Chew your fingernails! Do the toes with your molars. My foot is usually in the neighborhood anyway.
rms - is that you...?
Readit Newspartomniscient commented on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn
i still miss office 2003 - esp as a power user of excel - it was so much faster/more reliably than the modern versions
65k rows was a feature, not a bug...
Yep. The slow-down it had in responsiveness once you got the thick green cell-highlight cursor was sooo noticeable I immediately though it was a downgrade.
I remember the original dev's for the Excel application used to pride themselves on its performance. I don't know what happened, except probably upper-management overrule.
partomniscient commented on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn
I'm also in agreement that server-side, Windows 2000 server was peak.
XP/Window 7 were peak end-user OS's, once you got over the Fisher-Price look of XP.
The constraints you had in terms of user-UI were a massive advantage in terms of user-understanding. Now we're in a stupid era of the browser is the UI and everything is non-conformant with everything else in terms of looks/expectation/behaviour.
The version of MS-Office prior to the stupid ribbon-shit were also the peak versions. It's all been downhill since then with Windows ME and Windows 8 being exceptionally low points.
I'm about to shift to FreeBSD as my main driver as the Linux distribution fragmentation and wane in reliability/dependability and repeatability has given me the shits (how many apt-get equivalents are there now...?) I used to like Debian back in the day but now it and its derivatives (e.g. Ubuntu) give me the shits and Red-Hat and Fedora likewise, and Debian itself won't even install a working desktop. Apparently raising a bug for Fedora gets put into "Closed - not a bug" because IBM don't give a shit about quality anymore - even though the install resulted in an unbootable OS and I spent hours raising a proper bug report. Pop-OS was reasonable, but scaling where some apps have both big and little font sizes intermixed still mean its a clusterfuck of a kludge.
It's 2025 and apparently trying to mount network shares in fstab before the network interface is up isn't a bug. It's still not year of the desktop for Linux.
FWIW, I liked Apple in the 1980's - not so much since then.
I still appreciate all the contributions of those individuals out there is both GNU/Linux and the BSD'd trying to make the world a better place for themselves/others and sharing the results.
partomniscient commented on Bullfrog in the Dungeon filfre.net/2025/08/bullfr... · Posted by u/doppp
I remember Dungeon Keeper was the first time I ever “hacked” something, I had a demo of Dungeon Keeper that I’d downloaded over 56K, and couldn’t afford the game at 14 or so, but by looking at the config files realized all the characters and their stats were in there, so I was able to unlock all of the units, only without their art assets! Invisible giants were walking around my dungeon doing my bidding. I was very proud of myself and spent many dozens of hours playing this demo because of this, and it probably helped lead me to becoming a software engineer eventually.
Ha, I did the same kind of thing with the dodgy corrupted copy of Ultima III that was circulating at the time when I was too young to afford anything - the main map had a string of garbage items ruining the feel and also navigation (it made the game almost uncompletable. I don't know if this was an intentional move to reduce copyright infringement or not...?
If I remember correctly, there was a town called Yew, which had some druids which gave you hints towards the final answer you need to solve the game, but otherwise was not important. I worked out the % symbol represented a chest for the game and replaced the Yew town data file (the files were all separate) by hex-editing it to be full of chests. So I had effectively unlimited gold and a chance to spawn better weapons/armour for my characters.
I also ended up becoming a software engineer. Once I could afford it, I bought it as part of the Ultima I-IX compilation which came out on CD decades later.
No! Don't you people know that's how you release Moloch the Corruptor?!
I thought Ginsberg already did that back in the 1950's...?
partomniscient commented on Honesty Boxes in Scotland (2024) awayfromtheordinary.com/2... · Posted by u/NaOH
Lived in rural Australia with this as commonplace. Fwiw the neighbour did have someone take the whole box one day. He did run after it and get a numberplate since he was close to the box at the time.
That's one thing about these, it's not that no one would ever steal them as if there's some magic in these areas that leads to zero theft. After all anyone can drive out there. They exist because there's little choice but to accept some losses since you can't staff a store selling small amounts of produce.
For all the comments along the lines of "society has gone to shit, look how nice it once was" just remember that theft still happens and these honesty boxes were always done out of raw necessity.
Also Australian and can confirm once you get on main-ish roads a certain distance from major population areas these were a thing (at least quite a few years ago, don't drive so haven't recent data on this stuff).
It's nice to think there is some trust/faith in humanity once you get a certain distance away from the frenetic pace of life in cities.
On a related note, have recently finished (with my wife) a bottle of Adnamurchan whisky - highly recommended, although I'm more of an Islay guy.
Also spent 2.5 years living in Scotland - those blue sky photos are the exception, not the norm.
partomniscient commented on Mary had schizophrenia, then suddenly didn't newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/fortran77
I don't think the nasal route is good for me. Brain doesn't like it, body doesn't like it, it just feels extremely miserable. I think I tried it before the ketamine spray, but it would just dry out my nose and it was really painful and it just felt so awful that I couldn't manage to dose myself enough to have a good effect before I just couldn't bear to take any more. It's awful and terrible and I hate it.
