1999: Copying files from hard drive onto DVDs, for safekeeping
2025: Copying DVDs onto hard drives, for safekeeping

(...though actually, I think I started doing the latter about 15 years ago.)

(More accurately, the 1999 activity would be "moving files off hard drive onto DVDs, to make room", but then you lose the parallelism. The Law of Roger Rabbit dictates that I must use the funnier version.)

@GossiTheDog Note that the paper itself is a bit sus (h/t: @inthehands)

@sharpdresseddyke Well, at least she can finally get some sleep.

(I have the vinyl of that...)

@vga256 Those were so cool, once upon a time... I wonder what wrongfully abandoned roads you may find therein.

blep

@danirabbit "Okay, but the Third Reich did have some good ideas..." [banhammer engaged]

@naga Childhood linguistic R&D FTW \o/

(I've found myself using "scheisskopf" on Nextdoor without getting flagged...)

For the life of her, Chloe could not figure out how what had seemed like such a good plan, had gone so terribly, terribly wrong.

@kalviter @davidgerard

In other words, we're now witnessing the weird economic physics at the edge of a rapidly accreting financial singularity?

...or, actually, literally just Pohl's "The Midas Plague", except the end-consumers are being given stuff for free and encouraged to waste it in hopes that they'll become dependent on it. (...which is kind of capitalism in a nutshell...) (#TASAT)

The whole thing sounds rather like buying on margin, enshrined as a business model. (Paging Black-Scholes...)

@rnd
"I know there are some among us who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!" -- Tom Lehrer, intro to "National Brotherhood Week"

:smol_purple_heart:

@naga Excellent! :queer100:

("Frack" is another good substitute curseword, since it also refers to a highly offensive act of exploitation.)

@davidgerard Yehbut...

Either (a) it works, and they stop drawing terrestrial power and water away from people who need them (reviving the fossil fuel balrog in the process) and generating additional globe-warming heat, or (b) it fails, which means AI investors have spent billions of dollars for nothing, which would be terrible because then they might get soured on AI investment (or even -- all digits crossed -- on trying to bring capitalism to space (I mean, a girl can dream, yeah?)).

@ObsidianUrbex Daaang.

(If nobody wants it, I'll take it...)

@EveHasWords Cantankerous? Or can they not? :blobcatthinking:

("Cantankerous"... wasn't that Tony Orlando's first hit?)

@Suran I always found it difficult to take SF seriously when its future-fashions are basically just exaggerations of contemporary ones -- or, worse, not really deviating from contemporary norms while pretending this is somehow neutral or universal.

That said, Buck Rogers was at least fun. ^.^

They were just sitting looking at each other.

A little #Caturday story about Ping.

Picture this:

Two or three days a week, I have a video chat of about an hour with my father-in-law 3000 miles away in England, who is soon 95, unable to move from his chair or wheelchair without assistance and with no friends or relatives to speak to. His only real contact is us, and his carers who come in four times a day to look after his needs. Sometimes I arrange his grocery shopping for him, sometimes I order him other things he needs, but mostly we just sit and talk and he reminisces. He struggles a little with the technology, but somehow we manage.

When it's my days to talk to him, I sit on a sofa with my tea and it's become a habit for Ping Pong to sit on my lap while I chat and stroke her. When I finish talking, she goes off. On the days when I don't speak to him, and Steven has taken the call somewhere else, she'll come meowing and meowing after me to get me to go and sit there with her. In the end, usually I have to give in, and take my tea and we sit on the sofa together. She doesn't often ask for cuddles, so this is a special time for her.

On Thursday this week, I was talking to my father-in-law when I realized that my bed cover that I had washed was ready to be hung up to dry in front of the fire, to be put back on the bed that night. As this was rather urgent, I asked him to wait and said I'd be right back after I'd hung the cover up. I lifted Ping up and went and got that sorted. After a few minutes when I came back, I was met with the scene of Ping, sitting upright, very proper, in my place on the sofa, just as you see her in this photo unblinking, looking at the phone screen at my father-in-law who was looking back at her. Neither was saying a word. They were just looking at each other. The two of them looked so funny.

It was as if she felt she was taking over from me. My father-in-law said "she's been looking after me". And that's just what it seemed like. She wouldn't move on her own to give me my place, so I had to lift her aside so I could sit down. My father-in-law is not a cat person, so obviously he didn't know what to say to her. And she didn't feel the need to say anything either.

Cats. Who can fathom them?

Have a happy Caturday, everyone! If you don't celebrate, have a great day!

#EllieKPosts #catsOfMastodon #PingPong #Pangolin #CornishRexCats
#catstodon #cornishRex

Does anyone have some good learning materials for someone who is very new to graphics programming, but needs to interact with OpenGL-Esque primitives (without anything like Glad/etc. in the mix)?

I dunno I feel like everytime I open up an example i get one of two things:

• it's like "yes to draw the triangle first you take your vertex shader, and pixel shader and your vertex attribute buffers which you should use an index offset so you don't have to call set attribute buffer everytime if nothing has changed", and I feel like I've skipped to drawing the rest of the owl real quick.
• It's like "here's this library that if you can use makes everything super easy just call DRAW_Circle and your circle is drawn congrats!" (which in this case I absolutely cannot use).

Is there a: "I want to learn to draw basic shapes without the libraries, and without immediately jumping into here's shaders and vertex buffers and good fucking luck"?