I have no idea what I'm doing.
Rob does toybox and mkroot, writes linux docs, worked with j-core.org, long ago co-founded Penguicon and Linucon, wrote for Motley Fool, taught at ACC, etc. Trying to learn Japanese and make Android a self-hosting development environment.
He/him. Answers to "they/them" just fine.
I have no idea what I'm doing.
@fade Not sure how much longer that's going to be an issue, at this rate...
@sarahtaber I see your first post in my timeline, but had to click on it to see the rest. Then again, I have no idea if I'm using this site properly yet. Maybe there's a config option...?
@fade @sarahtaber Maybe it's because I subscribed after the thread was written? No idea...
@fade @sarahtaber Huh, the codebase is mostly written in Ruby. https://www.openhub.net/p/mastodon-social
@cstross I lost the @landley account on twitter years ago for tweeting "guillotine the billionaires" too many times. (12 hour suspension but they wouldn't let me resume using it without providing a phone number so SMS hijacking could steal the account as a single point of password reset failure visible within my whole zip code.) Fade set me up a read-mostly account (same handle spelled backwards) when scrolling down one screen in timelines without logging in turned into a paywall pop-up.
@cstross @graydon Gastrointestinal distress was my main omicron symtom last year, and my brain interpreted the stomach butterflies as anxiety. I'd never had anxiety before! Not the kind where my brain keeps trying to figure out what I'm anxious ABOUT, and latches on to something different every few hours for SIX MONTHS. (That really, really, really sucked. Brain fog's annoying but I'd had that before from other things.)
@cstross Open source sucks at aesthetic issues. Sadly, it's a structural issue in the development model: https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#13-08-2010
@ksonney The domain expert here would be @randileeharper@twitter.com but I dunno if she's translated any of her work to mastodon yet?
@sarahtaber Still a big step up from twitter. where I know what's happening and would like it to stop.
@sarahtaber Most culinary traditions started with "we need to eat an alligator" or "keep dead fish edible for 9 months" or "how can we disguise the same staple crop to eat it yet again". Some overcome this, some are an acquired taste. The cheeseburger/candy bar/modern sushi depend on railroads and refrigeration. Using ingredients and techniques from multiple continents, often discarding the constraints in their heritage (sausage is now fresh beef, the rice and fish combo is no longer fermented).
This article mentions nibel trying to turn his twitter into a day job. A hobbyist who wants to do their hobby full time is what universal basic income would enable, without the need to "monetize your passion". https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/31/nibel-twitter-elon-musk/
I'm trying to do https://landley.net/toybox releases quarterly, which is every 3 months. 3 months from the previous release would be November 12th: one week from today.
@Sisuile @fade I'm using the official-ish Mastodon-for-android app from the app store and it seems to be working? (I just searched for Mastodon it was the first hit.)

@fade @sarahtaber I'm waiting for people I follow to mention other people I should follow. Which is pretty much how it's always worked for me.
I wonder how the platform does handle quote retweets? https://mastodon.online/@fade/109289113435239044
Amazon needs a sherman antitrust breakup like yesterday. https://elliottkay.tumblr.com/post/696164756228358144
@fade Yes, but it showed up in a lump.
In the game "Project Zomboid", the power and water and television broadcasts keep working for a couple weeks into the zombie apocalypse, and it's just random when they cut out. Using twitter today feels a lot like that. https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/357286663669992278/
Mastodon works like email. You follow @user@server but otherwise it's 90% twitter and 10% tumblr. You don't need an account on another server unless something happens to the first. You can set up your own server but most people use free gmail/hotmail-alikes.
@tatsunode On the web go to settings->preferences->appearance->enable advanced web interface.
The app is convinced I've accidentally boosted my own post twice (the zomboid one, second trying to UNDO it), but the web page doesn't see that. Oh well, bit of a learning curve involving what Aasif Mandvi called "the flying shards of a better tomorrow" is to be expected.
Watching various people from at the posting delay mastodon.online especially seems to be having. That server is just WHELMED right now. The timelines of @pkrugman and fade@mastodon.online are both "is this thing on?" all day. (Yes, it just takes a while to show up because overload.)
Sigh. Frown. Luckily this site still doesn't have a "gaslight" button to change a post after it's gone out. (Just like email doesn't, SMS texting didn't...)
@cstross I'd say "hit him in the ego" but dude bought a company that MAKES expensive red sports cars for his quarter century crisis. His ego's so big and fragile I'm not sure what counts as a vulnerable spot?
The lure of Mastodon is that Wikipedia's still around. The problem with Twitter is capitalism was not kind to the users of Vine, Flickr, Google Plus, Livejournal, Blogger, City of Heroes, AOL Instant Messenger, Myspace, Slashdot, Geocities, Compuserve...
@tomtomorrow It works like email. Once you've got an account on a server, you can read and write from there to anyone else, but name@hotmail is not the same as name@gmail.
@pkrugman Not "servers", the server. Mastodon works like email: @user@server. You can join a gmail or hotmail equivalent, or pick a smaller server, or set up your own.
You joined a popular server as as its userbase doubled in a week. Nobody here's sprung for banks of rackmounted servers for a single address (yet), mostly each address has its own machine (or cloud VM).
@fade You can still drop a link into your post. Even twitter took like 5 years to start expanding those inline. I expect the mastodon devs to add an update before too much longer.
@fade Ooh, cool. I joined one that's run by... a japanese journalist, I think?
Thought I'd hit the first technical weirdness following somebody on mastodon (503 address could not be fetched?) but Cory Doctorow's account here is pluralistic at mamot.fr not marmot.
Incomprehensible error messages! Yup, that's an open source user interface: https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#13-08-2010
Also, inability of the search bar to parse the URL form of addresses so we have to reverse http://site/@user by hand into @user@site is probably the most common complaint from people starting here. "I have their page up! How do I follow them?"
The Boomers have a lot to answer for. They broke the world and we can't unbeak it until they're gone. https://twitter.com/JoshuaPHilll/status/1589724965158662144
Latchkey kids raised themselves, but today despite carry a tracking device 24/7 if they're found walking on their own 2 blocks from home their parents face legal action. Modern american children are basically under house arrest until emancipation becausse Boomers are afraid.
Following both @sarahtaber and @cstross causes a little cognitive dissonance. In the absence of fossil fuels, grazing for meat is way more sustainable than monoculture corn. Sure it emits methane (half life of 7 years in the atmosphere) unless you feed your cows those seaweed supplements, but grazing improves the soil (without chemical fertilizer) and requires 1% as much water (in a trough vs acre-inches on the ground). http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/10/strong-and-stable.html#comment-2159828
The Chick-Fil-A effect: even if you like the product, the company is too evil to give money to. Tesla, Solar City, and Starlink all fund fascism now. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-elon-musk-sell-shares-twitter-losses-advertiser-exodus-2022-11
I'm taking "twitter goes down so the leveraged buyout loans get called in" as a given. I'm wondering when "You have a nazi powerwall in your house? Ew." kicks in. Remember: Paypal kicked this guy out but kept Thiel.
@fade There's a github thread on this if you wanted to opine at the developers. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12753
It's a pity the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund imploded when its executive directory got metooed. (He deserved it, but the splash damage took down a useful organization.) https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/109302124170270595
Talking too much about twitter here seems a bit like droning on about your ex, but this is a good article bout the layers of nested stupid in play in dujourpocalypse. https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/musk-advertising-twitter-boycott.html
Gas station donuts costing a $1.30 now helps a lot with the not buying one part.
Manly beardy men keep forgetting that women are half the population and when they stop playing along everything STOPs. Iran is relearning this right now. https://warontherocks.com/2022/11/why-dictators-are-afraid-of-girls-rethinking-gender-and-national-security/
Behind every successful man is a woman who at the very least provides him unpoisoned food and has custody of the household's knives while he sleeps. 80% of the society he maintains is dedicated to preventing her from realizing that.
I'm rooting for Ukraine and Mastodon for similar reasons. Some asshole marches in and goes "you people all belong to me now" and starts getting his ass handed to him.
@sarahtaber What plumbing are you using to cross-post these? (Or does your server just recognize links to the tweetocracy?)
@cstross Blogs and email. Some random dude out there impersonating. You've got a longstanding website that can point to your official whatsits.
@stephenfry If you're using the web interface, click the preferences gear and appearance->"enable advanced web interface" to get column view (ala tweetdeck).
Only your server knows who you are: when looking at someone else's web page you're not logged in there. Flip "https://server/@user" around to @user@server and type it into the search bar, that pulls it up in a column on YOUR server so you can interact (reply, favorite, retoot) without a login pop-up.
@Ciaraioch The process is "export, import, announce". They did a blog about it: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/
@rwalker1501 @pluralistic I wrote Android's command line utilities and I've literally been trying to address this (and poke them about it) for years: http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/011898.html
@rwalker1501 @pluralistic ON the hardware side, Jeff Dionne (long-ago founder of uclinux) has been working on this, https://j-core.org isn't up to date but gives the basics.
Huh. @sarahtaber uses the "only the first tweet of a thread shows up in your feed, you must click the link there to see the rest" and I worry I'll miss her (rare) threads. @pluralistic expands every post inline for his daily screen and what I really want there is a link to his blog. I wonder if there's some way to control this per-user at my end?
@fade Hover text: "A small dog with big ears stretching" and "A small dog with big ears looking aside".
I am so tired of watching octegarians argue with septuagenarians over who should run the country.
@fade Meh, I assume it'll all sort itself out in a few months.
@Ciaraioch Being on the receiving end of a refugee wave is seldom fun, but a few years later they form the backbone of your society.
@sarahtaber Can be sung to the "cindarelly" song the talking rats were singing in the Disney Cinderella movie.
@fade My reply wound up under your same "the cw" tag as your post.
Remembered why I didn't follow Cory Doctorow on Twitter, and unfollowed him here. Good material, but way too high volume for the medium. I am not up for a 50 tweet screed expanded inline every day, I fall behind way fast, miss what everyone else has to say, and then reading becomes a chore. I want the link to the blog with topic summary version.
@fade Yes but A) we're married, B) you don't to it every single day.
@fade The software is still under active development...
Tool for finding mastodon accounts for a given twitter follower list. (Requires authorizing it to see your twitter follower list, remember to undo that afterwards.) https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
Ooh, the "glass floor" is a wonderful metaphor. https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/the-glass-floor-is-keeping-americas-richest-idiots-at-the-top_in_5da3e9d6e4b02c9da04cc610
@fade and I watched a Spy vs Family episode and I want big circular ice balls like that for my Diet Dr. pepper. I've got the glass for it right here, but it's got automatic ice in it.
@ursulav Welcome!
@ClipMeri @ursulav There's a website that'll do it for you (https://fedifinder.glitch.me/) but I haven't used it. Easing in, as it were.
I already unfollowed cory doctorow again because his daily threads were just too high volume for my comfort with the interface here.
@sarahtaber I have yet to see a project run by humans that didn't have horrible aspects. Wikipedia, Linux, Worldcon... Pushing back is hard work. Writing it off as impure thus anathema is easy.
@sarahtaber Having read her thread, and her follow-up comments, she insists it's not any server(s) policies but "a culture problem" with "mastodon people".
The userbase literally doubled last week, and the influx is accelerating. The "culture" is kinda in flux. There may be some clenching from the locals, but how is "the problem is those people over there are bad people" a useful argument during a refugee crisis fundamentally reshaping demographics?
There have been two iconic batmen. The Bright Knight (batman as paladin) was Adam West. The Dark Knight (batman as Batman) was Kevin Conroy. #RIP
@sarahtaber I wonder if threadreader threads will outlive twitter? (It's about like asking if a site gets taken over will the new one put up a robots.txt that tells archive.org to hide the history from before it changed hands...)
Failed my politeness roll (https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/397#issuecomment-1311981105) but if I remove the nav bar how do you get to the other pages? Nav bar across top means laptop users have a screen of boilerplate to scroll through on every page before any page content (or navigate pulldowns, introducing javascript and also hard on a small screen)...
Day 3 of Moderna booster + 4th (hopefully final) rabies shot are combining into a neck/shoulder ache that goes from my sinuses to my ribcage. On my RIGHT side. (Got stabbed in the left arm both times this week. No idea why, but in case the twitpocalypse wasn't making it hard enough to concentrate...)
@fade Let them. I can set up my own server if necessary.
@rgegriff https://landley.net/toybox/about.html is trying to do something similar.
@paco in theory a raw feed of Twitter has been going to the library of Congress for some years. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/
@fade You have four profile links, one can be to IF, one to Spanc...
Boston Dynamics is up there with Cambridge Analytica and Palantir in the "oh hell no" range. No, you are not normalizing robotic police dogs wandering campus. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/robots-will-roam-a-university-to-study-a-a-socio-technical-problem/
@Dubikan@tooot.im Because police and military are already that company's largest customers for that product? It's not designed for delivery it's designed for crowd control. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-nypds-robot-dog-was-a-really-bad-idea-heres-what-went-wrong/
@Dubikan@tooot.im back on Twitter @cstross and @sarahtaber had multiple long threads on Boston Dynamics' crowd control robots. https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371590/boston-dynamics-spot-robot-military-exercises-french-army
@Dubikan@tooot.im I'm not trying to pull up the investor presentations on my phone. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robot-dogs-to-patrol-southern-border-ghost-robotics/
@Dubikan@tooot.im @cstross @sarahtaber Because they're trying to widely deploy them first. This whole wandering around campus thing is explicitly an attempt to normalize them. https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726111/robot-dogs-with-guns-sword-international-ghost-robotics
I have now blocked my first walrus on Mastodon.
Ah, it's Sea Lion. I was close. http://wondermark.com/1k62/
I have reached the "toggle always show images marked sensitive" portion of my mastodon experience, because otherwise I had to click on every image to actually load it. (If everything is sensitive nothing is.)
I'm seriously triggered by hypodermic needles due to childhood trauma. I used to be able to make my gums bleed by thinking too hard about them. I see pictures of them in news articles and on TV and such all the time and do not enjoy it. But I don't expect the world to censor itself for me, and anti-vaccine people who would like to eliminate such things are the bad guys.
Turns out reality is grey and complicated and full of sharp bits. "This is the answer" is never the whole answer.
@mekkaokereke If it's where the people are, sure. It's just another method for people to talk to each other and self-organize. Before twitter it was livejournal. Ukraine's doing it through Telegram of all things. When Freenode got a hostile takeover last year libra.chat replaced it in under a month.
This one combines failure modes of email (51 years old), wikipedia (21), and Worldcon (83). Refugees come here for the same reason techies fled to Linux: capitalism destroys all it touches.
@mekkaokereke Nothing's a perfect defense from capitalism, it's always trying to corner every market. Google's Android maintains detente with Linux and 1/3 of all email is gmail, but so far they're VERY careful not to squeeze to hard. Microsoft bought github.
All federated protocols suffer "embrace and extend" attacks from capitalist shepherds trying to fence in and milk a flock. This one is more "new" than "inherently resistant". We all know what's coming, but reset to fresh context buys time.
@howardtayler Eh, my email has been rob at landley dot net for years and nobody's made a big deal about it yet.
The endgame is de-gerrymandering the south. Ann Richards was still Governor of Texas in 1996. Barbara Jordan made the opening statement at Nixon's impeachment. Texas isn't red, it's blue and occupied. Why would any other southern state be different? https://mstdn.social/@emilylhauser/109334277735014689
@fade The official app is craptacular because I told my account to open all content warnings automatically, and the app ignored it. There's a little eyeball in the corner that's supposed to open the whole thread, the app ignores it you have to tap each individual message to see it. And the content warninged messages don't expand, they're full size of the invisible text, just with almost no text in them until you performatively tap. And I can't remove the CW from this reply.
@fade And having revealed the messages while viewing the thread, they're still hidden back in the main feed. Plus who exactly is triggered by "meta"? Why is there a content warning on it?
I am in this reply and don't like it. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-and-federation/#comment-237870
The blog post the comments are on is quite good too.
The Russian word "vranyo" seems to be exactly what David Graeber was talking about in his book BS Jobs. https://youtu.be/Fz59GWeTIik
Sigh. Why did the library of congress stop collecting full twitter data in 2017? Why does mastodon still refuse to implement proper quote tweets? https://newsie.social/@rvawonk/109340710010154210
Hmmm, on the one hand I want to read threads in the 4th column of mastodon's "advanced web interface" (ala tweetdeck) so I can favorite things like https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109342811491016990 but on the other I have 4 fixed columns with no scrolling and "right click the timestamp -> open in new tab" has unlimited tabs to read later...
I remember when twitpic was an external site, one which eventually went down. We're recapitulating phylogeny like mad over here. https://toad.social/@davetroy/109337529381432993
And yes, linking to tweets was a thing long before they expanded inline so you didn't have to click through. Right now mastodon has "posts that aren't replies", "everything", but nothing between. Replies-to-self are hidden just like replies to others, so if I add to a thread it's easily missed. Once again open source UI guys are SCRUPULOUSLY avoiding learning anything from the experience of other projects.
Take this thread: the second post was over half an hour after the first, and there were a couple posts on other topics in between. The first tweet wasn't a thread when I started, and unless you scroll back you won't see it. But "posts and replies" includes replies mid-thread to other people with zero context. Replies-to-self and replies-to-others are categorically different things, a distinction Mastodon ignores.
Nobody who's afraid to look stupid is actually smart, because correcting ignorance/mistakes is the source of learning. https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109344167912235621
If you have 1 million dollars you can spend $20k/year for 50 years without earning a penny of interest. That's the take-home pay from a full time job earning $10.75/hr. US federal minimum wage is still $7.25/hr.
Iran's ruling theocracy just announced its decision to execute fifteen thousand protestors. Meanwhile, they're Russia's biggest arms dealer in Ukraine. https://www.newsweek.com/iran-votes-execute-protesters-says-rebels-need-hard-lesson-1757931
When open source development works well this is why: integrating feedback from users as part of the design process. https://mastodon.online/@fade/109348335806292088
@kerileighmerritt Mastodon has a dozen different phone apps. The official one is the worst of them all.
Why is a barf bag prominently displaying a patent number in 2022? The movie "airplane" had a barf bag in it 42 years ago (the jive bros used one) and they weren't new then. #becausecapitalism

Libertarians are to liberty as scientologists are to science.
King Henry II of France's intellectual property law needs to go away with Billionaires and Boomers. Attribution is not ownership and the USA has been able to afford universal basic income for at least 50 years. https://youtu.be/MAFUdIZnI5o
@ArkadyMartine The main downside of induction is it's incompatible with woks. I need the electric kettle version of a wok.
Content warnings are me trying to guess what other people might be offended by. (The answer is "literally everything". There are cheese phobias.) Filters are me setting "I dowanna see this" on my specific things. https://wandering.shop/@devinsinger/109354238077828563
@sarahtaber An abuser promising he'll change is not to be believed anyway. He's looking for an ablative blame shield for his continued micromanagement. He CAN'T stop.
