yt-dlp supports a number of video streaming websites, not just YouTube.

This is now fixed, but you didn’t used to be able to filter excluding game tags on Steam.

Though Steam doesn’t have a single unified search interface. You’re probably referring to the most-comprehensive one, the one used on the Steam Store after you’ve performed a search. That one does have “exclude tag” functionality now. But there are a bunch more, which have varying levels of completeness in functionality. For example, the list that comes up on the store when you click on a sale. Or the list of games in the sidebar in your library. Or the list of games on the “shelf” in your library, in the large pane. They don’t all support the same criteria.

I have before commented to say that I wish that they’d unify all their search interfaces.

data centers and supercomputing facilities, which consume voracious amounts of electricity and water

Memphis is on the Mississippi. Evaporating the volume of the Mississippi at Memphis with graphics cards would be a pretty impressive feat.

kagis

https://snoflo.org/flow/report/tennessee/

TENNESSEE FLOW REPORT

August 22 2025

Streamflow levels across Tennessee are currently 92.0% of normal, with the Mississippi River At Memphis reporting the highest discharge in the state with 354000cfs

345,000 cubic feet of water per second is a pretty substantial amount of water.

EDIT: Water has a heat of vaporization of 2.23 kJ/g.

345k ft³ water is 9.7×10⁹ cm³, so 9.7×10⁹g

That’s about 2.2×10¹⁰kJ to vaporize it (disregarding the specific heat of water, just the heat of vaporization).

1kJ ≈ 0.28 Wh.

So 6,160,000,000 Wh to vaporize the water going through in a second.

3,600 seconds in an hour.

So at a flow rate of 345k ft³ that’d sink about 22 trillion watts through vaporization alone.

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/egee102/node/1925

In 2024, the world wide energy consumption was about 186,000 TWhs

8760 hours in a year. So global average power usage is about 21 TW.

If we put the entire world’s generated electricity towards heat to vaporize the Mississippi at Memphis, it’d still fall a bit short.

EDIT2: I also inadvertently transposed two digits (should be 354,000 ft³/sec rather than 345,000 ft³/sec) in transcribing the initial flow rate, so it’d fall slightly shorter.

Frankly, animations in general. Okay, for Web-based video games, maybe I get it. If your website is not a video game, why am I watching visual elements zing around? If I walked up to a bank or a grocery store and then had to stop and patiently wait by the door while some animation involving the store’s logo or bank played, how many customers would take that store seriously? Why are you doing it on your website? I don’t want fade-ins, fade-outs, buttons that slide in from the side, anything like that.

I’m not really familiar with Firefox’s performance analysis tools, but fumbling around with the Network tab, with my browser cache off, I believe that that webpage, including all dependent files, had loaded in ~160ms, sans the favicon (which was another 24ms).

So many expensively-developed websites that aren’t even remotely as responsive.

I don’t know if it’s a good idea for sites to do so, but I personally hate websites having some sort of timeout and then killing the session if they don’t detect activity. I never walk away from my system with it unlocked. Sometimes I need to do other things on another desktop, and I don’t want to be forced to manually click things to keep the session live. I will grant that probably, there are people who don’t do that, but this really is obnoxious.

Also, very short timeouts on 2FA systems that use stuff like email. I’ve had antispam systems greylist authentication emails and that create problems with sites that have short timeouts.

If your website is light-mode, also have a dark mode. And respect the user’s requested dark-mode setting from the browser via prefers-color-scheme. Don’t require them to use the site in some default mode to go through the login process and log in and explicitly set the thing in your internal account settings. That’s especially annoying for users who may have something like time-based modes on their system (I don’t, always want dark mode, but it’s extra obnoxious for them.)

I think that the entire “m.” convention for forcing use of a mobile site — Wikipedia being a prominent example of this practice — is a terrible idea. It means that mobile users inadvertently send links to desktop users that force a mobile-mode page, which is virtually never desirable for the desktop users. I don’t know what the state-of-the-art here is in web dev, but I am very certain that there are better options than that, because lots of sites manage to have a mobile site without doing this. If you want to have a way to force mobile or force desktop mode in your URL, fine. But for God’s sake, don’t make that the default. I have spent more time manually stripping “m.” off Wikipedia URLs on discussion sites so as not to inconvenience desktop users when I happen to be using mobile, or stripping it out of URLs from mobile users when I’m on a desktop…and yes, there are extensions to help with this, but it really shouldn’t be a problem in the first place, I think.

