FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Program Change shift at the MIDI factory

I hope this email finds you before you lug all eleven boxes of Halloween decorations and costumes up from your basement.

I wonder how often "normal people" install an OS from floppies (real or emulated or virtual)

because it seems to happen to me on about a weekly basis

It's been 30 years but I'm still mad at the punk who snuck SMARTDRV.EXE into the install process but fucked it up so that it's BEFORE the @ ECHO OFF line.

interestingly Netscape Communicator 4.08 doesn't have an uninstaller: it has a deinstaller.

a part of having a kobold version of myself is that kobold nora is a little guy i have to take care of by taking care of myself and i must gently myself

mon dieu, c'est une pipe

Ladies, if you were waiting, this is your sign to seduce her.

if undefined behaviour is so great, how come there's no UB— *taps earpiece* hm? forty? goodness gracious.

Eric couldn't understand why his game "Colonoscopy 2024" wasn't getting the traction he was sure it deserved.

can anyone with young school age children tell me what is working for y'all w.r.t. covid mitigation? bonus points if your household also has an immunocompromised person in it.

negative 1000 points for "homeschool them" - my child *needs* school that is not homeschool, and i actually didn't even look up to see if homeschool is possible in NL because i have no intention of even considering it a viable option.

please RB!

​ Hey, fediverse friends!

I want to remove the shroud of secrecy from a project I've been hacking on off-and-on for quite a while now.

It's a fediverse app for posting about things - in the first iteration, video games, but eventually lots more stuff.

Obviously you can already post about video games on mastodon or whatever, but the point is that each game can be a first-class object that you can reference and share across the fediverse, like with Bookwyrm or NeoDB.

I also wanted to experiment with different ways of federating posts, managing visibility/privacy, etc.

Current status:
All the big pieces are there and work, but lots of things are rough and/or clunky. It's definitely a 0.0.1 instead of a 1.0, but I set myself a deadline of sharing it this summer, otherwise I'll just trap myself in an endless cycle of quietly tweaking this software that nobody uses but me and never actually sharing it.

I've been using it for gameposting for a while now (almost 2000 posts already!) - it's absolutely not ready for General Consumption, but if you're willing to put up with some code and some jank, it might be worth a look for you.

https://codeberg.org/gush/gush

https://gush.social/

#gush

https://netizen.club/~wildweasel/updates/2024-08-26.html - This time on Golfshrine: donations, hauntings, and assorted other things.

@twipped @zkat @dragonarchitect To bring this back to Kat's original question: Is web dev too complex and people created giant web apps to avoid the pain of doing it right? Most likely, yes.

Could the industry have prevented this by better tooling/documentation? Not sure. MDN is as good as it gets. Modern browsers are angels compared to the old monsters.

I think what was happening is growth along two axis:
1) browsers got way more complex
2) the industry needed A LOT of code written fast

🤷‍♂️

@twipped @zkat @dragonarchitect You are probably very much correct. Our industry is so messed up.

I'm old and back when I started at an agency in 1999, we had a large team of kick-ass information architects and graphic designers that would have murdered any engineer that didn't put user experience first.

Computers were slow, so it was of paramount importance to make the UX work perfectly. As the tech got faster, our craft got sloppier.

@tsturm what it achieves is less spent on development time and faster “growth”. The fact that the customer base has a sub-par user experience is irrelevant as long as the company value climbs fast enough for the investors to make their exit in time.

Startup culture doesn’t value good products, just sellable products.

@zkat @dragonarchitect

and thinking about it more, yeah, the noise injected into that signal by the "evangelism" of the JS industrial complex is making it actually harder for anyone to learn to do these things closer to the platform. It's actively sabotaging efforts to educate/learn.

Maybe the answer to everything here isn't really "the web sucks at DX", because it genuinely, truly, honestly has been making enormous strides in that aspect, but "we need better education/documentation on how to develop things end-to-end"

MDN actually does a really good job of this! But maybe we need more focused guides that are less technology-centered and more task/application-shape-oriented.