I grew up on 8-bit computers (C64/128/Amiga) which gave me a spider sense about dying platforms and where to jump to that's served me well as DOS and Fidonet and Livejournal went under. The current was flowing strongly from Twitter to Mastodon since the day Musk carried his "I am going to sink twitter" prop into the lobby. @stephenfry switching over was confirmation. (Wikipedia and Linux and Worldcon still exist, largely outside of capitalism. That's the appeal of Mastodon: same kind of thing.)
@sarahtaber I'd estimate mastodon can completely replace twitter (working out new spam filtering, scalability, interpersonal social networks, cultural cachet so everybody links to toots instead of tweets) in 6 to 9 months. And then surpass it. (Given its decentralized nature, various national regulatory bodies are going to absolutely freak out.)
Quote tweeting will show up on individual instances. It's a thing you can trivially just DO, the question is what the interface of your particular instance displays. https://mstdn.social/@clive@saturation.social/109348460968672108
A society designed to actually take care of people can do so cheaply and efficiently. https://youtu.be/drGeDmBXNuU
@vagina_museum I'd be a little more worried that this is the second post from you where the image was missing in the phone app if I hadn't just opened the link in browser and had the page fail to load twice before finally working.
Translation: it's open source, the maintainer thinks he knows better than the entire user base unanimously telling him otherwise, so you have to fork the code to get this feature. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99662106175542726
@Gargron so we have to run a fork is what you're saying.
@fade if the largest instance keeps threatening to block every other instance that steps slightly out of line, I suspect they're the one who will wind up unplugged from everyone else. But we'll see how it shakes out...
@fade You have kigurumi. That probably counts.
Wow. nitter.net has a MUCH better threading interface than stock mastodon. (The thread in question about running a Mastodon instance in the USA is informative too.) https://wandering.shop/@CliftonR/109368830530284582
I expect 99% of the reason he really did that is when you link to one of his posts he wants a big picture of his face to show up instead of what he said.
@aloria who knew such a small cat could draw so many webcomics.
@caztastrophe didn't Stephen Fry delete his twitter account last week?
@fade Let them? "If you don't change your behavior I will..." Good luck with that.
@sarahtaber The solution to Kings has always been the same. The Red Queen was projecting.
"An American Tail" is mostly remembered as a Don Bluth film, but it was the first animated film Steven Spielberg produced. Spielberg went on to be executive producer on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and eventually became the "S" in Dreamworks SKG.
Some people do great work as part of a group, get a big head, go solo, and create Rock-a-doodle, Thumbelina and a Troll in central park back to back.
@cstross No but I am following the mstdn.social one and you might want to swap the "(alternative)" title from the one you use more to the one you use less.
@KBSpangler You can sing "himbo, he's a himbo" to the flintstones song.
Attempting to clean the crud out of my keyboard has greatly increased the keybounce I'm experiencing. As was foretold in legend and song.
@fade "What are you doing?" "Mastodating."
I await the mastodon landscape stabilizing enough for people to produce decent server directories. I've found a nudist mastodon instance, one for graphic artists, several for furries, one entirely populated with journalists, one set up by fired twitter employees, and now https://handmade.social/@maker/109269198300726570 (click on server link, what's in YOUR "local timeline"...)
Listening to NHK News Des, and... did Zelensky always speak like Batman? Because that's some serious Batman going on there.
Oh hey, Japan just intercepted its first ICBM in flight. (Launched from a ship off Hawaii. The USA first did that in 1996, launched from Kwajalein which is why I heard about it.)
@determinerik The same way leaving Livejournal when Russia bought it and MySpace when Rupert Murdoch bought it were political statements?
Faceboot has been a cesspool for decades and has 6 times the userbase. If Cambridge Analytica wasn't a call to action, waiting out the Boomers seems like the most viable strategy. (Midpoint of Boom was 1955, post-covid USA average lifespan is 77, thus LD50 of Boomers is 1955+77=2032.)
I lost my twitter account in 2019 (https://landley.net/notes-2019.html#21-10-2019) for being publicly anti-billionaire, and stayed stealth-ish on my alt (original name spelled backwards, as I said: "ish"), and I'm totally out of practice linking to my own stuff from this sort of environment.
@davidgerard I go to individual interesting servers and look at their "explore" tabs. Both the locally generated content and what they're pulling in from federation can be interesting. Each server has a different one generated by its user base. https://archaeo.social/explore is a site of archaeologists, for example.
@fade That book Elrond wrote?
I can't figure out a URL to see my favorites list. There's a pulldown menu when I view my own profile in column view, but no link when I got to my actual page.
As with all things mastodon, this issue was brought up years ago and the maintainer went "I personally dislike it therefore I won't allow anyone else to have it". https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/166
@sarahtaber Not leaving one privately owned service susceptible to capitalist buyout once the userbase is mature enough to harvest for another of the same, thanks. Good luck with it though.
@sarahtaber I'm sure their "loss leader" phase will be highly enjoyable, especially for the judasfluencers.
@digitalraven @cstross I had that problem once. Had to swap out the azumanga diodes.
Expecting software development from the Free Software Foundation is like expecting televangelists to feed the homeless.
@fade Romanes Eunt Domus.
@alexwild Raising the top tax rate back to 1963 levels is not at the edge of the Overton window, it's the middle. The edge is sharp, like a guillotine.
@jwz works fine here..
@cstross Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, bananaphone. Ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul, bananaphone. #YesIAmOld
Bought the 2023 "free frosty with purchase" keychain yesterday but it's still 2022, so I showed both keychains today... and the cashier gave me two frosties. Fairly certain that's not how it's supposed to work.
@BunRab Ooh, tip of the iceberg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_metre links to https://medium.com/illumination/the-cursed-emily-dickinson-and-pok%C3%A9mon-crossover-39cdc9bcb9c7 at the end.
@monad_cat Mastodon isn't special, the protocol is the important thing. https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/
Sigh. Yeah, pretty much. https://universeodon.com/@Saadia___m/109383130630567327
@fade I know there are browser plug-in filters that can swap out specific words...
@nameshiv Why were your opinions about cricket difficult to separate from their loved ones' opinions about cricket?
I've never been an orthodox cricketeer. I followed the Fifth Doctor as a child, but have long since lapsed. FIFA has probably let out the white smoke a couple times since then, so I don't know current orthodoxy...
@sarahtaber I blogged about how both-sidesism makes you trivial to manipulate a full dozen years ago when it was Obama being played. http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#11-09-2010
@fade usually it's a profanity filter doing that? Scunthorpe in England has that all the time.
@fade merde is french?
@seananmcguire Welcome! (I'd mail you a mastodonwarming present, but you moved.)
@sarahtaber Can be sung to "wish you a merry christmas".
@cstross This is a guy who bought a company that makes shiny red sports cars for his quarter-life crisis.
I used to be annoyed at twitstrangler and such for stealing content and reposting it surrounded by ads, but now I _want_ to link to thread archives that should outlive the parent site: https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109411399771719010
@BadgerGirl @cstross He's a middle-aged white male narcissist with a rich daddy who grew up under apartheid breathing leaded gas fumes. (South Africa didn't stop using leaded gas until 2005.)
@fade Nothing enrages a comfortably well off white male like something not being for/about them. They have to go all brony on it and claim the territory for Spain and push the original inhabitants onto reservations. That or flounce. They can't compete otherwise.
@rrwo@fosstodon.org @cstross You know how pulsars spin faster as they collapse inwards? Grifters have a similar endgame where fewer and fewer followers are more and more fanatical. He's trading broad shallow appeal for a dedicated cult.
@notfunnyelle@mstdn.social All part of the process.
@april @ArkadyMartine This old anonymous posting "Institutional memory and reverse smuggling" was brilliant, and the fact it's only in archive.org now is officially ironic: https://web.archive.org/web/20120111055334/http://wrttn.in/04af1a
@lauren @cstross The government hates anonymity. The ongoing "war on cash" in the USA is kind of related: everything you've bought with a credit card records who money went from, who it went to, and when. It's supoenable when not freely shared. Five years ago you bought birth control and donated to a political party. Stores demanding "exact change only" or refusing to take cash, civil forfeiture, removal of ATMs... the ability to pay cash is going away and nobody's even particularly noticing.
@lauren @cstross It's come up there too https://www.kpcc.org/2018-04-04/why-more-and-more-la-businesses-are-refusing-your hence https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/california-bill-cash-payment-requirement-cashless-store-ban/ but it looks like the war on Cash is mostly a Republican initiative (they want to track and control everybody) and once Democrats got the house in D.C. they introduced https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4395/text which passed house but died in the Senate and then this year it got tacked to a defense spending bill https://payne.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-payne-jr-s-bill-protect-cash-passes-house-defense-spending-bill but it looks like Republicans in the Senate shot it down again https://www.atlantafed.org/blogs/take-on-payments/2022/10/24/payment-choice-act-and-what-it-means-for-cash
@lauren @cstross I live in Austin Texas. The governor is a foaming loon and the GOP tries out its crazy stupid here first.
Austin is so gerrymandered six congressional districts each have a slice of it, mine runs up the west side of I-35 for 200 miles into the suburbs of Dallas. When I enter my ZIP code into the "who is your congressbeing" web pages, they need the street address to answer the question.
The Fiesta mart near my house has had "exact change only" signs up for over a year.
@sarahtaber @fade The way greensleeves was jesusized as "what child is this"?
As Picasso said: good artists borrow, genteel white men steal and get called great for doing so. https://masto.ai/@vagina_museum/109421452672788920
@conradhackett The ciiiircle of riiiiiiiice.... (Music swells.)
Hitting the reblog button by accident can't easily be undone. Bit of a design flaw, not sure if that's in the app or the protocol or what...
@fade The official app is terrible.
@lilithsaintcrow Artemis doesn't even come to the family gatherings anymore, she has her lesbian polycule in a cabin in the woods with more chest freezers full of deer meat than you can imagine, and takes potshots at anybody who gets too close.
GOP Boomers want to raise the voting and drinking ages because they don't consider anyone younger than them to be people. https://wandering.shop/@kagan/109422734878291417
Yes, I plan to continue link tweeting. We'll eventually move to a service that actually supports this, whatever the mastodon maintainer thinks about it. (If the import side doesn't fix it, the export side can make the "preview" be the whole post in a box.)
@lilithsaintcrow Waste not want not.
I always assume "peasy" is the peas porrige that's been in the pot for 9 days. It's like natto, except served with fresh squeezed lemon juice for some reason? https://mastodon.social/@jef/109424423447349468
@fade If people have been actively living there, the upper layers are probably noise until you get down a bit.
@jaskot @DavidOAtkins Except "centrists" have been the "good people on both sides" camp trivially gamed by manipulating the Overton Window.
I wrote about that right-wing strategy in 2010 (https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#04-07-2010 then https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#11-09-2010) and they've faithfully executed on it ever since.
This is why I don't give google maps location permission, I search a nearby intersection to get a starting location. https://infosec.exchange/@thezero/109403993020558254
@jaskot @DavidOAtkins That's not what centrist means anymore. The same way libertarian and neoliberal have nothing to do with liberty or liberalism.
@jwz At the start of November Mastodon had 665K active users, it's ending the month with 7 million, and you're surprised it's having scaling issues.
@carturo222 I still hold the demise of "Adult Wednesday Adams" against it. I'm aware that's not fair to the new girl, but everything Adams since has seemed like a cash grab. (Especially those two recent CGI movies.)
@digitalraven @Dingfelder @cstross @foone @funranium If we did have star trek replicators, they'd have to have a whole LOT of safety protocols in the pattern parser.
@fade Why not?
I wonder if I can set something up to post a link from Mastodon to my blog every time I update that? https://landley.net/notes.html it's just a text file I edit in vi with a python script to generate an RSS feed from the name= html tags. There's no way to comment there, and hasn't been since I left livejournal. "Comment on mastodon" would make sense if each entry linked to the Mastodon post linking back to it. Hmmm...
One slight awkwardness is I do tend to upload them in batches, but I try not to get more than a few days behind at a time these days. (Keep the open source development blog up to date was one of my patreon goals...)
@drewtoothpaste wouldn't that just be damnation army?
@fade brevity is the fillet of sole of wit.
Without the guillotines, monarchs respawn in the form of billionaires. Raising the top tax rate back to where it was in 1963 is NOT the left edge of the Overton window. https://mas.to/@VeryBadLlama/109439006906312107
In the absence of proper support for quote tweets, people are using screenshots. I intend to continue linking to the post, and Mastodon sucking stops mattering when we eventually all move to activitypub implementations other than Mastodon. https://wandering.shop/@susankayequinn/109439009515868706
Of course the main problem with this style of quote tweeting, other than losing proper attribution, is that servers tend to only retain attachments for a few months before purging them. So the nutso Mastodon maintainer is insisting that we lose history. https://mstdn.social/@AdamParkhomenko/109436668085166260
Not that archive.org seems prepared to archive Mastodon yet. Which is going to be a problem because each individual server goes down on its own timeline. It's like having a link to web pages on a site that may not be there in 3 years...
@evacide Mastodon started November with 655k users and ended it with 7 million. There may be a pause to digest, but there's also been a lot of new instances starting and people moving from larger instances to smaller ones. Many of the larger instances have hit capacity constraints, Mastodon's Ruby codebase doesn't really scale all that well, and active pub is uncached. (Each server independently fetches the attached resources for each post and the bandwidth spike from that is nuts.)
@evacide Here's Jamie Zawinski complaining about the bandwidth spikes on his own instance. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/
Sigh. Damp clothing dries much faster while you're wearing it, but there's a significant warmth investment required before you get a return.
@AMS @digitalraven @Dingfelder @cstross @foone @funranium The sundae is a binary explosive (needs oxygen) rather than self-actualizing, and the reaction is rate-limited by surface area (modulo liquid oxygen).
Of course in zero gravity and an oxygen atmosphere, flour and non-diary creamer are powerful explosives. Possibly why all the gravity plates have built-in batteries that last a very, very long time. (I always wanted an episode to tap those in a power failure...)
@jaskot @DavidOAtkins You're calling yourself a "centrist" when those are the "good people on both sides", "opinions on shape of the planet differ" people. It's like trying to salvage "libertarian". 70% support for abortion is majority and mainstream, but not "centrist".
Centrists try to put only _some_ kids in cages, restrict _some_ abortions, allow _some_ forms of voter suppression, etc.
@cstross @digitalraven @foone @funranium @Dingfelder @AMS Mamalian evolution has had way longer than battery technology to work out energy density, impact resistance, mostly avoiding spontaneous combustion...
@fade Podcast-style or convention-style?
Trusting Billionaire Jeff Bezos to permanently install an always-on microphone in your home was NEVER a good idea. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/
I wonder if the implosion of Amazon Alexa counts as a good example of that "trust thermocline"' thing? https://scribe.rip/the-trust-thermocline-explains-how-companies-suddenly-lose-customers-and-employees-2657c9535e6a
Alexa always struck me as basically spyware. Amazon's business model is selling customer data. (You're not the customer, you're the product.) Amazon's purchase of Roomba is about mapping the inside if your house. https://www.natlawreview.com/article/amazon-s-recent-acquisitions-highlight-value-consumer-data-and-evolving-privacy
I file this under "we still need link tweets". Possibly a new version with more features, but not having it at all is fork-worthy... https://infosec.exchange/@deweyritten/109422726098578343
@fade Good thing you got snow chains for your boots.
@fade I've done two of those, if you need help with it...
"Only observing humans under capitalism and concluding it's in our nature to be greedy is the equivalent of only observing us underwater and concluding it's in our nature to drown."
@Ciaraioch I'm good on dread and anxiety thanks. Stocked up in 2016.
@lowpassage @fade Oddly that post did NOT reach my feed via @ursulav
@cstross @sarahtaber Mugging is profitable. Preventing myself from being mugged is interference with someone else's business model, and someone somewhere has to have sued over it...
@infinite8horizon @cstross Capitalism is the dominant modern religion. It replaced Christianity in the US about the time televangelists and for-profit mega churches showed up. The primary remaining advantage of pretending to have a god over other profitable cult forms is the tax avoidance.
We can't get sane healthcare in the US until the Boomers die. https://youtu.be/dAMAZf6q8lI
@luvadeforno@mastodon.social @evacide It's not the implementation language, it's the design. https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/109423049041769090
@luvadeforno@mastodon.social @evacide Passing along attachments fetched from the original source while federating the post would require some sort of signing/checksumming infrastructure to trust them, which is either absent or insufficient (and potentially CPU-intensive to verify). But without that, the process is very inefficient (and unreliable) because it repeatedly recreates the summary/digest. It's the gnutella problem: emergent scalability issues because the designers didn't think ahead enough.
@cstross @eliza I was seven years old when I first read a story where orbital energy platforms beaming solar power down to the ground were hijacked and pointed at cities. It was not a new story when I read it.
So of course: https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1596505/musk-uk-power-station-space-energy-initiative-spacex
@BrynnTannehill74 @alanhunter He made his followers private. Right click open in new tab if you're unsure, that'll always go to THEIR site, but in this case the cannonical link is https://mstdn.social/@markhertling/following and the follower list is privated. (There are 58 entries it won't show.)
@BrynnTannehill74 Syndication isn't new, newspaper journalism was doing it a hundred years ago.
If an associated press article or "dear abby" is syndicated into your newspaper you can READ it locally. You can only publish a reply through YOUR newspaper (your own column, or letter to the editor). If you need more info than was published in the syndicated column, you may have to find the newspaper the author actually works at.
Now substitute "website" for "newspaper".
@BrynnTannehill74 You don't actually have to switch your subscription to track down and talk to the author of "dear abby", and then switch it AGAIN to reply to Siskel and Ebert.
@dotsonapage @fade TalkBack is a profound difference in how the phone works. It took me a couple of minutes to manage to switch it off again when I tried it. (I grabbed something called speechify out of the app store and cut and paste individual text blobs into it, but it's a terrible solution.)
@sarahtaber What billionaires are buying with all that money is control.
Late stage capitalism in a nutshell. https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109452616245273119
@sarahtaber This is why moving back to distributed protocols makes sense. It has its own problems, but a lot more people are in a position to do something about them.
@cstross Giving the other side what they want up front is generosity. Giving in after a struggle is capitulation.
@sarahtaber And why running for the hills from the compromise to network to an uncompromised one makes exactly as much sense as fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Participation in a totalitarian state does not let you "fight back from within".
@sarahtaber Here's the guy who wrote the "I am part of the resistance inside the trump administration" op ed for the New York Times explaining how stupid and counterproductive his attempt to provide "adult supervision" was (around the 20 minute mark): https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5hY2FzdC5jb20vcHVibGljL3Nob3dzLzVmZjVmNTIwMzk0NThhNjk0Yjg3ZTUyMw/episode/MmIyZTMwYTAtNGM3Mi0xMWVkLTlhYjUtMzM0YTAwZjZiZDdk?ep=14
@neolithicsheep It's not a panacea but it means more people can act on the problems. Dictators are highly effective but tend to become the problem with time, until the guillotines come out. Distributed solutions (spam filtering, immune systems, democracy) require constant maintenance and result in stalemate wars of attrition, but are ultimately sustainable without tearing it down and starting over.
