ryan

@ryan@the.coolest.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Real!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of my earliest memories are watching The Next Generation with my parents. I never stood a chance! I was always destined to be 🤓

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Real!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Real answer: these are actually real languages! They're just conlangs, or constructed languages, instead of natural languages. The major problem with conlangs generally ends up being the limited vocabulary, but the grammar foundations are usually solid.

  I actually really like Klingon as a language because it was intentionally designed to be alien, and specifically to be very Klingon. Most languages are Subject-Verb-Object (like English and other Western languages) or Subject-Object-Verb (like Japanese or Hindi). Klingon, however, is Object-Verb-Subject - it's very direct with the emphasis placed on the target of the sentence, which makes sense with the Star Trek world and Klingon culture.

  Fun fact, Klingon has at least one native speaker - some guy raised his daughter to speak Klingon as well as English. (I'm not a fan of this - on one hand, learning multiple languages from an early age is a huge leg up in being able to learn more languages in the future, but on the other hand Klingon is entirely useless as a primary language given its structure and the few other people who speak it.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Queer.af mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately, I think due to the way ActivityPub works, the domain name is inexorably tied to the instance. Trying to migrate to a new domain name would break a lot of federation to my understanding.

  It looks like someone posted an attempt at a workaround here (latest reply): https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5774

  But it does require the self-destruct button because the old domain name has to be erased from other servers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is no point in trying to escape the simulation; Odds are, we don't exist outside it!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How long until someone discovers an arbitrary code execution exploit in the simulation?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I love you ❤️⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
  • you <3
  • caffeine
  • caffeine
  • if I don't get my coffee I will either die or kill
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users towards Edge in a new Research Report⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  you WON'T BELIEVE what MOZILLA said about MICROSOFT 🚨 (watch to the end)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I live every day in fear that dark gary will one day return⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is a Light Gary on your right shoulder and a Dark Gary on your left. They don't provide any great moral advice, but damn do they love to argue about the best hiking trails.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A lesson in Input Validation⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  "client side validation is fine, nobody's gonna open up the dev console"

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. Instances always have the option to defederate with Threads should it prove spammy or ad-filled or socially awful, but I'm cautiously optimistic that Threads will pave the way for a more open social media paradigm in general. Decentralization is a core tenet of Web3, and everyone started focusing on the block chain and Bitcoins and whatnot but there's so much more to decentralization than that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's the style right now. Personally, I'm hoping for a "retro beige case that can hold modern hardware" era because I have terrible taste.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We already exist in a cyberpunk world, and people are just beginning to wake up to it. Implants that go obsolete, corporations controlling everything, the general sense of despair because you can't change the system, only rebel in hopes of improving the immediate life of yourself and those around you...

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Technical Writing: Deprecating Content⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Re: this section:

  As a technical writer, you should stay close to the teams whose work you are documenting. Listen out for any code, SDK, or product changes that may require action. When you hear that a tool may be deprecated, start communicating.

  It just assumes that nobody will ever proactively reach out to the technical writer about deprecations, which is entirely true in practice, but just feels so sad to acknowledge. Please keep your content and document management team(s) in the loop!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The new Outlook may give Microsoft access to third-party emails and logins - gHacks Tech News⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Azure AD is now Entra ID. Please do not deadname the Microsoft cloud offering (even if we all think it chose kind of a dumb sounding new name 🤫).

  And Microsoft is heavily pushing their cloud services of course, but you can still set up on-prem AD as an option as well as other on-prem services.

