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One of my litmus tests for a software product these days is that, if it has search, I should be able to search for a nonsense phrase and get an answer that says “no results”. Every website and app is so damn thirsty for clicks now that it will just show an infinite scroll of useless garbage no matter what I’m looking for, which means I can’t get “no results” and then refine my search quickly, I have to page through the “results” to see if they’re plausibly related to my query. Please stop it.

@transfaeries Tusky is very much alive and well. Version 22.0 came out just last month.

I read that #Meta has launched #Threads and many don't understand why it's not fully usable via the web but only through a dedicated mobile app. Meta isn't interested in letting us talk but rather in collecting as much data as possible. Browsers have become (more) skilled at protecting us, while apps can have almost complete access to our mobile devices, gathering data that an average person couldn't even imagine. And our mobile devices have become the safe (or should I say, the exposed pantry?) of our lives. #privacy #datacollection #SocialNetworks

I’m loving the Fediverse 🥰

You’re all beautiful and appreciated

officially . please get in touch with me if you know of any remote positions for an all-around programmer, developer, interface designer with 10 years experience. i can do pretty much anything with computers and i need to survive. :boost_ok:

Facebook 

Do not trust them personally: Hypothetically, imagine you're a Mastodon instance operator and you're contacted by some Facebook employee about a relationship between your instance and some Facebook project. Imagine this employee is nice, really Gets It, seems sincere. This employee doesn't actually hold any power! If you trust this person you'll find a couple years later the person you were talking to has either been suddenly replaced or that they cannot follow through on their promises.

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Facebook 

I would like to strongly offer this advice:

- Do not trust Facebook, ever -

Do not trust them as a market participant: If you look at their company history, every time Facebook is afraid their MAU dominance will be challenged by some new platform, they just buy it. Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus.

Do not trust them as a platform: What Instagram users can tell you is once they have you locked in, the features you liked about your now-bought platform will disappear in favor of monetization

@nixCraft The nl utility skips empty lines & restarts line numbers at the end of logical pages. If the file happens to have a "\:" line in it, nl will confuse its users. A better option for most terminals:

less -N /etc/resolv.conf

There's also the more/less replacement "most", which shows the cursor's line number in the status bar.

Facebook's upcoming invasion of the fediverse is not welcome at ComputerFairi.es. I have just preemptively suspended Threads.net.

In better news, I found a reasonably portable way for a shellscript to read a single (one-byte) character without waiting for the Enter key:

readkey() {
stty -icanon -echo
dd bs=1 count=1 2>/dev/null
stty icanon echo
}
variable=$( readkey )

For the curious:
Framework: x11-toolkits/xforms
OS: FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p8
cc: clang version 13.0.0

All I want is something a tiny bit more flexible than Xdialog.

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There's nothing like finding a really lightweight, straightforward, and easy C GUI toolkit, and the example hello-world program straight up fails to compile because the linker says every single function is an undefined symbol.

Saying that ChatGPT "can't yet provide reliably correct answers to questions" is like saying your cat can't yet provide reliable services as a paralegal

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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!