The first of William Gibson's 'Sprawl' trilogy, Neuromancer is the classic cyberpunk novel.
More information on the [novel's official page][1].
[1]: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/neuromancer.asp
Welp, Nextcloud went sideways when I tried to upgrade it today. I am however happy to report that I have confirmed that my backup system works.
I'm probably gonna have to figure out how to do a manual upgrade again. I have to do this every few years, but not often enough that I can remember off the top of my head how. I just remember that it's a pain in the ass.
I keep getting ads for "wealth management" services. If whatever algorithm that's serving these up thinks this is a good fit, at least I can tell I've been doing a good job of screwing with the data brokers.
My partner and I seem to be passing the same flu back and forth. I'm presently reclining in a hammock chair (because I can't lay flat wthout coughing up a lung) under a weighted blanket with the humidifier going. I'm starting to perhaps feel human again.
The comedy of my Cyberhole toys using a Terminal, simulating a VT52 more or less, made in HTML & JS, running in a browser, on a "real" GUI, relying on high-speed graphics cards because I'm WAY too lazy to do my own double-buffering, hits me just about every day I play with it.
I keep being amazed by terminals that use fancy UTF characters, colours and whatnot to create graphic features when you could just as well render just any old shape in the same place.
Unless something actually needs to be able to run outside of a desktop environment (which, alright, is needed for a fair number of things), I don't really see the benefit.
I'm still waiting for a proper graphical code/equation editor where comments happen in the margins and can be threaded and contain figures, where I can zoom out to see methods and classes as little boxes with connectors, arranged in a way that makes the relations between them more obvious, and I can rearrange and refactor them by drag & drop.
@Mr. Teatime @muesli I do a surprising amount of computing over an SSH connection with no X11 or Wayland system on my end. If it can't be run through a CLI or TUI, I can't use it.
...technically I can do VNC, but it's a pain in the ass and requires way more bandwidth than it ought to.
@me No objection. I have to use the non-graphical ttys on my machines so often it's a bit embarrassing (RAM full, desktop locked up ...), so yes, I do appreciate a good shell. @fribbledom
Tools makers have been very successful at labeling working code and working tools as "technical debt". As you would expect from people who would be unemployed if not selling us on using new tools to write new code. Really slick scam they have going on there. With the willing participation of people who similarly benefit from calling working technology "technical debt". #technology
@me Only because tool makers make it a real thing. If I am not running Java 37 and Spring Boot 9 I can no longer get security and bug fixes. Instead I have to upgrade to new security flaws and new bugs. As well as introduce new bugs into my program because they changed APIs and renamed a bunch of things. It's a scam to keep people employed.
@Badtux the Snarky Penguin That is definitely a thing, and I'm not going to pretend the modern computing industry isn't a giant clusterfuck, but also, sometimes we just legitimately come up with better ways of doing things.
Things do get messy when money is involved, though.
@me The reality is that 95% of data entry jobs would work just as well with a 25x80 greenscreen terminal backed up by a COBOL application. A huge amount of the "improvements" since that was state of the art are self serving nonsense intended to keep programmers employed and tools providers emitting a constant stream of paid updates (or in the case of free tools, to keep the programmers of those tools employed writing a constant stream of updates).
@me 95% of new programmers would benefit from knowing how to do control-break processing. I clean up after so many youngsters doing ad hoc processing for data we have known how to process efficiently since 1968.
Honestly I much prefer Java to COBOL and the recent enhancements to add more modern language features to Java version 255 are much appreciated. However: Programmer convenience is not the purpose of software engineering. Solving business problems is.
@Badtux the Snarky Penguin I think that programmers could also benefit from learning assembly. That doesn't mean I'm going to use it as my day-to-day language. A good software engineer knows that everything is a trade-off, and it's about picking the tool that best solves the problem at hand.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that the industry is overrun with inexperienced devs who build a ton of slop (even before so-called AI hit the scene) because the companies they work for want to make line go up above all else. That's a capitalism problem more than an engineering problem though.
