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Ariel Millennium Thornton

Welcome to Computer Fairies, where the ✨​sparkles✨​ are lively fairy dust, not lifeless AI slop.

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

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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Ariel Millennium Thornton

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.

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Ariel Millennium Thornton boosted
Brett Sheffield (he/him)

It's very sad to see #rsync getting polluted with LLM slop now.

Even more sad, given who is doing it.

People are talking angrily about "the maintainer" and suggesting "this guy" [should have his commit bit revoked] etc. apparently not realising that "this guy" is Tridge, both the original author of rsync and creator of samba. His PhD thesis "Efficient Sorting & Synchronization Algorithms" which describes the original rsync algorithm. Still worth a read, even now.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_T

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Ariel Millennium Thornton boosted
hackaday

When is an Apple Laptop Not a Macbook? When it’s an Apple II

hackaday.com/2026/05/29/when-i

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0x10f/kalle/qalle

I tidied up my QBasic implementation of the MD5 algorithm.
codeberg.org/qalle/qbasic-md5/

#QBasic

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

Windows once had the most perfectly skeuomorphic database/PIM application: Cardfile.

Stacks of index cards in a window as your own personal free-form database.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardfile

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The Iconolog

CARDF03A.ICO - Data, File

...Card files, Filing Cabinets, Roladex

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jail bait dog girl

if a string of plain english words in a log output is 'malware' we have so thoroly fucked up computers, its pretty amazing actually. from 'never trust user input' to 'eval the entire internet as root all the time' in a decade is one thing i honestly did not expect to happen

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mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)

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

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

It also kernel panics during boot on occasion, dropping me into an almost Sun-like black text on white background screen and prompt. I don't understand any of it, but it gives me so much data I feel like I could, and do something about it.

It also hangs on occasion during shutdown, where it's supposed to send the ACPI power-off command.

It isn't just good, it's beta!

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mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)

@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

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

There's no Firefox for it, not even for download, but its preinstalled Web browser (WebPositive) is refreshingly not Chrome-based. Its User-Agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Haiku R1) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) WebPositive/1.3 Version/14.1.2 Safari/605.1.15

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Ariel Millennium Thornton boosted
mcc

Every time I check out the headlines

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

Oh, I forgot to say: The netbook is an eMachines eM250 with its stock 1 GB RAM, Seagate 256 GB 5400 RPM HDD, & Windows COA sticker so faded from less than ordinary wear that only the pre-slop Microsoft logo is intact.

Haiku is beta, but it installed successfully, with only a partitioning barb keeping it from being a completely smooth experience. It recognized the graphics chips, used its native resolution, & didn't ask or try to use any other. It also connected on wifi like a desktop OS should.

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Ariel Millennium Thornton boosted
Nanoraptor

IBM ThinkBoy

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maple "mavica" syrup [6502]

i miss making music for video games

is anyone making a cool video game that needs music

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Paul Cantrell

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

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tante

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.

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Ariel Millennium Thornton boosted
Lynnesbian :bune_ylw:

✨ 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.

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

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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Ariel Millennium Thornton

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

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Corvid Crone

*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.

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