I like my browser’s back button to work. Some sites maintain session state that cause things to break when moving back to a prior page. Short of some obvious examples, where irrevocable changes to state have occurred (e.g. making a payment at a bank to someone) and it’s obviously not possible to back things out, I want to be able to use my browser’s features.

I think that you’re going to need some context here for a useful answer. Are we talking about a hardware MP3 player? An Android phone? A Linux laptop? Just a recorded audio file where you want to have a period of silence?

No. I think that things have pretty steadily gotten better over time, and that a great deal of people being upset about now for any given now comes from a tendency to focus on negatives. Could be social media or news media tending to bring negatives to the surface because it drives engagement, political activists aiming to drive or leverage upset, or so forth.

User visits community for people to post photographs they take, encounters posted photograph, gets upset

And I’ve never played any of the Total War games so I guess I need to look into those too!

Just to be clear, the Total War games make up a large collection that span many settings and themes (e.g. ancient Japan or Rome). It’s the Warhammer line of games within that collection that is specifically fantasy, and inside that, it’s specifically the Curse of the Vampire Coast stuff that has the undead pirates.

That’s not to say that the series is bad — it’s been a prominent strategy game series for a long time — but if what you’re looking for is specifically undead pirate stuff, only a small portion of that collection is relevant.

You kinda made me wonder how the “undead pirate” theme developed. Sounds like it might have been at least in part around The Flying Dutchman, though that’s not the only “supernatural maritime” folklore, and that specific story wasn’t originally about pirates.

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), a friend of John Leyden’s, was the first to refer to the vessel as a pirate ship, writing in the notes to Rokeby (first published December 1812) that the ship was “originally a vessel loaded with great wealth, on board of which some horrid act of murder and piracy had been committed” and that the apparition of the ship “is considered by the mariners as the worst of all possible omens”.

https://fathomsdeepbeyond.substack.com/p/the-flying-dutchman

As to games, have you played the classic Monkey Island series? It’s not all that dark, but it is pirates and ghosts.

If you play the Total War: Warhammer games, there are undead pirate factions in the second game’s Curse of the Vampire Coast DLC. You can buy multiple games and use the factions from different titles in later games. I don’t know if that has enough story for you.

EDIT: TV Tropes calls it the “Ghost Pirate”:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GhostPirate

Despite the name, the Ghost Pirate trope includes all forms of undead pirates, including zombie or skeletal variants (literal skeleton crews).

EDIT2: I thought that the Flying Dutchman didn’t involve pirates at all, but WP says that it did become associated with pirates at some point; added reference above.

EDIT3: Going a bit out of genre, there’s Sunless Sea. That’s Lovecraftian and Victorian British naval stuff, but not really specifically undead and the player’s ship isn’t a pirate ship. Might be close enough in feel to make you happy, though. I’m not really a huge fan of the game, as I don’t like the gameplay much. It’s really about the ambience and feel, but it might be right up your alley.

Not certain of whether you’re thinking specifically of plain ASCII art or also ANSI art (which was specifically around that time and made use of PC drawing characters and ANSI escape sequences), but there’s a software package called ansilove that will render ANSI art, as well as some related text art formats, into an image for viewing.

https://www.ansilove.org/

It’s packaged in Debian Trixie.

https://16colo.rs/ is a gallery of ANSI art. A lot of the thumbnails are in grayscale, but tap on them and they’ll open up and have a lot of colorful artwork.

From an organizational standpoint, it doesn’t sound unreasonable to me.

The group will be split into four smaller groups, according to a New York Times report. One group will focus on AI research, another one on infrastructure and hardware projects, one on AI products, and another one on building out AI superintelligence, a hypothetical AI system that could outperform human intelligence on any and all scales.

I mean, they have different skillsets, a fair bit of that is going to be on decoupled timelines, they have different levels of risk, and the technical expertise is going to differ. One succeeding or failing isn’t tightly coupled to another doing so. Sure, they all relate to one thing or another to something that has been called “AI”, but that’s a pretty broad group.

If you use the standard editor, ed, then these sorts of things are no obstacle.

Well, interoffice memos.

Yes. You typed it out. You don’t need Lunix for that.

