In physics, curved spacetime is the mathematical model in which, with Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity naturally arises, as opposed to being described as a fundamental force in Newton's static Euclidean reference frame. Objects move along geodesics—curved paths determined by the local geometry of spacetime—rather than being influenced directly by distant bodies.

@davidgerard @nina_kali_nina minute of silence for the divas who formatted their entire hard drives and switched the OS of their actual workstations on a whim :ablobcatcry:

I'm more upset than I've been in a while.

Windows 11 sets the default documents folder to onedrive\documents. Anything that gets saved there gets backed up to one drive. This includes various save games, all my Reaper stuff, and various other odds and ends that I like to, you know, save.

To save disc space, OneDrive also defaults to files being online-only. They're not stored on your device, they're just listed there. So despite what they call it, this is in fact not a backup at all, because it doesn't create an extra copy. It is actually just transferring your most precious, irreplacible, personal files to Microsoft in the background, and trusting that nothing will happen. You can see where this is going, but just to underline the point with a bleeding fucking dagger, I did not ask for any of this, I just clicked save like I have done for the last twenty or so years of my life using Windows.

Since I don't care about and have never intentionally used onedrive, I signed out of it. Flash forward six months, the files that I thought were on my computer (because I can go see them there in the folder) are in fact gone from my hard drive, and also Onedrive nuked them from orbit.

Years of my life, gone without a trace. Thanks so much, Microsoft. Whoever came up with all those ideas probably got massive performance bonuses, because we're in the worst timeline.

Goodnight.

i don’t know what DNS is (do NOT explain it to me) but the way people talk about it i imagine it as a little humanoid creature thing named dennis whose job it is to absorb blame for everything

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.”

@mavica_again Forced dark mode is also great if you hate people who need to use computers outside.

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

@monorail Yes, and unironically yes, both.

I would expect a click on this image to reveal a curated gallery of buttons and a one-glace museum of how they're used on websites both ancient and modern.

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.

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