Firefox recently grew that terrifying WebSerial USB thing!

What if instead we… stop that from happening?

Why can’t I just write this up as a PR to Firefox and stand a snowball’s chance of getting it merged, though? Everything’s somehow simultaneously extremely stodgy and completely beholden to whatever Google decides to ship this week.

Why don’t browsers know how to render a Markdown content-type yet, all by themselves? It’s ubiquitous now and it’s not like it’s hard to parse, but every site has to translate it into HTML itself for the browser.

No?

I mean, how else are you meant to play the game actually?

I guess you could be like opening ports just to particular IPs. And you need a game that isn’t Swiss cheese that gets immediately hacked.

But like hackers don’t sort of seep in through port forwards; they need to physically identify and exploit a particular vulnerability.

In terms of the transport, sure.

But if you put the password in a URL, the user’s browser is going to turn around and store that plaintext password in its history, then sync it to the user’s other devices, and then pop it up on their screen in the address bar autocomplete, perhaps when the user is screen sharing or streaming to hundreds of people. The browser does not expect a password to be stored there and will mishandle it.

What it is is my attempt to avoid the nonsense biannual massive Ubuntu upgrades.

Really I’ve got “Siduction”, an ostensible distro “based on” Debian Unstable. This is accomplished by just having the Debian Unstable package sources in there, plus a couple others that give you pretty themes.

I expect Debian Unstable to occasionally ship me broken packages, but I’m surprised to have it just generally not have functional migration solutions when the setup goes through major changes. Not because there’s a bug in something, as far as I can tell, but because nobody engineered anything.

dist-upgrade must die.

I spent like three hours I didn’t have the other day trying to bring a Debian Unstable system up to date, it decided to stop every few packages to tell me it failed because the t64 libraries conflict with the regular ones and nobody taught apt how to figure that shit out for me and install the right ones.

Even Ubuntu is like “oh hey there’s a new release, you’re available for three hours straight to, every two to fifty minutes, explain to a TUI dialog that you don’t have an opinion, right? Oh also can you resolve this merge conflict on this config file we think you edited, but you didn’t, by being shown the diff once and then opening nano?”

This is not an acceptable way for this to go.

So I can’t be directly bezos@aws?

If the password is going in URLs you already have a problem.

The underlying scam is the concept of a “cost of living” that’s somehow different in different places, and a minimum wage that can be different for two people who nonetheless might be expected to buy the same thing.

Anything that touches this concept and tries to accommodate instead of destroy it is going to inherit its foolishness.

IMHO it’s already dead.

Nobody’s made RAM actually targeting the specs in the standards for years; the sticks ship with built-in overclocking settings for one or the other proprietary system, and the boards expect the sticks to already be on their Qualified Vendor List to actually work right. The interface between the RAM and the motherboard is ceasing to be a legitimate extension point.

There’s two people who make CPUs, not to any spec but to work with their own other chips that need to already be on the board, which are then driven by firmware software basically supplied by the CPU makers. When the CPU makers update their base firmware bundles, the board makers skin and ship it. In the distant past, one could slot competing CPUs from different vendors into the same board, and they would execute BIOS software fundamentally under the control of the board makers. The interface between the CPU and the board has long since ceased to be a legitimate extension point.

The real remaining extension point is PCIe, and since its dominant use is to attach exactly one ever-widening GPU from one of two (or perhaps now three! How spoiled for choice we are!) manufacturers, each year fewer slots are provided. The target customer only needs one, and it needs as much physical clearance as humanly possible. A case will have 7 or 8 slots on the back and a board will provide two slots to plug anything in, one to actually use and one to be able to claim that there’s more than one slot. And each year there’s less stuff to put in there (who buys sound cards?) and more stuff (fast networking, wifi, fancy USB) is integrated into the board.

And all these components have started to acquire fancy molded plastic and metal casings, to the point where it’s not clear why they need a separate enclosure around them.

So the net result is you obtain one fancy shrouded box from Lenovo, or you purchase two fancy shrouded boxes and plug them together, and you call the result a “PC”. And then on the software side it’s a terminal for a Microsoft account, which you use to run a client for fetching from Steam, which you use to load client software for talking to live services. And now the people orchestrating all this are wondering why they bother actually mailing you the boxes.

This is very deeply not personal computing.

I saw NTSYNC and was obligated to reply with the complementary 90s boy band.

How the Backstreet Boys Taught me to Code

Why do you think people got so into T posing?

Still waiting on the improvements to BACKSTREET_BOYS to get merged.

That cop is about to shoot that dude already in jail

Sounds more like the pirate queen.

I have never wanted to use Slackware more.

I’ve had pretty good results with Wings3D actually, as opposed to Blender. For proper CAD you can try Solvespace, which also sucks but at least has so little to it that you can learn to use it if you remember the idea of solving systems of equations at all.