08:00 <SiFuh> Time for a break

11:05 <dlcusa> A call for the formation of Stupid Anonymous: https://brownstone.org/articles/needed-stupid-anonymous/

11:07 <SiFuh> Not enough space to seat them all

14:16 <farkuhar> There are 26 external stylesheets loaded by the Piers Gelly article "What happened when I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English classroom". Identifying by hand which of those stylesheets defines how the browser should render <span class="pullquote"> is too much work.

14:19 <farkuhar> That particular tag would be better if rendered invisible, when running `lynx -dump` on the page. Otherwise it's a tedious cleanup job, to delete all the "pullquotes" from the flat-text version before printing.

14:23 <farkuhar> If <span class="pullquote"> is used more widely than just lithub.com, maybe it's worthwhile to define a user stylesheet so that lynx can render the contents block-quoted. Otherwise those excerpts have the same margins as the other paragraphs, and there's no visual distinction to alert the reader that the flow of the story is being interrupted.

16:57 <SiFuh> https://www.rt.com/news/622480-australia-machete-disposal-bins/

17:20 <SiFuh> zorz: Correction from yesterday not AB-INBEV and SARS. It is AB-INBEV and SABMILLER

17:36 <dlcusa> farkuhar, why are you doing that?

18:07 <farkuhar> dlcusa: I want to maintain the viability of a CLI solution for making dead-tree copies of interesting websites. The extra steps of editing manually the output of `lynx -dump`, and then opening the Firefox print dialog to get 2 pages per sheet (as opposed to a2ps), constitute a much more laborious workflow.

18:20 <farkuhar> The lithub.com article is just the latest test case for troubleshooting the CLI workflow. I could easily focus on a different webpage when I find the next print-worthy thing, but for now this one is well-suited to exposing the weaknesses of my existing CLI tools.

18:24 <farkuhar> Currently the two biggest weaknesses: lynx does not adequately render <span class="pullquote"> in a visually distinctive manner (unlike <h2> or <h3> which are properly set apart from the main text), and a2ps in its default configuration generates headers and footers at too large a font size.

18:27 <farkuhar> The lynx problem can probably be solved with a user-defined stylesheet. As for a2ps, I still hold out hope that one of my backup hard drives has an old copy of /usr/etc/a2ps-site.cfg that will do the right thing when inserting headers and footers.

18:50 <farkuhar> "unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has changed`." http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-rot.html

18:53 <farkuhar> Another recent example is the failure of SDL games to open the soundcard using the native ALSA driver. The last time that worked for me was more than a year ago. I had to export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=sndio to get sound working again, something I don't remember having to do with the previous installations of libsdl, sndio, and alsa-lib.

18:57 <farkuhar> In a similar vein, I want to be sure I periodically test the CLI workflow for generating a plaintext printout of interesting websites, lest the bit-rot phenomenon render untenable the previous solution (`lynx -dump` -> manually edit the result -> a2ps -> lpr).