Not only is email still around, Gmail's market share declined from 1/3 to 1/4 over the pandemic.
Under US tax law, vehicles over 6,000 lb are deductible as a business expense. Smaller vehicles are not.
That's how stupid tax policy eliminated the small cheap cars people actually want to buy, and instead we have to be excited about the F-150 lightning.
https://www.taxplanning.com/single-post/vehicles-over-6-000-pounds
@ben The mastodon maintainer's personal hatred of quote tweets is like Linus Torvalds' hatred of kgdb, or source control. Linus eventually caved to his user base because he's a good enough maintainer not to let his project get forked.
The German guy is on a path to having the ecosystem fork out from under him:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/
@Teri_Kanefield Yeah, @seananmcguire hit a similar issue. There's some sort of rate limiting if too many new follow requests come in at once, anti-dogpiling or something. Threshold configurable by the server admin. You can "accept all".
@dalias I should log back into the old account from 2019 and change the bio to point here. I've refused to give Twitter my phone number and still don't want to...
I am a child of the 8-bit systems. I can sense a technology with the smell of death upon it. I know when it is time to move on, and usually where to go.
It's a little bit like being the cat who curls up next to people in the rest home, or that woman who could smell disease. Except it's about technology in ecosystems of production and consumption. It's a feeling you have to interrogate to figure out why.
it's why I write things like http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween9.html#itanium which begat http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html
(And then of course http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#26-06-2011 because I'm not perfect.)
This is indirectly about Twitter, where I got frustrated enough last month to block someone who was dissing mastodon, because complaining about the lifeboats when the Titanic is sinking struck me as counterproductive.
I didn't have the spoons to argue about how leaving an obviously burning building and trying to build shelter from the blizzard outside may have a certain amount of time pressure if you want good results.
But https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/ is this problem set's equivalent of Intel licensing AMD's x86-64 instruction set. To quote the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, "The choice has been made".
I vaguely expect Mastodon itself to go the way of the IBM PC eventually. (But where are the clones, there ought to be clones, send in the clones...) Then again IBM participated in the ecosystem it once led for a long time. Aptivas, ThinkPads...
TL;DR quote tweets are inevitable. Just link with a comment for now.
I just followed back the person I'd blocked on Twitter. According to Wikipedia[citation needed], Mastodon started November with 655k active users and ended it with 7 million. At this point the fediverse has critical mass to survive _regardless_ of what happens to other sites.
https://mastodon.lol/@skye/109450317713028179
Those other sites have a business model demanding not just profit delivered to investors, but perpetual increase. Capitalism treats sustainability as failure. They can't NOT corner the market.
(And yes the above begats led to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s and then https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/ and http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/019938.html and so on. My todo list runneth over. I've been accused of trying to boil the ocean...)
Good idea: prune twitter followers you follow on mastodon. I'm still following @cstross and @dianeduane and @sarahtaber and so on over on twitter, and don't need to since they're active here. Work your way down...
https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/109459092466440573
Once upon a time Moleskine WAS good. Google gave out Moleskine notebooks at Penguicon circa 2003/2004. Alas, Moleskine then did the same "cheap out on the materials" thing Pyrex did a couple years later (when Pyrex stopped being laboratory grade borosilicate glass and turned into normal glass dyed blue), and Moleskine's paper quality became terrible.
Late stage capitalism sees sustainability as failure, and MUST squeeze blood from every stone or the CEO gets fired.
https://fadeverb.tumblr.com/post/702476608089522176/moleskine-bad-its-so-bad-and-i-hate
Third party app makers switching to mastodon https://indieweb.social/@tchambers/109463070342898569 is the logical response to twitter's "war on apps" a decade ago https://twitter.com/landley/status/344863226267332608
Twitter was leveraging its dominance for profit long before the Muskrat bought it. The decline of twitter is catalyzed by a clueless silver spoon billionaire, but the fundamental rot is capitalism.
Twitter was a capitalist site driven to grow past sustainability by squeezing blood from a stone. Captain Dickrocket made a joke offer to buy twitter (the price was a weed reference) and Twitter's capitalist management literally took him to court to follow through on it.
The reason "the cruelty is the point" (ala https://twitter.com/DaveKeonsCousin/status/1599433639091392512) is a specific brand of zero-sum thinking, as explained in the article "for me to win, you have to lose" (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/for-me-to-win-you-have-to-lose).
If there's a fixed amount of happiness in the world, reducing others' happiness must increase yours. Them being happy must reduce your happiness.
The premise is false, but religion and totalitarianism teach from birth NEVER to question your assumptions.
I am so tired of octagenarians arguing with septuagenarians about how to run the country.
@lesley It would be something "run start encoding" (or run index encoding) but it's never stored or transmitted that way because it's guaranteed to be a less efficient storage format for the same data (storing absolute indexes takes more bits than storing run lengths) and converting one to the other is 0(n).
For context, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transform
@fade I sort of _do_ employ an ornamental hermit.
Kings always "move fast and break things", like peasants' houses and bodies and food supply.
Privilege is blinding. Can't see the forest for the trees. Chopping the trees down to get visibility destroys the very thing they didn't understand.
@dalias maximum post length is a server setting, and the web view on the server I'm on does a "click for more" thing at the end of 500 characters for imported posts.
Capitalism destroys value in order to concentrate wealth. It corners markets and clear-cuts any resource it can find.
It's like breaking a $1,000 shop window to steal a $200 TV. The shopkeeper lost far more than the thief gained (plus opportunity cost, clean up, repair fees).
Capitalism calls these costs "externalities" which don't matter as long as the recipient centralizing the wealth doesn't have to pay them.
Neoliberalism is smash-and-grab as governing strategy.
@fade those people who can't read in dreams don't know what they're missing..
@wordshaper @SteveBellovin @jsrailton Twitter spans enough jurisdictions that plenty of governments get a bite at the apple. That's why they had such a large legal department in the before times.
@fade so avoidance collaboration then.
I keep wanting to link @fade to things she reblogged (here and on Tumblr). I guess that's the sign of a healthy relationship?
@elipariser I remember 20 years ago people reading bayesian chain output (used in spam to defeat beysian Spam filters) and finding it hilarious. I could not see the appeal. Still don't.
And I don't want to feed it.
@HowardTayler I'm not sure the "movable type puts scribes out of business" cycle has actually accelerated since Photoshop was invented and people worried you'd never be able to trust a news photo again?
When people turn 50 it gets way harder to keep our heads above the waters of change. I've noticed this fairly strongly in myself, but Dave Barry wrote about it 20 years ago and Roman senators orated it. @cstross had a blog entry I can't find...
@isaacs science is all about trying to disprove hypotheses...
I'm sure this is a valuable case study of something, but I'm not sure what:
https://m6n.io/@fuzzychef/109462617404377728
(No that's not a clickbait headline, it's @Gargron continuing to refuse to support link tweets. I could add a screenshot like everyone else, but can't be bothered. I'm waiting for the project fork.)
Blinking at the URL https://youtube.com/@TheSun and going "that's not a mastodon instance"...
Good related analysis, talking about network effects and emotionally sticky nodes in the life and decline of social media sites: https://mastodon.social/@zephoria/109462011665932747
@ChrisO_wiki I never understand why the supervillain who constantly shoots his minions doesn't run out of minions. If working for this guy has such a high attrition rate...
@dalias 10 years ago was 2013. Why aren't mask mandates where they were in 2013?
Remember when Covid was threatening to kill 2-5% of the population and leave as many permanently disabled? "Why are we not treating the flu as seriously?"
As for hospitals staffing, this is from 2013 https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/05/opinion/kohn-hospitals-medicaid-close/index.html and of course the AMA has been intentionally restricting medical school admissions since 1970, see https://bradhicks.livejournal.com/432458.html and https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/14/us/ama-board-studies-ways-to-curb-supply-of-physicians.html and https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/15/ama-scope-of-practice-lobbying/
@luckytran@med-mastodon.com Sigh, my reply went to the person you reblogged instead of to you. https://mstdn.jp/@landley/109465775912036380
@esther@strangeobject.space In my feed people are using it like the old "livejournal cut". A little intro summary then click to expand. (At least they were before I told the viewer to just always expand them.)
I have childhood trauma about injections, but there's no "CW: needles" in vaccination discussion. I know someone who's so allergic to mangos she had to use an epi-pen once from the SMELL and does NOT want to see them, but you can't "CW: mango". Outgoing CW doesn't work conceptually.
@zorinlynx The Steak-Umm account could totally thrive here.
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io @NeoQwerty Huh, I hadn't even noticed those summary info boxes. My brain filtered them out as a form of advertising.
@ParanoidFactoid @paparatti I remember the beysian text chains spammers generated to escape beysian spam filters 20 years ago, and how everybody thought the result was amusing to read. (Never saw the appeal myself.) And then spellcheckers grew syntax checkers...
And now the spammers are collecting feedback from humans reacting to the generated results so they can update the automatic lie machines futher. Why are people engaging for free? (Still don't see the appeal.)
@paulidin Also the voice of Tony the Tiger in the frosted flakes ads.
@andrewfeeney @kevlin @cwebber@octodon.social I await the first big lawsuit against the model makers from somebody hurt by the result. GPT generated medical, legal, or investment advice passed off as human. The deep pockets are those who paid to train the model, then make it class action...
Protest works. https://sfba.social/@twrling/109469211614765283
Late stage capitalism must corner every market, or it dies. Bottled water must prove tap water unsafe to drink (see Flint Michigan). You can cook at home and feed your family, but can't feed the homeless without a license and inspections. Any alternative is ruthlessly suppressed.
Here they come for wikipedia:
https://ioc.exchange/@vortex_egg/109469202151377952
Mastodon is just new and small, not immune. Capitalism will try hard to devour or destroy it the more important it becomes.
@dalias @fade I've replied to several of your boosts, but I have to add your name manually. It only replies to the original author by default.
And I continue to put links to Mastodon posts in a bunch of my posts. The maintainer having his head up his ass just means we need a better activitypub client.
@evacide Speaking of reporting, the creepiest thing I saw on YouTube recently was https://youtu.be/gSRc1DScOY8 and I am honestly unsure about their policies...
@mos_8502 I'd ask @persephinae about that...
Creative types can have both a resume and a portfolio. These supplement each other (and done properly, multiply each other).
The resume shows you can work as part of a team in a professional environment: show up sober, complete assignments by deadline, not punch out coworkers, etc.
The portfolio provides examples of work you've done, for direct examination.
If you're a computer programmer, your open source contributions are your portfolio.
@nova Wikipedia isn't the example of sustainability. Worldcon is.
@dalias The only way I ever found anything on the bird side was by downloading my archive. You could work out a URL to the live post from the archive in the old CSV format. I never bashed through the new format from 2019 to make anything useful out of it.
Here's an example of a Mastodon instance with a "gaslight" button. In my client there's no way to see previous versions, and no indication the reblog was edited other than that it says it is.
I'm using the official Mastodon client, which is widely acknowledged to be crap, but there had better be something baked into the protocol so "Ye" can't make a viral post about his music and then edit it into praise for some dictator later. Or a trilby wearer make a threat against someone and then gaslight it to a comment about their choice of shoes when they try to tell anyone.
Wayne's World is a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure AU.
"Party Time! Excellent!" vs "Be excellent to each other. Party on dudes."
@dalias That also trusts the instance not the recipients to maintain the history. A bad instance could maintain plausible deniability for a while, or have poor security. The protocol needs some kind of anti-tamper signatures.
@dalias Still shows up in other people's feeds for some amount of time. Any sufficiently viral post becomes a target for hacking the original instance (or user's login), a Kanye->Ye style devolution may have a sudden break, performance artists like that Jordanian Peterman clown may try to save up credibility...
I'm not saying it's an unmanageable attack vector, just that it is one. There's a reason birdsite never implemented this: they wanted to, but couldn't solve it.
if America could turn Yojimbo into "A Fistful of Eastwood", Japan can totally make Wayne No Sekai with lots of katanas and transformation sequences.
Although I'm still waiting for that film where a Japanese salaryman in Tokyo is regularly drawn into cowboy gunfights which he always wins with his trusty six shooter.
@dalias Does $8-chan refer to the site or the "extremely divorced" middle-aged white guy who bought it?
@left_adjoint Ownership, attribution, and sustainability are three different things.
@left_adjoint @mxmxyz Universal Basic Income and citing your sources have nothing to do with intellectual property law, and are often harmed by them.
@fade do you need to tell Plauatus to stop trying to make [word] happen?
Well that didn't take long. https://newsie.social/@jeff/109472272956314954
@bcrypt I just spent several hours tracking down a segfault to glibc getting confused (probably by vfork) and enabling thread cancellation in a non-threaded program, using uninitialized thread cancellation state, meaning it was calling rt_sigaction(null) right after the successful syscall.
This is probably the halfway point of this particular debugging session.
The official Mastodon app is confused by "Http://" and says there is no app for this action.
This thing has had absolutely zero testing, hasn't it?
It won't even let me copy the URL and paste it into the browser myself, just because a letter is capitalized...
@dalias Identifying problems and identifying solutions are two different passes.
@StevenBeschloss neither the Oklahoma City bombing nor 9/11 were pulled off by a large group.
Why did "Skeleton Knight in Another World" recycle the "One Punch Man" theme song?
Is there a baldness-related genre convention I'm unaware of here?
@BethO we do regulate vehicle sizes: if they're too small you can't get a tax deduction for them. https://www.taxplanning.com/single-post/vehicles-over-6-000-pounds
Okay I think I've got it: the annual meeting of billionaires is Davos, the founder of the Daleks is Davros, and the acronym describing abusers is Darvo.
@traineyjr it's probably not y2038 compliant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Looks like the bird site has recognized Mastodon as a threat. https://indieweb.social/@ethanz@octodon.social/109479073170955454
@ChrisO_wiki actually more or less.
In a way this is what I'm trying to do with Android (https://landley.net/toybox/about.html) by making the base OS a self hosting development environment.
https://kolektiva.social/@trashrobot/109479425159800636
You should be able to use old phones as general purpose computing devices, building new stuff from source as necessary. The hardware already plugs into a USB hub (which keeps it powered even with an old battery, and can provide wired net access without a SIM card). The rest is just software.
Huh, so THAT's what we walked past to/from runoff voting.
Two ambulances, a fire truck, a life flight helicopter overhead and multiple police cars on the way there (before 6pm) with people clustered around a parked car with its hazard lights on. On the walk back WAY more police cars (now blocking off the sidewalk) and loudspeakers repeatedly demanding someone come out of an apartment.
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/apd-responding-to-active-swat-situation-in-east-austin/
@nova People massively underestimate the impact 50 years of breathing leaded gas fumes had on the boomers. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it
Sigh. As far as I can tell, the only way to get thunderbird to STOP opening links in mozilla is to uninstall mozilla.
@SpaceLifeForm I think changes made in the config editor aren't saving or something?
@SpaceLifeForm This is Thunderbird. Incompetence is inherent.
@SpaceLifeForm Hanlon's Razor sings its song, doo dah, doo dah...
Linux Weekly News did a mastodon writeup last week. https://lwn.net/Articles/916154/
@sarahtaber Is warnock still 51 if they lost one? I was looking forward to not having to care about manchin ever again.
@fade according to TV tropes, the article that introduced "the smurfette principle" (there can be only one) was in the New York times in 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/07/magazine/hers-the-smurfette-principle.html
@dalias @sarahtaber I was unaware she was leaving the Senate and would not be participating in any future vote.
@_L1vY_ The boomers were also uniquely poisoned for 50 years breathing leaded gasoline fumes. As with acid rain and the ozone hole, people have forgotten the massive scope of the problem now it's been addressed: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it
Lead exposure did significant measurable neurological damage even before age-related mental decline started to stack on top of it:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/lead-gasoline-blunted-iq-half-us-population-study-rcna19028
When they themselves said "never trust anyone over 30 (in November 1964) they were (contextually) right.
@dalias @sarahtaber if she votes against a bill they still need McMansion.
@fade I avoided linking you directly to TV tropes because TV tropes, but that's the one they cite. I was hoping they would have "see also" for the adjacent principles, but didn't spot it.
@seldo Do you know what sparked the ongoing uprising in China? Chinese citizens watching the world cup saw stadiums full of unmasked people and realized the rest of the world was no longer under permanent house arrest.
@seldo Because all those fans in the stands were "the people of Qatar", sure.
I'm sure you personally have never used any electronics from China, what with the Uyghurs and surveillance and suicide nets at foxconn...
@annaleen Dunbar's number?
@seldo I've never had the slightest interest in soccer and I think Jon Oliver's multiple episodes on the rot at FIFA years ago probably should have resulted in some kind of prosecution.
I just think your attempt to shame people is actively counterproductive.
I'm considering unfollowing Rich because he reblogs stuff he thinks people should be outraged about 50 times per day, and I'm full thanks. (Like Rachel Maddow's "and there's nothing you can do about it" ending every segment. Got tired.)
Dunbar's number goes to voicemail.
@SpaceLifeForm I had to abandon IMAP in 2012 because it didn't scale, and because Gmail and Thunderbird had conflicting design assumptions. Pop3 fetching of email locally is the only way that's worked for me for a decade now.
https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#06-02-2012
https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#12-02-2012
https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012
https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#20-10-2012
(I miss kmail but it was tied to the boat anchor of KDE. Balsa was crap. Text email clients don't work with my habit of having 30 open reply windows.)
@vallery because the Bay area has rigorously denied permits to anyone trying to build downtown apartments and forced everyone earning less than half a million a year out of even Oakland.
@vaurorapub I've always approached it in terms of traction and momentum. Hard to start, hard to stop.
@vaurorapub @nocturtle@mastodon.online gotta swing the wrecking ball...
@rvawonk it's also what their sponsor Russia has been doing to Ukraine for months.
Checking bird site about twice a week I sigh a bit that some people who've made accounts here still mostly use the old place (Gondor needs no context: https://twitter.com/NeolithicSheep/status/1601704843998949377) but... it's almost comfortingly familiar?
I've never had a Faceboot account (like AOL before it) or a Windows machine (went straight from OS/2 to Linux). With proprietary products/services "this too shall pass" is guaranteed. Maybe not on a useful timeframe, but progress is being made towards an inevitable conclusion.
Checking on an account that posts interesting stuff: I've scrolled back 30 posts and not quite made it 4 hours back in the timeline yet.
Nope, not following a firehose. Blogs exist for a reason.
I don't mind things like https://mastodon.social/@ChrisO_wiki/109491835129024072 as much because I can treat them as a block.
Having to individually evaluate each of those without knowing where it ends is a much higher cognitive sorting load. I am custodially saturated, thanks. Categories, containers, and indexing done for me helps a LOT. I am juggling many other balls.
It's a pity 15/ is useful thread labeling and the entire CW infrastructure here is the opposite: I must click through and read behind it to see if I care.
