With a whole bunch of folks leaving MS Word and similar as of late, seems like the right time to post this again, but I put together a little resource to help explain *why* it's so important to ditch Word and similar.
[edit: I'm aware of some readability issues on some systems, and am working to fix. See note below.]
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Dane's law: There is not a hobby in existence that has any kind of an upper limit on how much money you can spend in it.
Fountain pens? Sure, there's the Platinum Preppy and Pilot Varsity, but also Momtblanc and Visconti!
Amateur Radio? Sure there's your $30 Baofeng, but also your $20,000 kilowatt at-home HF shack!
Drones? Sure, there's your $20 supermarket drone, but also tens of thousands of dollars super high performance FPV racing drones
Computing? $35 raspi vs at-home supercomputing cluster, just for giggles!
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@paradoxmo I'm currently using a TWSBI Diamond 580. As for the technique, I was basically just making a rookie mistake:
It looks like I wasn't moving the pen enough. As I would keep writing, the shimmer would collect in the feed until it just straight-up clogged. I didn't realize I had to periodically roll the pen around even while I was actively using it. This should have been obvious by the fact that my writing kept getting more and more, well... shimmery before the ink stopped flowing.I'll try this approach in the future.
Rookie mistake, but in my defense, I didn't even know that shimmer inks were even a thing until late last year.
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@Kate McDonald It's a bit of a pain to work with because I only use it with a dip pen* and have to juggle that with a UV flashlight. That aside, it works really well. Completely invisible under normal lighting conditions and shows up really well under UV.
* Because I feel that cleaning it out of a regular pen would be a pain.
@Kate McDonald Here's a post about it I made in January.
Okay, I feel like a spy now. I have invisible ink! #FountainPens
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It looks like I wasn't moving the pen enough. As I would keep writing, the shimmer would collect in the feed until it just straight-up clogged. I didn't realize I had to periodically roll the pen around even while I was actively using it. This should have been obvious by the fact that my writing kept getting more and more, well... shimmery before the ink stopped flowing.
I'll try this approach in the future.
Rookie mistake, but in my defense, I didn't even know that shimmer inks were even a thing until late last year.
in a deleted article techcrunch confirmed threads would be moving from threads.net to threads.com
zero clue why it was deleted because threads.net already redirects to threads.com as of right now
sooooo yeah!!! new domain to block. check out fedipact.online/why if you're wondering why
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I have successfully built my first #Emacs package. I want to clean it up a bit before I consider releasing it though. Also, while I can build a simple (single file) package, buildig a multi-file one is still eluding me.
When I try to install it, I get the following (less than helpful) error message:Wrong type argument: stringp, nil
Is there a way I can get more detail on why this is failing?
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here’s a large project, still in one file:
Simple notes for Emacs with an efficient file-naming scheme - protesilaos/denoteGitHub
@🇺🇦 Myke Yes, it can be done that way as well.
That still doesn't negate the point that I want to know how to build a multi-file package.
Besides, sometimes I like to learn stuff just for the sake of learning it.
So Katy has a #Jinhao10 and today the clicker seems to be jamming. When pressed, it seems to resist extending or retracting the nib. I'm giving it a cleaning right now to make sure there was no debris or anything in there stopping it from working, but I don't know if that'll fix it.
Has anyone experienced this before? Is there a fix?
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Is the trap door opening/closing properly? It could be wedged somehow. You should be able to poke the nib unit through it manually with the top removed and see if it works as expected.
Also when it's apart you can press the rear of the nib unit up into the tail and press the button and see if it operates normally that way.
Then you at least know which end of the pen is misbehaving.
Katy likes these YouTube channels where they teach about canning and such. One of the people in one of these videos is wearing a shirt with what looks like an AR-15 that says "defense is not a crime".
What in the cinnamon toast fuck do you need an AR-15 to defend yourself from?