I know the fedi really hates it, but have you ever actually tried heroin? It's really good actually, and everyone who says otherwise is a hater who doesn't understand nuance. 🥴
Nationality isn't really important to them. Religion isn't really important to them. Culture? It isn't important to these kinds of wealthy and powerful people.
The only other people they can really "see" are those with enough wealth and power (and the will) to have an impact on their lives. Everyone else is essentially invisible, unimportant. Background music, an NPC.
Colorful hats of religion, ethnicity, nationality are like masquerade ball costumes. Useful, fun even, but not important.
There is a secular value in being able to navigate diversity, in having experience with and an understanding of a diversity of cultures. It's popular with academics and some business people because it's a stance that allows you to learn more about the world, which academics like and it can help you make more deals which the business people like. I'm not talking about secular inclusiveness.
I'm talking about the utter indifference of the ultra wealthy to anything but other ultra wealthy people.
This entry was edited (Saturday, October 10, 2026, 2:09 PM)
This is very true. I've seen it happen to people who marry into that wealth too.
It's the wealth disparity as much the total amount. I see it here in Mexico with the gringos who move here too...although it's aided by a healthy dose of white supremacy.
I think the paranoia that comes with ultra-wealth (people are trying to take advantage of you), and the awkwardness (shame?) of social conversations with people whose problems are completely different than yours, all contribute to it. But that doesn't excuse it. It just means that it's work to keeping it from happening.
What really gets to me is the banality of those circles. Gossip, garden parties, and finance.
Religion serves as justification for hate, punishment. Words have opposite meaning, science means nothing, all to support their evil visions of having it ALL. Regular people…. maybe they pick it up & mimic it to feel like they’re in w the soulless rich that are literally extracting us & everything else to death.
Welcome to Trans Tuesday! This is what it all comes down to, for trans people and the cis folks who actually care about us. Listen up, and show it to every cis person you know who does not get it.
If you do enjoy Harry Potter, know that a hateful old fascist loves that you lay down your morals for the sake of entertainment, she laughs about it over avocado toast and foot massages, at you, all day long, every single day.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, October 14, 2026, 7:46 AM)
@Gwendolyn honestly as a person who used to be a fan when i was young and thought about the content for a bit. Ursula K. Le Guin is 100% spot on in her assessment: "stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited"
There's just better content and her transphobia is proof she's ethically a broken person and i would no longer want to feed my mind from her well.
@missqarnstein @Gwendolyn it's literally not about how good or bad you think the books are, and conflating your opinion of them with how horrid their author is is not good, actually. read the previous essay for more on that
There was no book series I was looking forward to reading to my children more. As my parents did for me. They have not heard a word of it. It ends with me.
@Curioso @vramvoolenaar @🎃 Killy Witches 👻 I was recommended the Discworld series as a better alternative to Harry Potter. Having started to read it, I heartily second that endorsement (unless there's some issue there I'm unaware of).
EDIT: just saw the "even pirated" line. I want to stress I still won't look fondly on it even if I think it's less bad. I'm leaving the original comment for transparency and the hope others catch it if they didn't in your original post.
P.S., some of us won't judge you as harshly if the nostalgia trip is too strong, but you pirate it so the bitch doesn't get a single red cent. Y'all already do that for shit that isn't made by obsessive genital police.
This entry was edited (Tuesday, October 13, 2026, 6:03 PM)
Yeah, I saw what you said about tracking pirated download numbers and it convinced me, so I edited my comment to stress I still think it's a bad move to consume new Harry Potter media anyway.
I do not agree. The Harry Potter series is a masterwork. A true trans person was born with the wrong body, it must be a horrible experience, I feel very sorry for them.
When I see someone with a Harry Potter T-shirt on or something I immediately think of them as anti-trans. But I also see people in Starbucks or Gail's and I immediately think of them as anti-Palestinian racists.
I mean, they *might not* be those things but if they're so oblivious to what's going on in the world and are just ignorant, they might as well be those things. Ignorance is complicity.
