There’s two kinds of crypto scams: Ones that actually involve crypto and ones that don’t.

Vague, possibly impossible to implement promises about proposed future functionality are an integral part of the crypto sphere!

Damn, OneCoin was bad. Ruja Ignatova was the first crypto scammer I’ve seen talked about in national news and she was also made fun of in a news comedy show over here. A true scam pioneer.

Brief history of YAML:

“Oh no! All of these configuration file formats are complicated. I want to make things simpler!”

(Years go by)

“…I have made things more complicated, haven’t I?”

YAML is generally good if it’s used for what it was originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data). Problem is, people use it for so much more. (My personal favourite pain example: i18n stuff in Ruby on Rails. YAML language files work for small apps, but when the app grows, so does the pain.)

I watch a lot of “lost media” discussion channels.

There’s been a lot of lost media searches where the people looking for the thing suddenly found a crucial hint when someone who worked on the project posted a 2.5 second clip of the thing in question in a video cv / showreel.

Expect a lot of that in the future. Except about media that probably didn’t even get released at all in the first place.

Kids these days get worried about computer noises???

I slept for years with my Linux desktop/server next to my bed, running 24/7, with a hard disk drive and cheap-end cpu/case fans. The only time I was bothered when the original case fan went bonkers and started making hell of a racket.

(I don’t use that thing any more, because it got way too obsolete, but I still have a NAS box with a fan and hard drive and it’s not bothering me at all.)

I recommend one of my favourite CRPGs of all time: Neverwinter Nights - for the modern hassle-free experience, get the Enhanced Edition. The first single-player campaign is pretty meh by Bioware standards, but the expansion packs (included in the NWNEE) are pretty great. Heard a lot of good about the premium modules (a few of the original premium modules come with NWNEE, the rest are available as DLC).

The official campaigns are set in Forgotten Realms, the same D&D setting as BG3, but you really don’t need to worry about diving headlong into horrors. More fantasy vibes and less visceral stuff. (the second expansion pack is a bit more in the direction of subterranean spooks, but not, like, excessively so.)

However, the real big strength of NWN was not the campaigns. It was deliberately designed for player-created adventure modules created with the included Aurora Toolset. There’s loads of them and some of them had really great production values and writing. They’re currently hosted at Neverwinter Vault and NWNEE also has a custom content browser (though the latter doesn’t have much stuff). Custom modules also have a whole bunch of genres and settings, as expected.

Oh and it’s a game from 2002 so it runs on any ol’ potato. (Well the EE needs a vaguely modernish machine, but not anything unreasonable.)

Reddit has an user data checkout feature (IIRC, check out the user settings or maybe reddit help pages to find it).

It’s a bit crap though.

It takes a long time to process, especially if you happened to post in the era when the Reddit data infrastructure was horribly terrible instead of merely ordinarily terrible, and apparently this involves some handwork in the worst cases on behalf of the staff.

Some data may be missing or truncated. It doesn’t give you data from privated/banned subreddits (which was a fun thing to discover because last time I tried to do this the blackouts were on), and even for legit stuff, long comments/posts may be truncated. Even so, I’m pretty sure that the dumps just straight up didn’t have all of my posts from several years ago, even if those were on public subreddits. So you need to make sure the checked out data is sensible.

In conjunction to the official dumps, I recommend a few other tools, especially since the dumps aren’t really magnificently usable on their own. One tool that I found personally invaluable is reddit-user-to-sqlite, which allows you to import Reddit data dumps and available live user data (I think it does this by scraping or something, I’m sure it worked despite the API being shut down) to sqlite database, and Datasette is a nice frontend for browsing the posts.

As for scrubbing, there’s tools for that are supposed to work. I think.

Yeah, and at least for me, the only reason the notification thing even shows up there is just to let me know that there’s an “update” available. Which I can’t install because I have the permanent license, and not the monthly subscription.

PAIN indeed.

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?

