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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.

OK #Firefox users, this is a special request. I'm looking for someone with a high-end Raptor Lake machine that is experiencing instability in Firefox (or anything else for the matter). The best candidate is a CPU from the 13900* SKUs. K or not doesn't matter as long as it's one with the 8P+16E cores.

We have a potential workaround for one of the most common bugs of this CPU, but we need a broken machine to test it.

"the sky above the port was the color of Netscape's default bgcolor"

“Confucius Gets Rekt By A Child,” a blatantly apocryphal anecdote but I do love glimpses into ancient childhood:

Once, they say, while Confucius was traveling with his disciples, they came across some children building a big sand castle right in the middle of the road. The children all scattered when they saw the oncoming carriage, except for one: Xiang Tuo, the smartest little boy in the world.

The driver hurriedly stopped the carriage and demanded to know why this little boy would not get out of the way. Xiang Tuo answered: “You approach my moats! Now tell me, do carriages go around castles, or are castles supposed to get out of the way of carriages?”

After getting a good look at the “castle,” Confucius chuckled. “Oh, what a clever child! I see you are wiser than most, so how about a little wager, some honest fun between young and old. I pose a riddle, you pose a riddle, the winner becomes the teacher and the loser becomes the disciple.”

“It’s a deal!”

Confucius asked: “How many stars are in the sky, how many grains grow upon the earth, how many hairs are in your eyebrows?”

Xiang Tuo answered “One skyful of stars, one cropsful of grains, one faceful of hairs. Now, sir, riddle me this: what water has no fish? What fire has no smoke? What tree has no leaf, and what flower has no stem?”

Confucius answered: “Every river, lake and sea has fish. All firewood gives off smoke when it burns. Whoever has seen a tree with no leaves, or a flower with no stem?”

Beaming, Xiang Tuo explained: “There’s no fish in a well. There’s no smoke coming off a firefly. Dead trees don’t have leaves! And snowflakes (‘snow flowers’) don’t have stems.”

Confucius conceded that the child was now his teacher, but Xiang Tuo asked if he could wash his hands off first before all this teaching stuff.

Translation mine, based on the version found in a book about the Three Character Classic by Hu Yuanyuan. (There are many variations of the story.) Art by Wang Lumin

#classicalchinese #translation #philosophy

AI, movie poster parody idea 

Part Capitalist
Part LLM
All Slop

ROBOSLOP

i do think it's funny that any company that wants a huge influx of extremely good engineers could just say "we are not doing ai" on the careers site

TIL, the SD card specification allows cards to report they support a maximum current consumption of… 65 amps

The neat thing about Sony's FD-series Mavica cameras is they save photos to actual IBM/DOS/Windows formatted MF2HD floppy disks, and the cheap USB floppy drives commonly available today have no trouble reading them.

They're JPEGs with some quality sacrificed to save a dozen or so per disk, but even way back in the Y2K panic days, they were easier to get pictures out of than USB or parallel port digital cameras needing special drivers and software for their cables.

I tried putting the SSD in a 2.5-inch to 3.5 inch laptop-to-desktop drive adapter, but there was simply not enough space between the drive cage and PSU for that and the IDE-to-SATA adapter as well. Not even if they were forced in enough to cause damage.

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Most of the time I know my right from my left. The first inside picture description was not one of those times.

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The insides, although pretty much entirely proprietary, is surprisingly accessible. The only things needing a screwdriver to remove are the expansion cards.

The most annoying proprietary problem is the CD/DVD cable: I'm pretty sure it has the right number of pins for an IDE cable, but both ends are smaller and the pins thinner and more closely spaced than standard IDE connectors.

Also, the DVD-ROM drive is the only thing with a date code I could find: It was made in 2000.

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I'm amazed that the fix for the port multimedia/gstreamer1-plugins (and friends) failing to build for upgrade on :

ld: error: undefined symbol: gst_udmabuf_allocator_get_type

...is still to uninstall it first, then install it anew:

make -C /usr/ports/multimedia/gstreamer1-plugins deinstall clean build install clean && pkg set -yA 1 gstreamer1-plugins

Growlerton is sadly underrated as a product solutions architect.

Do y'all remember that era of the internet when furries were widely seen as a super weird and cringe community? During that time I remember many furries making apologetic videos trying to make the community seem more "normal" by claiming that the majority of furries are straight and don't consider the fandom sexual *at all* and like.. come on. That was dumb and also seriously had the vibes of throwing all the "weird furries" under the bus to gain acceptance. The furry community broadly speaking is very queer, very neurodivergent and very kinky and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm glad we're no longer pretending otherwise to such a degree.

Happy 40th birthday, ZMODEM! On May 20, 1986 the ZMODEM protocol specification was posted on Usenet by Chuck Forsberg of Omen Technology.

tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.sources.u

If you used a BBS before the Internet you might get nostalgic. Otherwise you probably have no idea what this is about (and that’s fine).

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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!