i restarted firefox, and that seemed to fix it. oddly, the only thing open in firefox was this mastodon tab

for the first time ever in 25+ years of using microsoft windows, i've just encountered the clipboard stop working entirely. ctrl-c/v just don't do anything, in any program, nor do any of the equivalent menu option

(for comparison, this happens to me on X11 about once every year or two)

the internal disaster recovery playbooks at major organizations are sprawling wikis written entirely by claude. when something is going horrendously wrong and employees are frantically reading through internal documentation to work out how to prevent total collapse, they will be squinting at instructions such as "The purpose of the narrower lever is what isolates it: harm flowing through the cross-level tier. What it gets you is what's saved: full user capture, where convergence is the target."

you think youve seen stack traces before?? youve seen nothing

when hasn't it

think you might have pests in your attic? cut away a small square of the ceiling below, and wait until it's dark. if you can see a red light flickering through the gap in the floorboards, then it's almost certainly mice. the light comes from the optical sensor which is on the underside of the mouse

the human animal (100% animal with no non-animal side) sees vegetation in its environment as a sign of life and fertility. if the vegetation has bright, colorful berries and fruit, even better. if the branches heave under the healthy plumpness of enormous pigeons, better still

one of the most important parts of urban planning is to surround yourself with trees with big fat pigeons in them

the human, which is a type of animal, is the only animal which claims to be 'trying to get in touch with its animal side', despite being an animal and thus having no non-animal side

on my windows install i hit "ctrl-alt-E" and it opens the program Everything. i type filename and the result appears instantly

on linux i type "find . --type f filename" and the syntax is wrong. so i try "-type" and thats wrong. so i type "man find" and theres a wall of text about symbolic links and shit. so i go into google and type "linux find command syntax" and twelve pages of slop results come up. i click one and it slowly loads. theres a wall of text which is even worse than the manpage

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jk/117477882756050251

i've literally just had to look this up again. i've had to look it up every 2 weeks for the last 17 years

// Existing items keep their previous state's state; new data joins the pool linearly, one data for each data added
// What's anchored is what's chained: the list's modification of what the owner guaranteed. What's added is the item into is the list into which the item goes.
myArray.Add(item);

it’s 2026 and finally my food is enthusiastically consenting to being eaten

british person: i love tea. i drink tea every day. for my entire life i drink tea every single day

non-british person who's really into tea: oh cool, what type of tea??

british person: i don't know

i think the IT-dominated 'tech industry' of the ~21st century is historically distinct from earlier eras, in that it is largely parasitic, using novel ideas primarily to capture existing industries and extract the value from them. all the 'great new things' it has provided are things we could already do before, but now they're a bit quicker and more convenient, and under the total control of corporations. nothing life-changing or life-saving like the tech developed in the 20th century

there's a disingenuous argument i see go completely unchallenged all the time, which is "this <computer thing> deserves to be respected and celebrated, because it underpins the entire world and you wouldn't have {products, services, entertainment, electricity, food, etc} without it". like, we had supermarkets before SQL. we had maps before Google Maps. the world functioned successfully, it just wasn't on Computer. now it *needs* Computer, when it didn't before. strange to brag about that, really

the main thing that's good about the web as a medium, imo, is that you can just chuck something into a directory and then it will appear in web browsers around the world. you can edit the file and hit save and refresh. the magic that you feel is the core of the entire thing. and as far as i've seen, Web Development, as a discipline, has focused for the last few decades on systematically destroying that magic

i really like PHP. in my experience, its full of insane issues and functions called "doThingSecurely_final_FINAL". but it's a tool, like excel or hypercard, that lets a normal person make Web without years becoming a Web Developer. you could just throw it onto a server and make a view counter or whatever. just mash it in there in the HTML for some basic dynamic feature on an otherwise-static page. wow! then 'Developers' ruined it, like with javascript, by trying to use it to make actual software

i've found that other people seem to be able to just encode structured data in their brain, verbatim, and reproduce it. i can only produce a paraphrased version, with the same meaning and stylistic features, a plausible guess. as a kid, i used to get in trouble for 'improvising' when playing piano, but the only way i can learn is an improvisation that converges toward the real thing. if the syntax has a strict "wrong until perfect" step function (not differentiable?) i can't learn at all

i can remember places i've been to (or only seen in photos) decades ago, and navigate them successfully. i can describe images i saw once when i was a kid. but i have literally no 'verbal memory', i can't remember movie lines, or lyrics to any of my favorite songs, and when it comes to programming, and terminal commands? well. i've been using linux distros for almost 20 years and still, daily, look up things like "linux how to find files with extension". it is NOT a good operating system for me