The way to favorite a post via link to someone you don't follow is to cut and paste the URL of the post into the search bar, then favorite it when it comes up under that.
Yes, the maintainer refuses to implement link-post support, because he has his head entirely up his ass. The project will be forked. Give it time.
@valkyrie I miss David Graeber. "You make a cup once, you wash it a thousand times." He wrote a whole book about Direct Action in 2008: https://www.amazon.com/Direct-Action-Ethnography-David-Graeber/dp/1904859798
David Graeber would have LOVED the fediverse.
@mekkaokereke @Teri_Kanefield Agreed.
The only reason to support octagenarian democrats is the "let's you and him fight" style of diplomacy. 90% of their value is keeping a republican out of office. A potted plant would be about as useful.
Their natural inclination is to line the pockets of corporations giving them multi-million dollar "speaking fees". They do damage more slowly and the other side is exponentially worse but that's not an endorsement. Nixon supported UBI, democrats stopped it.
@nuttycom The downside, of course, is that if they revisit it 6 months later none of them will have the slightest idea how it works, and even small modifications will turn into a complete rewrite. (I was a teenage programmer too, once.)
@jfparis most instances have a patreon link.
@sarahtaber it's not even an "again": The Tobacco Institute was essentially a reorganization of the Ethyl institute, which existed to defend lead in gasoline. then they moved on to climate change denialism. It's been the same set of researchers working at the same set of think tanks for almost a century. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-industries-used-same-researchers-to-sway-public1/
@dalias Given that the protocol does not require centralized reporting, I'm honestly not sure how accurate the growth figures are? A lot of reshuffling has gone on with people moving off of big instances to small instances, or setting up two or three accounts to start with and then consolidating to one (ala Charles Stross).
A bunch of Twitter forwarder bot feeds got set up and then shut down again when the person in question moved. I have no idea how you account for that in "line go up".
@dalias "All of Those People moving in who are Not Us shouldn't be Allowed, we must police them thoroughly."
Bog standard European response to everything as far as I can tell? Being conquered by Rome sucked, can't be on the receiving end of that again. Do unto others, full stop...
@dalias which is a maintenance nightmare and means what you ship is most likely generated code. (Note the and, not or.)
@VPS_Reports@kolektiva.social It's the most car happy city in the country, and the oil companies have dropped the mask.
@pkrugman Peter Zeihan wrote multiple books about this over the past decade. Predicted all but the pandemic.
@joshsusser@neurodifferent.me The French built a machine to address this problem back in the 1700s. They had to work their way through Napoleon afterwards, but in the long term it seems to have worked out for them quite well.
@graydon @dalias That third one is in large part because the Boomers went senile after breathing leaded gasoline exhaust fumes for 50 years, and the two combine VERY BADLY:
https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#19-11-2020
Once enough Boomers die the system should tilt back to being able to process at least some factual information.
The midpoint of the baby boom was 1955 (half of all Boomers were born before then), life expectancy in the USA is now 77 (went down 2 years in pandemic), so the LD50 of Boomers is 2032
@malwaretech You can also set it private, and unfollow everyone who's moved to Mastodon. Makes line go down.
@malwaretech rule 17 of the internet: any data retained long enough will leak.
@anniebeeknits @fade "The three-day shows were about digging the hole essentially". Truer words...
@recursive hybrasil is sinking? (From Erik the Viking.)
Finally reclaimed my old birdsite account to change the profile to point here, and posted an explanatory thread:
And yes I kept each post in that thread down to 140 characters. Go out as you lived.
(Changing a thing out from under me without my consent and waiting for me to "come around" has not, historically speaking, been an effective strategy.)
It's my duty as a scientist to respond to new information, re-evaluate, and change my mind as necessary even including previously fundamental beliefs. (That's how I became a nudist, went from GPL to 0BSD, and so on.)
But "this is it, deal"? The sun's only got so much hydrogen. I can wait.
@skinnylatte I still miss Kwajalein, in the marshall islands. Haven't been there since I was 10, but it set my baseline in a lot of ways.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Birdsite has reached Gandhi-con 3.
@b0rk Start with the oldest failure you can find. The crash is more interesting than flying shrapnel.
People keep treating eating meat and burning wood as "carbon intensive" when that all that carbon came from the atmosphere over the past decade.
They treat "the CO2 from coal is recycled into soap" as carbon capture, when THAT carbon was in the ground for the whole of recorded history and they're delaying its release into the atmosphere for ~5 years.
Methane has a ~7 year half life in an oxygen atmosphere. I don't care about cow burps. You're either digging up fossil carbon or you're not.
The oil companies are pointing fingers at animal products exactly the same way the plastic companies are pointing fingers at plastic drinking straws.
The same way california's agriculture industry (using 80% of the state's water) insist people in cities must take shorter showers and use special toilets.
That's not the problem. If you don't understand what the problem IS, you're easily distracted by irrelevant "solutions" that do not address the problem.
@thespoonless @Zendadaist I'm curious, the virus has 2019 in the name and we're about to go into 2023. We've done a 3 years of mitigation and three rounds of vaccination.
At what point DO you get to stop? Or is this just your life now, for the rest of it?
@b0rk A reproducible test case is one of the most valuable things in programming. A bug "goes away" the same way a cockroach escapes under the fridge: it just got worse.
Bugs are like movie villains. Habeas corpus or it doesn't count, and even then if you haven't dissected the body it's probably fake. "Gone for now" is the BAD outcome.
(I may have been lucratively called in to refinance the technical debt of a few "nine fives of uptime" projects over the years, and developed... opinions.)
This bug wasn't a Mac OS kernel issue, it was ifndef O_PATH define O_PATH linuxvalue which on MacOS was already used by O_SYMLINK.
The previous bug wasn't misbehaving glibc thread plumbing, it was a signal handler inappropriately inherited by a child process they tried to use global data the child process had repurposed.
Glowering at the bug I've been ignoring because it only reproduces in a Fedora VM and is happening inside the glibc FILE object. Yes, that's taking a bullet, but from where?
It's hard to feel productive when you're taking multiple days to come up with a one-line fix. (Sure I wrote a thousand lines of scaffolding along the way, but you tear that down again when you have your answer.)
In professional programming, adding a thousand lines of code to avoid having to come up with that one line fix makes everybody's numbers look good. In open source we spend a lot of time looking like we didn't do anything. Oh well...
@themedievaldrk @dalias @garius Early in my career I watched venture capital destroy my employer, and analogized it to handing a non-swimmer a scuba tank and telling them there's a bigger scuba tank at the bottom of the ocean.
Most professional services companies work like law firms or dentist offices: three experts and a support staff. VCs want the next Microsoft, funding from operations while small ruins the fantasy. Gotta hire 500 people to show "growth" to get the next funding round.
@fade @themedievaldrk They are lovely socks.
@themedievaldrk That's a central flaw of capitalism.
My objections to VC were more specifically 1) that's the opposite of teaching someone how to swim, 2) making the recipients lie (to themselves) about the nature of the business.
A corner bodega is not Whole Foods. That's not a "flaw" in their business model. A food truck that's still a food truck 10 years later has successfully stayed in business, not "failed to franchise".
@Popehat FDR's "I welcome their hatred" speech remains inspiring a century later. Know them by the quality of their enemies...
Back on the bird site, I'd link to a lot of enraging stuff from my account, but cut and paste links to happy things to the household slack.
I don't particularly want to broadcast bad things on Mastodon. There's plenty of places to find that, and the Boomers are dying as fast as they can.
Seriously, the horrors of the past few years are Boomerdamarung, magnified by 50 years of chronic lead exposure. It's amazing that in senility they're functional as they are:
I'm still reluctant to "boost" much because of my history with twitter (long before twitler bought it), but lots of nice stuff goes by here.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cs/109506997549142245
@dalias It was an explicit strategy I blogged about back in 2010:
@AriCohn Real estate and broadcast spectrum are finite public resources exclusively allocated. That's always been the basis for regulating them: letting you broadcast on this frequency or build a house there prevents anyone else from doing it.
Cable TV escaped the broadcast regulations because it wasn't a finite resource. Faux News leveraged that regulatory escape to create a propaganda network with the illusion of federal scrutiny forcing them to speak only truth.
@dalias Capitalism always collapses into fascism. That's why the Great depression led to the rise of the Nazis.
Mark Blyth did some great talks on this, one example:
@jchidley The original insight is from @sarahtaber in an old thread at https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1006363794556227589
Once upon a time there were a bunch other sites mirroring those threads, but twitler seems to have gotten all mirrors taken down so when twitter fails google can't find them. I hope she reposts them somewhere, or maybe revisits them in her podcast...
@ct_bergstrom @dalias The bureaucrats who worked for nazi germany hoping to "mitigate" wound up collaborators.
The guy who wrote https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html was recently on a podcast at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/miles-taylor-and-the-truth-about-the-trump-white/id1547658204?i=1000582741014 where (about 19 minutes in) he says:
"I put out an anonymous op-ed that basically said don't worry america, the adults are in the room they know the president's crazy and that's scary but they're trying to keep him in check. I was totally fucking wrong about that..."
@dalias I remember writing for The Motley Fool forever ago when my friday article got slashdotted and the site metrics attributed it to the column, which had its monday article up (by a different author) already, and that author told us (4 authors total in a, common chat room) about how unusually interested people were in the (completely different) topic he'd covered and his planned follow-up article...
The problems with managing what you measure aren't _just_ Goodhart's Law...
People relied on goat entrails to assist with decision making for centuries. Using AI for that purpose is fundamentally no different than opening the Bible to a random page and reading a few sentences for advice on what to do about a specific current issue.
Humanity is darn good at seeing faces in clouds, it's why we invented so many imaginary friends and called them gods or dryads or leprechauns. Inserting GPT3 into a decision loop is the modern version:
@sarahtaber in the case of Einstein specifically, he stole at least half his work from his first wife.
@mmasnick so livetweeting literally anything involving actual people violates the TOS. Speeches, sportsball, ted talks, any geolocatable live stream...
Ok, that's "Inception" levels of incompetence: https://twitter.com/KToropin/status/1603136282376474632
Twitler got his fee-fees hurt being booed on stage by the audience of a comedian currently best known for making fun of trans people.
He lashed out by blocking the account of the college student who has been posting the publicly available tracking data of his jet for years now.
To "justify" this, Twitler retroactively changed Twitter's policy so livetweeting a TED talk violates it.
New versions of the streisand effect tracker immediately went up here and on hipstergram and so on, which twitler blocked the URLs of... via exact match. If you stick an #anchor tag on the end of the URL it goes through.
Sigh.
@timberwraith @gwensnyder is there some sort of plug-in to do that automatically? Or maybe a feature in one of the phone apps?
@susankayequinn The main reason guillotining the billionaires isn't within the Overton window yet is people are waiting for the boomers to die.
@pikhq The Linux community went through this in 2004, and I didn't see the appeal at the time: https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/bayes_spam_filters.html
@dalias any idea for a good site to move off of GitHub to?
@b0rk I've seen "bounds checker" and "leak detector".
Old and busted: metaverse
New hotness: mastodon fediverse
I wonder how many Boomers stuck on Faceboot think the first is an abbreviation of the second?
Ah right, Boomers: s/think/believe/
Yeah yeah, #notallboomers
@stephenfry Weird al will chase any other song out of your head except Girl from Ipanema. (You're on your own with that one).
Gumming "Girl from Ipanema" will also chase any other song out of your head, but the downside is then you have that stuck in your head.
P.S. I still don't know the weight of San Jose. Do we include only the stuff sticking up above the surface, or everything installed by humans? Native Americans terraformed the soil... And that's ignoring the air, of course.
@SexyCyborg Red Lobster.
@briankrebs Yes and no. Every server independently pulls the page to generate the summary, so each server you have a follower on counts as a click.
Replication is not a backup. https://infosec.exchange/@SwiftOnSecurity/109452054873199073
@SwiftOnSecurity It's called "unix" for a reason.
@themedievaldrk I'm GenX. We didn't get as _much_ pediatric lead poisoning before they took it out of the gasoline, but I don't really expect my generation to have the spare neurons to handle age-related mental decline gracefully either.
Luckily we've never been the ones driving, so getting Grandpa to stop regularly running over pedestrians at age 90 might be less of an issue? Power is going to pass over us straight to the millennials I expect. I intend to vote for AOC as soon as she can run...
@cstross I've been voldemorting him as twitler.
@miss_s_b I've been voldemorting him as twitler when it comes up, but I also consider bringing him up on Mastodon to be in the "ranting about your ex to each new person you meet" bucket.
Yes the trash fire is impressive, but it's also visible for orbit. They can see it themselves just fine...
@0xabad1dea Congratulations! You can still link to a page that links to the thing, of course...
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io Nah, just stop awarding them huge government contracts. They're at most 18 months ahead of the competition.
@seananmcguire I followed you from livejournal, and we're both still here.
@seananmcguire @the_gneech Take your time. You're here, we like you, this is a hobbyist run convention not a professional media con with a corporate owner. The art show is half set up, the dealer's room is still locked, the panel schedule is stuck at the printer's, but the bar is open and there are already room parties.
Pitch your tent and people will find you. It's not a race. You're doing good.
@Angle @seananmcguire It's a hobbyist run space. Every once in a while there's a horror story about someone handcuffing themselves to a sprinkler and taking down their instance, but there's lots of these little spaces and you meet the same faces in the hallway track and the masquerade.
@seananmcguire @Angle I am using the official Mastodon client, which is widely acknowledged to be the worst possible Mastodon client, and I've still managed to post cat pictures with it.
Peejee is 19 and there is a heating pad set on high under that fluffy blanket.

@sarahtaber The Wikipedia page calls it the Streisand effect.
@kerileighmerritt He might _also_ be dumb.
Remember how a couple days back I dug up my old birdsite account from 3 years ago to point everyone following it here?
You know how I tend to wait until the last minute to do... most things?
Children of the 8-bit machines can smell when a platform is ending and it's time to move on. Didn't want to be right, but blocking links to Mastodon is Gandhi-Con 3.
First ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
@claytoncubitt @kerileighmerritt see also the Gish Gallop.
@neolithicsheep People with actual legal knowledge have come up with good checklists for server admins: https://nitter.net/rahaeli/status/1593819064161665024
@KBSpangler twitler is doing a speed run.
@b0rk The opposite of clickbait headlines.
@chelseakomlo kind of can't do password entry without it.
@elithebearded @fade I want to lobby the state government to install a historical marker commemorating its own placement. "On this site at $DATE, a historical marker was placed."
@vaurorapub The Mozilla foundation is just embarrassing. Here's an old blog of mine with a bunch of links:
https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#30-08-2020
Which was shortly before they did:
https://lwn.net/Articles/833625/
And then the foundation tried to fund itself with Bitcoin: https://twitter.com/plinss/status/1478135256683143168
@SwiftOnSecurity @jerry @oneunderscore__ It's an anti-brigading measure. When too many follow requests come in at once it assumes the user is being dogpiled by trolls, and temporarily switches on follow approval. They can just click yes once on the whole batch.
The open source community needs a term for projects that release source but are developed by a proprietary company instead of a community.
For example: a browser with tab-local cookies would let you have different tabs logged into different GitHub accounts, which seems obviously useful.
Google Chrome will never offer that, because it defeats advertiser tracking. What the users want doesn't matter, they're not developing it.
@YusukelcuiferKaneko Hello.
@Patricia another trick is to go to the main page of interesting servers and pull up the "local timeline" and "federated timeline" of that server. Each server has a different one...
@drewharwell it's the radio version of a car's license plate/headlights/taillights/turn signals combined.
@drewharwell Airplanes broadcast their license plate via radio. The FAA has required them all to do this since the 1950s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFF_Mark_X
Half the arguments about drones in civilian airspace is that they don't have sufficient transponders:
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/resources/faq#q16
Twittler getting suddenly upset about this is like him getting suddenly upset about Apple's 30% cut of iPhone sales. He knew for years and agreed to it, then "forgot" when he donned the maga hat.
So say we all. https://mstdn.party/@gwensnyder/109526890776098302
@caragraph They annoyed me when they first showed up, for about a month. But I was linking to tweets long before they expanded, and my real gripe was adding _any_ link summaries without letting me say no.
Last administration I didn't want to link to things that would put the Resident's face in my timeline, and I don't want to link to things that put Twittler's face in my timeline now.
"Saves you a click to see what I'm commenting on": net positive.
@signalthirteen @tinker Heroes are ablative armor for a social order. They're a human sacrifice made to mitigate a systemic failure. The existence of heroes, like billionaires, indicates the system failed and needed heroic effort to continue.
Now that I've zapped my old account, I should put an html version of my archive at landley.net/twitter. I certainly tried loading that enough over the years...
So wait, All those League of Legends sponsorships on PrudeTube we're paid for with Scam Bankrupt-Fraud's money?
Oh right, Twittler has to maintain his security clearance for SpaceX to remain viable. And without SpaceX, his spylink sattelites only last 5 years each...
https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/109525155409961073
And of course Tesla's real business isn't selling cars, it's selling carbon credits. It's government handouts all the way down with him.
Twittler may be panicking because now that other car manufacturers are ramping up the F-150 lightning and so on, they don't need to buy Tesla's carbon credits anymore.
https://carboncredits.com/teslas-carbon-credit-sales-down-49-in-q2/
We just got mail at 7am from the US post office. A postal worker, with a post office van, dropped off a package on our front porch using a flashlight.
I knew Biden had signed a bill to fix the post office back in April (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-president-biden-signs-the-postal-service-reform-act-of-2022) which removed the pension prefunding liability ($50 billion albatross the GOP hung around the post office's neck under dubyah https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/fy2010/ar2010_4_002.htm) and nerfed trump's Postbastard General, but... dude.
7am delivery on a Saturday. Welcome back.
@oldrawgabbit I honestly can't think of anyone I know who still uses Facebook, and only one parasocial relationship (author Wen Spencer) who still posts there.
Lots of Tumblr. Several patreon. 2/3 of the people I followed on Twitter moved here or to one of those two by the time I deleted my account there. Several blogs/newsletters/forums/email lists still active, and a few new ones recently on places like substack.
But Facebook is... five years gone? Seven?
@hollybrigstocke @Quinnae_Moon Social media isn't new. I joined my first bulletin board in 1983, went from WWIV net to Fidonet to usenet to web forums to livejournal... I've had an internet connected email address for 30 years.
Livejournal was a huge centralization point that imploded in a matter of months: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough (leading to "archive of our own").
Freenode was acquired and imploded last year: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-been-taken-over-by-the-crown-prince-of-korea/
https://lwn.net/Articles/857140/
@hollybrigstocke @Quinnae_Moon The livejournal community's response to being acquired by Russia and freenode community's response to being acquired by a Korean billionaire let me know exactly how Twitter would go down. Seen it before. Find or create a new site that works like Wikipedia instead of Capitalism, everyone moves there "gradually, then suddenly". Rupert Murdoch bought myspace...
