OldCoder

Sure, you can [ link to the individual folders or PDFs ]. Here you go. The link provided below goes to the top-level folder. From there, you can get to each of the four category folders and the individual PDFs [ which can be linked to directly ]. https://dansu.org/images/about/trumpfun/index.html If I missed anything, let me know. #FOSS is boss. I'm pleased to be a FOSS Hoss. #election #voting #trump

It'll depend on what you're trying to do. Different entities hold different rights. W. H. Freeman and Company held the rights related to non-U.K. English language versions of the book. However, the company doesn't exist any longer as an independent business. Rights that they held now belong to Macmillan Learning. To inquire about their properties, try using this form: https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/us/legal/copyright-permission-form Or email this address: permissions@macmillan.com Penguin Books holds the rights to U.K. English language versions of the book. To contact them, mail these 3 addresses: penguinpermissions@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk randomrights@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk randomrights@penguinrandomhouse.com Suhrkamp Verlag holds the rights to German language versions of the book. To contact them, email this address: Nora Mecurio mercurio@suhrkamp.de Other parties and/or entities hold the rights to different properties such as use the author's original materials. #fedihelp

Yes, my enlarger base was just the right size for a drowsy cat. [The photo itself was probably produced using the same enlarger.] Side note: You might be interested to know that many of the books and novelettes which I read at the time [1970s] are in Project Gutenberg now. Two examples of novels are listed below. [One illustration for each book is attached.] Drowsy (1917): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53802 Anything You Can Do (1963): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30742 If you like, add the "Anything You Can Do" cover to one of the Project Gutenberg copies of that book. [The project already has the "Drowsy" illustration.] For what it's worth, the alien pictured here [the Nipe] is a gentleman by his standards. Of course, his standards include the concept that it's polite to eat people. The hooks for "Anything You Can Do" aren't limited to the polite but chompy alien. A parallel thread is the question of exactly who the detective who's hired to hunt down the alien is. The detective himself isn't entirely sure of his own identity. People underestimate how readable even #books from 50 to 150 years ago can be. Not all, but some are entertaining.

You're skilled at this. I'd like to direct the attention of: @gutenberg_org@mastodon.social to the further improved version by @Ross@digipres.club To explain myself: I'm a generalist. I've been a code and data architect for close to 50 years, and I do work on images and videos. However, I have only a casual understanding of some issues. I redo Project Gutenberg covers and @CatsOfYore@mastodon.social photos regardless because it's a simple matter to offer some improvement. Feel free to comment further either in DM or publicly on how you approached the Nancy Drew cover. In my case, I found a generally good copy but it was damaged in places. Fortunately, this was at the edges. Ms. Drew and her clock were intact. I used Resynthesizer in The #GIMP to patch some of the holes and scratches but left others. I used #GMIC to do additional light cleanup. I noticed the rotation issue but didn't decide to address it until after I'd submitted the image. In the end, I used only the one source. In previous work on one of the Oz books for Project Gutenberg, "The Yellow Knight of Oz", I used two sources. I don't think that I've gone higher than three. I'd be interested to know if it was difficult to get six different sources to line up [in terms of pixels or of colors]. The attached kitty is work that I did on a Cats of Yore photo. This one was a lot of work, hours, but I had no choice. The photo is about 85 years old and the #cat is long gone but look at this and the chasm of Time is nothing. Note: Cats of Yore hasn't responded to this or other submissions but perhaps he, she, or they will see this post.

Here's a better version of the book cover. Perhaps this version will be useful.

@itgrrl@infosec.exchange : "All that [I've] done" [quote] is to make review of the documents [and direct links] more convenient. Thank you for acknowledging that even if the acknowledgment is backhanded. Nobody claimed that the mirror site is "authoritative". Where did that come from? Regarding the fact that I renamed the files, I absolutely did so and I'll be pleased to accept thank-yous from #Linux users for doing so. Pro Tip: Spaces in filenames complicate both manual and scripted operations under Linux. A number of other special characters do so as well. Did you imagine that I was proudly claiming to have mirrored Mr. Trump's nonsense in a form identical to the inept manner in which his people put it up? If so, that wasn't the point.

