Mildly spicy web advertising takes

* 468x60 static non-animated non-tracking banners for cool webcomics and weird hobby blogs are brilliant and only the most tedious of people have any problem with them at all

* blog writers and webcomic artists getting paid a couple bucks here and there for running non-intrusive ads is Good Actually

* the shittiness of web ads scales exponentially in accordance with how much money you're trying to make off them - if you want a few extra quid each month for pizza and beer money, web ads are great and useful to everyone, that's the perfect use case; if you want more money than that then ads are the wrong tool for the job, and you can in fact use the wrong tool wrong enough to destroy democracy

Edit: one more

* the fact that my adblocker will look at a 468x60 non-animated non-intrusive non-spyware banner ad for a gay webcomic and go "ah yes, this can go in the same hole as this 50 megabyte video ad for a toothbrush you bought last week, loaded with so much spyware javascript that your processor fan roars like a jet engine," by DEFAULT, is... honestly tragic. These are Different Things but, remember the most tedious people in the world I mentioned above? They made the adblocker

LB: remembered that I'm giving away advertising space for free PURELY BECAUSE THE WORST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WANT TO CHARGE LOADS OF MONEY FOR IT, please give me your 468x60 pixel non-animated banner for your hobby website or small (small!) business.

Make it colourful and cool looking like something that someone would want to click. I'm not going to put it over content or move stuff around just as someone's moving their finger to tap on something or any of that bullshit, I'm not going to TRICK people into clicking it accidentally, so if you want anyone to click on it then it has to be Actually Enticing. Put it in https://www.improbableisland.com/hobbysites.php and tell your webring.

EDIT: expand this thread for examples of good ads, cool/interesting replies and some of the most incredibly niche websites you've ever seen

whenever I try to read Math Things it’s always super cryptic and using normal words in vague and esoteric ways like “an algebra is a set of values, a set of operators that it is closed under and some laws it must obey” and I’m just like, okay I don’t know what most of those words are supposed to mean and I can’t google them but I at least know what an operator is and what a value is so I think I get the gist? “an algebra is when there are values and operators and laws are involved somehow”

Boosts plz

Fox has been added into the game, and with this we're about ready to upload the new build for betatesting!
#babaisyou

I've posted it here before, but I'm still happy with https://memorable.website/. How much I was able to get from just using HTML, no CSS, no JS, nothing but good old markup.

No shade on CSS, and only some shade on JS. But it's nice to see that some of the basic stuff still works in some ways.

I’ve been reading a Lisp math paper by the creator of Lisp which describes Lisp in mathematical terms and then describes how Lisp can be used to produce a Lisp interpreter in very few lines of “code”/“math”

and first of all I definitely think that there’s something beautiful about a language that can be explained “simply” (very relatively speaking) in terms of itself, but that is also so powerful that it can be built up from those basic building blocks into a full-featured programming language

it is a very dense read, and I find it funny how the creator of Lisp himself is apologetic about the syntax of Lisp lol. at the time of writing this it seems like he was interested in finding a better syntax but was limited by the BCDIC character set of the IBM computers he worked on

I feel like the creator did his best to explain things clearly but definitely could have done better, and I noticed a few syntax errors in his handwritten Lisp code and/or math syntax which I find kinda funny. even the creator of Lisp gets his parenthesis mixed up. some of those threw me for a loop for a while and I’m still not 100% sure if certain things are mistakes or if I’m just misunderstanding something

but idk reading through this paper has definitely given me a deeper appreciation for Lisp as a mathematical model of computation, and as a language. I can definitely see the beauty of a language whose entire core feature-set can be explained in a 35-page math paper. and which could presumably be explained in a longer article that’s designed to be more accessible for laypeople and has the mistakes fixed

also, I really wonder how close something like Common Lisp or Scheme is to the conceptual simplicity of the Lisp presented in this paper. I feel like Common Lisp has had a lot of… things added to it over the years, and I wonder if these languages still boil down to basic operations like car and cdr, maybe some arithmetic operations, etc. or if the list of mathematical primitives that they boil down to has gotten large and messy. unfortunately “large and messy” is the impression that I get of most Lisps, except for maybe Fennel and Janet

why not recommend Arch to beginners it can be stable if you know what you're doing

i dont think they know what beginners are

got a MRI today and just having a massive objectum crush on the machine. like an mri is the most cozy romantic thing ever. the giant machine takes you inside it and you're in this safe little dark enclosed space and it wants you to just close your eyes and lie perfectly still and be a good little doll for 30 minutes while it sings to you in a voice so powerful that it gently wiggles you, on both a tactile and molecular level. humming and thrumming and making so many pretty noises for you as it peers into your inner workings, taking you apart without even taking you apart. aaaaaaa

my Tech Thing of choice is programming and the thing about programming is that in well-written code, {everything your code is doing} is explicitly visible and usually organized in an easy-to-understand hierarchy. if you want to know how the parser works, look inside of the parser module and recurse until you find the specific function that does the thing that you’re interested in

but administrating a Linux system is not like that at all which is a big part of why I hate it. config files are scattered everywhere, there’s no easy way to figure out what’s installed or what’s running at any given time, and nothing is organized in any way that makes sense to me

so I think I can understand the appeal of NixOS just because it lets you turn your Linux config into a nicely-organized codebase instead of the vague low-level chaos of a thousand config files and 5 different package managers

also it seems like Linux organizes its files based on what type of file they are. for example there’s a directory that contains every logfile for every program on the system, and there’s another that contains every executable for every program on the system. and I really prefer the Windows approach of having one directory per program instead of one directory per type of file. that way I can say “I’m interested in neovim” and go into my neovim directory and see every file related to neovim all at once. and I think that’s roughly how NixOS works too

One thing I find kind of fascinating is the way artistic genres can sometimes emerge from what's essentially pranks and hoaxes.

Pro-wrestling is a good example of that, it has its roots in rigged wrestling matches and it spent a lot of time maintaining this polite fiction that it wasn't staged long past the time where it had gone from being an attempt to scam people to being a form of entertainment and artistic expression in its own right.

(There was a time when just enough people genuinely wrestling was real that you might feel the need to point out that its not, but enough people knew that it wasn't that "wrestling is fake!" was seen as kind of an annoying position to hold, like being the one guy getting angry at model train enthusiasts because their photos of trains are "faked", they are real model trains!")

My most unhinged personal theory that I genuinely believe is true is that the love for sci fi looking gas masks in drone kink is because of Bionicle

at the decentralized nerd internet, services only go down if hetzner or netcup are dead

Pokemon game that never gets around to having gameplay. it just introduces characters, railroads, and tutorializes mechanics for 200 hours and then the credits roll

🤖 SECURITY BOT v0.1 COMMANDS YOU TO WISHLIST RECONFIGURE: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3989530/Reconfigure/

Look at how firmly its feet are planted on the ground thanks to some IK and raycasting magic!
#godot #indiegame #pixelart

Sometimes it is very easy to de-anonymize redacted documents
https://media.defense.gov/2025/Sep/17/2003800984/-1/-1/0/CG-115_INTERVIEW-DEEP-SEA-EXPLORER_REDACTED.PDF