"Old site blocks links to new site" is a predictable tourniquet when the migration s-curve tilts upwards.
@eloquence Clay Shirky pointed out that people have hated being "nickel and dimed" longer than that phrase has existed.
@dansinker you can migrate posts: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/
1) Export your data to an archive, 2) create the account on the new server, 3) import your archive on the new server, 4) forward your old account to point to the new account.
The reason for journalists not to blog through their employer is that if they go on strike they can't update their blog. But that's not specific to mastodon. (Plus the "my opinions are not the opinions of my employer" thing gets real thin.)
@boblord @jack_daniel @accidentalciso I've worked at over a dozen employers in my career, from IBM to a partnership with one other person. Sometimes my cubicle is at Johnson Controls and my payroll is handled through a recruiter with seven people on staff. I've worked for undigested acquisitions, small companies working onsite at large clients, been a subcontractor of a subcontractor... I believe my personal matryoshka record is four nested companies at once.
@eloquence and then HBO got acquired by right-wing octogenarian du jour and yanked dozens of things people liked from its archive and proved the pirates right.
Gritty explained succinctly.
@skinnylatte @georgetakei said company is still screwed if twitler loses his security clearance.
@sfierbaugh @tinker Why did nobody flag Trump's NFT cards as obviously AI generated? They had all the signs...
@vaurorapub Terry Pratchett worked through that years ago.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/190619-all-witches-are-selfish-the-queen-had-said-but-tiffany-s
@dalias @SwiftOnSecurity I have literally done that, and I stopped for a reason.
@mdb "if I ask for something specific, will I get it?" "such as?" "dunno."
David Letterman's retirement project is a Netflix series called "My Next Guest" where he spends an hour interviewing someone.
He just traveled to Ukraine to interview Zelenskyy. It's a _really_ good interview.
Moscow is attempting to destroy all of Russia's regional governments ahead of Putin's collapse, to give Moscow a head start in Russia's upcoming civil war.
https://mastodon.social/@ChrisO_wiki/109534240739797850
@davecl42 they were AI generated. That's how AI generation works.
@ubiquity75 Russia bought livejournal. Rupert Murdoch bought myspace. Twittler buying twitter is definitely a trailing indicator.
Especially the journalists who learned nothing from right-wing buyouts of the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and Newsweek and so on. Buying credibility and using like kleenex is what fascists do.
@sfierbaugh @tinker The current crop of AI images are just a follow-up to the morphing technology from Michael Jackson's "black or white" video 30 years ago, with a library of millions of images scraped from the internet and using all that "is this a stoplight" training data people have been feeding it via captcha for years to select sets of images to morph together.
Of course people are finding watermarks from the stolen source images in the result.
@davecl42 Derived works are explicitly covered by copyright law, yes.
@lynncunliffe@mastodon.world @oldrawgabbit A tealight with an upturned clay flower pot over it is an old trick.
Here's a YouTuber overcomplicating it: https://youtu.be/GV23gAO7F8E
@lynncunliffe@mastodon.world @oldrawgabbit And here's a guy explaining why having more than one tea light under a given flowerpot, or putting it on a flammable surface, is probably a bad idea. (Also, the pot will get hot to the touch if you're doing it right.)
@emilybell @jeffjarvis @davew they're not building anything, they're being recruited.
@jeffjarvis @emilybell @davew Seemed like a fairly blatant attempt to control the narrative by controlling the narrators to me.
@lynncunliffe@mastodon.world @oldrawgabbit can't find a video doing the standard upturned pot with it's drainage tray as a stopper, one tea light under it, with the pot on on some bricks or something raising the pot up high enough that the tea light has plenty of air and does not overheat.
The ceramic pot catches and radiates the heat so it doesn't just all go up on the ceiling. It's not complicated.
@lynncunliffe@mastodon.world @oldrawgabbit People have run numbers:
The trick is to heat a small space. Otherwise yeah you need a dozen of them going in parallel.
Good luck. I'm sorry tories still exist in 2022.
@oldrawgabbit @lynncunliffe@mastodon.world this is why the flower pot needs to be sufficiently above the tea light that the heat rising into the flower pot does not heat up the tea light until the wax catches outside of the wick.
Flower pot gets very hot, tea light should not get hotter than tea lights normally do. Also, this is why you use one tea light per pot instead of multiple ones.
@skinnylatte Price. That's basically it. Everything these days is an HDMI viewer.
With "smart tvs" they're cheap but you have to fight them to bypass the spyware and advertising insertion. It's the TV version of those burner phones sold at Walmart loaded up with adware.
@skinnylatte A couple of models of those if you give them internet access it's like an always-on Alexa streaming audio from your room back to the manufacturer in China.
@bkeegan Cooking with knives and fire, like programming in c, do not go out of style.
I have so far avoided the endless time sink that is Android app programming, but after using the official Mastodon client for several weeks now... wow I'm tempted to write one from scratch.
@dalias is that a nickname for the Korean dude who took over freenode? Because as someone who was on freenode, I didn't recognize it.
That's beyond preaching to the choir, that's excluding the choir too and only getting the other clergy in the room.
I have reached the point where I no longer click on links to Twitter, because I'm just not emotionally up for it.
Yes I've seen the threads about how Tevye's rooftop song about tradition definitely meant they all should have stayed to face the Bolsheviks together.
There's a "flee Nazi Germany" case and a "stay and fight for Ukraine" case but you built a community in a rental property and the USA's state religion (capitalism) lets the new slumlord burn it down for the insurance.
I can't watch.
@malwaretech First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Stage three. All the open source people expected this, because freenode did the same thing with libera chat last year:
@Popehat last year a Korean billionaire bought the open source IRC net "freenode", which was replaced by a new one within months.
The billionaire banning references to the new network is what started the mass exodus.
@deviantollam Billionaires buying social media sites always do this. This literally happened last year to a different site (the freenode irc network):
https://slashdot.org/story/386026
Livejournal's "strikethrough" was how archive of our own got started, when Russia bought them and the fascists started anti-gay banning campaigns:
@tychotithonus I have not wanted to start a whack-a-mole search. That's at least as big a time sink...
Last year a Korean billionaire purchased the IRC network freenode, and the real mass exodus of users started when he banned anyone who mentioned the emerging alternative network:
https://slashdot.org/story/386026
15 years ago Russia bought livejournal, and "archive of our own" was created when fascists started banning content:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough
Fascists literally never learn. If they could they wouldn't be fascists. The closest they get is trying to copy the past.
@b9AcE fire fighters fight fire, crime fighters fight crime, freedom fighters fight freedom.
@wendynather I'm always reluctant to reply to unknown texts, for the same reason most internet facing servers these days drop packets instead of sending NAKs.
I'm not confident enough in my understanding of the threat model to want to acknowledge that this is an active phone number, that it can receive texts rather than voice only, that the recipient speaks english, what hours I'm awake...
@themedievaldrk I deleted my birdsite account already. I'm used to years of people having a Facebook account I didn't read, AOL forums I wasn't in...
Guillotine the billionaires.
By which I mean the USA should change federal law so hoarding an offensive amount of capital is a capital offense, punishable by guillotine after full due process.
Lobbying to put the top tax rate back where it was in 1963 is a compromise position, not the opening offer.
https://doctorow.medium.com/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop-110ba9711133
Huh, mastodon has a symlink format (so I could have an arbitrary username on a webserver I control forward here):
https://guide.toot.as/guide/use-your-own-domain/
And somebody just wrote a generator for the link file format:
@molly0xfff I like closure. I deleted my Twitter, and am trying to remember to back up my Mastodon weekly.
Apparently I need to run my own instance to import the historical post feed I downloaded though. Or at least my instance wouldn't let me do it. (Metadata like follow and block list yes, post history no.)
@mjg59 The amiga was a nommu system. Commodore bargained for the creation of the cheaper 680E30 with the MMU removed because AmigaOS _couldn't_ use an MMU: it was a microkernel system. It passed pointers around as "messages" and everybody just read/wrote the same structures. If it had to copy the data (or remap it), performance would have tanked.
People held the amiga up as an example of a microkernel that could do multimedia for _years_ without understanding how they did it...
@mjg59 Which hardware is it using? (Post-bankruptcy the name "commodore" bounced off a number of organizations. I only had a 1000 and 500, and then went to x86....)
@mjg59 Good luck.
@simon_bitdiddle @christianschwartz @malwareunicorn People change a lot slower than technology.
@mjg59 The amiga acquiring an MMU didn't mean the developer base and culture caught up. :)
@fade Could you see if ect or multiplexer are interested? Also, hi @BunRab https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/109538027829514449
@tinker It's like explaining the internet to AOL users. They'll figure it out eventually.
@themedievaldrk I try never to criticize anyone who finds themselves unable to leave an abusive relationship. The abuser is always 100% at fault.
@valkyrie "The workers control the means of production. The struggle of the urban proletariat."
"No it was Wolverhampton wanderers who beat Leicester 3-1."

@sarahtaber many servers have a Patreon link on their about page.
@apiratemoo He's looking for a scapegoat. Somebody to sock puppet his decisions through.
@0xabad1dea there's some sort of data connection to a microcontroller on the brick that wears out long before the power connection does.
Try tilting the laptop so the battery points straight upwards while it's plugged in. I have no idea why that helps, but it sometimes does.
@0xabad1dea once it's managed to exchange a few packets with the brick, it continues to charge from it as long as it's plugged in. The microcontroller in the laptop caches the state or something.
I have, however, had the brick get very very hot while charging the battery and doing power intensive stuff with the laptop. It couldn't communicate to tell it to back off or something?
it's fine while the battery is full. Dell is weird.
@GossiTheDog @Gargron that was pretty much the problem I had with "line", Japan's version of Twitter. I had no idea who to follow except a couple of coworkers who almost never posted.
@SexyCyborg when they said sunlight is the best disinfectant...
The commodore Amiga intentionally didn't have an MMU because it was a microkernel OS. Its "message passing" was just passing pointers around and directly reading memory, and an MMU would have killed performance.
They even asked Motorola to create the 680E30 processor without an MMU to save money.
Alas chrome's :~:text=Why%20no%20MMU anchor search trick doesn't seem to work on PDFs, so you'd have to search for "Why no MMU?" yourself in https://amigaone.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/amiga-history-and-patent.pdf
For more on why microkernels suck, see the Tanenbaum-Tovalds debate: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is. And once "everybody knows" something, Max Planck's Principle applies:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works
And then you get the 2005 Nobel prize in Medicine: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank-infectious-broth-gave-himself-an-ulcer-and-solved-a-medical-mystery
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease (I.E. dunning-kruger at the OTHER end).
I am reminded of the explanation why Squirrel Girl can wield Excalibur, since she's descended from King Arthur and that squirrel Merlin set him up with: https://tyrantisterror.tumblr.com/post/623500793924993024/noreasonisreasonenough-spankzilla85
@shawrd773@zirk.us The Wall Street journal, Washington Post, and electronic frontier foundation have all done intro to Mastodon pieces.
@frontier has he announced which scapegoat he plans to sock puppet yet?
@georgetakei I think he's appointing a scapegoat he can sock puppet.
@KN3RDS @BlackAzizAnansi it's a bit like crop rotation.
@nadine_nonny I am impressed by his ability to make it worse.
@0xabad1dea it's somewhere between jubilee and crop rotation.
The polar vortex kept cold air contained at the North Pole. Climate change has destabilized it, so the cold air leaks down here instead of staying up there.
The freezer door is open and the ice cubes are melting, but we get a cool breeze. All the snow dumped on the USA melts in spring, while the polar ice caps are not replenished.
@wdlindsy The images were obviously AI generated. The prompt probably wasn't even long.
@0xabad1dea sign up to continue reading.
@malwaretech there are already plugins that make a GIF of a post and attach it to the thing you're linking to.
The "you can't have it, you don't know how to use it, this is for your own good" guy is unlikely to win in the long term. He is giving screen readers a harder time though, and the plugins can't tell if you're linking to a protected account you follow or not. And they can't delete the post to stop it. Nor does it verify authenticity. So at least he's managing to make it worse.
@oldrawgabbit for a definition of quit that means appointing a scapegoat he can sock puppet.
@regehr there's the architecture specific elf specs, the syscall man page with the register argument assignments... what are you looking for?
@pikhq Checks mental inventory: coconuts, married a squirrel, size 10 Roman gladius...
@evacide this is like the duct tape and plastic sheeting people introducing blue into the alert levels isn't it?
I always have to look it up: they stuck Grover between Oscar and Bert.
@regehr I know that c++ puts the member names in the wrong order because of https://itanium-cxx-abi.github.io/cxx-abi/abi.html which were the first people to write up a detailed spec so a lot of other architectures followed them even though it was stupid.
@regehr https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscall.2.html has the architecture specific syscall register mapping. https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/ has some more...
@eniko Community is much higher commitment than audience. I'm subscribed to like 2% of the channels I watch on YouTube. I'm often in the audience for _years_ before trying to talk back.
@gwensnyder if you notice the tech it's immature tech.
@dalias a community is a subset of an audience. Demanding everyone write fanfic as a condition of watching the show doesn't scale very well.
@JonnyT @isaacs
I'm all for adding the feature. Refusing to add the feature doesn't stop people from linking to posts, it just means people aren't notified when their posts are linked to or where from.
The Mastodon maintainer has a personal dislike of the feature, and in the absence of a server-side implementation end users are hacking it in anyway.
@dalias This new network has a whole lot of toddlers telling newborns they're doing it wrong.
@janl I download my archive and use grep. Same as Twitter.
@janl Ah, missed what you were searching for.
@malwaretech If there is I expect trolls pointing their widely blocked twitter account to some mastodon acount they don't like to get a victim blocked in the new context.
@malwaretech "I control X, I point it at Y" is verifiable, so migrating follows seems reasonably secure. "Random other person controls X, they also point it at Y" is not verifiable, so migrating blocks is easily gamed. You probably need to assemble block lists in the new context?
Dowanna learn Ruby. Dowanna get involved in a new timesink. Dowanna maintain a fork of a project. Dowanna run my own mastodon server...
Loading my profile in the fourth web column and clicking "posts and replies" to add a P.S. reply to the post I just did (and thus start a thread) doesn't work if the tab is cached and showing me yesterday's info, but there's no "refresh just this column" and refreshing the page will refresh my home tab and lose my place working through a backlog of posts.
I have no idea why right clicking my profile photo and doing "open in new window" so I _can_ see a refreshed column of my posts where I can reply and extend a thread does the "proceed" pop-up when I then try to reply to it. It's the same website! You are asking _yourself_ for authentication! (And getting it, without me having to log back in. What's this extra step for? Seems insecure somehow. The redundant explicit request for credentials makes me dubious.)
Not a big deal. This is teething troubles. But Grognard the mastodon maintainer has already established himself as "somebody whose personal aesthetic opinions trump the expressed preferences of the vast majority of his userbase" on the quote reply issue, and thus somebody I'm not gonna bother to try to engage with via bug report.
"You cannot be trusted with this feature. It's open source, therefore I can prevent you from having it." Umm... not how it works? I await the fork...
Also, I have NO idea why the link to my blog doesn't show up as green in my profile? I cut and pasted their link thing, it's even on its own line now. It's within the first 1k of the page text.
$ wget https://landley.net/notes.html -O- 2>/dev/null | grep mstdn.jp | head -n 1
<a rel="me" href="https://mstdn.jp/@landley">mastodon</a>
I want <pre> in posts.
@natureworks ping for @ursulav
Also, can I get the "crying laughing" emoji out of the corner of the compose box, sneering at everything I write? Grognard insists link tweets are aggressive, and he puts that staring down at everything we type. Sigh.
@Ciaraioch The Rooster's jailhouse lament was sped up to provide the "hampsterdance" song.
@SexyCyborg It seems like tipping waiters to me: in the USA if you don't do it you're an asshole, in Japan if you do it you're being insulting.
Defund the police. https://mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot/109548755944422536
@micahflee @drewharwell @MattBinder @w7voa @tony Did the dude ever find a scapegoat to sock puppet as new CEO? Or is this a Boris Johnson situation where he resigns an then stays anyway?
@atomicpoet Me personally? Keep using plastic straws and taking long showers because that's not where the problem is.
@oldrawgabbit I wouldn't allow one of those in the house.
@cstross I think giant batteries to stick the wind into are more immediately interesting.
These guys seem to have the best tech for municipal container batteries:
It's iron, road salt, water, and vinegar in a bunch of PVC pipes. It's all 1970s tech. Their patents are all around special filters (clever but still pool/aquarium level of complexity) that take it from a few hundred cycles to "the plumbing wears out long before the chemistry does".
@cstross P.S. I blogged my last research pass on them, with links to the source material:
https://landley.net/notes-2022.html#16-07-2022
Alas it isn't a home solution, it's municipal. Supplements electrial substations or attaches to an office park.
@cstross This video is the best intro to their tech I've seen so far. (Wadsworth constant 6 minutes.) Dude went to their factory and interviewed the founders.
@FeralRobots @cstross And there's room for improvement. Shipping containers are designed to stack up to eight high, but ESS's current deployment doesn't seem to be vertically stacking them at all? Presumably later generations of the tech can upgrade density pretty easily, but right now they're optimizing for maintenance I guess.
I used to follow them at @ess_info@twitter.com when I had an account there, and they linked to all sorts of talks and articles...
@robryk @cstross does an hour-long interview with the CEO talking about the technology count? https://youtu.be/LPm3fgxbgg8
@robryk @cstross I suspect there was some due diligence along the way to going public? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/11/ess-battery-company-backed-by-bill-gates-softbank-opens-on-nyse.html
@robryk @cstross Odd. It shows up for me: https://mstdn.jp/@landley/109551851654546174
@robryk @cstross There's a bunch of container battery companies like Ambri and Form Energy that never shipped anything, which I consider basically scams. (Ambri gave a great 2012 ted talk but they've been wrestling with their tech for a decade: molten antimony is STUPID.)
These guys have actual customers and their website has actual numbers for products you could buy today: prices, capacity, charge/discharge rate, weight, efficiency, etc. They're building factories in spain and australia.
@cstross @robryk Ambri set the space back years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sddb0Khx0yA was _exciting_ back in 2012 but it didn't WORK. (Ivory tower academic white guy behind it, of course.)
The moten metal ate through the seals (https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ambri-returns-to-the-energy-storage-hunt-with-liquid-metal-battery-redesign) and he KEEPS FUNDRAISING https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/ambris-liquid-metal-battery-mines-144-million-in-storage-investment-gold-rush and just... please stop. Get out of the way of the people who have stuff that actually works.
@cstross @robryk And I had ESS confused with Form Energy for about a year myself (http://landley.net/notes-2022.html#17-04-2022) which is another company that seems to soak up funding, advertise extensively, but never actually ship anything to customers.
ESS has real working things deployed in the field that people have paid them money for, and their limiting factor isn't research but building factories. As George Carlin said, "kinda helps the belief along".
