Still, El Niño happens cyclically every few years, and this dataset spans decades. There are no other years in there similar to 2023….

The ones with the rabbits are pretty messed up as well!

Yah, I can’t imagine finger being widely deployed nowadays, the huge security and privacy hole it would be!

As for nntp and email… I also remember using email relay proxies for FTP way back when! FTP access to some places was spotty at best, so I sent a GET request to an email server that would get the file, UUENCODE it, and send it multipart by email. Not that files were big back then, but not was it possible to attach more than a few hundred KBs at once, if that.

In fact, I just remembered a funny story from when I was using the Usenet. I used a client that ran on our VAX/VMS mainframe. While browsing the newsgroups, I would get a figure for the transfer rate at the bottom of the screen. It was usually in tens of bytes per second, sometimes a few hundred. Often it stalled, etc. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I see it is showing “1”. My immediate thought as the most plausible interpretation: “damn, one byte per second. this is especially slow today!” And then I noticed the units: one KILOBYTE per second. it was the first time I had ever seen such a fast transfer rate!

A few years later, mid 90s I was trying to download a video that accompanied a conference paper. It was 6MB in size if memory serves. It took me from Friday afternoon to Sunday to manage it. Not only was it slow, but it kept interrupting and I had to start over numerous times. But I did manage in the end, and walked away with it split into a few floppy disks 🙂.

We’ve certainly come a long way since!

So much this! I am old, I guess, but I was on Usenet for years before the web was even invented. When I became aware of the fediverse, I got serious Usenet vibes. A decentralized model, several servers, you access one and get what it sends you, but it syncs with all other servers. You‘re getting everything in the entire Usenet and what you post gets everywhere too… we’ve come full circle, I think, even if we now use ActivePub instead of NNTP… a shame people nowadays know of it as “that piracy thing” instead of what it once was (and was designed to be).

This. Inform was the language/platform developed back in the day to author/interpret Z-code, the basis for Infocom’s text adventures. It went beyond just that in more recent versions, but it is designed from the ground up for text adventure creation.

This is like saying “you can write ransomeware in C++” and implying it is the language’s fault, somehow. ChatGPT is a tool, it does what the user asks it too (or it should, anyway). It has no agency nor morals. The argument that it makes it easier to write ransomware is silly as well. From high level languages to libraries and IDEs, we’ve always been developing tools to make programming easier! This is just the latest iteration.

Yup. Got it last week. Found this shit so disingemuous it almost pissed me off more than the privacy violation itself. I dont use any of Meta’s stuff except for WhatsApp out of necessity (some groups from the kids’ school), but i keep getting dumped into FB by busineses that dont have a proper webpage…

I reluctantly started reading ebooks years ago for a very practical reason: owning some few thousand physical books, I pretty much ran out of room in the shelves in my small apartment. So nowadays I only buy physical art books and the like. Having said this, I actually easily grew to like ebooks, for their ubiquitous availability and, of course, not taking up precious shelf space.

Have to read them in an ereader for a proper experience, though. Tablet/smartphone displays tire my eyes a lot if I read for any meaningful period of time.

Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.

So much this!

I see myself a bit in all those stages, but i don’t think i ever really ever (temporarily) outgrew “childish” things. Always liked cartoons, always read comics, always played games, and always told those that chided me for not growing up to fuck off. Now entering my 50s, the biggest difference is that people don’t have the courage to bother me about it anymore (and in the rare occasions when they do they don’t argue back after being told off :P )

One more, then!

My latest one looks different (100% renewable), so I guess it depends on which provider you’re using or the region you live in?

Ditto

Its a book of proceedings of a scientific conference, usually peer-reviewed. Springer publishes the proceedings but has nothing to do with the selection of the papers or their scientific quality… its just a service they provide, for a fee.

I’m in the same boat. Will be replacing my 12 Pro, which will go to my wife, hers to my kid. We get about 10 years out of each phone, by using them like this. The improvements I get for upgrading only after three years are very significant!

Indeed. Apple does give you control over notifications, in their different forms, so just turn them off.

Having said this I have the app installed since forever and notifications turned on (useful for order status, shipping notifications etc) and never got a self-promoting notification like that. I wonder if it is a regional thing (I’m in Europe).

Your body, as a warm-blooded animal, tries to keep a constant temperature (around 98°F or 37°C). Thing is, the body is constantly producing more heat (your metabolism at work…) and needs to get rid of the excess. If the air around you is at the same temperature as you are, it is very hard for heat exchange to take place (for you to get cooler as the air gets hotter) and, thus, you overheat a bit and feel warm.

This is why wind makes you feel cooler: it moves the heated air away from your body and brings in new, cooler air, making the exchange more efficient. Evaporation takes heat away as well, hence we sweat to col ourselves down.

Finally. Every time I go on a trip and pack a USB-C charger for my iPad, my laptop, my headphones, and have to bring an additional lightning one just for my phone drives me (slightly) crazy.

That’s fine: I wasn’t young back then either 😛

I’ve considered this, but fragmenting my identity seems a bit of a hassle as well. Ultimately, it will alleviate the problem but not solve it, anyway.

In any case, there is an open issue on github (someone beat me to it). Let’s hope it gains traction!

github issue

I’ve been feeling the same pain, of small, less active communities just not showing up in the feed. While in principle I am very much against “the algorithm”, this will lead to a feedback loop where small communities remain small because they will be much harder to find and revisit, even more so as large ones grown even larger.

We need a kind of sort that is able to get posts of smaller/less active communities interspersed with the rest. This does not/should not be a user profiling algorithm, etc. Just a blind “show the latest post from every community unless it is over x days old, and only then show the second newest,etc” or similar would help.

As things stand now, I’ve considered unsubscribing from some communities so that they do not overwhelm the feed, but it feels like a bad solution.