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Welcome to Computer Fairies, where the ✨​sparkles✨​ are lively fairy dust, not lifeless AI slop.

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Don't blindly believe everything you read online, tempting as that is. Do your homework first. This video series will help you do it well: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8d

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Remember to pop your filter bubble every so often. If you think you're not in one, you're trapped in one and in for a rude awakening.

Thanks to Infinite Mac, I found out the reason defn has that bug is because in even older m4 versions, such as those in NeXTStep & OpenStep, the changequote macro sets the quote strings to only the first byte of its argument strings, not up to 5 bytes each, and its manpages imply this.

And it went either undiscovered or unremarked because what kind of masochistic idiot would want multi-character quote strings, i.e. more typing, in m4 anyway?

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realising also that as a professional and recreational computer toucher another one of my issues against gen/agentic AI is that it's a tool to make people touch the computer _less_. why would you want that? either touch the computer or don't, stop getting something else to do it for you and saying it's the best thing in the world

so how long til torvalds posts his claude prompt in a fit of rage and we find out his big brain move was the text “do not hallucinate. do not write code with race conditions. you fucking idiot.”

OTD in 1977, Anita Bryant was hit in the face with a pie on live TV by gay rights legend Thomas Lawrence Higgins.

Happy Pie A Homophobe In The Face Day to all who celebrate! 🥳💁🏻‍♀️🥧

🐭the year is 2035. nobody understands how computers work anymore because they're all vibe coded. nobody except the freakiest trans women the world has ever known. they speak in strange, cryptic ways that chatgpt can't process without crashing. they will not help you now

When you have adequate English skills and top tier comeback skills

In researching my next issue, I've been reviewing several articles about a CEO from the late 80s/early 90s who happens to be a trans woman. What's interesting is that none of the articles mentioned she's trans. Some mentioned that she's a lesbian, but none of the writers thought her being trans was notable. And there were several articles written about her before she transitioned, so it wasn't some big secret.

Could you imagine how she'd be covered now? On second thought, maybe don't.

"Jack, we've heard about Apple's new 'folding' smartphone, which is expected to sell for around $2,000. How will Atari compete in that space?"

"Our folding phone will be more powerful, easier to use, less expensive, and available through mass-market retailers. And you can be damn sure any money we make from our phones won't be used to finance Nazis."

#retrocomputing #satire

Delphi has never changed.

If you took a Delphi developer who only knows modern Delphi, and sat them down in front of Borland Delphi for Windows running on Windows 3.1, they would be able to make hello world in about 10 seconds.

The user experience has remained fundamentally unchanged for over 30 years.

They designed a thing that worked, and it has stood the test of time.

Meanwhile, your android phone moves some button to a different place every few months, and adds three new gestures, one of which you won't discover until a year or so later.

I tortured myself with enough m4 to unlock a legacy bug:

The defn macro is supposed to give a user-defined macro's definition enclosed in the current quote strings. It actually gives that enclosed in only the first byte of each quote string instead, thus not properly quoted. This is never a problem unless you changequote to multi-character strings. Guess what I do.

The workaround is using ifdef instead.

Tested in Heirloom Project & Dell UNIX System V.4 Issue 2.2.

LB: oldbytes.space/@flexion/117392

Those SGI workstations are on wheeled dollies. Let me assure you, as an owner of an Octane just like that green one in the photo, SGI workstations are so heavy that they practically NEED to be on dollies!

musing on AI and metaphors 

@nina_kali_nina This is pretty much the exact thought process that inspired my short story that did the rounds a year ago blog.foxtrotluna.social/theyre

I made it about "blue food coloring", and it was interesting how many people didn't realise it was about AI (and all manufactured consent stuff, really), and instead thought it was about being vegan, or gluten intolerant or something.

Discord (-) 

Discord is such high quality software that:

If you join a voice chat and watch another user's stream in a Web browser barely 100 days old, then not only does the other user's video fail to load for you, but:

THE VIDEO SUDDENLY CUTS OUT FOR LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE WATCHING THE OTHER USER'S STREAM AS WELL!

Oh, the quality gets better!

The instant you give up trying to watch the other user's stream, literally that very instant, EVERYONE ELSE CAN SEE THE OTHER USER'S VIDEO AGAIN!

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Computer Fairies

Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!