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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.

i miss making music for video games

is anyone making a cool video game that needs music

RE: tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605

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.

Oh, how could I forget the most important top software picks for 2027?

* Microsoft Windows 7
* Microsoft Windows 98SE
* Microsoft DOS 6.22
* IBM PC-DOS 7.0
* FreeDOS 1.4

:V

In all seriousness, FreeDOS 1.2 or 1.3 is preinstalled on some HP PCs, but somewhere between likely and certainly without a compatible TCP/IP packet driver.

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With the rising cost of PC hardware, and modern PC software's inability to cope with fewer hardware resources, the top software picks of 2027 are shaping up to be:

* WordPerfect and WordStar
* Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro
* dBase III
* Harvard Graphics
* CorelDraw
* Paint Shop Pro
* Ability Office and Lotus SmartSuite
* RetroZilla
* Oregon Trail
* Doom
* Sim City
* SkiFree

:V

*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.

start your own website, even if it's barebones. support your favorite artists on DRM-free platforms like bandcamp or itchio. grab an install of winamp, built a music collection. raid a friend's soulseek & learn to safely torrent. put media foundational to you on a USB drive and forever hold it close

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it may be years before it happens, but you've had to jump ship many times before, and you've still got a long life ahead of ya. there will always be a new startup that springs from the ashes of a dead service, but it's no guarantee that it'll contain the featureset or content you fell in love with

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if you're following me, or we're mutuals, we're probably around the same age bracket, which means i can confidently tell you:

you are going to outlive many of the services you use. it's never too late to start building that offline media library, or find a tool that can be ran outside of a browser!

"A Repose at Tintagel Castle" 🏰
Art by Elisabeth Alba
4x6 inches, ink, watercolor, and acryla gouache

With new gaming hardware getting more expensive by the day, it's finally time to start making games again for the hardware everyone already owns. That's right, the sun rises once more for the Nintendo DS

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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!