  It's just that all their cross service interoperability stuff won't work as well if it's not all in the cloud. Like, all their stuff is designed to work together in the cloud and keep you entrenched in the ecosystem, like any company I guess, except I actually like using Teams/Office/SharePoint combo, it's executed well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What a great deal⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  smh getting tancos from kurger bing when there's a perfectly good taco baco right around the corner

  you could even get a conmbo with a tanco, a chapula, a burro jr., and fries

  some people, man.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bored ape NFT event attendees get their faces burned by event lighting⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, fascinating! I wonder if it's more concerns about the size of the blockchain itself then. I had assumed, clearly incorrectly, that it was a platform limitation itself. This makes the ways NFTs have been implemented even dumber. 🙃

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bored ape NFT event attendees get their faces burned by event lighting⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing about the jpg ones is that the jpgs can't be stored in the blockchain, so what is actually stored is a URL to some server (and that URL endpoint could be redirected elsewhere, the server could go offline, etc).

  The other major use case I see touted is "own your game objects and bring your objects to different games" but 1) why would a company spend resources supporting an object they did not sell you and 2) could this not be handled more simply on e.g. Steam? (yes, locked into a service, but that's just the way the industry is and I don't see why it's worth the time and effort for them to change that)

  I do see how potentially a blockchain that stored actual data, e.g. some JSON, could be of more use. However, I struggle to find cases where just a regular database wouldn't be more practical. I guess it would be limited to cases where auditability and visibility of changes are topmost concerns, and where it's important that anyone can have a local backup copy at any time.

  If you have some examples of where this technology could be one of the best solutions, I'd love to hear them. The blockchain does fascinate me but I feel like it's often a solution in search of a problem rather than the other way around.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bored ape NFT event attendees get their faces burned by event lighting⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yuga Labs says it’s currently investigating reports of impeded vision and skin/eye injuries believed to be caused by unprotected exposure to UV lights during ApeFest 2023.

  Jesus Christ.

  Anyway, I'm... Actually somewhat impressed they're still having Monkey PNG meetups. I kind of assumed every NFT was a scam but this one is just a very expensive buy-in to a cryptonerd club, I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't be fooled: Net neutrality is about more than just blocking and throttling⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Couple points:

  The issue isn’t “net neutrality.” The issue isn’t even about an “open internet.” The issue that is once again before the FCC is whether those that run the most powerful and pervasive platform in the history of the planet will be accountable for behaving in a “just and reasonable” manner.

  Absolutely true. The Internet is essentially a basic utility at this point and those managing it should have accountability, like other basic services, like water... I'd say "or electricity" but I live in PG&E territory...

  Second point:

  Mischaracterizing net neutrality as “blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization” also creates an opening for ISPs to proclaim they are now against such practices. “We do not block, slow down or discriminate against lawful content,” Comcast’s web page proclaims.

  This is disingenuous on so many fucking levels. Sure, Comcast doesn't slow anything down anymore, but they do offer the Peacock streaming service for free on certain tiers, which naturally incentivizes you towards watching those shows rather than paying for a second service. T-Mobile used to do the same thing with Netflix, I remember. This is still a violation.

  Anyway, once the FCC does its best to keep the Internet from being a shithole, who do we yell at until it's considered actually a basic utility and prices come down and it's available to literally all Americans?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How well do Swedish fish keep past their best by date?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It probably won't make you ill immediately, more likely the texture or flavor would begin to suffer first (hence "best by" rather than "expiration" date). Keeping it stored properly (i.e. not an open bag but something sealed) would likely allow it to last longer.

  You should probably not eat 3.5lb of candy within 10 days unless you are trying to make your intestines suffer, but if you choose to binge please update us as to the state of your health so that you may be used as a cautionary tale.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An oldie but a goodie⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You've brought up a real interesting and nuanced point, which is "what's the difference between an insult and a slur, and when does one become the other?" And a lot of it's just down to "whether the target of said insult/slur feels it's so offensive as to actually cause harm or be a predictor of causing harm," I think.

  In the cases you've pointed out, redacted is still very much a slur, whereas "queer" definitely used to be and is now going through a sort of reclamation phase, so whether someone considers it a slur or not really kind of depends on their own history with it. "Queer" is definitely a word with an actively evolving meaning and legacy*, I think, and since we're in the middle of it I'm not sure whether it will end up fully reclaimed or the pendulum will swing the other way eventually.

