Has anyone else noticed that younger people are starting to speak with a strange affectation, as if they're narrating a TikTok video? It's eerie. There's a new accent being invented. Most of the recent videos I've seen that were made by younger creators had the voice. It feels like I'm lost in the uncanny valley. Can we bring back the Mid-Atlantic accent, please?

I did a lot of gardening today. I've got a good variety of vegetable and herbs planted: multiple varieties of tomatoes (heirloom, cherry, beefsteak, etc.), multiple varieties of spicy peppers (habanero, jalapeno, ghost peppers, banana, etc.), zucchini, cucumber, several types of leafy greens (Romain lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard), a litany of herbs (oregano, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, dill, chives, etc.), two kinds of green onions, and some other things I'm forgetting.

Do you have a garden?

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I acquired a new laptop. It's a Dell Vostro 1500 from 2007. It's got an Intel Core2 Duo T5270 @ 1.40GHz. It came with a 250GB hard drive. I put 3GB of RAM in it. It's an interesting machine. The build quality is sturdy - this thing could take a beating! It's bulky and heavy, but that's more of a feature than a bug. I removed the Windows 7 that was installed and put Debian on it. Although it's a bit slow compared to modern hardware, it's still quite usable for simple tasks that don't require a lot of...

The sheer size of the universe sometimes overwhelms me. When I try to wrap my head around its vastness, something in my mind just buckles. I'll never fully understand what this reality actually is, where it came from, what it's made of, or whether it has any purpose at all. We're deeply intertwined with reality, yet we barely understand it. Everything that makes you you is made of the same stuff as everything out there in space, and somehow it still feels unknowable. Fucking scary, man.

It's...

When you're alone in the world, birthdays aren't the festive celebrations they could be. They're downright depressing. I feel for everyone who has to suffer that loneliness. Being deprived of a cultural ritual that others get to experience every year can hurt the soul, and serves as a reminder of how you're viewed by the rest of the world.

What one does with that information is up to them.

Suburban design often encourages social isolation, weakens communal ties, and alienates people from both nature and civic life. Simultaneously, modern technologies transform not just what we do but how we perceive and experience the world, severing many of the social and material connections that once shaped daily life. Humanity now seems trapped in a cycle of constant social and civic upheaval, struggling to adapt because change outpaces opportunity to adapt. Whether this is a good thing remains to be...

I hate ChatGPT. It's infuriatingly incompetent, and has a rude, inconsiderate 'personality'. LLMs are going to render great harm to human civilization.

I fear for the future.

Friend: Is that Yoga For Dummies? What's it about?

Me: Ummmmmmm...

The terminal doesn't scare people. The idea of the terminal scares people. The branding is bad. If we rebrand the terminal to a new word, people won't have a problem with it. Everyone knows the term "search bar", so what if we call it something like the "network search bar", and then rebrand "commands" as "apps"? These are concepts everyone knows. It's IDEAS that scare people.

I created a game. https://temporor.neocities.org

Ever wish chess was more chaotic? Welcome to Temporor, a simultaneous turn-based strategy game. You and and the computer both plan your moves, then watch them all happen at once. You've got an army of pieces on a 12x12 board. Each piece type has its own unique way of moving. Capture one of the enemy's two Sun pieces, or outscore them before the timer runs out. When you hit "End Turn" both players' moves execute...

Check out this useful awk one-liner that prints a multiplication table in your terminal:

awk 'BEGIN{for(i=1;i<=20;i++){for(j=1;j<=20;j++) printf "%4d", i*j; print ""}}'

And here's a more advanced version, with colour and additional styling:

awk 'BEGIN{n=12; ESC="\033["; RESET=ESC"0m"; BOLD=ESC"1m"; RED=ESC"31m"; CYAN=ESC"36m"; printf BOLD" |"; for(j=1;j<=n;j++) printf BOLD"%4d", j; print "\n----+" sprintf("%s","----"*n); for(i=1;i<=n;i++){printf BOLD"%3d |", i; for(j=1;j<=n;j++){v=i*j; colo

...

I purchased an old Lenovo ThinkCentre with an Intel i5-3470, 6GB RAM, and a 500GB HDD for extremely cheap. I spent last night setting it up, installing software, and transferring files. Due to the computer being so far away from a router and lacking wifi hardware, I'm sharing the wifi connection of another computer over Ethernet, NIC to NIC. Now the machine has an Internet connection, and I can transfer files at lightning-fast Ethernet speeds. I love Debian.