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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Followup in the spirit of documenting it for someone else: If you modify the fonts in qt5ct.conf, removing the last option, for some reason it does exactly what I want: looking at notepadqq, I get a bold menu, but non-bold body text.

    [Fonts]

    fixed=“Go Mono,11,-1,5,50,1,0,0,0,0,0”

    general=“Helvetica,11,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0”

    It seems like removing the last paramater treats the specification as less prescriptive-- places in the UI that call for bold get it, and non-bold gets it. This is evident in the Double Commander Qt package, where some parts of the UI are bold and others aren’t.









  • “Us versus them” politics are asking for a complete washout on the international stage.

    In the end, when the shit hits the fan, are you going to align yourself with the country that makes All the Things, or the one that can’t even pass a budget? COVID proved that it wasn’t just good-times, low-stakes gridlock: even existential crises weren’t enough to get America to cooperate and discipline herself.

    If real life were a survival movie, we’d be getting to the scene where the secondary characters decide whether to follow Grandpa Sticky, who’s in the midst of full-blown dementia and was at best a vaguely racist philosophy professor when lucid, or the 22-year-old trained soldier with a fully stocked supply line. And we’d be throwing popcorn at the screen and deriding how terrible the writing is.



  • Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

    For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

    Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

    • A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
    • a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
    • followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
    • a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)