  *all words are actively evolving like this but it's much quicker with insults and slurs because of the emotion involved

  Anyway, back to the subject of Drath’nor the Anus Destroyer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An oldie but a goodie⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  20 inches

  doubles in length

  takes off my robe and wizard hat Nah I'm good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am just so tired⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Star Trek: Bridge Crew, great game which was sadly abandoned and left to rot, started you out with the Kobayashi Maru. My friends and I got in there, beamed out as many folks as we could without firing a shot on the Klingons, and then got the hell outta the neutral zone as soon as the Kobayashi Maru was destroyed.

  Is that considered a loss? I'd say we saved a bunch of people and hopefully avoided a war. Best we could do given the circumstances. And that's how we manage life sometimes, as well. You can't win, but you manage as best you can given the circumstances and take the small victories wherever you find them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Twitter app just went very, very strange⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It doesn't seem to be broken. This article gave no screenshots, only a million ads, so I searched up reddit. Yeah, there's some minor visual glitches. The dates have been epoch'd for some people.

  It's indicative of Twitter's services slowly breaking down as the engineers left either don't know how to manage everything or simply don't have time to, but what else is new?

  This article is pretty sensational for what is the continuing sad decline of an app which was probably a detriment to humanity overall, but which spawned some funny jokes and was occasionally a means of mass communication in times of crisis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That Voyager is one clean burning starship though, I’ll tell you what.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The transporter is just a people replicator. Same technology. Why reinvent the wheel?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Even the Tesla Cybertruck's Brake Lights Don't Make Sense⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There's a video in the article and... oof, that's good to know in case I end up behind one. It's definitely a bit confusing and likely won't alert distracted drivers because the red light is always present. (Not that drivers should be distracted on the road, but it happens often.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am God's greatest programmer⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Let him play in the legacy code. You can just hose him off later before letting him back into the office so he doesn't track it everywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fediverse stuff is always gonna be somewhat niche. Consider that a lot of people still don't fully understand it. Federation is like email in a lot of ways, with multiple domains that can cross communicate, but the way people understood email was by likening it to the postal service and not even considering domains and such. So even explaining ActivityPub by means of email is a bit of a heavy lift.

  And getting people to host their own instances? That's asking a lot out of anyone. I had to learn a lot to spin up my kbin instance here, and I'd like to think myself fairly adept at technology.

  Add onto this that Lemmy is pretty stable but occasionally still has its issues, and kbin is still in a fairly early state, so it's not as clean an experience as existing centralized solutions.

  However, the fact that we have a pretty steady population out here is super encouraging. People didn't migrate during the reddit evacuation and then immediately dip out - there's reasons to stay. Hopefully we can continue to slowly socialize the fediverse to folks and get more people onboard. I know everyone associates Web3 with the blockchain and monkey jpgs, but in my mind this is the proper Web3 - decentralizing the internet and socializing it back into the hands of the people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Resistance was futile⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I will be forever mad about Voyager. Everything was set up to succeed: crew conflict! Unknown location! Some good actors! Voyager was a nice looking ship!

  And then, famously, the actors playing humans were told to be blah and less dynamic to let the alien characters stand out more, and the series had to follow a more stagnant TNG style (they tried to serialize certain plot threads which I appreciate but were confined to episodes of the week a lot of the time).

  Like, I can just imagine a mirror universe where the entirety of season 1 was the Starfleet and Maquis crews learning to work together, and conflict and drama as they're brought together by even more hostile external forces, and also the actors were allowed to actually act and stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨#1 or #2?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can't find the exact timestamp but Jonathan Frakes does point out the single bathroom on the Enterprise D in the 1994 documentary "Journey's End: The Saga of Star Trek — The Next Generation."

  But why would you use it when you can just use the holodeck? (crude humor warning)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely, that was my point and I worded it poorly :) If Troi were any more telepathic, Starfleet shouldn't allow her to practice mental health services. She's right at the edge where it's really useful before it becomes terrifying.