Cute (and I mean that sincerely, not sarcastically), and I appreciate that it appears to gracefully degrade for `@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)`, but for the demo site, it would probably be a good idea to allow the user to override that without having to change their system settings, or at least alert them that they won't see the animations.
PSA: Apple menu > System Settings > Accessibility > Motion
These cool demos come up now and again and it always takes me a minute to remember I have reduced motion. But for that minute I was disappointedly clicking around thinking "Whats the big deal?"
Would also be trivial for the author to add a warning for users that have that setting enabled. Something like "Heads-up: you have requested reduced motion, and this library disabled animations as per your request"
> Would also be trivial for the author to add a warning for users that have that setting enabled. Something like "Heads-up: you have requested reduced motion, and this library disabled animations as per your request"
They already do exactly this. The commenter wants a switch to force animations anyway, so he can check the demo without changing system settings.
At the time that I viewed it yesterday, there was no indication that it respected the "prefers reduced motion" setting, so I was very underwhelmed at first until I remembered I had that turned on.
This actually isn't even writing data to the disk, it's exploiting a bug in the Windows 11 storage subsystem to run up the drive's firmware's count of bytes written without performing any actual writes in order to disprove the myth that SSD firmware is programmed to self-destruct when the endurance rating is reached.
This is detailed in the thumbnail of the YouTube video embedded about halfway through the article.
Thirty years ago, Apple made a translucent green ADB "keypad" which had a small LCD display (perhaps only two lines of text?) – marketed towards academics, it allowed students to learn touch-typing without the distractions of an entire computer.
Once you were happy with your touch-typed document, you then plugged the "keypad" directly into your Mac's ADB (keyboard/mouse) port... and the thing would sit there and manually re-type your composition into the computer's texteditor.
----
Education needs such "reduced tech" to return to teaching. Think of this one as a "more advanced typewriter" – although I own a few of those, too, and they're fantastic for pure composition.
Didn't you hear? The author of this daemon is going around and forcibly installing it on anyone's computer that has soldered memory and an Nvidia GPU. I heard even he brings a Ludovico-technique chair with him and straps you in and pins your eyelids open like A Clockwork Orange so you have to watch.
Dude, are you for real? We've had the supposed inevitability of AI rammed down our throats since the minute LaMDA convinced Blake Lemoine it was sentient, we've watched CEOs hype up AI as if it were production-ready while it was still barely beta quality, LLM-driven chatbots have been stapled to the side of every product no matter how little sense it makes since OpenAI published an API, and we've been told to prepare for the inevitable "agentic future" even as Claude 3.5 had to have its hand held more than a wet-behind-the-ears freshman summer intern. We're told that this technology is going to eat the entire world economy and render human labor obsolete, starting with our jobs, but if it's genuinely supposed to do that, I think it's more than reasonable to expect it to write superhumanly perfect code, not just code that's incrementally better than the last model release but still bad; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, after all. To liken AI skepticism to the obstacles faced by women and minorities in tech is a category error that trivializes actual human struggles against human prejudices.
Oh yeah, I love having to manage sync conflicts in my password database because I was dumb enough to edit it on two separate computers that weren't both online at the same time.
Yeah, my main reason to stay away from Keepass, everything is in a single versioned binary file. I like 'passwordstore.org', where every secret is it's own gpg-encrypted textfile in a git repo. Every change is a commit, easy to see history, easy to revert or know which version is newest. And easy to selfhost, you just need a place to git push/pull from.
As I recall, Wildcat was one of the more expensive BBS packages that was still within reach of hobbyist budgets--I want to say a license for a single-digit number of nodes was between $200 and $300 in mid-90s dollars (around $450-$650 in 2026 dollars)--so it's not surprising that it would have been mostly older people running it. IIRC, it was pretty popular where I grew up, and the demographics in that area definitely skewed a bit older.
> it has somehow become not just commmon, but accepted that a vendor can tell us and force us to use something in the way they want.
The PS5 is a games console and is marketed as such, not a general-purpose computer. Of course they want, and "force", you to use it to play PS5 games. I have a hard time seeing this as coercive when computers still exist, even if architecturally a PS5 is virtually identical to a general-purpose computer in most of the ways that matter, because at least since the Fairchild Channel F, it's always been the case that consoles are just constrained computers.
> Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.
> We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.
Imagine, for instance, if that flat head screwdriver had a means to prevent you from using it to pry things open. Some kind of magical negative mass in the handle that kicks in to cancel out leverage but not torque, or an explosive charge that blows your hand off if more than a certain amount of force is applied non-rotationally, or something. It might seem a little less risible then, and you would probably just opt to buy a screwdriver that doesn't have such restrictions (especially if those restrictions were explosively enforced).
Like, I get it. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the argument that we should be able to do whatever we want with hardware that we own. At the same time, being upset about the PS5 making it impossible to run arbitrary software without hacking feels a little like being upset that your washing machine doesn't clean your dirty dishes as well as it cleans your dirty laundry: it's not made for that, and it's not really reasonable to expect it to be able to do that well if at all.
> At the same time, being upset about the PS5 making it impossible to run arbitrary software without hacking feels a little like being upset that your washing machine doesn't clean your dirty dishes as well as it cleans your dirty laundry: it's not made for that, and it's not really reasonable to expect it to be able to do that well if at all.
Except that's so completely not like what's going on with modern hardware. They're taking general purpose computers and restricting you from doing general purpose computing on them. Like, a dishwasher is made to wash dishes. It has a shape and a design made for washing dishes. You would need to make physical modifications to get it to wash clothes. This is like taking a machine that could wash both dishes and clothes and intentionally stopping it from washing clothes.