@lydiaconwell ignorance is not complicity, not in this society. some people *genuinely* do not know. does mainstream news cover these things? people are overworked and exhausted and worried and stressed all the time. people miss things.
this is why we inform those folks, like my essays on this topic have done. because then they will know. and THEN if they still choose to support, they are complicit.
and people who feign ignorance to cover their bad choices are something else entirely.
oh I checked her work out around 2005…I could see the appeal but it didn’t appeal to me. i think I read one book and maybe saw 2 movies. Meh and Feh…just something innately wrong about it all. Chalked it up to cultural differences between here and there. But still it felt like she was popular due to a Cross Roads Demon Deal.
@wonka @jcurioso @me @vramvoolenaar Especially if you have daughters, I can recommend Patricia Wrede - "Enchanted Forest Chronicles" for the younger ones and all Tamora Pierce Books for the older ones. I loved the "Song of the Lioness" and the "The Circle of Magic" Series the most.
@Franceska Mann @🎃 Killy Witches 👻 I tend to refer to JKR as "she who shall not be named". It feels to me to be the only apropriate reference to her work.
Edit: If that does cause problems, please correct me.
After the recent reorganization in VPG, I’m leaving my job at Apple. Which means that I’m looking for a new job!
I’m looking for a senior or staff-level software engineering role, particularly where my experience with Swift, Objective-C, UI frameworks, Apple platforms, and large, complex software systems can be useful.
I’m looking for something in the SF Bay Area, something remote or something back in Belgium.
@Void Chicken To be fair, apart from Vincent Price and the old guy, I couldn't tell any of the men apart. It didn't help that they were all wearing the same suit.
Oh, somebody finally noticed the hole. They're oddly nonchalant about it. After all, glass is known for just spontaneously developing circular holes. #monsterdon
If you've had a secret hiding place built in your home, and you have the seemingly only copy of the plans in said house, I know where I'd keep them... #monsterdon
if the financial benefits of Amazon's efficiency were shared with their staff maybe they could already have 3 day weeks?
House prices would still be too high. Maybe AI will invent a wealth tax so people with multiple properties will be forced to sell them causing prices to crash. Suddenly there will be enough housing for all and it will be affordable!
it more likely to be that everyone can.onlybdo 3 days a week as part of a workshare where the available jobs left after AI takes all the current ones have to shared around so we can have something to buy food with
Exactly. We've had the technology for a 3 day work week for decades now. But when your job becomes easier, it just makes bosses pile more stuff on you so they can justify "What am I paying you for?"
Bezos is a fucking wanker with the emotional intelligence of a brick and the morals of some one who partied with Jeffrey Epstein. Needs locking up, not quoting.
So I'm working on adding a feature to #NomadNet that allows you to press Alt+r (keybinding not yet fully settled upon) to find the most recently failed message in the current conversation and copy it into the message editor so that it can easily be resent.
I think I've done this, but in order to properly test it, I need to first intentionally cause a message to fail. This is proving more difficult than I anticipated.
The funny thing is that when I attempt to send a message to a destination that I know is offline, it appears to just route through a propagation node even though I've got it set to direct delivery. I don't understand what's going on there. #reticulum #NomadNet
Looks like #gentoo has had a bunch of sponsors pull out. I wonder if this has anything to do with their stance against LLMs. Looks like they're looking for new ones. While I'm not in a position to help out on this, I will at least do what I can to boost the signal. gentoo.org/news/2026/10/07/inf…
Gentoo has had a series of issues, security-wise, management wise, socio-cultural wise (with their "Code of Ethics"), and now this. It seems something like the constant shaking of a wide-gauge screen.
@tom grzybow Honestly, all I know about Gentoo is that they've explicitly banned LLM-generated contributions. Can you elaborate on the issues with the code of ethics (or any of the others)?
I've been working on this feature for over an hour without writing a single line of code. I'm just familiarising myself with this part of the (rather large) codebase. Working with other people's code is fun! #programming #reticulum #NomadNet
@PerryM talk to him if you haven’t he may not even realize what he is doing. I know I used to be horrible about talking over people but with some practice I have gotten better about it and do it a lot less.
