Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I tidied up my QBasic implementation of the MD5 algorithm.
https://codeberg.org/qalle/qbasic-md5/src/branch/main/MD5.BAS

#QBasic

OH MY GOD FINALLY IT GOT ONE RIGHT AND BOY HOWDY IS IT A BANGER

@arielmt how far the computer industry has fallen such that "it has baseline functionality" is now the mantle of scrappy hackers cloning a third-way OS from the early 2000s

Every time I check out the headlines

IBM ThinkBoy

i miss making music for video games

is anyone making a cool video game that needs music

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072

Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because

and •only because•

they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.

Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that are fully breaking that contract. We should reciprocate.

1/2

In Yesterday's IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web.

While they packaged it as a lot of "AI" talk what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated response means is that they want to establish a new abstraction layer on the web. Where Zuckerberg with his Metaverse failed Google is starting the next attack: Your website, your work no longer matters.

Well it matters as (unpaid) raw material for their synthetic text extruders but not as cultural artifact you can share with others.

This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google's abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It's about monopolizing access to information.

If you care about the web, about people's ability to participate in it as more than mere passive consumers, this needs to be taken seriously. De-Googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don't use their browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment.

✨ python string length

🖥️ Ah, a classic question: How long is a piece of string? Unlike the cheeky philosophical retort however, this question has an answer in Python ⸻ and it's shockingly simple. 😎 The most common way to get the length of a string in the Python programming language is with the len() function. If you're feeling a little extra, though, here's a for loop that does the same thing:

ℹ️ The global average temperature has raised by 0.0003°C.

*gently grabs the cheeks of all programmers to stare deeply into their eyes*

All I want is a dry tech manual. A boring, well indexed manual that defines every function. Not a chatbot. Not a training. Not a million "articles" that I have to search through. Not a "community forum".

My rice cooker came with one. I want one for every piece of software I have to interact with.

Go get yourself a technical writer if necessary.

I. Want. An. Instructional. Manual.