@tedu well here's my mini blog post about strings in Go:

If you're going to iterate over a string, you need to think carefully about using for idx, rune := range str vs manually iterating for i := 0; i < len(str); i++, because oh boy can the latter bite you hard if you're a C programmer who forgets about UTF8 all the time.

@cross @briankrebs yOu MuSt bE uSiNG cHaTgPT 3.5

(sorry, that's just the stock response on The Orange Site whenever somebody says some LLM isn't impressive)

@robpike @twylo Featuring the world's most beautiful mouse which is, at least for my personal physiology, also kind of rough on the hands and forearm after much use.

Ron Minnich disagrees and apparently uses his replica version pretty frequently.

(also I found and bought one of the keyboards too against the day I locate a 5620, and boy those keys feel like they're going to do murder on my fingers)

@larsbrinkhoff @alderson Confession time: I'd never really looked into the Latin version of that phrase, so I assumed "the die is cast" meant "the mold (die) has been made and the shape of the final result is now set". Which also works in some ways, since civil war was unavoidable after the crossing, but it loses the element of chance Caesar surely intended (he wasn't certain of victory)

@amszmidt Make sure to practice good deck maintenance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbazGVrbN-g

@larsbrinkhoff if he had chosen to trudge across the Apennines, the phrase would be "crossing the Arno" instead. Same result, though.

@ireneista Have you looked into stumpwm? No titlebars on the window frames. If you turn on the mode-line, you get a small bar across the top with a list of window names (current window highlighted). You can also hit C-t w to get a list of window titles.

@tedu Oh man thank god we can all finally skip that terrible "getting to know you" phase of the relationship and get straight to wordless Netflix binges.

@ohno @DamonHD @cks I've got an Epson v550 which is explicitly a flatbed photo scanner, with a special light in the lid to shine through the negative. I don't know that you'll get very good results with a normal flatbed scanner.

@tedu and "enshittified" is being enshittified to mean "anything becoming kinda bad"

(i agree about torment nexus though)

These were just some of the big boys, of course most of the smaller booths were the same way.

yes, I would say "zero trust" is often appropriate when dealing with AI

@cross @kstatz12 That was a pretty good Futurama episode though

@DamonHD @cks @ohno Yeah that's exactly how I do negatives. Apparently these aftermarket ones are an improvement over the stock carriers: http://betterscanning.com/

@cks @ohno I scanned a big pile of prints prints using a document scanner and the scanimage command on Linux. Batch mode means I could just keep feeding them in. They came out... ok.

I'm afraid my only experience with scanning negatives is on an Epson flatbed scanner, which does great but it's a very slow process since you only get 5 exposures at a time. On the plus side it handles 120 film fine too, and I think it can do mounted slides as well.

@jbcrawford @jordan at the end of the day it was like if the people who used to brag about "hate-watching" Fox News also wrote up a daily report on what they saw. I think even the author of n-gate (who always stood out as a particularly big prick on 9fans, which is quite an accomplishment) can't keep up that sort of angry effort indefinitely.

Anyway my current technique is to favorite the truly exquisitely bad posts so I can go back and savor them occasionally.

@jbcrawford speaking of antennas, I assume you've driven past "ICE Station Otto", around 35°04'24.1"N 106°00'31.9"W north of Moriarty?

@filippo THIS WILL BE REPORTED!

@larsbrinkhoff @trevorflowers Those are great, I just wish I could download the models and print them myself!

@amszmidt @mhoye @thermous They don't want to look up the docstring, they want the docstring to be right there in the backtrace from the beginning. Now, I haven't done enough emacs lisp to know about that, but SLIME's traces could certainly do with some friendlying up

@joeyh @hannah dunno about you but I'm wearing the ring right now...

@oclsc @cks Lefties will scroll with the pinky. Or get the mirrored version I guess, if we want to kowtow to such sinister folk.

@oclsc @cks So you're saying it could probably even survive Fedex

(hey why did all the 5620s end up in Canada?)

@cks @oclsc Looking at the Depraz, I think the best place for a scroll wheel is a horizontal one at the bottom of the left flat side, so you could just reach down your thumb and scroll. I envision a large diameter knurled stainless wheel. Low scroll resistance.