@maxleibman @reiddragon In fact, businesses both large and small are switching rapidly to AI agents in attempts to replace humans. This is not simply something that I've Googled. One of my former employers, a national chain, has been experimenting with it. They've had 80-85% customer satisfaction with a semi-stable AI service and are hoping to push that to 90% with an experimental service. That might sound good, but we're talking about one in ten of the customers being, at best, annoyed. And then there's my own experience of a few days ago. I called a process server to explain a job that I needed done. He said, "Okay, now tell me why you're calling today". I repeated the explanation and he repeated the question. After the third or fourth pass, I said, "You're an AI agent, aren't you?" And he said "Yes". I hung up, found a human service, and did business with them. Here's the thing. It isn't a matter of fine tuning. The current approaches are never, repeat, never, going to produce human equivalent. But the level of greed that the prospect of not having to pay people engenders blinds executives to this simple fact.

Subject: Admiral Wonderboat and webcomics.

Illustration: Typical comics from Narbonic, Superosity, and one of the incarnations of Few and Far Between.

@admiralwonderboat@mastodon.social :
Admiral Wonderboat continues to achieve a balance itself. [I'm referring to the subject of the latest comic.] It looks at serious subjects at times but is accessible to all ages and offers productive takes.

I think that I've commented to you before. I might not have mentioned that I've followed webcomics in general, a new type of media at the time, since the start with Bob the Angry Flower, Few and Far Between, Superosity, and many others.

For the Internet per se, I go back to the 1970s. I think that websites in the 1990s, #webcomics and other personal sites in particular, marked the most important turning point. The Web permitted individuals to have their say.

People are concerned that the corporate Web might fade away, to some extent, due to everything that's happening [including so-called "AI"]. My response is, "And?" There would be worse outcomes than to go back to the period when the Web was more of a voluntary collaboration of creative types.

I like to tell individuals with projects like yours [another example being @ZLabe@fediscience.org with his undoubtedly thankless work on climate visualizations] to keep the faith and to believe that social good is being accomplished.

Your lead character wants to be sure of the purpose of his life and whether or not he's headed in the right direction. To make a positive difference is, I think, purpose enough.

The most important part is that he thinks about things. You often caution the reader not to fall too far into reflection. But to reflect to some extent makes us real.

Unrelated: I've mentioned what stands out to me about Admiral Wonderboat. Upon reflection, some of the early webcomics were striking as well, each in its own way.

Few and Far Between was subtle but sometimes bordered on eerie. Superosity was pure insanity with storylines that featured Dan Ackroyd as the ruler of the Galaxy, the creator of ALF as a giant man who lived on the Moon, and Santa Claus as a reformed murderer who'd been raised on 4th Century Mars by a Martian magician.

Narbonic and WIGU could be read casually but were epic series collectively and had a dreamlike quality at times. [Narbonic actually included pages that were a tribute to Little Nemo, a newspaper comic of a century ago related to dreams.]

People who aren't familiar with the oldest webcomics should check out the archives for those that are still online.

@_L1vY_@mstdn.social
@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online

There have been no complaints that I'm aware of related to my PeerTube instance yet. Nor has Legal in Support at the host commented yet. However, one person in Support is saying that the host doesn't permit any "sensitive" videos to be hosted. By "sensitive", he means, more or less explicitly, videos that might inconvenience Donald #Trump.

This includes Status Coup #ICE protest videos.

This is a surprise as the host is Zynoo. They're based in Bulgaria and The Netherlands and the company per se has commented before that it doesn't rush to obey takedown demands from the U.S.

The Support person is a Tier 1, probably in Europe and probably a false name. So, an essentially anonymous Tier 1 person is expressing concerns. The Legal or Abuse group might decide in my favor, but I've asked the Tier 1 repeatedly to escalate to them and he's ignoring the request.

Update: The Tier 1 has escalated to a Tier 2, but I think that she's just a Support lead. She's also ignoring requests to permit me to speak with the Legal or Abuse group.

I figure that the video site will disappear shortly. If that happens, the site will return in due course. However, it might be a while because I'll need to look closely at the next host.

@WataruTenkawa_1@social.vivaldi.net Hi.

I responded to a post of yours yesterday, but I neglected to respond in the thread. So, you didn't see it and this is a day late. Additionally, I can't find your post again, but hopefully the context of this response will be clear.