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Got my hair cut for the first time in probably a year because I have an interview tomorrow for a job I really want to get (and think I have a pretty good shot at).
It looks decent, but has revealed a good deal more grey than I'm accustomed to seeing.
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Is there any branch of the provincial or federal government that we haven't had to deal with today?
I suppose it's possible.
“Slopsquatting” in a nutshell:
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_…
: Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'Thomas Claburn (The Register)
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#Today I was asked for the first time if I'm a senior citizen. I mean, I have some grey in my beard, but I was masked so it wasn't visible.
I feel like I'm a senior citizen. Does that count?
TIL that Instacart now charges a "membership" to get higher priority on assignment of batches. This does not guarantee you anything, it just allows them to further exploit a workforce they're already working to the bone.
Do they not realize that many (if not most) of the people who are working this job are doing it because they don't really have any other options? And they expect them to pay for the privilege now?
Just when I thought they couldn't possibly get any more predatory, they pull this shit.
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One thing I really dislike, is the amount people think hosting data is hard.
People talk about needing dozens of cores or gigs of ram to host a database or a website. They get impressed by projects where someone runs a website from an Apple ][ or a pi0.
We, as free software advocates, need to remind people that the charger for a Macbook Pro is enough to run a website, not the Macbook Pro
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Reasons somebody may have misspelled a word: glitchy phone screen, non-native english speaker, they expected their spellchecker to fix it and it failed, dyslexia, standardised spelling is a fake invention of the printing press industry to sell more moveable type
Reasons somebody my have substituted a homophone (eg their and there): Their dictation software fucked up, their spell checker fucked up, they're a non-native english speaker, they were thinking verbally, standardised spelling is a fake invention of the printing press industry to sell more moveable type.
Reasons somebody may have put in the wrong word: Their spellchecker did a substitution and they didn’t notice, their dictation software fucked up, they speak a different English dialect in which that word was correct, they were editing the sentence and made a mistake.
Syntax errors very rarely indicate unclear thinking. They're just typos. It's the logic errors that fuck everything up. Anybody judging the value of an argument based on syntax is missing the more important picture: the printing press companies have lead us down an evil path, but its not to layt too eskayp
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Happens to me all the time, especially when I'm composing a post on a dinky phone screen with on-screen keys that are tiny pixels I must mash with my meaty sausage fingers.
I tend to compose non-linearly, maybe writing the conclusion last, then write the main points above it, and only then do the intro. That's often more than the max 500 chars, so then I go back to shorten sentences, change verb tenses, remove adjectives. If I'm not careful, that can result in weird syntax & spelling
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And then they extort you by saying: "Hey, but wouldn't you rather have an Orphan Crushing Machine that *didn't* accidentally leak the data of their parents in an incident, rather than one that did?"
And yes, the only answer to this is: Stop the madness and also stop collecting that data. But capitalism means you're right when you deliver shareholder value I guess.
Dear state and local governments: STOP using Google Drive as your only means to disseminate public information.
Private systems are not public, they are subject to arbitrary access controls with no public oversight or appeals process, and therefore they do NOT meet your responsibility to provide information via public means.
This means you, #Brattleboro and #Vermont. #VTpol
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Anxiety's been bad again lately. I am moderately worried about losing the apartment. Taking steps to try to keep that from happening, but sometimes just trying to engage with the problem brings on a panic attack.
I have medication to help with that now, but it makes it hard to think clearly. I will survive this one way or another, but my life is going to have to change. I don't handle change well.
This probably won't help me in my current job search, but is it worth learning COBOL? I've heard that there are still a bunch of critical systems out there that use it, and that it's hard to find COBOL devs these days.
Is this still the case? The only downside I can see is that I'd have to program in COBOL.
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Having worked adjacent to 4 different mainframes at this point in my career along with their "modernization" efforts. Reading COBOL, not terrible. Writing it, eh, probably not so bad but I've never done, only had to read and comprehend what it does. And there are non-MFs that provide implementation of COBOL so you can learn on your own time.