@oclsc @cks I've often thought it would be nice to have a completely separate scroll wheel, maybe something which could sit between the halves of my split keyboard. I remember seeing something ~15? years ago where a guy set up a giant standalone scroll wheel using a big (like 2 inches) metal wheel that I think had been the spindle on some sort of disk drive, that always seemed cool.

@oclsc @cks My replicas are so light that lead foil wouldn't do the job, even if it were still available. Instead, I bought some big donut-shaped fishing weights and hot-glued them in the same spot.

@oclsc @cks Note also that I later built a ground-up optical replica of the Depraz: https://jfloren.net/b/2022/3/2/0

The PCB layout, firmware, and 3d model are available at https://github.com/floren/bellwether if you want to build your own.

(btw uh if either of you should ever decide to part with one of those 5620s in storage, they're right at the top of the list of hardware I really want to acquire so drop me a line...)

edit: will trade a Depraz replica for a working 5620 :)

@petersanchez I've always held that you can have beer or you can have dayquil but not at the same time. Either does a pretty decent job of making the symptoms feel better.

@petersanchez well if you go to the front page of that instance they declare right away that they'll defederate at the drop of a hat, so maybe you ended up on the wrong end of that?

@tmcfarlane @knapjack The thing is, text is enough if your client is good. Image/link previews are one thing people cite a lot, but that should really come down to your client pre-fetching links, and clients like The Lounge do just that. Emojis are almost trivial these days thanks to Unicode. A good IRCv3 server will give you scrollback, and with an IRCv3 client you can get niceties like message replies.

The funny thing about voice and channel flags is that Discord has exactly the same stuff, they just call them "roles" and "channel settings". I've been on servers where you have to prove yourself sane in a general channel before you get assigned a role which lets you chat in other channels. Then there's slow mode, etc.

@tmcfarlane @knapjack I spent a hell of a lot of time back in the 00s talking with mostly non-technical people on IRC. It was more or less the best option at the time for creating a place you could just join and have real-time chat; yeah I know there were various crappy webchat systems but IRC had staying power that let these channels persist for years.

We dealt with netsplits and spambots because they weren't a frequent problem. We fiddled with bouncers because we considered the communication sufficiently important that we didn't want to miss anything.

Now I'm in a dozen Discord "servers" and I don't really keep up with any of them because they're all the size of my old single IRC channel, yet they're all split out into a dozen channels including that one on every server where the furries post their porn.

IRC was good. I don't really use it anymore, because Discord and Slack have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but by god you fire up an IRCv3 server and a good client like The Lounge and it's pretty damn comparable to those other services. The difference is that if you want to be a grognard weirdo who chats using netcat and shell scripts, by god you can just do it without futzing with API keys or worrying that Discord is gonna ban you for using a non-standard client.

Anyway sorry for being a reply guy or whatever, but I want to push back on the claim that IRC users were somehow "gatekeeping". You know who's watching the gates these days? Discord, Inc.

@amszmidt @wyatt8740 Every time Wayland comes up, there's always somebody stumbling in to defend its shortcomings with "at least there's no screen tearing!!!!"

If my screen is tearing I'm not noticing, but then again I mostly leave my windows in the same place and I look at text all day.

At least I can take screenshots (please don't come at me to point out how on nearly 73% of Wayland WMs it is now possible to take a screenshot)

@gwozniak @cross In high school I did a lot of driving in an old Mack water tanker... 12 speed, and once it was moving, all shifting was done by rev-match. We had the PTO water pump rigged to a cannon so I could drive along spraying water into the cattle pens to keep the dust down.

@tedu that rushing sound you hear in the distance is 10,000 Mastodon users taking a very deep breath to list off all the -ists you're being in saying this

@tedu there's another person standing near the back helicopter, ted.

@larsbrinkhoff at least according to "Dealers of Lightning", it wasn't that DEC wouldn't sell them a computer, it's that Xerox management had just bought SDC and didn't want their new computer research department to buy a computer from a competitor.

Your message can be read that way, of course, but it could also be read as "DEC refused to sell them a PDP-10", and I'm curious as to which is correct :)