You called for comparisons of the Fediverse, Bluesky, and Twitter. This was due to a post by somebody else that you considered ill-advised. I wasn't able to see the post that you were commenting on. However, regardless of the content, you'll agree that what matters is more about the tone and/or trend of a venue as a whole than that of a single person or a small group. There is, too, the question of where you yourself can do the most good.

In my view, the answer to the last part is the Fediverse. If not in one node [or instance], then in another.

The Fediverse is people. People do what people do. There is no haven from that. However, the average levels of intelligence and sincerity here leave Twitter in the Pre-Cambrian era. Twitter is controlled by a literal Nazi and populated with murderous Yahoos. I was threatened with death there myself roughly a dozen times.

Bluesky is a Potemkin Village of Federation. I know less about Bluesky than I do about Twitter. And you know best what works for you. However, a review suggests that the new platform is unlikely to succeed long-term. Moderation of a centralized framework [and Bluesky is likely to remain largely centralized] is a tightrope and they're going to fall off.

An attorney named @Popehat@mastodon.social here left for Bluesky due to excessive requests here for Content Warnings. He didn't really need to leave. Many Fediverse instances, and this is a key difference relative to Bluesky, would have been pleased to have him. But Bluesky is centralized. They suspended Popehat this month due to a post critical of Elon Musk and he had no recourse.

The parties in charge, for their part, felt that they had no choice. The Bluesky community supports Popehat but, as Bluesky is centralized, the organization was vulnerable to lawsuits or even prosecution if it didn't act. In an era when the oligarchs control nearly everything, at least in the United States, it was a legitimate concern.

This isn't the only issue with a centralized platform.

In my view, true Federation is the last stand. Possibly for society as a whole. You're aging, but you still have things to say. You'll find an audience here and it'll last the rest of your life. A decentralized system can't be censored or shut down solely because a billionaire sneezes or glares at a regulator.

You won't have a huge following in the Fediverse. However, enough people will take what you say seriously. As I start to approach your age [and note that I won't make it that far] that is what I find matters to me.

@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online

#zoitechat, which is #hexchat but better, is an option: https://zoitechat.zoite.net/ I switched a few weeks ago There has been no woe So, zoitechat is the way to go It's hexchat, but for gtk three Accordingly, switch and say whee You can use The Lounge too Use both and let fun ensue Source: An Old Coder and not LLM. #FOSS @itsfoss@mastodon.social

@cmccullough @mayintoronto Over the years, a number of people from IRC visited me IRL. I actually lived for a while with somebody from a game world. We had a kick-ass Christmas that year, 2020, that won't be equaled in my lifetime. It's not something to be rushed. However, if an online association has evolved to the point of trust, which is of course an important issue, online and IRL can become one and the same. During the IRC era, I used to refer to this as IRCL or IRLC. 😀

@MissConstrue @lxskllr You called? This is Bob speaking. We're only here and not still on the Savannah due to Everett Wheeler. There was no old man with a beard. There were simply a lot of dice, so many that we came up on one of the throws. Still, we could have done better.

Subject: Graham Platner speaks to the working class in Maine.

The link below goes to a June 05, 2026 speech by Graham Platner in Maine. The video is excerpted from an MS-NOW live-stream.

https://peertube.dansu.org/w/4jSxgdK6o2V5W4C2UDeaQ9

@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online I've edited this video as requested. This copy is taken from roughly 0:04:37 to 00:20:10. Feel free to indicate a different range for this video or for others. I can concatenate videos, rotate them, and do other minor edits as well.

The video is hosted at Dansu PeerTube. The site is resistant to takedowns. Additionally, you can download videos at the press of a button. New feature: For your convenience, the site now includes video collection links:

The Graham Platner page located is at:
https://peertube.dansu.org/search/?alltags=graham+platner&title=Graham%20Platner

The Status Coup page is located at:
https://peertube.dansu.org/search/?alltags=status+coup&title=Status%20Coup

#platner #election

I see that that's a real book. For people who are curious, it's "Let's Go" by Sarah Williamson. Based on reviews, the book has the makings of an old-fashioned classic. Old-fashioned is good. In short, Tuski's Taxi picks up whatever needs a ride and at each point, kid readers chant, along with the story, "Let's Go!" #books

Or perhaps the following may be relevant: https://garethstack.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/accelerando.pdf

And, in some cases, the next quarter will be soon enough for damage to show up.

