𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Oh, color laser is the way to go, for sure. Refills are expensive, but rare; the biggest problem is if you have to move them, they’re a nightmare. And far heavier than inkjet. But, all things being equal, I’d take a color, duplex laser any day.

You’re not the first person I’ve heard who’s had trouble with Ecotanks. I’ve been very fortunate and have not had any issues. I did learn that you need to print at least once a week or the heads tend to clog; the downside of never replacing the heads with the cartridges, I guess. But now I just have a cron job that prints a test page once a week and it’s fine.

Both Ecotanks and laser eliminate that “print anxiety”, where you’re afraid to use the device because each page costs $2 because of the cartridges costs.

To paraphrase Quint: “I’ll never replace a cartridge again.”

Epson Ecotanks. Liquid ink in, prints out. There’s nothing to lock out.

More uncomfortable how, exactly?

Reminds me of a Bakshi film. I wonder if Ralph was inspired by this.

Better than Butterfly? Better than Dymaxion??

Ba-da-ching!

Came here to say this, but you did, so I’ll ask for the Dymaxion projection.

Radio has especially durable blood.

Really?

No, I’m serious. I don’t have crocs for a variety of reasons, so I’m ignorant and possibly a my own expense. I have slid my feet into other’s once or twice, you know, when visiting and needing to cross a wet yard, and they’ve always felt uncomfortable to me.

Easy to put on, I get, but that’s true of half the shoe designs out there. Cleaning… Ok I can see that. Spray them down with a garden hose, right? But comfortable? Can you explain that?

I, too, am curious about the appeal. Not enough to wear a pair, but perhaps you can explain. Are they like leather, and conform to your feet over time?

The best restaurants I’ve ever been to have been in London. But, then, they rarely serve “traditional” English food. Dollar for dollar, the food in London is better than the food in Paris.

Outside of London - sorry, I agree with the map. English cuisine has a few of things they do better than anyone else, but the meals have not impressed me. I can’t speak for the rest of the UK; I haven’t visited Scotland or Ireland, and only drove a few miles in Wales by accident.

However. I will fight anyone for a Cornish pasty. I don’t know where they were invented, but like all great foods they’re both delicious and made with, like, 6 ingredients.

My credentials include more than a single trip. I’ve had 4 vacations in France, and 2 years lived for 2 weeks every other month in Paris. I’ve had two vacations in England, and lived for 1-2 weeks every month in London, again for two years running. I have a great amount of experience with restaurants at all price ranges in both cities, and a reasonable exposure to cuisine outside of the capitals.

I agree there’s a lot of design repetition throughout the AI logo ecosystem. It’s almost as if the leadership of these companies did something asinine like use AI to generate a new logo, which would guarantee that they all look similar. But that would be stupid, right? And CEOs aren’t stupid, lazy, and tight-fisted, right?

However, I’m not here to speculate about how useless CEOs are, or whether of you put a bunch of morons in a room together, they unsurprisingly make moronic decisions, or whether any executives reading this will huff and puff about how they aren’t useless leeches making decisions about a business involving technology they don’t understand. No, I’m here to quibble about terminology.

Hexagons are, indeed, the bestagons. However, few of these logos in this graphic are hexagons, and most don’t even resemble hexagons.

1. … is. Vaguely, but technically, yes.
2. is a circle. Maybe a Möbius strip, but not a hexagon.
3. Is an octagon
4. Is another Möbius strip circle
5. Is another circle. You might argue that it could be a dodecagon, because it has 12 leaves, but again: not a hexagon.
6. Finally, a true, unambiguous hexagon.
7. Another hexagon!
8. A circle (or maybe an octagon), stealing the styling of #7. However, the void center does form a hexagon, so I’ll count it - even though the void center of 6 is a circle.
9. Another true hexagon. Now we’re rolling! Containing a circle made from the stroke design in #6, and containing yet another circle.
10. My favorite. Not only a hexagon on the outside and inside, but offset by 60°
11. Breaks the run. Back to circles, this time containing a square. Nothing hexa- about it.
12. A circle, containing a circle. There are 6 segments in the stroke also used by #6 and #9, but it’s still not a hexagon; just unoriginal.
13. Another circular Möbius strip, although the interior does form a hexagon.

Observations:

• They really missed their chance at some symmetry at a neat dozen, which is at least related to hexagons by being a multiple of 6, by having 13 logos (excluding DeepSeek).
• Of 13 logos, a smidge over half (7) have a hexagon in them somewhere; 2 of those are because of the shape of the empty space at the center of the logo, so fewer than half of the logos (5) are actually hexagonal in shape.
• More logos (9) contain elements of circles than contain elements of hexagons.
• Möbius strips show up a few times
• Several (7) use a 6-segment, 2-strand, vaguely Celtic braid

There is a fantastic amount of re-use of style in these.

The first logo is actually either 3 interlocking ovals, or two interlocked distorted triangles (with hidden bends); it’s interesting, topologically.

Hexagons do recur, but the title:

new logo trend: the swirling hexagon

is inaccurate as over half the logos contain no hexagonal elements. They all do tend to swirl, and most are symmetric. It’s have been more accurate to say “the swirling circle”, or “the celtic knot”.

It’s hard to believe that most of these weren’t generated by AI; few are actually unique (#5) and share almost no element of another.

Good luck!

You rule.

I stay away from Usenet because I’m particularly susceptible to it as a time sink. It’s worse than Lemmy, than Mastodon; I can spend hours in Usenet, and I’m really incapable of not doing that when I have access to it.

But I’m really glad it’s still active.