@robryk @cstross It's not an electrode it's a membrane? I've seen explanations of this but it was a while ago and there is COVID between here and there. It could have been in https://youtu.be/xCzKQbukL1E or https://youtu.be/qhtAiIMkmJY or one of https://resources.essinc.com/white-papers or...
I believe the metal completely dissolving into solution each cycle is part of the expected operation? It doesn't have the lead/acid problem of too much discharge being bad for it.
@robryk @cstross I also vaguely recall that the iron being in solution is the charged state, not the discharged state? But don't quote me on that, I'm sure it's written down somewhere.
The basic technology was developed by NASA in the 1970s and is all out of patent. It was uninteresting because it's really big and heavy, and at least back then its round trip efficiency was only 75%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_redox_flow_battery
I'm not a domain expert here, I can just point at sources....
@FeralRobots @cstross Oh sure. But those things get stacked 8-9 high in the wild and even three high triples the storage density.
Googling for numbers, a 40' container is allowed to weigh 20K kg and be street legal, the internal volume is just under 68 cubic meters, so about 2/7 of its internal volume could be water and it's normal weight.
As solvable versus unsolvable problems go, that one I'm not worried about. I'm also not at all surprised they're saving it for later.
@edavies @cstross Oh goddess no.
Hydrogen leaks through everything, has a round trip efficiency below 50%, destroys the ozone layer, needs dangerously high pressure to have ANY energy density, embrittlement...
https://youtu.be/f7MzFfuNOtY
https://youtu.be/b88v-WvqzeQ
https://youtu.be/2EA4tDYwNYo
https://youtu.be/zSeTHOCHryc
https://youtu.be/ge4ux1Y1ric
https://youtu.be/MgmBkvrO0Dg
Maybe international airplane travel will use it... but even there biodiesel seems more likely?
@gaya_tech @cstross You're surprised a magazine used clip art for molecule graphics?
@bascule He was not born in this country and would thus require a constitutional amendment to run for president.
@antoinevg @bascule They needed the Boomers to pull that off. Too many of them have died already.
@cstross @edavies @markrvickers You probably don't even need to get that fancy. Vegetable oil, kerosene, diesel, and jet fuel are all reasonably interchangeable. In theory we can let 4 billion years of evolution handle the synthesis for us.
We can't produce enough to replace trucking fuel, and food crops aren't efficient feedstock, but for the "lithium ain't dense enough" niche it's an option that doesn't require significant new discoveries. We KNOW farming.
@bascule you said pathological narcissist who wants a title.
@0xabad1dea Will render it like... and then there was nothing until your sentence about being unsure it was supported.
@ginnyhogan Scam Bankrupt Fraud.
@ahribellah@peoplemaking.games @eniko I go ahead and link to it and treat it as if it's a quote tweet. The plumbing sucking at it is a separate issue.
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Yup.
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social I sent him the link to your post. I don't think he's on here yet but I've been poking him...
@fade popehat, pwnallthethings, swiftonsecurity...
@Are0h So you need to pre-judge people then?
@choochoobear Popeye explained https://mastodon.lol/@dulcedemon/109554851225936731
@apiratemoo I find https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/index.html easiest to navigate.
@apiratemoo I'm trying to make http://landley.net/toybox/help.html useful but it's terse by nature. More a cheat sheet than man pages.
@apiratemoo Sigh
And I see I need to teach the generator about aliases so it doesn't dump a half dozen redundant instances of the still unfinished shell stuff...
@miss_s_b Efficiency and resiliency trade off. Increasing efficiency usually decreases resilience by eliminating spare capacity.
@shreyas@x0r.be "git format-patch -1 $HASH" and then email the file to the maintainer or mailing list. (Apply with "git am filename")
@shreyas@x0r.be Note that for historical reasons the Linux kernel mailing list does not want the file to be attached, it wants it cut and pasted inline with word wrap disabled, and that whole signed-off-by-in-triplicate nonsense.
Every other mailing list I'm aware of is okay with file attachments.
@futurebird@sauropods.win @barometz "What are people talking about?" + "Some people are terrible." is a hard conflict to resolve.
Google replaced its original pagerank algorithm with something more complicated and opaque because SEO spammers gamed it so hard. The YouTube algorithm has been a clusterfuck ever since shoving Google+ down its throat shattered its original commenter community.
An established community self policing is a double-edged sword. Externally imposed "benevolent dictator" has more edges.
@XanIndigo It's like "consumer". Capitalism wants you to self-identify as capitalist the same way other religions want you to build your identity around first communion and being a parishioner.
@SexyCyborg you're posting stuff directly here and then we are also getting copies of what you post to Twitter, resulting in duplicates.
@hakan_geijer @cstross @jbgi some of us switched from copyleft to public domain equivalent licensing a decade back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s
https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3
@gsuberland @esther@strangeobject.space how do you remove results from a hashtag?
@Tiggersong @fade Multi-time agility champion. Here's 2019 https://youtu.be/GhKmykc02Bw and 2021
https://youtu.be/MS6LnSbnEFI
Happy dog.
@miss_s_b @cstross @CherylMorgan It's catchy too. Good walking music.
@Popehat The people I follow use it almost entirely as the old livejournal-cut. A short intro for a long post.
The problem with content warnings is they're incoming, not outgoing. I follow someone who is deathly allergic to mangoes (carries an epi-pen and had to use it once because of the smell of mango sauce) who is uncomfortable seeing them, but does not expect CW: mango. Childhood trauma left me with needle phobia and I don't expect CW: syringe. I would LOVE a CW hiding Trump or Musk's face.
Pipes froze again.
The insulation we had a guy install around the water pipe going into the house last time Austin froze over is (so far) preventing the heating pad and blanket from thawing it this time.
Reporters interviewing each other about their experience with Mastodon. https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/can-mastodon-be-a-reasonable-twitter-substitute-for-journalists/
@Popehat Here are some professional journalists talking about mastodon's content warning mechanism and their own debates about it: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/can-mastodon-be-a-reasonable-twitter-substitute-for-journalists/#:~:text=content%20warnings
@bhawthorne @bethsawin @catvalente @sdague Malls were de-facto public spaces for a while. Then their owners got greedy and they all went bankrupt.
And thawed.
(Yes we could have waved a blowtorch or something at the frozen bit, but gentle warming with a heating pad under a military surplus sleeping bag is better for the lifespan of the pipes. Replacing them would involve tearing open the wall _and_ jackhammering up concrete, let's not.)
@lrhodes Boomers who inhaled leaded gasoline exhaust fumes for 50 years, including significant pediatric exposure, got very bad at dealing with change as they aged (they temselves said "don't trust anyone over 30") and went completely mental as real age related mental degeration set in a decade ago.
It's more widespread and intense than other generations because the pediatric/developmental lead exposure was so severe in Boomers.
@jomc Instantly fatal?
"But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live." - Exodus 33:20.
Indiana Jones was right.
@pleia2 you know the backstory about how IBM got into Linux, right?
They put out a "beta" of DB2 for Linux, thinking it might be of interest to the educational market, and started getting support requests from large banks.
When the Boomers die, intellectual property law needs to end with them. https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/109563859159777518
@pluralistic I'm told Fiddler on the Roof is an old movie about migrating off Twitter.
Russia is widely expected to collapse into civil war when Putin finally dies, in part because he's eliminated all potential successors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT4sK36cU3Y
Putin invaded crimea to distract from the Sochi Olympics imploding, a vietnam-style quagmire putting a timer on his tenure. (He doubled down like Johnson.)
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2014/02/sochi-olympics-russia-corruption
But it looks like the civil war's already started, with all the guns handed out in Ukraine smuggled back home and sold to criminals:
https://twitter.com/betelgeuse1922/status/1606251954979618816
1) Right wing loons are pearl clutching about global decline in birth rate.
2) Ronald Reagan's Racist Rant about "welfare queens" having lots of babies because of federal subsidies for baby-having meant official GOP position was "giving money to mothers increases baby-having".
3) Biden's $300/month per-child payment during the pandemic was bigly effective.
So of course:
4) Republicans unanimously voted against it, and it wasa not extended.
When the Boomers die, UBI.
@anildash @jab01701mid @taylorlorenz The word "journalist" was probably optional in that sentence. I await a fork of the software, maintained by someone less condescending to the entire userbase.
Listening to Fuzzy and @fade open their "my little pony" themed apple juice bottle. The stopper is a capsule you open, with a little pony figurine inside.
It's Rarity again. They called it before they even opened it. They have six of her now. No more than two of any others, but so many Rarity...
@gwensnyder The Mastodon maintainer is a comfortable white male saying "you don't really want that, you don't know what you want, I know better, let me tell you about your own needs, I don't care how many times I have to repeat this".
That's a strong sign the project needs a fork (or fresh implementation) maintained by somebody else. Market opportunity you could drive a truck through.
If he's like this about quote tweets, it won't be the last time.
@laser Twitter auto tagged me as female. I let them continue in that belief.
@malwaretech I unfollowed a bunch of people cause I didn't want to see what they posted.
@malwaretech Nothing to do with quote tweets, plenty of links out on the web to be horrified about.
@seananmcguire Not in my experience?
@annaleen George Zimmerman did not consent to going viral.
@moof @cstross @jwz @neilhimself And before that Arthur C Clark's "9 Billion Names of God" in 1953...
@saint_rebel_ukraine_ I liked https://twitter.com/uamemesforces/status/1606701325177262082 but can't find them on mastodon yet...
@Patienceltd @aprilfollies @moof @cstross @jwz @neilhimself In the french RPG Steve Jackson's "In Nomine" was based on, a demon of technology uploaded himself to the internet... and the recipient immediately shared him on bittorrent so hell couldn't get him back out because there's always someone invoking him online.
@markhertling "Can I convince you to fight back less, at least for a while."
The real life japanese news stories behind each Persona 5 villain.
@vaurorapub I made @fade a cup holder by drilling four holes in a plastic cup, running twine through them, and looping it over the shower curtain rod.
This allows a range of shower beverages.
Sigh. Quote posts are edging towards attaching screenshots without even bothering to link to the original.
https://mastodon.social/@kerileighmerritt/109577253570783336
https://infosec.exchange/@wendynather/109577029835326187
This is the future the mastodon maintainer wants...
@adrienne Hello. Still in canada with person you moved to canada for?
@adrienne I didn't expect the technical part to be hard, it's just that grognard insists "his" users can't have what they want for their own good, and will somehow all thank him for it someday, you'll see, etc.
How hard is the fork for other admins to install?
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social @bcantrill I have yet to see anyone who is not a white man express this position. And I've been waiting for a month and a half.
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social I linked to two women doing it despite grognard's prohibition, and a white man linked to another white man in support of the original white man's prohibition of it.
Here's a conversation I just had with a woman I've known since 1998 (we met at Armadillocon) about the instance she's on implementing support for it: https://social.treehouse.systems/@adrienne/109578704728551626
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social I believe one of the women I linked to initially has been a professional programmer longer than I've been an _amateur_ programmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendynather
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social https://mstdn.social/@danielhanley/109569763543559036
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social informing the recipient of the link, making it stop showing if they delete the link, ensuring that you're not accidentally publicizing content from a locked account that way...
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Oh and making sure you can't just post a fake expansion of something they never said pointing to a URL that never existed and claim "the must have deleted it" when viewers can't click through to your forgery, that's nice too...
There's lists of these. I think Rich was collecting them? I expect Adrienne's instance has implemented them.
Grognard already said he never will, so there are plugins that attach a screenshot with a link.
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Somebody mentioned the plugin they were using had just updated to rewrite links to other mastodon instances to be local links on your curent instance (as if you put the URL in the search bar) so clicking through lets you favorite and reply without the login pop-up, but I didn't save it because I don't use that one and want it supported in my instance. (Which means running a non-grognard fork like treehouse does.)
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Darn it, what's it called when someone finds additional reasons for something they've already decided, none of which were motivation for them doing it in the first place?
It's related to "his conclusions never change but he has a different justification for it every time the previous one gets shot down", ala George W. Bush invading Iraq.
You'd think it would be on one of the https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/fallacies_list.html lists but I guess it's adjacent...
@catvalente As creepy as Amazon is, this is why the amazon wishlist was created. (A bridal registry without needing to get married...)
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social That sounds right, yes. Thanks. (Knew there was a phrase for it. :)

@oldrawgabbit What's that old parable, it is easier to pass a rich white man through the eye of a needle than send them to prison?
A blender and syringe help.
Don't pick an unprovoked fight with a lawyer. The good ones know where all the levers of power really are, and how to turn them.
@robryk @freemin7@mast.hpc.social I can include a dead link to anywhere, yes. But if my instance doesn't expand that dead link into a forged post, then my instance isn't implicitly attesting to the validity of a snapshot in time of what the post said. (Back on the bird site a summary card and inline tweet data were distinct and distinguishable.)
Activepub is eventually going to need cryptographic signatures if it doesn't already have them. Shouldn't be noticeably more heavyweight than https...
Not that this is a new development, but it seems to be becoming more common. https://mas.to/@carnage4life/109565771932814923
@ariadne Sigh.
The Wizard of Oz was isekai. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was isekai. Gulliver's travels. Dante's inferno. A Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court. Ovid writing about Orpheus trying to rescue Euridice.
Andre Norton's Which World in 1963 started with an american going through the Siege Perilous. Roger Zelezny's Nine Princes in Amber (1970) was multiverse Isekai, as was Robert Aspirin's Another Fine Myth in 1978. Alan Moore named Marvel's Earth-616 in 1983.
@sarahtaber The premise of Doctor Who is that an advanced long-lived alien species created a time traveling RV you could park in deep space for years to catch up on stuff, and then return home 5 minutes after you left and pick up where you left off.
The Doctor took one to another planet and interacted with others, and his people insisted he was using it wrong.
@cstross It should have been another September that never ended but Twittler never ships on time.
@SexyCyborg The USA is also waiting for the Boomers to die.
@molly0xfff Chevron vs Donziger. The fix is in then.
The problem with Copaganda: https://elliottkay.tumblr.com/post/703567320532074496/theoutcastrogue-copaganda-does-three-main-things
@SexyCyborg Fascists love STEM because it's amoral. Nazi science was no threat to the German regime, and when the USA and Russia captured the V2 engineers and used them for our space programs, they worked just as hard for each side of the Iron Curtain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
Fascists are eliminating everything ELSE because educating people on history, sociology, literature, etc directly undermines fascism.
@Patienceltd @aprilfollies @moof @cstross @jwz @neilhimself Speaking of SJG's In Nomine, the first supplement (Relevations I: Night Music) had a sample adventure "The Demon Prince of Rock and Roll" where a demon who was offered a boon by Lucifer had paniced and asked if he could come back later. So Lucifer gave him a song to summon him... by singing it 10 million times.
The adventure is about trying to stop ANOTHER demon who learned the song giving a live performance of it on MTV.
@wa7iut @SexyCyborg That statement is a can of worms that I'm not going to try to follow up on from my phone, but... great is not how I'd describe it
@wa7iut @SexyCyborg Let's just say they put a lot of effort into it.
Russia is having its agents attack the power grids of its enemies. If they won't pay for Russian oil and gas, they will live in the dark.
@rubenbolling you don't escape capitalist embrace-and-extend by moving to another proprietary platform ready to be purchased.
Russia's Matroyshka dolls started out as a copy of Japan's Shichi-fuku-jin dolls nesting the seven gods of fortune.
The Russian copy was shown at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, from where it became famous.
https://en.japantravel.com/kanagawa/history-of-the-russian-matryoshka/31720
@fishkin Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal in 2007.
@catvalente You can go to the "following" tabs of people to see if you recognize anybody. Mine's https://mstdn.jp/users/landley/following for example where @scalzi @seananmcguire @HowardTayler @neilhimself @KBSpangler @ursulav @dianeduane @ArkadyMartine may be familiar from the convention circuit...
Increasing efficiency reduces resiliency. "Just in time delivery" increases efficiency until it's brittle. A thread on how Southwest Airlines just shattered.
@jpkmensah@mas.to Any time a field gets lucrative, men push out women. Here's the famous 1983 MIT paper on that purge happening in computer science: https://simson.net/ref/1983/barriers.pdf
(See also @sarahtaber 's thread on "egg money" and https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109545727584656667 for "beer brewer" becoming "witch".)
@BrynnTannehill74 who are you following?
@mikey @BrynnTannehill74 Some people private that. (There's a setting for it.)
@BrynnTannehill74 He privated his followers. You can do that here. Some people do. I haven't.
@cstross "So what was your parents' total bill for raising you, with interest and adjusted for inflation, and how long did it take you to pay it off?"
Then again it does explain why so many libertarians are spherical. And frictionless.
@SexyCyborg Don't underestimate the impact 50 years of breathing leaded gasoline fumes had on the boomers worldwide.
Pediatric and chronic lead exposure combines badly with senility. The debuffs don't just stack, they multiply.
@oldrawgabbit It's called shrinkflation.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/brexit-shrinkflation-ons-pack-sizes
Next May 4 remind me to glue two hexagons to opposite sides of a can of thai iced tea
@TheRaDR The NYT is for and about Boomers only.
@pixelfed You're not providing any context either.
@cstross I always assumed Mr Blobby, Barney, and Teletubbies were regional variations of the species.
@shepgo Need to trim the /a/ from the end?
@caseynewton "He has also asked some leaders to snuff out the sources of leaks to the press and anonymous posts on social media sites, three people said."
@bookishbrews s/we/Boomers/
Forty years of breathing leaded gasoline fumes combine poorly with senility.
@Quinnae_Moon @dalias An argument _against_ stay-and-fight on twitter to use the Ring against Sauron then.
Grognard insisting the mastodon community is nicer because it doesn't have quote tweets is like a religion insisting its members are nicer because of the dietary restrictions.
@dalias I should add something stuff to main.c in toybox that violates that fucking stupid compiler flag.
"What broke?" "My special lint flag generated a false positive!" "But what actually happened?" "The static checker complained!" "Do you have an example of a supported system on which it doesn't work?" "Not with this flag!" Which does nothing but insert an error message...
I'm disappointed in GenX but most of us spent our first 25 years breathing leaded gasoline fumes too. The brain damage comes out with age...
@dalias those guys are going to replace everything with rust on general principles. And they will say they're not doing it because of the rust, but always do it in rust.
@Cuprohastes @kam0n0hashi42 There's a reason for it. Lacking empathy they literally can't mentally model anyone else, all they can do is put themselves in another situation and describe what they'd do there.
The french guillotined all their billionaires centuries ago. https://mas.to/@VeryBadLlama/109604989885343084
@legion303 I'm pink therefore I'm spam.
@SexyCyborg You can sing "carbon monoxide" to "waltzing matilda".
Never trust "cloud" anything. It's all public, will go away randomly, and gets used against you by advertisers or the Iranian Morality Police. https://mastodon.social/@kashhill/109604876787897740
@vaurorapub I break everything. I debugged my way down.
@KBSpangler Nah, tooting your own horn is on brand here.