Yes, I use yt dee ell pee because the software is for to say gee yt dee ell pee is there for you and for me. Lovers may fail to be true Society meltdown is about to ensue But if you need something on which to depend It's yt dee ell pee, a good and faithful friend. Source: An Old Coder and not LLM. YT continues to up the ante. For "yt-dlp" to work with YT, you need "deno" or a comparable engine now. You also need to redirect through a foreign country [sometimes]. I'll review the video that you ID'd at a later point. I'm occupied with moving possessions presently. However, I'd be quite interested in videos or channels that should be archived. The S/N ratio on YT is low, but there *are* important or entertaining videos of all types. People who see this post are invited to offer more video IDs [or channel links]. Let's save what's worthwhile before AI gobbles up the platform. Note, BTW, that a license which you supposedly agree to just by visiting YT isn't #copyright law. I'll add that a single low-price USB-3 stick with rotating connector [both USB A and C] can hold literally thousands of videos and it'll plug-in to a Smart TV, a phone, and/or a PC. All in high-resolution. It's quite a change from the VHS tapes of 40 years ago. I've been working on such a stick for 2 years now. It has nearly every movie on it that I care to see again, ditto for songs and music videos, and famous or obscure shorts that shouldn't disappear. All in a form factor that is scarcely larger than a thumbnail. Illustration: Two of the shorts on my video USB stick, a science video from YT and "Khang's Malt Liquor", which I don't think is on YT. Depending on your web browser, there are multiple ways to expand the image to fullscreen [or 1920 pixels wide]. Note: If anybody would like to U/L the "Khang's" video to YT, I'll post a link here after I'm settled in to a motel or a new residence. #FOSS #youtube #videos #fun #hobbies

I insist in my #Linux distro on reproducible offline #builds to the extent possible. In some contexts -- Go, Rust, and PyPi, I'm talking to you -- #FOSS has become a bubbling froth of living code that doesn't exist as a specific fixed thing. In the case of Rust, even the compiler changes so rapidly that the idea of a stable collection of Rust programs is like a desert mirage that's glimpsed for a moment from miles a way. We've arrived at the point where builds can only be done, in some cases, through arcane rituals that are carried out in containers which download, as you noted, a large chunk of the Internet and do God knows what with it. Granted, this approach to FOSS offers a few advantages. It's not so great, though, if you'd like to maintain a "batteries included" Linux distro that comes ready to run with dozens of programs from each ecosystem. This said, I've managed to enforce reproducible builds, to an extent, even for builds of Go, Rust, and PyPi packages. Ruby and Perl CPAN packages as well. For what it's worth, I capture both application and dependency sources up front and store the sources offline in different types of repositories or source trees. The build framework encourages builds to reuse the stored sources. I've accepted that some software, such as the major web browsers and the Fediverse server that I'm typing on, is/are going to need to be built online. However, the vast majority of my packages exist as nice, static, source tarballs and, in my view, that's how it's supposed to be. Note to @bagder : I appreciate the fact that #curl is a static source tarball to begin with. If you're curious, its home in my distro looks like this: https://laclin.com/src/find/curl-low

unless they need a CPAP to sleep; in which case, it's the mediverse

My most recent employment was for a large firm. It was one of the majors in the oil and gas industry. The company was of course, a Windows house. I did most of my work in the Windows WSL [aka Ubuntu] subsystem. This allowed me to use my usual Linux scripts and tricks. So, I only needed to pick up some of the Windows software and workflows that the company used. For example, instead of learning Visio and doing laborious point and click procedures to draw architecture diagrams, I whipped up a Python diagram script framework and used that. You mentioned Support. Support per se for essentially anything was largely non-existent. One would open a ticket with an overseas call center. A few months later, one would check and the ticket would still be there. You could open another ticket to request an escalation. That ticket would still be there months later as well. If you ask, how did things get done, the answer is that it was largely about tribal knowledge. My favorite story from that company is that I wrote a CLI script for a manager to enable her to do something. The script needed to be stored somewhere formally. Management convened a team of about a dozen senior people to review the matter. I had to explain what CLI was. What a script was as well and the concept of storing a file. There was a lot of pushback about, couldn't the company simply use some sort of outside SaaS tool that it could rent from its usual vendors? The discussion took about two weeks. In the end, a subcommittee was designated to manage the storage of a single file and to keep an eye on it so that it couldn't go rogue. Everybody seemed proud to have worked this out. It isn't solely about Windows. Note that #Windows supports its own scripts. PowerShell, not just Linux type. But the culture in some firms has shifted entirely to online #SaaS. Even long-term developers, in some cases, don't know that #CLI even exists. They do things by click, move mouse, click, move mouse. It's incredibly slow.

