s not because you did something wrong (within reason - getting hit by a bus because you crossed the road without looking is really pushing the concept).






  • 1970s, uk, aged around 4 or 5, walking down the stairs carrying a glass when I tripped, Cut my right hand up pretty bad. My mum wrapped my hand in a towel and rushed me to a nearby army base where the medic did an effective but clumsy job of stitching me up - I still have a big scar but no movement damage.

    I have no memory of it, but my father certainly does. When he came home from work to find the house with its doors wide open, blood everywhere, and nobody around, he kind of freaked out.


  • I drilled a 100mm diameter hole through to the outside of the house and have a 120mm pc fan blowing air directly out from the cupboard through that. Possibly not an option for everyone, but as a householder with power tools, it seemed like a good idea.

    The PC itself is just a motherboard screwed to a flat shelf, with a bracket to hold the graphics card steady.

    Works well most of the time, although in recent 30’c ambient temperature, it got up to around 37c in there when I was playing a modern game. My CPU is only 65w but I’ve got a new graphics card and that creates a lot more heat when it’s working hard.








  • You can’t, or at least, you can’t not support evil in some way and exist in anything approaching normal society.

    Everyone has their own tolerance for ethical things, which changes with their daily circumstances. Some people literally can’t afford to pay the extra that some such choices cost, or don’t have the time to search them out, or just don’t have the desire or will. And there’s several levels of this too - at least their core inner belief, and what they tell the world they do.


  • I don’t think I can agree with that, and I’m a pretty agreeable chap.

    In the days when people actually cared about the html layout and readability, FP spammed everything hugely, and inserted a lot of terrible cruft. Inventing zillions of new <style> tags for everything, even when the user just wanted to italicise a word. Use a <i> tag? No! We’ll invent a whole new style class and embed it in the headers.

    A few years ago I rather stupidly agreed to take over hosting of a website for someone that was dying. It had been written with FP and it took me months to de-cruft it using a lot of regexp and scrifting. (Some 8,000 images and around 2000 .html files).






  • Before this year, the thought of an entirely arbitrary block to things like American cloud services by America to its European allies would have seemed extremely unlikely. It would make no sense, the damage to America and it’s GDP would far outweigh any any political benefit.

    All of those reasons still hold true, but I absolutely assure you, European governments and companies all over have that possibility firmly in their risk portfolio now. America tells microsoft to immediately not only stop selling products in Europe, but disable those already in use? Ditto Google. Ditto Apple. Ditto all the hundreds of IT hardware producers that are American. Want to cripple a foreign government that uses MS Office? Remotely disable it. job done. Sure, it would be illegal, but America’s government has no respect for law.

    (Even before this, several European governments were using open source (Germany, France, Austria, Portugal - there’s a list but this is less about idealism and more about protecting themselves from the unpredictable as well as not trusting America with their data any more. Every thing like this can only be seen as non Americans distancing themselves from America every way they can, and with good reason.)