Turtles are such underrated creatures and most people don’t realise how important they are to computer science. Turtle robots! Turtle graphics! Not to even mention the very concept of shell access! And yes, turtles are probably very happy that Secure Shell was invented.

Personal homepages. What we used to call 'em in the nineties.

Probably some other NPC that does some highly specific thing. Like the name rater, or whatever.

Not important in the grand scheme of things, but people all over the world come for that one weird task I can do, and that’s enough for me.

Sssss, tail number SSS-55555

My theoretical answer is this: in an ideal world, there would be no copyright at all. This is an artificial contrivance that was once dreamed up to serve physical-copy economy, and it was rendered obsolete by the digital age. Shit would be so much easier when we got rid of this shit and everyone could share everything by default without any profit motive. (Caveat: This will not work unless literally every jurisdiction on the planet gets rid of copyright laws all at once, otherwise this is way too exploitable due to power imbalance. So I don’t think this is a practical proposition. *cough* unless we all decide Anarchism is a good idea after all *cough*)

My practical answer is this: Welllllll we’re kinda damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. My personal feeling is that AI creations aren’t really copyrightable, and even suggesting they are copyrightable is kind of opening a huge can of worms regarding what exactly counts as “creativity” in the first place. The best we can do under current copyright regime is to regulate how the AI datasets are curated, because goodness knows the current datasets weren’t exactly ethically obtained.

They don’t have to be legal. In Finland we are getting YouTube ads for a sports betting website. That’s illegal. (Only the nationally regulated gambling monopoly can do that, and even they have massive restrictions on what kind of advertising they can run.)

In the off chance that you can report the ad to YouTube (can’t do that on TV or Android), YouTube has nuked the ad. Doesn’t matter. The ad has been submitted via bazillion different advertiser accounts.

The skip button was already too small, so of course they had to make it even smaller. YouTube’s usability on Android is already terrible enough, which is pretty spectacular considering YouTube and Android are made by the same company. The seek bar barely works. The video end screen hides the de-maximise button. Nobody at Google has heard of the concept that controls at the edge of the screen are harder to aim accurately at. Just to scratch the surface!

I was about to comment on this, but my Android phone spontaneously rebooted.

Anyway. Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was about to say: Firefox. It is a thing. An awesome thing.

32-bit software is still absolutely supported on amd64. Just go to C:\Program Files (x86) and be amazed.

It’s funny, the only Linux software I’ve ever used that was only shipped as binaries was Loki games. Also, the only software that broke after binary compatibility went south. There used to be a giant tarball of old libraries and jiggerypokery that enabled the Loki games to sorta kinda work.

I was kind of sad to see that Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri didn’t run too well, but then I tried to play the GOG version on x64 Windows 11 and there are occasional weird issues. So, eh.

Windows: Can you run 25 year old binaries? Yes you can.

Linux: Can you build 25 year old software from source? Yes you can.

Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.

If Chrome is known for one thing, it’s absurd User-Agent strings. Why not make it even more absurd???

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (Ahahaha; Fuck you Google; This is actually) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0

Depends on the type of account, but here are some of the common methods of how this might happen:

• The attacker could be straight up guessing the password. (One possible way to mitigate this: the website can go “wow, 10 failed login attempts from that source. I’m going to ignore all attempts from there for 24 hours.”)
• The attacker could be using previously exposed passwords. (One possible way to mitigate this: The websites should immediately require password reset for all users when that kind of data breach happens. For users: never use same password for multiple different services, certainly never reuse a compromised password even if it’s for a different service. Also: haveibeenpwned.com)
• The attacker, currently using the same network, could hijack the session. (This was a really huge problem back in the day. In this day and age, websites should be using HTTPS, which limits this very much. Still possible if the site doesn’t use HTTPS, and through some other vectors, e.g. malware or hijacked network hardware).

Also: Malware is a really scary big problem in that they’re rarely targeting you specifically. Why do that, when they can million people at the same time and sift through that stolen data for most valuable stuff, right?

The indoors aesthetics of sci-fi spaceships are really a topic that has not been studied enough. I loved it when Mass Effect series went full hard into captain’s quarters customisation and I was like “ooh! aah!”

I mean, it’s totally fashionable to give people who still somehow use Microsoft Internet Explorer scare pop-ups, so why not this?

If you don’t run an ad blocker, your browser just isn’t safe. This was the security community consensus 15 years ago. Shit sure got worse since then!

There’s been plenty of recent developments on plastic-free coffee cups. Even ones that have very thin layers of biodegradable plastic. A few years ago someone came up with fully carton based cups that hold coffee.

But I think that reusable cups are probably more viable. The €2 deposit sounds pretty hefty, so it’s going to strongly encourage people to bring their own cups and actually return the reusable ones. Mini-thermoses are cool, I like them.

That’s not weird at all. Here’s how neo-nazi mindset works:

“We should label these other people nazis, because the public knows that the nazis were the bad guys. It’s a powerful analogy that resonates with the public.”

…

“Why are you calling us nazis? Are you saying we are the direct political continuation of the NSDAP? You, sir, are factually incorrect!”

Here in Finland we have a really extensive and efficient plastic bottle and aluminum can recycling system. Every bottle and can has a deposit (0.40 € for large bottles, 0.20 € for small bottles, 0.15 € for cans) and you can cash them by returning them at any store. Just toss them in a machine.

There’s even some hypermarkets where you can just pour in a giant bag full of bottles or cans and the machine sorts and prices the things automatically.

It’s super annoying we still can’t really do the same for rest of the single use plastic, but at least trash sorting and recycling what can be recycled is a thing everywhere. We have a lot of projects that aim to reduce those. Probably the coolest recent thing was that someone came up with all-carton coffee cups. (I hope they catch on so we can get rid of the cups that have the Sad Turtle Warning. I don’t want turtles to be sad, they’re awesome.)

Or:

Software has a Linux version and it only comes as a .deb

Depends on a load of packages exclusive to Ubuntu and installing it on stock Debian is bloody impossible

Yeah I remember when Steam came to Linux. Never got it to work. I hope it is better nowadays? (Sadly can’t check. My only pure Linux box at the moment is a Raspberry Pi, I don’t expect Steam to run on that either)