DJT doesn't intend to allow that to happen. See: SAVE Act. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/save-act-and-election-power-grab

Work. Some businesses are Windows houses. However, remember, Windows comes with Ubuntu now: https://linuxvox.com/blog/how-to-enable-wsl-in-linux-windows-11/ This said, Linux has fewer programs for some purposes, but they're free, open source [and so more trustworthy], and sometimes far less limited and locked-in. #Windows is there to farm you. Moo-oo. #FOSS is there to enable you.

No, but my Linux distro includes a boss key because, why not. [See screenshot.] Actually, I think that this is referred to as a "Show Desktop" button, but I'm not sure that I see the difference. In the 1990s, my CEO at IPT would have been outraged if he'd thought that people were sneaking game time on the sly. But I don't recall that he minded when we set up the office openly, just for a few days, so that everybody could blast away in Doom. I think that we even ran extra cables. We must have used DOS TCP packet drivers. The details are lost to time, but I remember that it worked pretty well. A young developer named Leon, now an aging CEO in Norway, brought his two daughters to the office for a visit. We booted up a DOS game called "Katie's Farm" for them and they apparently talked for days about picking strawberries in the game. Nobody minded that. However, if somebody had been caught using a boss key, that would have been the end of them. I thought of boss keys, myself, primarily as humor. Wouldn't an approaching boss see you move quickly to hit just the one key? I suppose that somebody with nerves of steel would be able to bluff their way through it. Link to a copy of Katie's Farm: https://tinyurl.com/katies-farm Screenshot: Boss key in #Laclin Linux with the desktop running BEWorld, a video game that has the distinction of being written entirely in Tcl [even the music data and other assets]. #DOS #games

A simple photo of an Archimedes Palimpset page is believed not to be copyrightable. However, the images that were produced using spectral analysis might be protected. This said, the party who holds the rights to the protected images has released them under a Creative Commons license. So, copyright isn't a blocker. Accordingly, an image that Project Gutenberg can probably use is attached. Or is this about one "lost page" in particular? If not, the attached image is from: https://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/ The license is believed to be Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). See, for example, the license statements on the two pages linked below: https://www.tei-c.org/activities/projects/archimedes-palimpsest-project/ https://www.cis.rit.edu/people/faculty/easton/Archie/ Note: The license statements on those two pages are offered by Will Noel, who seems to be, or to have been, the lead at the first dot-org site linked further up. The attached image has been modified as follow: I've used The GIMP and #GMIC to upscale and to slightly reduce contrast. Those two #FOSS tools, especially the CNN2x upscaler in G'MIC, are recommended.

I was raised Fundie but Thank God I'm an Atheist. I'd like to add the footnote that, in the U.S., "After-School Satan" is doing good work. Their charter is to provide an alternative to hatred-based Fundie indoctrination and I way support that. I rather like "Satan's Guide to the Bible" as well. Satanism may have cults comparable to those found among the Fundies. Note: I'm qualified to say that the latter are a murderous lot indeed. But I feel that Satanism in general is more nuanced and far healthier than Fundamentalism. In short, Make Mine Satan, Stan, Satan isn't an Also-Ran, Of Satan I am a Fan. FWIW Here's the link to "Satan's Guide to the Bible": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8j3HvmgpYc

Note that biometrics are being added. So, actually, now, it's also to, in the end, physically remove individuals who are so presumptuous as to question the powers that believe they be.