@cameron29 Cameron thank you for your concern. 1 of us personally knows the autistic person and has repeatedly talked to him. It is fine for a day or 2 and the behavior returns.
I shared my experience because the person who posted this is autistic and believes that he is not understood and is put upon. I contend, with experience, that his attitude it's a matter of perspective and I know several people who would agree.
I would guess that he is not being treated and is angry!
As far as I can tell, all the dns entries have dropped off the internet.
SDF hosts it's own dns (ns-a though ns-c.sdf.org) and if all those servers go down, and then the ttl expires on upstream servers, it's /all/ gone. It seems that's what has happened.
@jns @SDF.ORG That would explain why the outage is so total, wouldn't it? Oddly, I was still getting an answer over SSH, but with an incorrect key. I guess I had the IP cached?
Yep, if you have the IP cached, you can still connect - and, assuming not all servers are completely down, you should still be able to connect by ssh'ing directly to the old ip addresses.
Oh, it looks like the Mastodon server is still running. @SDF.ORG, is there a reason SSH is yelling at me about a changed host key at arpa.sdf.org? I can't tell if it's a MitM attack, and I obviously can't ask on BBOARD.
I was using my #Kaweko Sport #FountainPen, and noticed that it was making an odd rattling sound. I opened it up to investigate and found that the converter had somehow come detached. Fortunately, the converter doesn't hold a ton of ink, so it wasn't as big a mess to clean up as I would've expected. Besides, are you really a fountain pen user if you don't have ink all over your fingers? I have to say, though, I'm impressed at the capacity of the feed. It had been rattling for some time without any noticeable loss of ink.
I bought that stupid converter even though my best pen friend told me not to. I had the exact same thing happen to me during a client meeting at my law office and I looked like a total dork.
I have since moved on to using a blunt-tip syringe to refill old ink cartridges and my brass sport (as well as my hands) thanks me for it.
@Antonio Giamberardino Yeah, as much as I love fountain pens, when they fail, they tend to do so spectacularly. I keep a small pack of kleenex in the bag I carry my pens in for emergencies.
As boring as they are, I understand why the ballpoint pen eventually replaced fountain pens.
I think people are done with "left" parties that fuck around at the margins instead of solving problems.
Right-wing corruption doesn't bother them because they think everyone in politics is corrupt anyway. And they're mostly right. But that vacuum creates endless opportunities for fascists. Fascists create problems they claim only a fascist can solve.
And people are dumb enough to fall for it over and over again because they're too busy being mad at the establishment.
honestly at this point writing your password down in a notebook or hidden on your desk might be more secure than keeping it online in some fashion. i mean what're the odds of you getting burglarized vs. someone just hacking the system you use
I've got a scrap of paper with a bunch of numbers on it. They're page numbers, and you would have to know which book to look in and have my copy of it so you can see which word is marked on each page.
Bought a new toilet brush from the dollar store. Today I used it for literally the second time and it snapped in half. I don't by any means expect a product from the dollar store to last, but are you kidding me!?
As much as I acknowledge having this same rage and disgust, I have become aware of also having an increasingly antithetical response to the materialism and lack of empathy in our society.
It seems that the worse the world gets, the more open and caring I feel and try to be. Frustratingly, putting this into effective action is often energy dependant, but the sentiment isn't. I don't know how much my near death plays in this, but I'm crushing on so many people these days.
@dabertime this makes sense to me. Amid all the awful, kindness and courage and fighting for hopeful things is downright swoon worthy. 😍 Beautiful fekkin humans.
Physically speaking, it wouldn't necessarily have to occupy the same space, it depends on how the time travel works, but either way this movie is already nonsensical enough that the only answer in-universe is clearly "🤷 whatever"
I get that "laser rubies" are probably difficult to come by, but if it's so fragile and so critical, you'd think they'd have had a spare. I mean $14M in 1970s dollars is nothing to sneeze at. #monsterdon
The first of William Gibson's 'Sprawl' trilogy, Neuromancer is the classic cyberpunk novel.
More information on the [novel's official page][1].
[1]: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/neuromancer.asp
Madison Silvernight 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •