reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google's own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community's concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.

One of my favourite tragicomical video game achievements was in Firewatch:

Adopted a turtle as a pet. The average lifespan of a box turtle is fifty years. It will outlive you.

And this is why I will not get a pet. I'm by definition incapable of taking care of them because they might outlive me.

Probably a floppy disk hardware emulator, something that essentially plugs to the original system's floppy disk interface, has a drive for modern removable media (USB/SD card/whatever), and buttons/displays to support disk image swapping and unmount/eject.

"Now those liberals are using these things they call 'letters' to form these things called 'words' and putting those together to form 'sentences'. I won't be fooled. Those are them evil Satan runes. No place for them in a Christian household."

Salmo has two AI packages commanding him to take five loaves of bread to the Two Sisters Lodge at 10am and to the West Weald Inn at midday, but the packages never execute as he has no bread in his inventory and the packages are of "escort" type, meaning he doesn't actively seek any out. It's possible this bug was introduced to avoid another, more serious one: if bread is given to Salmo using the console or CS, he will walk to one of the inns as commanded, take a bite of bread, and the game will crash. (UESP)

Right, this is classic Bethesda stuff right here.

This was so long ago that I can't actually remember the actual reason why things had to be done by hand. Part of it may have been a conversion snag, but there were probably some other reasons why it wasn't as simple as writing a script to do the job. Because I distinctly remember I wrote some scripts to help with other data conversion jobs.

Flashback to my first job. Coworker designed a giant complex web app with bazillion UI messages. Another coworker (in the Management) sent me the UI messages. As an Excel file.

I was tasked to manually convert the messages to a PHP data structure of some description (because this was 2002 and Excel files didn't exactly lend themselves to scripting in Linux). Surprisingly, the management person did acknowledge my complaint that the conversion process was far more painful than necessary. Not that this helped, because soon after the startup got acquired and as far as I know the tech currently only exists in conceptual level in some big corporate vault or other.

Oh, but the power of American superhero comics is that you can just start reading them wherever. Sure, there is deeper lore, but you're not required to know all that. There's this bat-dude, see? He punches crooks and does awesome shit in the night. There's also a bunch of wacky villains. See? Just go read it, you'll pick up the rest of the details as you go along!

And I also love a lot of European comics because most often they have a pretty good balance between complex writing and manageable size. And publishers here tend to be more lenient toward artists making one-shot kind of comics, without any expectations that it'll become the next endless blockbuster cash-cow property.

Still, I do like how most of the manga series are like "OK, here's the beginning, here's 20 or whatever volumes, here's the end."

Plot twist: the "wolves" are just furries going to a major infosec conference, and will also talk endlessly about Linux

Dead turtles are the saddest turtles. This is why I never got to Mario games that much and went with TMNT instead.

Ah!

Now let us never discuss it if we can help it.

Last I checked LinkedIn doesn't even have a way of straight up turning all emails off. I had to individually turn off email notifications on bazillion categories. ...Then they just invented more categories.

The 1970 ball (Adidas Telstar) is pretty iconic because it was specifically designed to be more visible on television broadcasts in the era when most viewers had black-and-white TVs.

A "hbox" in TeX is a horizontal box. In 99% cases when laying out text, it's a line of text. "Underfull hbox" means "I couldn't stretch the content of this line far enough, so it will look janky as f due to the increased spacing". "Overfull hbox" means "Well, I tried my best to hyphenate and line-terminate, but this word will stick out of the margin and will look stupid as f."

Most of the time this is caused by a word that auto hyphenation can't deal with. You need to add a manual hyphenation exception. I can't remember how to do that, sorry, because it's been a while and also I'm mildly drunk, sorry.

The way I think it, it's possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you'd just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.

Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there's also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.

Back in 1997 I was like "Ooh, Debian is mildly easy to install (compared to Slackware). Just need to engage my brain a few times maybe."

(The first Slackware guide I read in 1996 had an ominous warning about getting the ModeLines right in XFree86 or the monitor will catch fire. This, fortunately, was a little bit of exaggeration. Over/under refresh frequency protection was already a thing.)

Now? "Oh no I fucked up my password shit and can't login. I'll need 5 more minutes to completely reinstall this Raspberry Pi image. I should have engaged my brain!"

Shit, we've gotten to the point that your average desk jockey can probably install freaking FreeBSD on the first try. If that's not a good sign I don't know what is.

Not exactly boned but it probably doesn't make practical difference to store "local time + tzinfo timezone" than just UTC time.

• You record an event occurring at local time
• You store it as UTC
• Local time zone definition changes
• Well whoop de loo, now you need to go through tzinfo to make sense of the past data anyway rather than relying on a known offset

Even if you store everything in UTC, you may be safe... but figuring out the local time is still convoluted and involves a trip through tzinfo.

DAM as in digital asset management. Fancy word for "image library organiser".

Oh, everything works with Affinity. Thing is, Adobe is pretty much the only software ecosystem that is subtly (or not so subtly) making people think inwards. "I'd love to try that piece of software, but if it's not running as a Photoshop/Lightroom plug in, is it even worth trying?" Whereas when people who use other software are more likely to go "Well my favourite software package doesn't do thing X, but I have this other piece of software that does that, it's not even a hassle."

Also, when I switched from digiKam to ACDSee, at no point did I have to go "but what about my Adobe-locked-in catalogue, oh no!"...

I think it's only a good thing they're not trying to shoehorn DAM features into their existing apps. If they made a DAM software it'd have to be an external app anyway.

I did perfectly fine with digiKam in the past, and nowadays I'm perfectly happy with ACDSee. ACDSee even shows thumbnails for Affinity Photo project files.

Well, the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to produce a viable first draft. Some of these are so far removed from final draft it's not even funny. None of these drafts are good enough to be accepted by editors at publishing houses, sadly. ...No matter if we're operating in the ideal sphere of literary merit or the actual crass sphere of marketability publishers respect.