I'll introduce myself enough to say that I've been working on a Linux distro for 30 years. #curl is part of the core of this one and most others. There should be a curl flag to unfurl. Hm. Add a "--flag" switch. One thing that curl needed was wcurl. wget is nice enough you bet. For decades both I did vet. They're fraternal twins, I see, born in 1996, the years doesn't sticks, it can't be 28 years, I have socks5 older than that. But now with wcurl there is no excuse for anybody not to give curl a whirl.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. 😀 There are about 8 build systems, but the top 3 in terms of market share seem to be autotools [still, even after decades], meson, and cmake. Regular make is still around, of course, but I'm focusing here on the higher-level examples. autotools is the build classic system that everybody knows. However, it's too slow and it's fragile these days as well. cmake is too complicated and it doesn't work with distros that put packages in non-standard places. Such as mine. "cmake, why can't you find the right python? It's right there in PATH!" meson is opinionated about RPATH. I need to patch it [meson] to get things to work. "Meson, leave my RPATH alone!" However, meson is the one that I see most often in new packages, it's fast, and it "just works" except for the RPATH issue. So, my own preference is, from higher to lower rank, meson, autotools, and cmake.

I've updated G'MIC in my Linux distro to 3.6.2 for both GIMP 2.10 and GIMP 3.0. FWIW Presently, I'm using "clang" 20.1.8 to compile both of the GIMPs and the associated copies of G'MIC. If you're curious, the source pages for the two distro G'MIC packages are located at: https://laclin.com/src/find/gimp210-gmic and https://laclin.com/src/find/gimp30-gmic G'MIC three six two To install you one doesn't rue G'MIC three six two You're an image system true blue I used you to repair a 1940s cow And make her say moo Old images are dim and fuzzy as a rule But now the cow looks cool Source: An Old Coder and not AI #foss #gimp #gmic #linux #rhyme

Subject: Novelty song.

This is a short #humor novelty #song. It's the Alien Song from "Asteroid City" (2023).

https://peertube.dansu.org/w/uQYR6yeUWYeYZ6YivjxMJK

Yes. The illustration may have been intended humorously. But it strikes close to home for me. There were never any "Good Old Days" in the U.S. U.S. history is full to the rim with grim. However, there was a moment in the past century when we stood on the brink of change. There was a chance for a future. The moment was 1979. The Vietnam War was over. Nixon was gone. The idea that people had rights was no longer treated as a fantasy. There were still problems, such as the 2nd Energy Crisis. But, just for a moment, we were at a turning point. Then came Reagan. Donald Trump is nothing. The destruction that he's wrought has been as avatar of the ugly side of the ape that is the species. We refer to it as the modern term #MAGA but it's always been there. The ape has picked up an orange hammer and has smashed things to pieces; chee-cheeing with glee as innocents are crushed in the rubble. Ronald Reagan was different. He was no more intelligent than Donald Trump. In his final term, he was, in fact, gone. He believed, literally and this is no parody, that he was physically on a movie set playing a role. But where Donald Trump is a brutal ape, Ronald Reagan is a more refined and chilling portrait of evil. He was the end of the America that could have been. Trump is simply the simian rampaging among the ruins. Utinam ne hoc accidisset. At this time when Donald #Trump is raging ineffectively at Iran to distract attention from his sexual activities with children, it's worth a moment to recall that #Reagan supplied the #Iran revolutionaries with weapons in exchange for U.S. hostages and thereby helped them to consolidate their power. Illustration: Cover of issue #2 of "Reagan's Raiders", a 1980s comic book series. Note: This isn't GenAI. IIRC I owned a copy of this issue decades ago.

@jasohill@famichiki.jp @itsfoss@mastodon.social I'm sure that it could be programmable. Now, where do I get a bag of these?

The question of who is prosecuted if the agent commits a crime using your identity, credentials, and personal data is one that should be of interest.

Hi. If the question is for me, apologies, but I don't fully understand it.

There are thousands of talk.bizarre posts dating back to the 1980s online at the following link: https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=talk.bizarre In fact, the site covers most of #Usenet and hosts millions of posts overall. I haven't reviewed the site before but it seems to be legitimate and a resource comparable to Internet Archive. The site may ask you to enter a date of birth to confirm that you're an adult. However, no sign-up is required. The site is run by a developer named Jozef Jarosciak who seems to be located presently in Canada. As a single-person project, it's vulnerable to shutdown. I encourage people who know how such a project might obtain funding to contact Mr. Jarosciak. There is a contact link in the page footers. I've done so myself to find out if he's talked to Internet Archive. Speaking as somebody who was in Usenet from the start -- actually, I date back to the 1970s KAOS mailing list -- this project strikes me as important.

