That logo is fucking terrible. Cult minimalism produced a red sperm and a disconnected semicircle. It reads as nothing.

The ‘classic look’ in dark mode still puts 90% of the interface in light mode.

No other complaints.

Shatter.

Ooh, fair point. We don’t know that any of these options boot.

I cannot fathom having my shit together to such a degree that my bootloader has a theme.

Accidentally reinventing Yahoo Directory.

Troncets are such adorable minimalist devices. Like an abacus you don’t have to think about. The sort of thing that could have existed a thousand years ago, but wasn’t developed until after the comptometer.

Any reliance on remote compute is fragile, because you lack control of the model. Exact versions matter. Every thread that goes ‘how do I use the old [service name]?’ is someone learning this lesson, often too late.

Ehhh. Mixed bag. Integrating AI into every-damn-thing is half of why people act like a robot kicked their dog - but diffusion is the half that unambiguously does what it’s supposed to, and a popular FOSS tool is a decent place to offer an it-just-works installation for local models.

The images are generated on volunteer GPUs through AI Horde.

Nevermind, fuck this.

Oh hey, found an old comment:

I admire the concept behind Denuvo.

Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn’t really matter how they’re arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn’t matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.

The machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering… relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren’t warped by years of computer science, but it’s just a puzzle with a known answer, and there’s decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don’t even need to unravel the whole program. They’re only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.

So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that’s what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinkled throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The “attack surface” against pirates becomes enormous. They’ll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.

Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.

Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would’ve made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for these bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they’re told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that’s read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.

Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you’re gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it’ll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if it jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That’s why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.

Denuvo duplicates code at random, so executables bloat into a Gordian knot.

Chicken / egg.

If punctuation isn’t on your keyboard then it can’t be that important. All dashes are the same.

I don’t even appreciate that Markdown turns double-dash into one long dash. The distinction in print is a twee relic of uptight style guides, and the minute gradations do not exist in handwritten text. If you intend it as a pause-please, put spaces around it, or it looks dumb. Like that.

Anyone prescriptivist about “begging the question” cannot be taken seriously about anything.

The canonical meaning is a sloppy mistranslation, and what everyone sensible intends and infers is a plain reading of those words in that order.

There’s places where a comma can cause psychic damage.

A calque.

Yeah sometimes that neuron hasn’t fired in a while.

There’s an Ahoy video about tracker music, and when it played the first three notes of “Foregone Destruction,” that fucker released aaall the good chemicals.

Wackiki Wabbit. Set on Humuhumunukunukuapua’a’a’a Island.

It was fine, if it ran.

Windows XP wasn’t even secure and reliable, at the time. At this point it’s indistinguishable from keeping Windows 95 on a full tower from Gateway because nothing else supports your vintage scanner. You’re one step from the tech-priests waving incense as a ritual against crashing.

Wittgenstein essentially said there is only counter-evidence. You cannot support an explanation; you can only disprove competing explanations. This was famously expressed as a conversation about heliocentrism. His friend said, “To ancient people, it looked like the sun went around the Earth.” Wittgenstein replied, “What would it have looked like if it looked like the Earth went around the sun?”