I've started to add BeOS to Infinite Mac - you can see the first few versions on https://infinitemac.org/?filter=beos

Not having been much of a user back in the day, I'm looking for suggestions of software to make sure to include, or pointers to canonical archives (is there a Be version of the Macintosh Garden?)

Hey friends,

If you have tech skills—and many of you do—look for ways to reach out to your communities and help them de-enshittify their lives, even if it's just a little.

Help them install uBlock Origin. Introduce them to F-Droid. Consider setting up NextCloud or Immich for your family or neighbours. Show them alternatives like DuckDuckGo or Fastmail. If they're on Windows then help move them to Mint¹ or run Win11Debloat². Help them join Mastodon.

Talk to your local library or community centre about running a free session.

One of the impacts of enshittification is that it intentionally keeps people away from even hearing about alternatives. I genuinely feel the place to fix that is on the local level. We keep each other safe.

—

¹ Or whatever Linux/BSD distro is most friendly these days.

² https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat?tab=readme-ov-file#win11debloat

I read some post about how Mastodon consists primarily of German-speaking creatures talking in English. I'm gonna do a poll, need to test that. Boosts highy appreciated!

So, do you speak German?

'Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwrote

JPMorgan and MUFG are part of the group that has spent more than six months trying to distribute $38 billion in construction debt tied to a Texas and Wisconsin data center project leased to Oracle.'
https://startupfortune.com/banks-are-now-trying-to-offload-the-ai-data-center-debt-they-just-underwrote/

That's usually the beginning of the end of a bubble.

#debtdeflation

Kids today will never believe this, but it used to be an important user interface design consideration that buttons for controlling stuff (like a media player, or paging through a series of photos) not cover up the stuff that the buttons control.

Imagine: videos, where the play and pause buttons were not on covering up the playing video content for any amount of time. “See next photo” buttons that didn’t overlap any part of the current photo you are looking at.

We can have it all again some day, I believe.

With the days shortening and cooling in the northern hemisphere the #wildlife is busy preparing for the coming lean months of scarce food

But these two #deer seem to have made some sort of evolutionary leap in cognitive planning skills

Or they are evolving into snails

I'm not sure

EDIT: it's AI. thanks @katzentratschen @dictor

image removed

EDITEDIT: it's not AI. thanks
@geoffl

unfiltered version of the image restored

see my "exciting" rant about what happened here below if you want

My podiatrist has me wearing orthopedic shoes.

I didn’t think they would help, but I stand corrected.

#puns

I have a good friend who was passed on for a software engineering job because, according to the recruiter, he did NOT use an AI assistant in the coding test part of the interview. It was not for an AI company.

This is the biggest bullshit I've heard of in the tech industry in a long time.

They did not ask him to. They didn't hire him because he, effectively, didn't cheat in the interview.

Our industry is in a bad, bad place.

Protip:

When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do,

"Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL MOON with my software in 4K of RAM and here I am clicking your button and it takes ten seconds to load a 50 megabyte video ad and then it crashes

I'm not even ANGRY with you, I'm just disappointed."

I am so utterly sick of looking for new appliances and realising that pretty much all of them are inaccessible touch buttons, unless I want to spend 4 times the price to get a high end brand where tactile buttons are still a thing (and even then there's no guarantee that it'll actually be accessible), or i want to spend twice the price for one with smart control (and even then there's no guarantee it will be accessible or won't suddenly become inaccessible). And even the process of researching this involves such extreme (ultimately fruitless) cognitive load.

Yes they can!

Happy "Charles Darwin is poorly today" Day to those who celebrate

165 years ago today (1 Oct 1861), Charles Darwin was having a rough one

When They say that the death of AI will "kill the Internet," they're wrong. It'll cut off the flow of algorithmic sewage. It'll cripple Meta, X, Google, and so on.

Those of us who have our own web sites, who communicate independently? We'll be fine.

Welcome to 1995. Here's your modem.

Can't wait!

From Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency :

‘We’d had it thought out for us. We had with us some very specialised devices for helping us to continue to believe in the purpose of the trip even when things got difficult. They generally worked very well, but I think we probably came to rely on them too much.’ ‘What on earth were they?’ said Dirk. ‘It’s probably hard for you to understand how reassuring they were. And that was why I made my fatal mistake. When I wanted to know whether or not it was safe to take off, I didn’t want to know that it might not be safe. I just wanted to be reassured that it was. So instead of checking it myself, you see, I sent out one of the Electric Monks.’

We're going to be pulling down and repurposing this stuff later. Guaranteed. So use your position and influence to choose components with standard interfaces, protocols and headers, choose standard form factors held together with bolts and loctite instead of epoxy. Find the justifications, fudge the numbers, do whatever you need to do, but make it easy for everyone - for us, for you, for all of us - to salvage this stuff piece by piece to serve the people and keep it out of landfills.

I don't know why you'd be following me if you're making custom hardware out there for this world of surveillance, stalking as a service, slop farming and so on, but if you are, I need to ask you for something for all of us: Find a way, with whatever workplace conniving or accounting chicanery you happen to need, to build whatever nightmare you need to build to keep a roof over your head out of individual, hand separable components. Compute modules, separate memory, breakaway boards, whatever.

A fence can be replaced. A tree like this takes generations. 🌳

A large corporation built a machine and the operators of that machine instructed it to break into a government computer system.
Thanks to Prof Bant's work, we can skip the intentionality tests and go straight to the consequences.