This is not OK. This needs to stop. Soon they'll come for our general-purpose computing with "features" for DRM.
> They're taking general purpose computers and restricting you from doing general purpose computing on them.
But so much tech hardware is commodified. A pregnancy test probably isn't using hardware dissimilar to your laptop. It just has less of it.
I don't think there's an expectation that every electronic is user programmable. But anything that is general phrpose should be punished as such for trying to put in excessive restrictions. There are arguments for game consoles on both aisles, but I don't agree with the mentality of "anything with general hardware needs general programming ability"
To me, the difference between a pregnancy test and a PS5 is that the pregnancy test isn't programmable at all, whereas a PS5 is programmable by people who have paid Sony for the privilege, and only at the pleasure of Sony. That's the problem.
It sounds like you don't like Sony's (and Nintendo's etc.) business model, which involves charging licensing fees to amortize R&D expenses and make money generally.
Sony has had this business model since the original PlayStation (1994), but it doesn't seem to have destroyed the ability to run Linux on your PC, or to have a Linux-based game console like the Steam Deck or Steam Machine.
Yup, I don't like their business model for the same reason that I don't like the business model of Facebook or TikTok. Just because consumers should be able to choose something harmful to themselves doesn't mean that the companies should offer it.
Nintendo have done anticompetitive things before and were legally punished for it. Just because something is video games doesn't make it's business decisions unserious and unworthy of regulatory enforcement.
Steam Deck is a gaming-focused handheld PC. It has a software certification system similar in function to what you see on console. If a user sticks within that environment, they essentially have the "console experience". There could be less friction with stronger certification enforcement, but Valve are consciously less strict for ideological and practical reasons. Is Steam Deck fixed function? Valve seems to intend it to be so, they just provide options for those who want to break free of the default gaming-centric environment.
Sony could provide an optionally accessible VM running a Linux distro, providing access to an open environment to install and run the stores that they want. Would it break their business model? Maybe, but no one is entitled to business models that are blatantly anti-competitive. It also wouldn't prevent it from being a fixed function console for those who want that, given that engagement with those features would remain a choice.
"Fixed function" isn't an excuse to build a vertical monopoly. It's been a long time coming for the console razor blade marketing model to come under scrutiny and Sony meets the criteria of being a gatekeeper under EU's DMA. When I look at what Microsoft is doing with Helix (which everyone else seems to be confused by) I get the feeling that Microsoft is anticipating exactly that outcome and getting out ahead of it.
Most appliances have fairly general-purpose microcontrollers inside them, but expose a fixed-function interface. Hopefully things like safety interlocks for microwave oven doors are implemented in hardware rather than software.
> Soon they'll come for our general-purpose computing with "features" for DRM.
You... haven't noticed all of the existing DRM features?
Not on my computer. I'm worried that there's a chance that someday general-purpose computing hardware will be locked down to the same degree that mobile or console hardware is today.
I see. So no intel CPUs with secret microcode and internal VMs. No ASICs with opaque internal functions and control software. No machine-readable serial numbers. Certainly no NVIDIA GPUs, and probably no AMD or Intel either. No hard-coded MAC addresses for Ethernet, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi. No USB. No secure boot or signed firmware. No secure enclaves. And of course no DRM-encumbered software like common web browsers or media playback systems. No Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, Steam, etc. So basically a system that regular people would not want to use.
Let me guess, you think GOG was perfectly justified in unilaterally taking away nake89's copy of--excuse me, I meant unilaterally revoking nake89's license to play Cyberpunk 2077--when they judged the gift transaction to be fraudulent, just because it could have been a conspiracy between nake89 and their wife to defraud GOG of the princely sum of eighty United States dollars[0]?
I don't dispute that GOG has the right, from a strictly legal standpoint, to revoke a license for any reason their terms of service allow, and that someone continuing to play a game after their license was revoked would be in breach of contract. What I do dispute is that this is a correct, fair, or desirable state of affairs, especially when the license in question was received as a gift and believed in good faith by the recipient to have been acquired non-fraudulently.
And in particular, if GOG wants the absolute and irrevocable right to prevent consumers from using products for which GOG has decided to revoke the licenses, they shouldn't advertise themselves as a DRM-free platform, nor claim that "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." -- advertising copy may not have the force of law, but courts tend to take a dim view of ad claims that are provably false.
[0]: the list price of the Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on GOG as of this writing (though it is currently on sale for 38% off)
GOG may have the right to revoke a sale, but since it lets you download the game without DRM, it doesn't have the ability. Unless you delete your copy of the game and then try to download it again.
If you buy milk from the supermarket and they reverse the transaction 2 days later claiming you used a fraudulent card, but you didn't use a fraudulent card, you have the right to keep the milk and the loss of money is the store's problem.
GOG has a Steam-like client application that you can use instead of downloading the installers (which, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, would be more convenient because its installer is in 28 parts, with another 11 for the Phantom Liberty expansion). It may be that if you install games through that, GOG can remove them if they revoke a license for any reason. I don't know that for sure, though. Just pointing out that they may, in fact, have the ability, at least in principle. But to be clear in case there's any doubt, I think we're on the same side: I think if nake89 had downloaded and installed CP2077 manually instead of through GOG Galaxy, and had continued to play it even after GOG decided the license was fraudulently acquired, they would have been in the right in every way that matters, and at least from a moral perspective, GOG could go pound sand.