It really depends on your needs, like most things.

What are you trying to achieve? Just set up a place for folks to chat about a topic?

I’m inclined to suggest that if you’re moving from Discord, then I suggest you pick a public server and create your room there. You already aren’t self-hosting or getting bridging, so no loss. A public Mjolnir used to be on matrix.org but isn’t anymore, so you have to be alert to spammers; if you have enough people you’re willing to make mods, this is manageable. Matrix spammers tend to pop in, drop some fishing or advertisement; if you have someone watching 24/7 they can ban-and-remove the spam pretty quickly. Otherwise, you clean things up whenever you’re in there; it’s annoying, but not arduous. If you’re a small room, you won’t attract the spammers as much; if you’re larger, I’d hope you have enough folks who can help mod.

I would not try to self-host out of the gate. If you do, start with a beefy server; you’ll need a bunch of disk space - maybe not immediately, but as soon as one of your users joins a big room on a different server. I’ve only tried Synapse; you might try one of the other servers, but they’ll all have the same disk space issue: it’s a result is the design of the protocol.

Matrix is probably the closest; it’s federated, there are a dozen more-or-less actively developed clients, for just about every platform. You can self-host your own server. It has a lot of features.

It’s not perfect; it has a lot of flaws, but there’s slow progress. Things to be aware of:

• Despite it being “open”, there’s really only one server that supports everything, and that’s Synapse. It’s where all of the new features are tested and land first. All other (half-dozen) servers lag Synapse. And - IMHO - Synapse is an awful piece of software. It’s a giant mess of Python, and it lumbers along like a bloated, arthritic hippopotamus.
• The way federation is done makes it very expensive to self-host. Everything’s fine until one of your users joins - even briefly - a popular room, and suddenly your server’s downloading 9GB of history and binary blobs. This can be managed, but you may as well quit your job and become a full-time admin, because
• moderation tools suck. Aside from the most basic banning, all mod tools are external servers you have to set up and configure and run in parallel. And the most essential tool - mjolnir, a “this account is a troll spam bot, so ban it site-wide” is still very beta-ish and it’s nearly impossible to get any help with setting up or using it.
• It’s really a rather heavy protocol. Lots of network traffic.
• bridging is better in theory than practice. Most bridging requires you to run your own server, and few major hosts provide anything more than IRC bridging, and even then you can’t actually bridge to most of the biggest IRC networks because it’s blocked by the IRC providers, because Matrix bridges are a major source of spam grief for the IRC rooms. And setting up a bridge between a Matrix and an (e.g.) Discord room is a fairly significant PITA, requiring a Discord mod to perform several steps.
• It does hand e2e encryption for DMs, but it’s honestly pretty bad at it. It’s a better Discord than a, say, Signal. Key management is a minor nightmare and it is both prone to breakage, and complex, with a lot of fairly obscure terminology needed to understand any but the most basic operations. Like, when it’s working, it’s fine, but as soon as anything goes wrong, you’re in a world of pain. I came count the number of times I’ve lost entire chat histories with people.

And to throw up a challenge before anyone disagrees about that last point: try changing clients several times, across devices, and on the same client. Delete your client and reconnect (as if you lost your phone). See how long you can go before you hit a point where you can’t get to your chat history.

It’s a good alternative to Discord; it’s categorically better than Discord. If you’re not hosting the server, it’s better than IRC; the user experience is simply undebatably better. It’s a crappy IM platform. It needs far better mod tools, and some competitor to Synapse has to get out of Beta.

But if all you’re looking for is an alternative to Discord and you ate fine with using a public service, it’s a good choice.

TELL EVERYONE ABOUT USENET

Yeah, there was, and probably still is, a bunch of warez trading on Usenet. But everything that was good and holy was also on Usenet.

Anyway, plebes won’t show up there anymore because nobody runs free nodes anymore, and the worst of us are so used to being products the idea of paying for a service is a foreign concept.

Usenet existed long before the Eternal September. It survived that and the subsequent decades; it’s never been some sort of secret haven - it’s been a haven only because it wasn’t trivial to use, web interfaces for it never caught on, it started costing money to be on, and these are deal breakers for the people you don’t want on Usenet.

You make my heart hurt, you’re so right. It’s getting harder and harder to find RSS or Atom links on sites. The more people rediscover these technologies, the more chance there is that site developers will continue to provide them.

It would be fantastic if more people would rediscover Usenet, and IRC, and ditch the shitty knock-offs like Discord. There’s a pretty big contingent advocating for Jabber, which I’m ambivalent about, having been there when it started and when it (effectively) died and being very conscious of its flaws and limitations… but, still, these are all open standards and old-school internet - sometimes pre-web! - and they’re often still better than the commoditized successors.

Embrace and encourage the new infusion of youth! Gate keeping is a very post-eternal-September behavior.

Okay. I don’t think it’s a bad map; I think it would have helped to define what counts as “a coast,” is all.

People fervently believe what they desire, regardless of evidence to the contrary. It’s a really annoying fact of human nature sadly few people are able to resist.

She wants it to be normalized so that her situation will be validated, and so she naturally believes it will be. Not an unusual behavior at all. Even scientists who should know better (fusion power within the next 10 years! GAI within the next 5 years!) are susceptible.

So, the definition is “a body of water from which one can navigate - even if by river or canal - to an ocean”? How big does the traversal have to be - if I can get there by canoe without portage, does that count? What about Lake Eirie? AFAIK, you can’t navigate without portage from Eirie to the Atlantic, but it connects to Lake Ontario via the Niagara River.