https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w0RKdvWmQg

A common question I get is along the lines of "what lessons have you learned from retrocomputing? what have we forgotten from computer history that we can apply today?"

I'm often at a loss for words. I'm not doing this for the utility. I'm doing it for fun. For the magic of seeing ancient technology come back from the dead. The process is the goal, not the end result.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/acceptance-speech-for-the-renomination-for-the-presidency-philadelphia-pa

P. T. Elmo's circus stunt is BS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x33gckVvXwo

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-spacex-shares-us-children/

How the fsck is the founder of "The Boring Company" going to legally get the personal information of every kid in the US???

random thought:

• you should have forums for your hobby / subculture / open source thing / etc., that are not discord, and that are openly accessible in HTML online. you should try to make those appear on google and be like the place to discuss the thing, if that's at all doable.

• many online subcultures used to have a politeness norm of "don't ask questions without first googling it". this rule is obsolete. googling it doesn't work anymore. stackexchange is dead. it is very difficult already to find reliable information. you need to make it as easy and inviting as possible for curious people and newcomers to get used to asking human beings about the thing. this means tolerating common questions rather than replying to them like "read the FAQ/TFM/search the forum" etc.

• in fact, actively establish spaces specifically meant for people who are too intimidated to ask questions. in a reddit-type forum, do "weekly quick q&a thread—all questions welcome" kinda thing (it's less intimidating to post a brief comment than making a question post). do "weekly casual chat thread" and "beginner's corner" and "off-topic fridays" and stuff like that, too.

• and on the converse, actively discourage people from posting chatbot answers, through both forum rules and fostering forum culture. don't be aggressive about it but also don't be lenient.

For years the pitch for single page apps was “it’s faster after the first load”. Its true: LCP drops by about a third when you factor in soft navs.

Google’s Core Web Vitals, which feed into search ranking, now measure soft navigations.

But 7 of the 11 SPAs we looked at still make people wait over 2.5s for the first page.

Hard fact: Most sites should be multi-page HTML page loads. JS apps come with too many compromises!

https://web.dev/blog/crux-experimental-soft-navs

Excellent article by John Markoff.
In this age of texploitation, we need more creative, chaotic, humanism at the cultural level.

https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/silicon-valley-psychedelics-sixties-genius/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Files_for_discussion/2026_October_12#File:Little_America_Penguin_Billboard.JPG

This billboard hasn't existed for decades, but it is copyrighted so
Wikipedia will be deleting it.

Meanwhile, some clanker has digested it and will puke it out forever.

https://github.com/smolkaj/eigencube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRrK4VJBf2s

Relentless AI scrapers pushed DNA Lounge's web hosting bill from $800 to $3,500/month.

That is a $32,000/year cost shift caused entirely by companies training models on their content without permission. AI companies are externalizing their massive training costs onto independent web operators, effectively taxing the independent web to build their proprietary models. 📉

https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/10/06.html

On June 29, 2007 Apple Computer will release the iPhone and you will see why 2026 will be much worse than 1984.

I was trying to use gimp for the first time to convert a multi-page grayscale pdf to a bitonal pdf. Inside gimp they are separate images. Is there a way to export all of the images back into a single pdf?

This is a no-brainer with Lemkesoft's Graphic Converter batch mode.

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117410710569897953

My prediction: Big Tech will "sell" us the solution...which will be effectively a dumb-terminal connected to the cloud in which the user rents computing power on a month by month basis.

why would i take time to do anything on my phone to organize it, or make it nice? its a little garbage spyware toy which can't do anything properly. it's the most patronizing machine in the world. every second i have to use that thing, or even look at it, is a second i could be spending doing literally anything else, for example, doing something properly on an actual computer, or looking at a nice wall or something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhHf5YZRg3Q

what is the best solvent for soft-touch surfaces?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs0CVkdEnqo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DSW1rN-ZV4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-3PMaZmuH8

Happy birthday, Squeak! 🥳 Can you believe it's been 30 years?!

Starting on October 1, 1996, Squeak emerged from Apple’s Smalltalk-80 lineage with the first VM written in Smalltalk itself. Thirty years later, it has grown into an open system for live programming, multimedia, education, and research, inspiring projects like #Scratch, #Croquet, and #Seaside. And it's still actively developed by a community that carries the vision of malleable personal computing forward.

https://news.squeak.org/2026/10/01/happy-30th-birthday-to-squeak/