If musk pulled the same kinda shit, he’d be mocked for it too

Yes, it is funny how more people are not calling out the Electric Car Jesus for swooping around in private jets and single-handedly undoing any positive effect his customers can have…

The cyberpunk mouse from the dystopian sucky cyber future where the megacorporations have abandoned the research into ergonomics in search of greater profits…

…what do you mean it’s a product on market today?

There are as many types of gaming as there are categories of clothing and apparel, then.

…Hazmat gaming: 1) (console gamers) doing couch co-op on someone else’s couch and you really don’t want to think about the condition of the couch in question. 2) (PC gamers) gaming while doing Half-Life cosplay? Dunno? Something???

I’m using Finnish keyboard layout (same as Swedish basically).

I like how AltGr+7/8/9/0 gives me { [ ] }, it’s a very nice grouping. The key next to Z is < > and you get | with AltGr, which is very handy.

Only thing that’s mildy annoying from programming viewpoint is that for tilde and backtick, the keys do diacritics - you need to press the diacritic key and space. Backtick is especially fun, because it’s shift+acute, space. Meanwhile, the key next to 1 does § ½, which aren’t that handy most of the time. I often just stick backtick on that key if I’m particularly assed to customise keyboard keyouts. Similarly, shift+4 is ¤, which is another not a particularly useful character (but I don’t mind that, because £ $ € all need to be produced with AltGr, which is at least consistent).

My headcanon is that Earl of Sandwich had a dream one night where some mystery people from Sahara, the Sand Witches, showed up, and went like “yesss, a slice of bread, yesss, now put some stuff on it, yesss, maybe more slices of bread and more stuff and so on but that is optional. But we must go. Bye!” And thus was born a simple delicacy known worldwide.

I’m, like, OK, nuclear power isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
But power plants like that should probably serve wider municipal needs.

Building a private nuclear power plant just to power a data center? Well that’s clearly stupid.
Building a private nuclear power plant just to power a data center focused on a niche application? Well you know how that goes.

Also, look up SL-1. Disturbingly few Americans I’ve talked to have heard about that. Generally a good argument about why not every single thing should be powered by a tiny dedicated nuclear reactor.

“What am I supposed to do if 30-50 feral wolves run into my military base within 3-5 mins while my small soldiers are training?” - Putin

The only job I’ve commuted to by car was, um, the summer job I had when I had my learner’s permit when I was 18 or something.

I don’t have a car, I’ve not driven a car with my full driver’s permit, I think you need to renew it nowadays and I’ve not bothered with that for a couple of decades. We have buses here, why bother.

Just boomers trying to desperately ignore the fact that the generation after them is not only adult, but hitting the middle age. That can’t be true, right? That’d mean that boomers are the objectively becoming old farts? Naah, the whinge must go on!

We don’t really have this whole tipping thing here.

I’ve had coffee in two places recently. One was in a hypermarket. I don’t remember what the coffee costs there, because it came free with the meal. If the restaurant staff feel they don’t get paid enough, I don’t care if they get inspiration from France and torch every car in the parking lot. You see, I go to the hypermarket by foot. It’s not that far away.

The other place I had coffee recently was in the train. 2.80€. I certainly hope the restaurant car staff gets paid well. They’re technically railroad employees, after all. You don’t fuck with railroad workers.

In middle of a couple of worldbuilding projects. Haven’t really had much good ideas for the fantasy project lately.

Ah HA! Maybe I’ll do some mild subversion of expectations.
Maybe one of the most famous sites in this world, where people come to visit from far and wide, has a tiny old withered tree.
…I mean, there could be a lot of legitimate logical reasons why this site could me important. Maybe the tree has a really fascinating story behind it.
Heck, there’s probably many such places on our world too! Can think of at least one from the top of my mind.
I should write this down.

Last year I felt really crappy as far as my writing projects go, but in the last few months, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that even smallest ideas can sometimes break the writer’s block. Keep writing them down!