Which sucks, because I really feel like dissociatives would be nice. I've taken memantine orally and it was nice, although it took really long to wear off, and also after a while it made me throw up all over my expensive tech, which was very not fun. Ketamine though I haven't found an adequate way to take.
I've never had ketamine. I've had memantine, but its half-life is ridiculous.
I self-medicate a variant of what's now available in the USA as 'Auvelity' but is just a ratio'd mixture of dextromethorphan and bupropion. The bupropion is there to slow down the metabolism of the DXM via its CYP2D6 pathway, but bupropion gives me anxiety/insomnia so I use something called berberine phytosome which isn't as effective but still works on CYP2D6 at a lower level, but no side effects.
All the other anti-depressant classes never worked for me but still gave me extremely shitty side effects.
There's a lot of anecdotal reports on DXM/Auvelity for both prescribed (variable outcomes, but for some people its the first thing that's ever worked), and recreationally its been around for ages sometimes referred to as the poor mans ketamine...
Not DID here, but schizo-affective. I've read things like meditation can actually have negative affects on dissociative disorders. Dissociating in order to re-integrate to a better place seems a somewhat reasonable strategy but I think mental-health/medication effects and understanding of how differently the same medications can affect different people is only just beginning to be realised by psychiatry now.
At least now there's even genetic testing for Auvelity - if you're already a poor CYP2D6 metaboliser due to a shortened version of a gene on a specific chromosome, they won't prescribe it to you. On the other hand you could be an ultra-metaboliser.
partomniscient commented on Mary had schizophrenia, then suddenly didn't newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/fortran77
My understanding is that the Liver King, Brian Johnson, is basically doing that right now.
Not to be confused with "Don't Die", Bryan Johnson who wants to outlive everyone, and preferred 5-MeO-DMT.
Interestingly, he uses immunosuppresants as part of his anti-aging medicine/supplement regime.
https://medium.com/@x3em/from-depression-to-superhuman-bryan...
partomniscient commented on Mary had schizophrenia, then suddenly didn't newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/fortran77
Mushrooms and LSD have high tolerance from 24-96h where higher doses will not reproduce the same effects w/o abstinence. I find it hard to believe that a week's worth of exposure was the sole cause.
[s]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...
I agree, most medications will create/change tolerance to more of the same. In some respect that's the purpose of taking some medications in the first place, but it can lead to poor long term outcomes. Take enough melatonin exogenously and your endogenous production stops completely.
“I took five people, and we locked ourselves in a building for three weeks, and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day.… We finally were just drinking out of the bottle.… We were very high.”
From Be Here Now - Ram Dass/Richard Alpert
Interestingly he was the guy involved in giving psilocybin to priests back at Harvard in the 1960's.
Recent source: https://tripsitter.substack.com/p/ram-dass
On the other hand, one single dose of a psychiatric medication can ruin peoples lives. They get brain shocks, sexual dysfunction or anhedonia for life. One dose of marijuana can effect similar outcomes.
I know immunosuppresants are whole separate part of medicine, but its a playing with fire risk/reward where its too early to establish reasonable probabilities. But at least we can begin the cause-effect discovery process.
That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate. Some use cases just don't fit email, and for those, we have other, more fitting platforms.
> So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail).
Ok, so now you have two problems.
I was fortunate enough that my solution was to host my own mail server 20+ years ago and create a separate email address per relationship with a company, so I can tell the moment some 3rd party has been comprimised when I receive spam on a specific address. My personal spam has been minimal over time.
If for example moc.elgoog@mydomain.com gets spam - I know they're compromised or have sold me out.
Yes gmail has had something similar using the + character, but most people don't know about/make use of this and still abdicate spam filtering to things they don't understand like bayesian algorithms which suffer from false positives. (Have you checked your spam folder for our very important message...?)
Email has never been secure and despite modern updates, I still don't consider it as such. Then again I don't have much to worry about, so I'm ambivalent most of the time. That said, special 'fuck you' shoutouts to Ticketek for being compromised and their general ineptitude and shitfuckery in so many ways... It took them 2 months to respond to an issue I raised with them only to ask whether it was still an issue... (yes, it still is).
Unfortunately I don't know if you could easily manage to convince majority email providers you're legitimite with a new domain in this day and age - I suspect its now a major hurdle to overcome as I've read often enough of mail bouncing because "we've never heard of you until now, so we don't trust you" - which makes communicating with the majority of the world via email almost impossible to build up the trust level you're considered legitimite and that's despite all this extra DMARC, DKIM, and SPF and SSL/TLS supposed safeguards which have appeared over time and I've had to comply with.
Security as an afterthought means its still probably never going to be secure. I've always considered email the equivalent of transmitting plaintext and have always treated it as such. This has led to some pretty difficult situations where I don't email important stuff to a 3rd party just because they expect it and everyone else does it.