My avatar is the Fuzzbomb from the 1980s children’s educational PC game Agent USA for no particular reason. You can play it in your browser here.

  • 38 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 9th, 2025
  • ∃∀λ ( eah@programming.dev ) toGaming@lemmy.ml•This is basically me whenever people ask if I play videogames
    1·
    20 days ago

    It doesn’t work that well anymore.

    After an edit to the Awareness article in April of 2024, switching the order of Philosophy and Psychology, the number of articles that lead to Philosophy this way had been greatly reduced, as Awareness and Psychology formed a loop of their own. In the months after the edit, there were numerous attempts to switch the order of the links leading to a discussion on the Awareness talk page. Following another discussion, the order was changed back in July 2026.

    Following discussions like Talk:Mathematics#Hyperlinks missed in the first paragraph about over-linking in the first paragraph of articles, some first links were changed or removed in July 2026. As a result, almost no articles continue to lead to “Philosophy” as of July 2026

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy

  • ∃∀λ ( eah@programming.dev ) toOffbeat@lemmy.ca•Coin-Operated Elevators in Condominiums and Apartment Buildings Are Becoming More Common
    9·
    1 month ago
    Libertarian Police Department

    I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

    “Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”

    “What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

    “Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”

    The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”

    “Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”

    “Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

    He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”

    “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”

    I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.

    “Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.

    “Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.

    “Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”

    It didn’t seem like they did.

    “Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”

    Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.

    I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.

    “Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.

    Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.

    “Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.

    I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”

    He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.

    “All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”

    “Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.

    “Because I was afraid.”

    “Afraid?”

    “Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”

    I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.

    “Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”

    He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.

  • ∃∀λ ( eah@programming.dev ) toLinux@programming.dev•Linux desktop use spikes to over 10% in North America for the first time. There is also a corresponding drop in Windows and OSX use.
    6·
    2 months ago

    The spike likely represents Statcounter being too slow to adjust their methods of filtering out bot page views after some brand new web scrapers appeared on the scene hoovering up all the data for AI training. 10% linux market share would be a cosmic event. You would hear about it in mainstream media if it were really happening.

    Edit: I forgot about popular youtube channel Linus Tech Tips’ recent videos in which they gave linux their highest praise yet. One was published in mid June, another in mid July, and their most recent and most favorable to linux was published on July 22 (“My Experience Using the Steam Machine as a Desktop PC”). There have also been videos on the Framework laptops. Vibes tell me that there’s a trend of more people using mobile over desktop, so I would expect a higher proportion of desktop users to be the gamer or technically inclined type, enough to be influenced by LTT and give linux a shot, compared to 10 years ago.

    Here’s the data for the last 4 months.

       Date    Windows     OS X    Linux    Chrome OS    macOS
2026-04      66.39    17.04     2.94         4.42     9.21
2026-05      64.66    19.92     3.56         3.72     8.15
2026-06      59.08    24.06     6.14         2.19     8.53
2026-07      57.63    21.07    10.61         2.07     8.63

    The data looks noisy. You would expect the lines to have consistent, regular annual patterns. You can see that with Chrome OS which seems to have a dip in the middle of the year corresponding to when schools are out for summer vacation, and if you scan upward, it appears Windows has a corresponding hump at that time. But there are still unexplained extreme swings. The lines look smooth up until 2012/2013. Maybe Statcounter doesn’t have as many members/page views as it once did, leading to higher variance. We could see that if we had absolute numbers, but we only have percentages. That’s probably affected by the advent of the LLMs. Nobody’s going to the web anymore to find information.