Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

@apetresc Dark Mode? I'm pretty sure I remember seeing and annoyedly dismissing that announcement for being so bulky yesterday, before it hit April 1st anywhere in the world.

...or, actually, now that I think about it, it might have been the day before, because I was already quite annoyed at the SE crew not having the foresight to dismiss all the "You can now follow things" popups in the tabs I'd middle-clicked open after I dismissed the first one I saw.

@strypey It's not all rosy though.

* Too much interest in "the cloud" by the majority of computer users.
* We're seeing more IM moving to platforms that use web-based clients rather than a stable protocol something like libpurple can easily clone and keep up with.
* Microsoft requiring locked-down Secure Boot on ARM-based devices to get Windows Logo certification and cheap OEM licenses (and, one would guess, any other non-x86 ISAs).
* etc.

@freemo @LittleWytch Intentional or not, I just can't implicitly promote it, so I always use "post" as the noun and either "post" or "send" as the verb.

@freemo True or not (and Snopes more or less agrees: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-cut-cdc-budget/ ), the tone of that article makes me very suspicious of using them as a *reliable* information source.

...something that seems to be backed up by a quick check of what the Mises Institute is on Wikipedia. By their very nature, think tank websites seek to promote a specific view of the world... that means that, at best, they'll promote facts that support their views and downplay ones that disagree.

@skunksarebetter Good to see Synergy got forked after that decision to take it paid.

@mgiagante @n8 ...or saying that "Twitter" is the place you go to be a twit.

@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir Oh, and I can't remember if it was something I read or something I figured out on my own, but the stupid "I have to be taught to share a ball" argument by a former RIAA or MPAA exec led me to the reason it's so hard to stamp out piracy:

We have an instinctive understanding of scarce (property) vs. non-scarce (information) and an instinctive drive to gather and share non-scarce things for the good of the tribe... that's what gossip is.

@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir Rick Falkvinge (founder of the Swedish Pirate Party) wrote some *excellent* articles on TorrentFreak on the topic:

https://torrentfreak.com/author/rick-falkvinge/

He points out things such as how authors and artists are technically entrepreneurs and we should question thoroughly the idea that a special class of entrepreneurs should get to free-ride off a small amount of work for the rest of their lives while no other class of entrepreneurs get to do that.

(Work is supposed to be trading something scarce, like the worker's time, for something scarce, like money. Copies of a recording are non-scarce. Performances are scarce.)

@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir

Here's a quick history of copyright law:

The Statute of Anne (1710) was the first government-regulated act in the western world and it boiled down to a pact with the printing guilds trading monopoly for censorship.

The U.S. constitution (1787) tried to salvage the idea by granting congress the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". ("useful Arts" meaning maps ant the like)

That's why the Copyright Act of 1790 only protects "maps, charts, and books" but not things like music or newspapers.

Also, it was intentionally designed to allow American to ignore foreign copyrights and that was key to the U.S. becoming the cultural juggernaut that it is today.

(On a side-note, Hollywood is in California because it was beyond the reach of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers.)

From what I remember, the modern scope of copyright involved a chain of legal goalpost-moving where they first managed to argue that a book of sheet music was a book and thus managed to get rid of the "musical compositions aren't protected" and then managed to argue that, because a piece of sheet music is protected, a recording of that sheet music should also be protected.

Examples of things still not copyrightable include clothing designs, jokes, and recipes.

@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir

I remember reading that 90%+ of revenue is made within something like the first 10 years and the rest peters off at a rate which makes it not worth the cultural hit to protect.

Beyond that, bear in mind that copyright was never intended to protect fiction or music or the like.

@sir I used to act that way.

These days, I'm so massively behind on the DRM-free games and used novels I've collected that it'd feel wrong to shun what I paid (almost nothing) for to pirate something instead.

(It also lets me feel satisfaction in knowing that companies can't whine about piracy being why they didn't get my money, because I neither pirated nor paid for whatever it is they're unwilling to offer on my terms.)

@elfio @normandc @brandon @DonMcCollough@fosstodon.org I doubt I would either... but who can say.

I do have a hobby built around collecting books and games, so who knows what I might do if I got used to a larger income.

@obi For whatever reason, I find that switching a UI from dark-on-light to light-on-dark makes it more of a strain to recognize letter shapes with the same font at the same size.

(Except for the terminal, where UI configurations are so built around the assumption of the intuitive meanings of and contrast relationships between various colors that, aside from cranking up the brightness on the blue to improve the readability, I can't find any way to improve it beyond trying different fonts.)

@obi It allows you to merge the entire public contents of another instance's local timeline (specifically, whichever toots they expose through their whole-instance RSS feed) into either Home or a custom list of your choosing.

As for how you use it, hit the gear icon, choose "Follows and subscriptions" from the sidebar, choose the "Domain subscribes" sub-entry that appears in the sidebar, hit the Add button, and it'll ask for you a domain and a list to merge it into.

I just ran across an interesting and highly detailed blog post from 2014 about the Intel x87 fsin instruction.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/intel-underestimates-error-bounds-by-1-3-quintillion/

No big surprise that it's from Bruce Dawson's blog. I really need to do an archive trawl of it some day.

@yohanandiamond I found a long Unix & Linux Stack Exchange answer which explains what a mess things are with echo and extensions to printf and why it's generally a good idea to stick to the POSIX-specifed subset of printf:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/65819/28019

@normandc @brandon @DonMcCollough@fosstodon.org @elfio

Around the same price as a brand-new keyboard with model F switches.

(CA$400 for the giant retro one, US$370 for the new ultra-compact one. Can't remember if the eBay price I'm remembering is before or after shipping.)

Economies of scale aside, the Model M switches *were* specifically designed to be cost-reduced versions of the Model F switches.

(And the Model F switches were designed to approximate the feel of IBM Selectric typewriters.)

@yohanandiamond

AFAICT, %q is specific to the CLI printf, so things like dash and BusyBox probably error out because their printf(1) just hands off to glibc's printf(3).

It wouldn't surprise me if the same implementation decision is also at play in all the non-GNU, non-Zsh stuff on the BSDs, macOS, and Solaris.

(After all, it *is* kind of nonsensical and counter-intuitive to have two separate implementations of printf formatting in the same userland rather than just putting %q into glibc.)

@yohanandiamond

1. %q is GNU- and zsh-specific

It's in GNU /usr/bin/printf and bash/zsh builtins, but busybox printf and dash's builtin error out and it's not in the FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, macOS, or Solaris printf manpages.

2. printf(1) isn't just "available in most systems", POSIX requires it:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/printf.html

3. printf actually is a builtin under busybox, dash, bash, and zsh… but only zsh makes `which` a builtin:

% which printf
printf: shell built-in command

@matt I use Audacious (currently with the GTK+ 2.x interface because the Qt5 interface hasn't re-implemented global hotkeys and I don't feel like binding a dozen different things through xbindkeys and audtool) because it's the right balance of a UI that I can customize to be minimal and an unbeatable set of bundled format-support plugins.

QMMP is the runner-up I'd choose and it's essentially Audacious's Qt-based competitor from before Audacious supported Qt as a frontend option.