The devil is going to be understanding IBM systems "junk": CICS, DASD, DCLGEN, TSO, RACF etc
@billinkc
What he said. Mainframe basics are more important than COBOL, I'd say.
I work for a company that's doing "Mainframe Modernization" and as a result we have to understand the old crappy non-modern stuff in order to implement new stuff! (Currently my group isn't reimplementing anything based in Cobol. We do Db2 monitoring stuff.)
rocketsoftware.com
rocket.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/r…
(We have AI hype on the front page but really we're just programming. I guess some departments might be doing AI, but I think we're just scared we'll miss the bandwagon. So don't ignore us just for that.)
Rocket Software provides IT modernization and IT automation solutions that help businesses solve their most complex IT challenges, across infrastructure, data, and applications.Rocket Software
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@nosrednayduj OMG super small world. One of the projects I was on dealt with model 204/m204. We ended up building a real time synchronization between m204 and SQL Server via messaging.
It was going to be a very cool way to modernize the client's data storage while they incrementally switched the front ends.
Pity literal debt caught up to them 💥
Dear job posting,
If you expect me to install spyware so that you can micromanage me while I work, at least have the decency not to expect me to supply the hardware.
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Went to pick up a prescription and the guy ahead of me in line was chewing the pharmacist out about the automated system, which admittedly sucks but is certainly a decision made by corporate, not her.
He repeatedly threatened to take his business elsewhere. Were I in her position, the response I'd have wanted to give was "please do".
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Sooo... I have a flatpak version of LibreOffice, and for whatever reason (probably sandboxing) the spellchecker can't see the text of my document.
I may or may not have sent off a bunch of resumes that said that I "wrote technical documentaiton" in a previous job.
That's just super.
There's a job I really want a decent shot at. Thank God I caught it before submitting to that one.
Edit: I typo'd my typo. 🙃
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Back in the 1990s I worked at a very large government facility on an RFP for getting an ISP. The winning bidder had in the footer of every page "Bid for Interenet Service Provider." Nobody but me noticed.
Of course, the Interenet was so new in the 1990s that maybe they thought that's how it's spelled...
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I had a bit of a hard time getting into this one, but once it got going it was worth it. That said, I think I'm going to step back from the horror genre for a bit. I'll probably return to it when life settles a bit.
(comment on HEX)
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Cassandra is only carbon now
in reply to Cassandra is only carbon now • • •I even have my e-mail signature set to remind people to be careful before opening things in Word; after all, it can be really easy to accidentally betray trust by opening a draft.
(If "consider before printing this e-mail" is a thing, avoiding carbon-chugging LLMs has to be at *least* as important.)
Funambolo
in reply to Cassandra is only carbon now • • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Cassandra is only carbon now • •young man yells at the cloud likes this.
Jonathan Lamothe
Unknown parent • •*sigh*
This is more true than I care to admit.
Cassandra is only carbon now
in reply to Cassandra is only carbon now • • •Thanks to everyone who's pointed out that the page is very difficult to read on some systems; I have not had that happen on any of the laptops and/or phones that I have access to, so I wasn't able to notice that earlier, and I apologize for the accessibility issues that creates.
I'm not, unfortunately, a professional webdev, and have found it a little challenging to make a plain HTML page that works everywhere.
Someone in DMs very kindly suggested a fix, and I'll look at applying that ASAP.
Cassandra is only carbon now
in reply to Cassandra is only carbon now • • •I *think* it should be fixed? On my laptop and phone, it looks identical to how it used to, but it now doesn't fix the zoom level in CSS, such that hopefully it should work well in more browsers and on more devices.
Thanks again to everyone who let me know about the problem, and for the kind person who suggested a fix in DMs.
Christian Tietze
in reply to Cassandra is only carbon now • • •Nice, will share!
PS: The link to your name in the footer is broken.