I don’t try explaining this stuff anymore. I’m extremely bad at it and I know most people will either not care or not care enough. And that’s fine. It’s easier to let people think I’m a luddite. I prefer to wait for them to ask me why I use technology differently than to preach to them, and most of the time, they don’t ask. It’s always easier to let people convince themselves than to try to convince them.

I tell them to install Signal and message me there, and if they don’t want to do that, they can SMS me. Signal is a better idea if they want faster responses as I rarely check my phone but do check Signal Desktop fairly regularly. I have tried to get KDE Connect working so I can respond to SMS more timely but it was annoying and I gave up.

It doesn’t really mean anything on its own. It’s romanized as “Shi”. If you know your Japanese, you’ll know “Shi” is how you pronounce 死; or “Death”. The word is not usually written in Katakana, though. There’s also ツ, which is romanized as “Tsu”.

Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as o and not wo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:

• 大文字と小文字を無視する
• だいもんじとこもじをむしする

Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That’s the sanest suggestion (who’s with me?):

• ダイモンジトコモジヲムシスル

Of course, you’re kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don’t generally render unicode…so let’s go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.

Honestly I laugh at the people whining about password sharing getting shut down. It was never really intended to be used that way

To quote Netflix, “Love is sharing a password”: https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

I haven’t been subscribed to a streaming service for about five years. Well, sometimes I pay for a month of Hidive. I usually just buy the show/film on disc and rip it. A decent amount of the shows I want to watch are old and not even on a streaming service.

It’s a good movie, but I find myself completely confused by the driving part at the end. The people who were in the van manage to catch up to him almost immediately, suggesting that the other guy could have just run across the distance to get to the van in the first place, saving everyone all the drama and hilarity.

I thought Wargames was a pretty good one too (mostly). It’s by the same writers.

The NET is…fun…

That’s a nice piece of hardware you’ve got there.

As the OSI says in the post linked above:

This is not to say that Elastic, or any company, shouldn’t adopt whatever license is appropriate for its own business needs. That may be a proprietary license, whether closed source or with source available. […] What a company may not do is claim or imply that software under a license that has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative, much less a license that does not meet the Open Source Definition, is open source software. It’s deception, plain and simple, to claim that the software has all the benefits and promises of open source when it does not.

A lot of companies are trying to redefine what “open source” means. And regrettably, this is probably something that was inevitable with a name as open to interpretation as “open source”, but it’s unfortunate that the OSI was denied the trademark for the term. If they owned the trademark, nobody would believe projects like ElasticSearch and MongoDB are open source when they do not meet the Open Source Definition (OSD), because those companies wouldn’t be able to claim they are.

Open source was never about preventing people from making a profit. That sounds more like the original Linux license, where Linus Torvalds didn’t want money to change any hands in the process of conveying the software. I can’t imagine how much worse things would be if Linus never transitioned to a license that met the OSD. My belief is that there is nothing wrong with making money so long as the software meets the OSD. I know at least the GNU Project actively encourages people to sell free software.

The GNU kernel was not originally supposed to be called the Hurd. Its original name was Alix—named after the woman who was my sweetheart at the time. She, a Unix system administrator, had pointed out how her name would fit a common naming pattern for Unix system versions; as a joke, she told her friends, “Someone should name a kernel after me.” I said nothing, but decided to surprise her with a kernel named Alix.

Source: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html

I’m assuming uralsolo is talking about free software as in, software which gives users the four freedoms.

I don’t think all software needs to be free, but in some ways, it’s no longer the issue of the day. In this day and age, a lot of what we’re using is no longer really software. We’re using services with client-side Javascript which is nominally free software (but not really). Most of the actual software is sitting behind a server. I see this as good and bad. It means users of less popular operating systems get access to the same services as users of popular operating systems so long as they have browsers, and the negatives are, well…I’m sure you don’t need my help to think of some.

It’s hard to make money with free software because everyone has the right to commercially exploit it. For this reason alone, I don’t think it’s necessary for all software to be free, but I’ll be there to celebrate the programs that are free.

I learn something new every week about subjects I was decided on for a long time, forcing me to re-evaluate. It seems like there are more knowledgeable people here than on Reddit. I do wish our visualnovels community was more active, but alas, it’s a more niche subject that’s bound to grow slowly.

Japanese visual novels, because there are more of them.

Cool project! I’m always on the lookout for more search services. It works without Javascript, which is great! It’s very clean and focused.

The Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for Google are embarrassingly large. Here’s a comparison from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-speed.html

It’s a little surprising that Duckduckgo’s SERPs are even bigger…

I know of a few others that fit this use case, if anyone’s interested.

Kagi’s interface works entirely without Javascript and is a meta-search engine with results from Google, Bing, and its own indexes, and I think it has some of the best results (paid search though).

Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index and is accessible without Javascript.

Another cool, fast search engine with its own index (though smaller) is Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/

This one is free software, and you can view the sources here: https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu

And there’s also Searx, which is a fairly lightweight (but nowhere near as much as Blaze is) metasearch engine released as free software: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

You can build visual novels in Ren’Py, which uses only Python, but that might not be what you’re looking for.

However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.

Gigablast went down 2 months ago. The crawler is available as free software, though.

Mojeek’s Search Engine Map gives you a good picture of the search engines out there. You can also see Seirdy’s very informative post on all the different search engines out there, which is fairly regularly updated: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/