Ms. Batson: I'm a believer in the Gordian Knot approach. So, the following email has gone to Mr. Browning. If he isn't already in the Fediverse, perhaps he'll join us. Date: August 01, 2026 From: Robert Kiraly (OldCoder) To: Joseph Browning (the gamebook person) Cc: Sebbu (a gamebook author) Subject: Suggesting Fediverse gamebook account @sebbu@dansu.org : It appears that Mr. Browning and you have a common interest in gamebooks. Mr. Browning, I'm writing to forward the following thread from the Fediverse. I'd like to suggest that you set up a Fediverse account [or migrate from Twitter]. Warning: If you try to mirror your Twitter account to the Fediverse, the Twitter bots will probably lock your account. The fact that that is the policy is one reason to exit #Twitter. BTW I'm aware that Twitter is referred to as "X" now. However, I decline to go along with the venue's attempt to claim ownership of a term as significant as "X". I feel the same way about Facebook and the term "Meta". @gvwilson@mastodon.social said: Looking for source of quote: "The real purpose of #AI is to give the wealthy access to skill without giving the skilled access to wealth." thanks in advance (please note: not in search of commentary at present time) @aleciabatson@mastodon.social said: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from skill the ability to access wealth." -- Joseph Browning at Twitter Joseph Browning’s website [is] josephbrowning blogspot com should you wish to contact @MissConstrue@mefi.social said: I don't have an X account, so I'm walled out of searching on the site. Plus, I don't want to get X cooties on me. Ewh. @aleciabatson@mastodon.social said: I cannot seem to easily locate this Joseph Browning in the fediverse. If anyone knows his location I would be glad to follow. 🙏🏻

@KarenKeiller@indieweb.social
I've posted the YouTube video that you asked about. You should see the link in Direct Message. If you don't see the link, let me know.

I'd hazard a guess that you're all "V For Vendetta" fans. I should find a copy of that film. We didn't have Thatcher in my country, but we did have Reagan. The two were different in many respects, but they shared the love of dining on poor children. In this context, they were sisters under the skin. They lurk together in Hell now, hoping to snatch the unwary down from our plane to be torn apart in the name of trickle-down.

Subject: More on Nicolium For: #selfhosting and/or #Fediverse power users I've tested and tweaked #Nicolium, a front end for Pleroma and other Fediverse back ends. With the tweaks in place, it works well for me. I'll share some of them in patch form at a later date. Features include hashtag follow, emoji reactions, borders on focused posts, Markdown, WYSIWYG editor, real-time chat, draft posts, URL cleaning, direct messages, enhanced interaction policies, theme editor with export support, image ALT-text button, profile avatars inline next to mentions, and different ways to handle load or display of new posts. There is also a multi-column Deck feature, but that is more of a work in progress. The attached screenshot shows what my tweaked Nicolium presently looks like. The panel at the top is one of the tweaks. I added it to hold link buttons for different purposes. To see a larger copy, in Chromium or Firefox derivatives, left-click on the image. To see a full-size copy, right-click on the image, select Open in New Window, and resize the new window. Trick for advanced users: The screenshot shows a /tags/ URL in the location bar. FYI The combination of Pleroma [as back end] and Soapbox or Nicolium [as front end] displays URLs of this type in response to hashtag operations, but the URLs don't work if you reuse them. If you encounter this issue, URLs of this type can be made to work by adding the following location block before other location blocks in your "nginx" or "angie" server ".conf" file: location ~ ^/tags/(.*)$ { return 301 /tag/$1; }

Perhaps they could be referred to as "aithurs".

