Troy Dowling

Vim, or neovim if you want to put some leg work in for vi with modern features.

It’s a beautiful bird until the horny little pricks find your chimney’s metal flashing at 5:00!

ToonStruck, remastered, or the shelved sequel ressurected. I’d like Burst to (exist again and) handle the development because they did a fantastic job the first time around!

Strangely topical for me. I wasted yesterday telling myself I was smart enough to make SwayWM on Wayland work well with my 1070. Should have trusted the warnings in the documentation; hubris cost me a weekend day!

I was with you up until the climate controls.

Any control you can find in a 1997 Hyundai Accent should be physical.

Anything else can be hidden behind a touchscreen because I’m not going to use it while driving anyway.

My big request would be to drop the USB cable. I don’t know why I need to connect both USB and Bluetooth. I’d love to just leave my cell in my bag where it belongs instead of advertising yet another reason why someone should smash my windows in!

Yeah, it certainly can go that way unfortunately. I’m in favour of digitisation generally, but at a minimum it relies on:

1. Redundant storage (always), hosted and paid for by the government (in this case).
2. Published and documented open file formats.

I believe that, in general, things lost to time on the net violate one of those two rules. They either resided on a single privately held server which was discontinued, or the data was locked up in some proprietary file format which was inevitably replaced for the sake of selling the new software product.

The benefits of pulling this off correctly are enormous:

1. Data lasts a very long time.
2. Documents can be authenticated and change-controlled.
3. Documents can be shared with any number of users simultaneously.

Problem: ambiguity of date terms like saying “this Wednesday” on a Thursday. Is the speaker referring to yesterday or the coming Wednesday six days from now? Not always clear.

Solution: I propose standardising our understanding of the week as beginning Monday, ending Sunday. At any point in the current week, “this whateverday” refers to that day in the current week, no matter if it’s past or future. “Next whateverday” refers to that day in the upcoming Monday through Sunday week.

“This Wednesday”, on a Thursday, is referring to yesterday.

“Next Wednesday”, on a Thursday, is referring to a day six days from now.

(I also suggest adopting ISO 8601, writing dates in year-month-day order to avoid that ugly ambiguity.)

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Thanks to Britain, we now have swearing on the Internet.

I bought a popcorn bowl that turned out to be terrible. It came with a leaflet coupon saying if I left a 5-star review, they would send me another bowl for free.

The comment I tried to leave was a short, fair, polite statement along the lines of 'this bowl doesn’t meet the claims X and Y on the description, and came with an offer to trade a good review for another bowl for free." That review got flagged by the automod and was ultimately rejected. If I recall, the rejection message wasn’t even specific on what rule my review broke.

I have heard it front to back, back to front, up or down, but never have I heard of a left-right wiper.

When I hitbthe B button instead of spacebar on my tiny, touchscreen cell phone.

Root access should be available from the moment my purchase payment clears. I paid, it’s my device.

The dietary illuminati hid their food pyramid atop the unfinished pyramid of the one dollar bill! It’s pyramids all the way down!

The perpetual year of the Linux desktop.

You need a touchscreen to open the glovebox?

Wow, this game was incredible! Apogee did a tonne of great work, but this may have been my favourite. The music and intro cutscene especially stand out in my mind.

The only reason I know what webp is, is because its “that dumb format” that doesn’t play like a GIF in Signal.

Cool ideas. I like the idea of an accessible, global democracy. But I wondered about two things:

One, I think the complexity of such an identity database would be so great, it would preclude any means of reliably identifying false connections. And if that complexity wasn’t boggling, would it really capture anything more than our present distributed (inefficient) system of records? You would wind up with a, admittedly more sophisticated, statistical model for identifying bogus individuals.

Another thing I wonder is how much help it would actually be. Lots of issues are more complex than “is clean water good?” If and when a decision needs to be made on something outside your expertise, or with no clearly altruistic option, you have to look for help in understanding your choices. And that makes you vulnerable to influence by someone else’s interpretation. Which leaves you where we are now.

So I guess it raises some problems to solve. Can you really create a perfect record of identity without sacrificing privacy? Could you meaningfully interrogate it? How do you provide an unbiased education of every vote and referendum? How do you solve the influence problem or stop organized political machines from springing up again? Does any of this address the root cause of unbalanced wealth and power?