I’m physically addicted to SwiftKey and it’s still very good, but, it is owned by Microsoft now in case that influences anyone’s decisions here.

It’s a three ton steel knife that does zero to sixty in three seconds, it’s literally designed to shred human bodies.

Chant it with me, friends!

Stop 👏 using 👏 Chrome 👏!!

More old trivia is that the original OK Cupid system was written in C, including the actual web server that served the pages. They wrote it in C so that the matching thing could run real-time, which is super impressive, even if writing your own web server is actually pretty dumb.

I loved the days when people just wanted to make fun, useful, quirky stuff on the internet and not just peddle thirst traps and Chinese merchandise.

Bram obviously gave so much to the global community, and directly to Uganda through his persistent charity efforts, and no more need be said about what a devoted and generous person he was. We’d all truly be worse off without his contributions and I say that as a devout Emacs user.

Still, it always rubbed me wrong that his stated plan for the project was immortality.

How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future?

Keep me alive.

Bram was notoriously possessive of the Vim project and consistently avoided bringing in other lead maintainers or adding widely demanded features (like async processing). Maybe that changed while I wasn’t paying attention, but it had a lot to do with the very successful neovim fork. Bram eventually added an async feature but not before neovim exploded in popularity.

It’s tragic to hear of Bram’s passing, and at such a young age. I will be interested to see what happens to the Vim project now, in his absence.

Also conserve helium, which would be huge.

I’m happy to see Inkscape continue to get big updates!

I recently got a pen plotter and Inkscape is the main way anyone feeds drawings into these things so it’s good to know it’s being looked after.

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I don’t know if that statistic included used car sales, so it may only reflect those able to buy a new vehicle. It still reflects a pretty substantial shift in preference though, in my view. The list was 9 cars out of 10 just a few decades ago.

Also, used car stock reflects prior new car purchase decisions, so over time we just starve ourselves of reasonably sized vehicles to choose from.

It feels like realizing that WhatsApp is a terrible Meta privacy nightmare, but you can’t wake up because you can’t convince your whole family to use Signal.

Developers all have their pet frameworks they want to use. Why contribute to a Kotlin app when I can finally learn Dart and Flutter??

I support Pocket Casts because it’s made by Automattic, the makers of WordPress, Tumblr, and WooCommerce. Their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, is someone who seems to really care about the freedom and diversity of the internet. As far as players go, it’s got all the features you’d want for an Android app.

I seldom listen on my PC, but if I want to I can usually find the stream on whatever service the podcast has chosen (their own site, or whichever embedded player they elect to use).

I see no plans anywhere here, only some software that presumably controls it, and a list of parts. That’s hardly enough information from which to build a functioning system.

Here in the States the Toyota Camry is the only car that made the top ten most sold vehicle list for 2022. Everything else is either a crossover/SUV (Honda CR-V, Tesla Model Y), or a truck (#1 is the Chevy Silverado, #2 is the Ford F-series).

We’re already deeply screwed.

Thunder is hot! It is making me want to actually try developing in Flutter, which seems to be the “new hotness.”

I wonder if these battles will shake loose the circuit split on de minimis exceptions to music samples (see https://lawreview.richmond.edu/2022/06/10/a-music-industry-circuit-split-the-de-minimis-exception-in-digital-sampling/).

Currently, it is absolutely not “cut and dried” whether the use of any given sample should be permitted. Most musicians are erring on the side of “clear everything,” but does an AI-generated “simulacrum” qualify as “sampling”?

What’s on trial here is basically “what characteristic(s) of an artist’s work do they own?” If you write a song, you can “own” whatever is written down (melody, lyrics, etc.) If you perform a song, you can own the performance (recordings thereof, etc.) Things start to get pretty vague when we start talking about “I own the sound of my voice.”

I think it’s accepted that it’s legal for an impersonator to make a living doing TikToks pretending to be Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise can’t really sue them saying “he sounds like me.” But is it different if a computer does it? It may very well be.

It’s going to be a pretty rough few years in copyright litigation. Buckle up.

It makes me so happy to see Doctorow’s smart work referenced around here.

It’s wild that even robotic, psychotic Zuck is more in touch with his company than Stevie Huff-Huff.

Like at least Zuck seems to know what he wants. Metaverse is an insane idea but it’s an idea. What Steve Huffing-man wants is money. Clearly. Nothing more. It’s pathetic.

Louis Rossmann is a bit of a provocateur, but what he’s saying in this video is the bare and unvarnished truth. If Reddit cared about its users and its moderators, the CEO’s internal messaging would be less like “this will blow over” and more like “what should we do to meet these people in the middle?”

There is no meeting in the middle when you’re up against institutional investors who have put literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to fund your operation. I almost feel bad for Steve, he really has no choice, it’s just a shame to see him falling into line and reciting exactly what the board wants him to say.