I mean, I’d have a hard time manually running the fastfetch binary part.

That typewriter probably doesn’t support color, but apparently some had a ribbon with multiple colors and the ability to select among them.

https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1jnie9o/can_someone_pls_tell_me_why_my_typewriter_has/

This guy is using it to do color accents with typewriter art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqi2qY918M

EDIT: Oh, wait, holy shit. This ribbon is multicolor — you can see the red stripe on the ribbon, and apparently the Remington Travel Riter Deluxe does support multiple colors on a ribbon.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/133756651478

EDIT2: Here’s the manual:

https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/RemingtonRandTravel-RiterDeLuxe_Manual.pdf

I think that it’s the lever in the upper right on the front that switches color.

EDIT3: You know, decades ago, I remember fiddling with my dad’s typewriter. It had a selector lever there too. Could never figure out what it was for, seem to recall that it adjusted the height of the hammers, which seemed pointless. He only had a black ribbon, but I bet that it supported a multicolor ribbon, and that’s what it was for. Never did resolve that mystery until now!

I was watching the thing and got to the part where he said that he was using XON/XOFF flow control and thought that the guy’s Arduino RS-232 ASCII-to-Baudot-encoding thing could be made more efficient if he’d make the encoder use the RS-232 RTS/CTS lines instead of XON/XOFF encoding. Then I realized that he’s converting to 45.5 baud, and that at that speed, even his 9600 baud line — normally the chokepoint for people with modern hardware, you know, 1980s and on or so — is blisteringly fast and inefficiency at that point is irrelevant.

Terminal emulators are bloat

The Linux kernel itself contains a terminal emulator — that’s how you can swap among virtual terminals on the console — and unless the code was rewritten at some point, that’s really the true core of Linux; the Linux kernel originally was a terminal emulator, before the other stuff got added. Before Linus even made his first announcement, when it was still a purely one-man project that he was banging on:

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-very-first-interview-about-linux

The very first interview about Linux with Linus Torvalds - Oct 28, 1992

LN: Please give a short summary of the history of Linux.

Linus: Difficult. “Linux” didn’t really exist until about August-91 - before that what I had was essentially just a very basic protected mode system that had evolved from a glorified “Hello world” program into a even more glorified terminal emulator. Linux stopped for quite a while at the terminal emulator stage: I played around with Minix, and used my protected mode program to read news from the univerity machine. No down/upload, but it did a fair vt100 emulation, and did it by using two tasks which communicated from keybodard->modem and modem->screen.

By mid-summer -91, “Linux” was able to read the disk (joyful moment), and eventually had a small and stupid disk driver and a simple buffer cache. So I started out trying to make a filesystem, and used the Minix fs for simple practical reasons: that way I already had a file layout I could test things on. After some more programming (talk about glossing things over), I had a very simple UNIX that had some of the basic functionalities of the real thing: I could run small test-programs under it.

That being said, I think that most people are probably using the framebuffer console these days — you aren’t usually talking to your graphics card in text mode on x86-64 machines, but rather in graphics mode, and an image of text is being rendered and handed to the graphics card, and I don’t know if internally, the original virtual terminal code is used beneath that or if there’s a different stack and two independent in-kernel virtual terminal emulators.

here is a checksum of my /usr/lib folder

That’s actually not as trivial as it seems, because you need a canonical representation of that directory to generate such a thing in the same way on each side.

You need to encode the metadata in a standard way, encode new data that shows up in a standard way, and various people can add more metadata to files: think like Posix ACLs or the immutable flag or whatever.

Then there is maybe some metadata that you probably want to exclude, like atime (though not if you’re something like rsync -U!), and some metadata that you almost-certainly want to exclude, like inode number.

The OS’s file APIs won’t have a defined order in which they return entries in a directory. Like, they’ll normally just return it in whatever order things come back from the filesystem, which is probably whatever is most-efficient for the filesystem in question, given how things are encoded on disk. If you sort the directory entries, then it can’t be — as is the case for most things on the system — done in a locale-dependent fashion. Utilities like tar don’t impose a canonical ordering, so you can’t just dump the problems on tar by checksumming a tarball of the directory.

EDIT: tar does appear to have a canonical ordering option today, though it also probably doesn’t have the constraint of being backwards-compatible with metadata included, another thing that one would need for such a checksum if one were to leverage tar.