Regrettably, the response from most people in the Fediverse who see your post, including me, is that we're open for work, too, and would be pleased to work with you if you're able to identify a company or organization with paid work to offer. If you like, DM your resume to me and I'll reciprocate. #fedihire

I'm able to D/L YT videos, but not to watch them casually unless I D/L. So, I probably won't see the video. However, if you're literally comparing 'C' and C++, I have reason to say that, for four decades, C++ has been the Devil's Playground, a language that has done more harm than good. I've been maintaining a Linux distro for over 30 years. For that long, I've been attempting to keep both 'C' and C++ programs built and operational. C++ exists to frustrate this goal. Even major FOSS frameworks need patches, at times, to deal with confusing C++ gotchas. In 2013, I worked for a Windows house. They used MS VC++. One day, the core product would no longer build. I wasn't a C++ person but I figured it out for them. It took only about 12 hours to identify an issue that was documented nowhere but perhaps in the works of M.C. Escher. The issue had to with something similar to pointers to lists of templates of namespaces. No, that isn't literal. Now, factor in what happens as the C++ standards and compiler interpretations of the standards change over time. In fact, the "std" compiler option isn't sufficient to fix things. No disrespect to C++ people is intended. However, the language ranks above primarily Malbolge and Whitespace.

DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA Source: A foolish Old Coder and not LLM Illustration: GenAI of Elon in the Sky AI is Satan So, Fedi AI is hatin' To most, that seems fine Few that are sane for AI pine Flames the Old Coder doesn't seek This rhyme is tongue in cheek He sees AI both sides Does not totally derides But the AI of right now Is a world-eating monster cow Cthulhu, give up your seat The cow is the monster to beat AI the economy will smash After the crash Billionaires at the bottom of the sea The place where they need to be Mad Max 2 world with burning tires Every institution set to expires Crushed by AI and the orange toad It's a colorful story and frightening load The world's great age begins anew The golden years return Yeah, right, that's not going to ensue It's all going to burn Meet me on the other side We'll be in rags, but we'll find our stride Let's collect the pieces Hand them to our nephews and nieces There will be a bit of this and that AI will be there but with a small hat Not much gas, but hopefully the Net I'd rather have the Net, you bet Little will have been learned A few more years may have been earned Then the rest of the bill will come due It's going to be warm, you know this is true After that, it'll be down to the sunless sea We won't be there, not you or me Twice five miles of infertile ground No bird will sing, there won't be a sound #AI #climatechange #CoderSongs #rhyme #Trump

The issue isn't really machine produced software. I've written software to create software for decades and it's generally worked out. But the new case is different. It's the more specific case of software produced by an inherently flawed framework. The framework offers praise for Nazis, is prone to hallucinations, and sometimes urges both adults and children to kill themselves. In short, it's a psychotic system. I don't have high expectations of something that is psychotic. So-called #AI can be useful this way if you approach work in small pieces. For example, I ask these things to figure out patches to existing FOSS programs. The output is usually incorrect. For example, the "AIs" mix up different releases of a program [even if you point them to a specific release]. However, the output provides the general idea. I'm able to code actual patches based on that. If you visit my instance, Coder Dansu, you'll see a link to a PeerTube site. It's an enhanced version of PeerTube. I couldn't have produced it without patches that started with so-called "AI". However, I'd never ask one of these things to code a full version of such a program. If you did that, how could you fix the bugs that turned up? Let alone add new features. I wouldn't trust "AIs" to do so even if one of them had created the code.

Subject: 3-day water fast

I completed a 3-day water fast on Thursday, June 11, 2026. This was the 2nd such fast in the past month. This one ended up as 92 hours or slightly less than 4 days.

The goals of this type of fast are to induce ketosis and autophagy, to partly reset the immune system, to reduce inflammation, and to improve insulin sensitivity. It's a cornucopia of benefits. However, there are risks as well.

The fast was easy in part because I spent most of Sunday to Thursday ill in bed, not awake or asleep. It seems to be passing, and a severe cold or flu doesn't end that quickly, so it was something else. Probably not Covid as I've been vaccinated.

On Thursday, I ate a garden salad, 0.75 lb of grape tomatoes, turkey from drumsticks, and sliced ham. That knocked me out for 5 hours. I was definitely asleep.

I was delirious on Tuesday. Would you like to know what an Old Coder sees when he's delirious?

In my case, I spent hours imagining that I had an Xorg driver which could produce a display in thin air so that I could work without making it to my laptop.

I wasn't so delirious, though, that I didn't see there was probably no way to project a keyboard which would work. I shrugged and dreamed that I was typing at a Linux CLI prompt regardless. In my Linux distro, of course. That is where I need to be and what I need to be doing.

The trick now will be to maintain a diet, between fasts, with adequate nutrition that falls into the range of 1,550 to 1,950 calories [or kcal] per day.

#diet #fast #health