Tesla autopilot sucks. https://youtu.be/FGXuVNl8YYc
Can we have a Sherman antitrust suit against Audible yet? https://youtu.be/gld-uHAIRlE
@Strandjunker So me missing the bus this evening might change the next election? If I spill my soda we get a tornado next year?
How would I know?
@pluralistic You can have just the first post in a mastodon thread be public, so they can click to expand the whole thread but won't otherwise see the rest in the feed: https://forall.social/@dancingdogs/109586685784409178
I am not impressed with Grognard's maintainership of Mastodon. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/109620366963153596
Global warming has reached the point where the national weather service is concluding its warnings with a "Look, you're fucked, sorry" paragraph at the end.
San Francisco paving over all the rivers running through it didn't help, of course.
@davidkaye The story is behind a paywall. Irony is not dead. (Just paywalled.)
The story is behind a paywall for me. (Irony is not dead, just paywalled.)
The bad guy is capitalism. It is an extremely destructive state religion which has outlived its usefulness.
@MeidasTouch They heard about AI art generation, asked a generator for a bunch of trump-as-hero pictures, and sold them on limited edition commemorative plate du jour.
Why do people still think humans were involved in anything but the selling?
@mhucka which is why it has the green check mechanism where a site you control points at your account?
That said, the Boomers were uniquely lead poisoned by leaded gasoline, and late stage capitalism is a collapsing religion every bit as septic as the divine right of kings got at the end.
How's the fork away from Grognard going? Is there an index of "sites you can move to that support new feature X" yet?
Oh, hey. Good news: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109623891328707089
@mulegirl Same in the USA: cowboy culture went extinct because land enclosure blocked cross country cattle drives to market.
Putting "in God we trust" on the money in 1957 marked the handoff from the old state religion (christianity) to the new state religion (capitalism). Who needs some Middle Eastern desert God when you've got the almighty dollar?
@bbak @mulegirl The kansas railheads were usually the destination of the drive. If you'd like to read about the topic, I"m sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy#End_of_the_open_range has some references.
@bbak @mulegirl https://youtu.be/-2ab5nv4Suc was also entertaining.
@oldrawgabbit I don't really need a closeup of roadkill, nor a blow by blow of a 76 year old sociopathic narcissist's struggle with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.
https://twitter.com/TomJChicago/status/1263811708566503427
@futurebird@sauropods.win @aral @akareilly @peter @stevenbodzin Small town people live in gated communities with sundown laws and security to keep "the riffraff" out. Urbanites deal with everybody.
Lots of people THINK they're a lot more metropolitan than they are.
If you've never restored from backup and tried to actually use the result, you don't have backups.
Replication is not a backup. Replication is "drop tables" propagating to 3 datacenters in 30 seconds.
Good backups have multiple historical snapshots. (At my scale, sticking a new 5 terabyte USB drive in a safety deposit box, next to the other ones, with the year written on it in sharpie, covers a multitude of sins.)
"Insurance" is what mobsters claim to be selling. Nice place, shame if something were to happen to it. The entire business is inherently criminal.
Governments provide services. It's why we pay taxes. All "insurance" should be a government service paid for by taxes. Private insurance should be illegal under anti-gambling legislation.
Efficiency being the enemy of creativity was also the point of John cleese's talk on creativity.
Plastic recycling started as a literal scam:
And it's still a scam today:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@glassbottommeg/109622278188444207
Automating away David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs". The ciiiiircle of caaaaaapitalism...
https://strangeobject.space/@esther/109630472366154784
Just do Basic Income already:
https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#24-01-2018
https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#28-01-2018
https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#05-02-2018
https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#19-02-2018
https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#06-03-2018
https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#08-04-2018
https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#04-06-2018
https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#01-07-2018
https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#12-07-2018
Also why mastodon beats twitter, wikipedia outlived brittania and encarta, why email survives, why good old web pages are still a thing, ao3 prevails...
Linux didn't have to beat Windows, just outlast it. Capitalism inevitably overshoots its user base and squeezes blood from a stone. It can't not. Growth past maturity is mandatory. 100% of the market is never enough.
Russia keeps claiming incompetence to avoid admitting its enemies' success.
I'm happy to agree Putin and Russia are profoundly incompetent, but Ukraine is also pretty good at this. Russia is running through its inheritance of Soviet surplus, without which they got 'nothin.
Without the USA paying them for ISS launches, they haven't got a space program either, meaning no ICBM maintenance. If their nukes worked, they'd have used them back around April.
@futurebird@sauropods.win @MetalSamurai @jeffjarvis @timbray I've found the easiest way to search my own posts is to download my archive and search that. Here or twitter.
@catvalente In part 1 Theranos snaped its fingers and made billions disappear, and in part 2 Phony Stark bought it.
@futurebird@sauropods.win On twitter the same hash that's in the status URL is saved as one of the entries, so you cut and paste it to make a URL.
In archive-blah.tar.gz file outbox.json the URL is one of the fields saved in the giant horrible json blob. I googled "Mastodon archive viewer" and got plenty of hits, but I was just looking in vi.
I admit the format they're saving is far less user friendly than it should be. Newlines between entries would be a start.
sed 's/"object":{/\n&/g' outbox.json
@futurebird@sauropods.win https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ and https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-activitypub too.
@MetalSamurai @futurebird@sauropods.win @jeffjarvis @timbray Didn't say it was optimal, I said it was easiest.
I have all the data here in text format. I can hit it with a rock. I do not have to entreat foreign servers to behave in non-obvious ways. Added bonus: the foreign server going away is not my problem.
For an example of toxic business models squeezing blood from a stone demanding growth past market saturation, see Adobe: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/109630505660962387
Last reblog is of course about the UK's Tory Brexit Party deliberately killing people to profit from selling the NHS to insurance middlemen. I have to clarify because we still don't have quote tweets, but for context, have some quote tweets:
https://mastodonapp.uk/@BogLoper/109630727090213284
https://mastodon.world/@oldrawgabbit/109625826893974315
https://mastodon.scot/@juliegrrl/109624084696532160
https://mastodonapp.uk/@Scrumples/109622567757010223
https://mastodon.social/@HarryMo/109618774772026529
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/this-is-the-route-to-privatisation-is-the-government-intentionally-steering-the-nhs-to-the-brink-of-collapse-341232/
@lauren You want skynet? This is how you get skynet.
Anybody remember Microsoft Tay? https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/109633763693381219
Fossil fuels fund Putin, Saudi Arabia's MBS, and the GOP in the USA (including Joe "coal" Manchin). The accelerating switch to renewables is almost as important as the death of the lead-poisoned Boomers in undercutting fascism around the world.
(And yes, the oil industry is what put the neurotoxic lead in the gasoline exhaust all those now-senile Boomers breathed every day from birth through middle age.)
How thoroughly sterilized to mindless yes-man conformity is China's political "leadership"? This much:
The punchline is somebody's head is at slightly the wrong angle in more than one officially staged photo op, which stands out from the rest of the robots and thus must MEAN SOMETHING.
"I don't believe anyone should own or run twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company." - Jack Dorsey, April 26, 2022.
@GossiTheDog I had that problem with the line app, which is Japan's homegrown version of Twitter.
Multiple AIs working at cross purposes are already here. https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/109636063289688362
@oldrawgabbit Untitled Goose Game, the backstory.
@themedievaldrk I have no context for this post, and on reflection I'm okay with that.
@emilygorcenski That just says the comment period will be open soon and does not have a form to provide comment. Do I need to use a desktop browser instead of a phone?
@b0rk Bytes are important, the next important size is the CPU's register size. That's how big a number it can count up to, and is going to be a power of two evenly divisible into bytes. 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit machines are all out there in the wild.
"Word" was introduced for 16-bit machines like the PDP-11, then win 32-bit machines like the m68k (early Mac and Amiga) showed up people said "double word", and at 64 bits (Dec Alpha) people said "quad word" but didn't mean it.
Oddly enough, this is Tumblr's new ad model. https://mstdn.social/@ifixcoinops/109639371987905478
@rbreich "Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake." - Napoleon.
@oldrawgabbit If they don't want to hear it, why is it on every front page?
@oldrawgabbit Define "hacked". My email address was public? My profile linked to my website and my website had my email on it..?
@oldrawgabbit if you're worried about security, enter a bunch of personal information into this random website...
@Apiary Brooks law that adding more people to a late project makes it later is because the people already working spend time to bring the new people up to speed.
There's a mirror of Brooks law: removing people from a project is equally paralyzing, because everyone spends their time doing knowledge transfers, and then the people staying have to get up to speed on what the people who left were doing.
@rgegriff eth0:
@pleia2 @grafana FYI I build S390X virtual machines from source in http://landley.net/toybox/faq.html#mkroot ala https://landley.net/toybox/downloads/binaries/mkroot/latest/s390x.tgz
@fishidwardrobe @SwiftOnSecurity Replication is not a backup.
Technology does not advance when patents are granted, it advances when patents expire.
If you want to know why smartphones or video conferencing were suddenly available from multiple manufacturers, ask what patents just expired.
@cstross No.
@benmschmidt I assume you've seen:
https://www.tekedia.com/nigeria-begins-digitisation-of-national-library-to-preserve-deteriorated-information-resources/
https://www.sunnewsonline.com/we-have-digitized-library-services-national-librarian/
https://tribuneonlineng.com/fg-commences-digitisation-of-57-year-old-national-library/
@dalias Some variant of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect#Other_problems_perceived_as_memory_effect perhaps?
@Apiary Pretty sure it's corporate greed.
@mjg59 S390x is 64 bit big endian.
@penguin42 @arnd QEMU runs S390X just fine. I build that as part of my toybox test images with mkroot.
https://landley.net/toybox/downloads/binaries/mkroot/latest/
@lauren The Force: now with Midichlorians. And a drop of Retsin!
@dave_heumann @lauren Somehow, Palpatine has returned.
@dave_heumann @lauren https://youtu.be/GFMyMxMYDNk was quite interesting, by the way.
@SexyCyborg power suits don't work for the same reason Mecha don't work.
What was that technique spam checkers used long ago where they moved on from simple beysian word frequency analysis to looking at word pairs? Does this word commonly occur after that word in a large corpus of input text?
Spammers used generators to produce nonsense text by following each word with a statistically likely word, and people like Linus Torvalds found the results hilarious. 15 years later it's evolved into GPT, but what was that _called_?
(Can't look up a name you don't remember...)
If that was spell check then GPT adds syntax/grammar/structure check (the wavy _blue_ underlines) but otherwise basically the same idea: mix and match the top 10 Google hits.
Image generators are morphing from Michael Jackson's "black or white" video plus reverse image search, facial recognition, and "click the stop signs" capcha image categorization training data to highlight similar regions to morph together.
There's no "there" there. Humans see faces in clouds and prophecies in Bible pages.
Wait, do I have to start caring about one of last year's plague of Pinnochio movies? As in, should potentially watch a specific one for reasons of possible enjoyment?
Is 2023 actually retconning some of the past few years' suckage?
@kerileighmerritt Other human beings are the only reason to interact with any system for long anyway. Sometimes it's just imaginary friends to "this might be big in future" but it's always people. We're tribal animals.
@lauren I am sad that Bernie is giving the exact same speeches he's given for 40 years (word for word, there's tape!) because he hasn't accomplished anything he talked about in that entire time.
Back in the last election I actually tried to find a legislative achievement of his: https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#17-02-2020
As far as I could tell, his job was to stand in front of Elizabeth Warren and prevent.
I am so tired of octagenarians fighting with septuagenarians for control of the world.
The USA appointed Merrick Garland to prevent the Jan 6 insurrection's leaders from ever being prosecuted for anything, which has given Brazil's fascists the green light to storm their capital after losing an election.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-64204860.amp
Two months ago, old white guys assured us that this would never happen.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/02/brazil-bolsonaro-democracy-silva-00064792
Looking forward to a webcomic I follow finally advancing the plot after 2 years.
Between the pandemic and the author getting a contract at Disney that forbid any work on personal projects, the main character of https://www.daughterofthelilies.com has been stuck in a magical storm, isolated from the rest of the cast, and hallucinating since the start of 2021.
Eh, could be worse. I could be waiting for an update on her other (excellent) project, https://ko-fi.com/s/3b378af9ed
@flameeyes If you download your archive you get all the posts in activitypub format. Importing them elsewhere is the question...
@cstross Twitter often felt like an obligation.
I don't have to "finish mastodon" before working, the back scroll doesn't act-now-supplies-running-out expire out from under me with random forced refreshes when I switch tabs.
And there's far less https://xkcd.com/386
@oddletters Hilariously, the MIT artificial intelligence Lab was the one that actually did all the work the unrelated media lab tried to take halo effect credit for: athena.ai.mit.edu was ai, not media. AI got ken olsen's castoff tx0 and that early pdp1.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/mimicry
@futurebird@sauropods.win If somebody punched me in my local grocery store and the resolution was store employees loaning me body armor while I shop, I would switch grocery stores.
@vaurorapub The racists were always duped by billionaires. The extremely rich would like to kidnap harems and hunt peasants for sport. The government prevents them from doing so, but if we collapse back into feudalism they can be tiny kings.
@kerileighmerritt wrote a book "masterless men" about the plantation owners puppeting poor people in the civil war. The modern shenanigans read exactly the same way. Guillotine the billionaires.
@vaurorapub Not buying it.
This is the same profession where someone got a Nobel Prize for proving bacteria cause ulcers because of the amount of resistance he had to overcome from people who refused to believe it.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515/
Dunning-Kruger is u-shaped. The highly educated end is middle-aged white men who think because they're a celebrated expert in one thing it extends everywhere.
@lassielmr@glasgow.social @oldrawgabbit still counts as wanting to hear it.
I've watched several times radio bits on YouTube about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, so YouTube is trying to show me what else times radio talks about. I've had to tell it I'm not interested in six attacks on Prince Harry this week. Yesterday they claimed he's literally killing people in Afghanistan now because he said he actually did his job while he was there. That statement = current ongoing mass murder.
Your mass media is borked.
Cell phone. Self own. Can't say we weren't warned...
@augieray It's endemic. It crossed into multiple animal hosts its first year, meaning it has local nonhuman reservoirs around the world in rats and such. We will be getting it periodically for the rest of our lives.
The Spanish flu from a hundred years ago never went away, it just became "the flu". You get flu shots annually, and otherwise either get on with your life or hole up like Howard Hughes for the rest of it.
@failrate @cstross I had an idea for a Linux talk about "how to bloat code", starting from standard C "hello world", then making it c++ with a class instance holding the message in a member variable with an initializer that sets it to a default value stored in its own .h file and get/set methods that sanity check the supplied/fetched value and throw an exception to configurable error reporting infrastructure... still just printing hello world but with ever more enterprise infrastructure.
@augieray Is anything alive NOT evolving? If the flu isn't still evolving why do we have new flu vaccine versions annually?
We stayed at home for two years because there weren't enough respirators. The hospitals were so overwhelmed car accidents and heart attacks couldn't get seen. Medical professionals had no N95 masks because national shortage. If that's still true in year 4 (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023)... My plastic straw use isn't likely to affect fishing nets. That's a systemic problem.
@cstross @failrate Ah yes: libraries! Build time and runtime dependencies. Let's build up that software bill of materials. SELinux, json, systemd integration. Wire that sucker into the KDE _and_ Emacs ecosystems so it can't build or run without either. Autoconf, automake, blueprint+kati+soong+ninja generating gmake files which call python3...
@cstross @failrate https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.4.0?topic=extensions-what-is-zos-container
Z/OS running a docker image containing Red Hat Enterprise running a flatpack from Ubuntu running a static binary.
The docker image is built via jenkins+jira cloud instance on Microsoft Azure running a new Yocto layer (on a board vendor layer, on a hardware vendor layer) pulling code from 30 different public repositories (and downloading 6 source tarballs), none of which are archived or even cached locally.
Hence the Leopards Eating Faces party.
"First they came for" works fine until the scapegoats run out. Nothing unites like an endless supply of common enemies, and when it's not so endless you can always paper over supply chain hiccups by designating part of the flock sacrificial lambs.
@shauny You can't grow rice, soy, or oats in American Southwest scrub. Even Kansas is sucking a fossil aquifer dry. Grain crops need acre-feet of water annually, grazers need troughs with a few thousand gallons per head.
Sure lots of factory farms are doing it wrong, but Monsanto suing farmers over roundup-ready genome seed patents because pollen blows on the wind is not an improvement. Grazing doesn't require Haber/Bosch nitrogen, and used right manure is a resource.
You can't logic someone out of position they didn't arrive at by logic.
https://infosec.exchange/@nazgul/109659076692958047
@pleia2 GPLv3? Pass.
@lauren If it can't get bored it's not useful. If it CAN get bored, now we have a new problem.
On the web I have a pop-up confirming I want to reblog something. The official Mastodon app just does it due to random screen touches, with no acknowledgment other than the reblog icon changing from gray to blue.
The official Mastodon app keeps finding new ways to suck.
@mrpinkly @nazgul @MudMan That was more Johnson than Lincoln. The first had extensive follow-up planned, the second let things slide until Grant inherited a position he had no experience with or aptitude for.
@kerileighmerritt did an excellent book, masterless men, about how the billionaires took over the South again after the civil war.
Prudetube HAS a children's mode (which disables all comments and the mini player, but not playing in a window, and prevents you from adding videos to lists via some methods but not others).
But that was created as part of a legal settlement where they got sued for breaking the law by tracking minors, and they made it as useless as possible.
@mrpinkly @nazgul @MudMan @kerileighmerritt No cultural impact outlasts living memory without fresh input.
Doomed to repeat it...
@nazgul @mrpinkly @MudMan @kerileighmerritt Tell me how that's going in Ukraine.
Microsoft charging hardware vendors $30k to sign each driver, and refusing to have generic drivers for standardized USB functions, is a big part of this. The Windows ecosystem is toxic all the way down.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innocent-users-chips-in-silent-update/
No of course there won't be antitrust enforcement of this yet. The Boomers are still alive.
@nazgul @mrpinkly @MudMan @kerileighmerritt Putin thinks it is. Soviet union broke up and he's trying to put it back together. The Donbas/Crimea takeovers were disguised as insurgency. Transnistria. Mueller report about Trump receiving Russian support here (and then asking Zelazny for a "favor" as an excuse to hold back aid)...
Would you rather talk about China or Afghanistan?. MBS in Saudi Arabia? Iran? Neville Chamberlain endlessly talking with Germany was too long ago?
@nazgul @mrpinkly @MudMan @kerileighmerritt I missed your mention of "over":
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/02/brazil-bolsonaro-democracy-silva-00064792
Isn't it nice where we can skip to the part where we won and are no longer in danger? Let's do that more. Maybe we just need more "understanding". Didn't Germany put Hitler in jail where he wrote a book? Whatever happened to that guy...
Me, I think punching nazis works better than intellectually debating who gets to be people. The Neuremberg trials happened _after_ the beaches of Normandy.
@nazgul @mrpinkly @MudMan @kerileighmerritt History is never "over". That's not how it works.
@nazgul @mrpinkly @MudMan @kerileighmerritt I keep watching people try to "move on" from Jan 6. I don't see the difference between the comission you're describing and the "House Committee on the Jan 6 Attack" being a bunch of television without indictments. Merrick Garland is waiting out multiple statutes of limitations, but as long as we get enough documentaries about what happened it's fine?
The Neuremberg trials were not about asking the nazis to explain themselves. They hung people.
Somebody put googly eyes on a fresh lettuce, next to a picture of Kevin McCarthy.
I'm looking at this and going "so we have a procedure now".
https://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/705993629641113600/it-begins
@sarahtaber is that related to Biden's rigid $600 reporting requirement on poor people's side gigs?
It's not double jeopardy if you're STILL DOING IT.
(I am very much NOT a fan of C++ as a language, in part because of its constant attacks on C, so have largely recused myself from commenting on this, but...)
The problem is capitalism:
https://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/705811328355516416
We got rid of the divine right of kings, we need to get rid of the financial ownership of billionaires. "But how will we afford"... no. Money is made up numbers just like football scores. It's NOT REAL. We didn't find a DIFFERENT god to endorse different kings, we stopped believing in kings.
Of course there's a dedicated ISP that runs personal mastodon instances for you.
https://mastodon.social/@mastohost/109664657472759342
Fosta/sesta have backfired, just like every sex worker warned it would. (via @sarahtaber)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/technology/porn-teens-online-report.html
Prohibition also tried to outlaw something everyone could make it home in their bathtub, expecting a consistent human behavior that literally predates recorded history to come to a sudden complete stop instead of trying to maintain traction via gentle steering.
Sorry, via
https://mstdn.social/@TheRaDR/109665153543131769 (I miss quote tweets...)
The layers of filtering are eroding sites like prudetube and causing creators to flee:
https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx2_K3c_LfpS0AemnITSk0RXGNVG4GGCp9
The US government hates TikTok and telegram, but the lure is escape from repressive capricious regulation.
Tumblr's anti-porn bots that triggered on pictures of hands and bread dough weren't imposed voluntarily, that was legally mandated by the Trump administration.
Being so powerful you can command the tide not to come in tends not to last long when you actually do.
Sigh, wrong link. (Well I can't see the expansion before I post it. No quote tweets.) Second attempt:
@LaF0rge It's 404 for me...
I would love to check the thread or ask follow-up questions, such as "logs in where?" since there are so many different instances and no central reporting in a federated protocol... but alas it's a cut and paste of the post because there's no link tweet capability.
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/109665840733480396
@ArkadyMartine I'm on week 3 of coughing and attack naps.
@arclight @bitsavers That's not the main issue. Survivorship bias is the main issue.
@arclight @bitsavers (Clarifying: in the ones I've read, which included the HP Way.)
@ljs @arclight @bitsavers There was a lovely twitter thread a few years ago about "here's company X's story of its own founding, and here's how much support the founder(s) got from their rich parents to do it", but that site was designed to bury anything that isn't current _before_ it suffered a leveraged buyout.
@bitsavers @arclight Moral of that story: you can't just blindly copy the Xerox Alto without _also_ doing a lot of engineering work to bring the price down, and being too many years ahead of the curve means the network effects are against you. (See also NeXT.)
Jobs at least signed a formal deal with Xerox letting them make a pre-IPO investment in Apple from which Xerox made ~$100 million profit. Gates just copied Apple's copy and Xerox never saw a dime...
@ljs @arclight @bitsavers if you dig into the story a little, they wanted his family connections and foreign legal jurisdiction for financial transactions, but not him.
@ljs @arclight @bitsavers South Africa was a common dodge around the ITAR export restrictions on cryptography in the late '90s, that's also how Mark Shuttleworth got rich.
@ljs @arclight @bitsavers People who aren't scumbags keep their wealth under a billion dollars by giving the excess away. Somewhere between 100 million and about 800 million they decide they have enough. Dolly Parton is a famous example of this, and the CEO of Zappos had a lot about that in his obituary.
Jeff Bezos' ex-wife inherited tens of billions in the divorce and declared she would give money away each year "until the vault is empty". Wanting to stay a billionaire is abnormal.
@ljs @arclight @bitsavers "Give it away when you die" doesn't count: hold on until your last breath, then dictate what happens to the money after your death. You can't take it with you but you can still exert control over it, and letting your relatives get it and a large chunk going to estate taxes would be _unacceptable_.
(Buffett is weird because investing is his autistic focus and he doesn't spend it. Last I checked he'd never sold a Berkshire share.)
@ljs @arclight @bitsavers $100m earning 5% annually is 5m/year which is just under $100k/week.
The current Coca-Cola stock annual dividend yield is 2.8% = over 50k per week (paid quarterly) ignoring the stock price going up (from inflation and share buybacks even without "growth").
If you spent $1,000 a day and never earned a cent in interest, one billion dollars would last 27 centuries.
@esther@strangeobject.space Younger generations didn't spend their first 40 years breathing leaded gasoline exhaust. Boomers have literal neurological damage which is combining badly with senility.
@thesunshinesushi It's as over as it's going to get. Vaccines, PPE supply chains, hospital staffing, ventilators, we know to use steroids now... all adjusted. As much herd immunity as is going to establish is established.
Any further hunkering down is permanent. It's endemic. There is no endpoint.
3 days vs how many months? https://youtu.be/YIctLB-le9Q
ChatGPT is a Gish Gallop Generator.
@Women4Popehat @Popehat Motive laundering.
@mattblaze @SwiftOnSecurity My rule of thumb metric here is "order of magnitude of the number of people trying to game the system".
Ten people? I can probably personally cope. A hundred thousand people? Find an expert. Ten million people? I need a longish 'splainer just to have proper context for understanding what the actual experts worry about.
Prudetube demonetizing George Carlin's 7 words you can't say on 1980s broadcast television isn't ironic, it's _sad_. The decrepit Boomers bringing back the Comstock act in their senility, clutching their pearls in a death grip.
This is the "inception" level of capitalism destroys intellectual property. Another layer, then another layer, then another layer...
Of course capitalism sucking is a running theme in everything, because it does and is as prominent in modern life as the Catholic Church was in the Middle ages.
https://at.tumblr.com/bakafox/greta-thunbergs-charity-funds-sami-fight-against/1j5kxcjvkzlf
My political position is "guillotine the billionaires". Not vigilante action, change the law. Hoarding an offensive amount of capital should be a capital offense. (A billion is $20,000/day for 136 years if there was NO INTEREST. Tax free, since you alread have it.)
Lobbying for taxes is a compromise position.
The sacklers' opioid epidemic killed ~100,000 people in one year:
https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates
They got off with a fine of less than their profit from selling oxycontin:
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/03/1084163626/purdue-sacklers-oxycontin-settlement
Nobody actually on death row in the USA is responsible for the death of 100,000 people. Each billionaire has NOT funded every medical GoFundMe. The law protects the rich from the poor.
Monarchy ended when people realized there's only a couple thousand kings and each has a neck.
https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming
Nobody's going to try anything until the Boomers die though. The last great believers in the religion of numbers, because they were the last people to profit from it before it turned into the parasitic 1% draining the 99% dry.
50% of all boomers were born before 1955, the average post-pandemic lifespan in the USA is 77, meaning the LD50 on the baby boom is 2032. Somewhere around there is probably when the societal ice breaks.
"There is no possible alternative to capitalism, children pay their parents cash for each meal and sign a rent check monthly!"
It's hard to leave a religion. You have to unlearn bedrock assumptions that were never true.
@gasugasu1984 @cstross Guess what Tesla's core business is?
https://carboncredits.com/tesla-regulatory-carbon-credit-sales-jumps-116/
Part of the recent collapse in Tesla's stock price is because big vehicle manufacturers like Ford scaling up their own electric car sales means they don't need to buy Tesla's carbon offsets anymore, they generate enough of their own to avoid large fines.
Sigh: why doesn't it work? What did Microsoft Github break now? https://mastodon.social/@kennwhite/109676800219894061
The classic "Heir, Spare, Colbert" cycle: https://youtu.be/E6l0ObY2XVM
"Any time you report someone for breaking a rule, it indicates to the site owner/administrator that you approve of the rule."
See also why calling the cops in the USA on ANYBODY is... complicated.
https://at.tumblr.com/resumbrarum/also-honestly-because-any-time-you-report/j4dsvvvauekd
@georgetakei The problem is as soon as the 143rd person reports him, the deal's off.
@b0rk My fundamental issue with floating point is that "one tenth" is infinitely repeating in binary (the way 1/3 in decimal is .33333...) so doing anything with most multiples of 0.1 or 0.01 in floating point can't NOT be subtly wrong in a way that accumulates the more math you do. Making change for a dollar is a pathological case.
The display functions try to file off the rough edges when printing numbers, but under the covers what's happening usually _starts_ wrong and gets worse.
Cross Compiling where compile time constants are calculated using the host machine's floating point semantics instead of the target machine's floating point semantics and what is and isn't a compile time constant varies with optimizer decisions du jour. (Especially fun when what you're building is an emulator with a "hardware" FPU.)
https://fediscience.org/@marcbrooker/109683204975189361
(Neither @b0rk nor @marcbrooker will be notified of the link if I don't tag them because grognard hates quote tweets.)
@marcbrooker I break everything.
Tolerance is a non-aggression treaty. It just says we won't _start_ anything.
https://newsie.social/@ZhiZhu/109667839755020395
@seananmcguire @caztastrophe We started just leaving the heating pad on all the time when our cat turned 19, with a fluffy throw blanket over it. She loves her square SO MUCH.

@seananmcguire @caztastrophe Squaaaaare. (Under the fluff.)

The reason it's always projection is they can't mentally model other people. (That's also why they have zero empathy.) Literally all they can do is tell you what they would do in someone else's place.
Capitalism is the opposite of sustainability. The "boom and bust cycle" is "scam, collapse, fresh scam".
Calling methane "natural" gas (to distinguish it from coal gas) was a 1920s marketing campaign that also had a young Bob Hope repeat the slogan "now you're cooking with gas".
Call it what it is: fart gas. GOP rallying in defense of fart gas stoves because nobody runs a dryer/furnace/water heater off fart gas without stoves to convince us to pipe fart gas into houses in the first place.
Putin's nordstream fart pipeline.
https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54
https://youtu.be/CcAJ3_-Hou8
https://youtu.be/Bcqah8U_uKA
This is good historical writing, but it reminds me that the fediverse is not archived and cannot be archived for the same reason it refuses to be searchable.
All the data is stored on individual sites which go down when they do. The fediverse is the web before archive.org. Sites will go down randomly taking their content with them, more each year, because that's what grognard has decided is best for everyone else. The EU's "obligation to be forgotten" exported globally.
@mlinksva A) posts are stored on individual servers. If that server goes down the user's post history is lost. There is no systematic offsite backup.
B) The german Mastodon maintainer. Garcon?
@mlinksva The burden is on me to solve the problem or I can't express concern about the issue. Got it.
"Mastodon's maintainer considers searchability a threat and actively works to prevent it, and many users repeat his opinions verbatim as How The Tool Must Be Used" is a new social constraint, which has second order effects on archiving.
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/
@fade At least demons want to reach an agreement.
The reason frying meatloaf patties as hamburgers didn't work is:
A) The mix is lot thinner and runnier (all that milk and egg and oatmeal), and spreads out to take more space. Hard to do more than one patty at a time if you don't know how big it'll be.
2) The resulting patties don't hold together well enough to flip until they're almost completely cooked through.
III) The result tastes really bland. 5 minutes on the griddle is not the same as 45 minutes in the oven, male duck reaction wise.
@fade You've got to pick a pokémon or two. There was a whole song.
@fade The Mallard reaction.
@fade I suppose I just suggested a ditto.
@fade Xerox.
@HighlandLawyer @orangetronic @cstross They strip mine us and haul truck after truck of our resources south, why would we want to leave?
@BunRab The Fed Chair just admitted that a big part of the worker gap is half a million working people died from covid. https://zirk.us/@jordinn/109691002989183691
Glad I got the omicron booster vaccination...
@SexyCyborg they're slowly catching up
@mlinksva P.S. It's cultural _and_ structural. Centralization and distribution each have their advantages, and when moving from one to the other people take for granted what worked in the old context.
"This URL will still be here to be referred to in 5 years" has been true on tumblr and on twitter (modulo pearl-clutching purges ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whitehouse and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBaqDjPCH8k). It is _not_ automatically true on mastodon, because each server is renewed monthly by an unrelated person.
@mlinksva This is a larger social problem we're wrestling with, especially as FDR's New Deal passes out of living memory.
This writeup is an excellent explanation off the problem of "institutional memory": https://web.archive.org/web/20120111055334/http://wrttn.in/04af1a
The fact the writeup is now only available out of archive.org may actually be ironic. (I'm never sure.)
People assume "has always been there" means "always will be there", but to a 5 year old "kipo and the age of wonderbeasts" has always been there...
I have never been good at this. To quote one of @HowardTayler 's characters: I generally keep digging until the hole goes clear through.
@regehr I have the Shepherd's Crown but haven't read it yet, because then it would be over.
@alasaarela @SecurityWriter Knowing that Russians are white and Iraqis are brown makes the GOP's actions _very_ easy to predict.
@Tarah "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - Howard Aiken
@protecttruth The New York Times: by Boomers for Boomers.
Long thread about migrating servers being... a "work in progress" for large accounts. Lots of people sharing their experiences in the comments, and at least one podcast.
Electricity generation based on fart gas is unreliable in cold weather, because straight out of the wells it's full of water which freezes in the pipes and pumps and blocks them. Removing the water is expensive, so they don't do it (except to ship LNG overseas).
Luckily solar plus storage prevented more blackouts this year.
@lilithsaintcrow Alcoholic buys distillery, ends predictably.
@flexghost @drewharwell It looks like they negotiated multi-year deals and they're letting them play out rather than paying extra to get out of them.
Is 2023 actually less crammed full of existential dread, or is it just that doomscrolling Mastodon has like 1/3 as much doom?
@BunRab Ours worked fine here when it was 8°f in the big blizzard a couple years back. I wouldn't want to rely on it in Milwaukee's 22 below, but "60 degree delta from outside temperature" seems doable?
We already ask it to keep it 75 in here when it hits 120 outside. Austin hasn't got any furnaces, just air conditioners run backwards, same plumbing in both directions. Shattering the polar vortex has brought us several interesting weeks.
@flexghost @reneestephen @drewharwell Nah, smells like path of least resistance. Lotta stuff continues on autopilot when nobody wants to attach their name to changing it.
"Climate activists have urged politicians and journalists to stop using the term 'natural gas' and instead use the phrase 'methane gas'..."
It's fart gas. The Nordstream II undersea fart pipeline. The GOP is all-in on fart gas. Liquified Fart Gas terminals. Fart gas stoves. Fracking produced fart gas as a side effect, flaring off fart gas at the wells as not worth selling. Call it what it is.
Dr. Seuss wrote a moving protest against environmental degradation.
The capitalists who looted the body after his death are selling officially licensed disposable Truffula tree pens in my local grocery store.

Tesla's "autopilot" is to driving what chatgpt is to writing.
@hammancheez The creator of the daleks is holding his annual meeting again?
@0xabad1dea Dubstep is the sound you get when the Tardis needs servicing.
1) mission burritos
https://woof.group/@aphyr/109705585196756746
II) New York Pizza
C) Philly cheesesteak
See also texas barbecue.
Apple's "scan all your photos for stuff to report to the police" daemon has apparently gone live.
No they didn't say they weren't going to release it, they said they would DELAY its release until the backlash died down and everybody forgot. That's how abusers work, there's never a "no" button, just "maybe later".
BuzzFeed lists totally would have used chatgpt back in the day. Algorithmic content farms, doo-da doo-da.
On the bright side, Google will probably figure out semi-reliable metrics for "probability/percentage AI generated content" and downrank it fairly quickly. It's been engaged in an ongoing battle with SEO spam for 20 years...
@ct_bergstrom Just like plastic straws are responsible for the great pacific garbage patch (80% by weight is fishing gear) and California's water problem is due to lawns and showers (80% goes to agriculture).
The left loves beating itself up. Distracting us from the real issues with performative hair shirts like veganism (methane has a half light of 7 years in the presence of oxygen, the problem is _fossil_ carbon) has always been sadly effective.
Ooh! Colbert is making an Amber series! People would finally understand the variable and function names in my sed implementation... if I hadn't changed them to be "professional".
(There's only so many times you can say pattern before you throw in a logrus, and eventually wind up with ghostwheel...)
https://masto.antovolk.co.uk/@FilmNewsBot/109706331173648365
@thedextriarchy George Lucas's original version of C-3PO was a fast talking used car salesman character until Anthony Daniels' audition changed his mind. (There's still traces in "it's like a second language to me" and such...)
@rschwebel wondered what license spare box was under, Google for the website click through to the source, no license file but instead a directory (bad sign), saw Apache under dual (how does the dual directory have only one thing in it...?) and MIT/x11 under deprecated, clicked the readme at the top the SPDX identifier says GPL 2.0 only.
Stopped trusting anything it said and moved on...
@ben_crowell_fullerton Tesla autopilot is to driving what chatgpt is to writing.
@illmeaningfaery @fade You can sing "tide pods" do the DuckTales theme song. (Woo-oo.)
@fade what is the official citation format for Little Mermaid lyrics?
Captain kirk would be proud: https://infosec.exchange/@tompohl/109711845374918862
Selling credits reduces carbon emissions the same way selling papal indulgences reduced sinning.
https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/109712405373199963
@ethanschoonover @sivy My cats particularly liked Ray Lynch's "no blue thing". https://youtu.be/F8d7CJFSSyY
I especially like section 3 saying corporations are not people.
Ah, nevermind, fencepost error. I'm still not used to the year number, that article about the 40% rise in deaths was from a year ago, not a week ago. (Deleted it.)
Still terrible, but less _immediately_ terrible.
Pfizer and Moderna raising their prices by 400% ala https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/moderna-may-match-pfizers-400-price-hike-on-covid-vaccines-report-says/ is still current terrible, of course. Late stage capitalism profiting off of mass deaths should involve judicial executions, not fines, but that's not the legal system we currently have...
@SexyCyborg Twitter is having problems after people who staffed various functions left, because without regular correction the algorithms spiral weirdly the way a spam filter does if you never go through and say "this is not spam" on the false positives.
Possibly with china's recent air quality issues, some services there might be suffering similar effects if the people previously maintaining them are no longer available?
@bees Online shopping is transhumanism. Lots of homebound people can get everything delivered WAY easier now.
France guillotined all its billionaires 250 years ago. https://skull.website/@lennie/109717484465841472
Once again, the technology in Bofuri is concerning. You put on a helmet and can taste food, get knocked unconscious, and experience significant time acceleration (week-long events where you sleep in-game, nobody takes time off from work or school, nobody leaves eat/pee/bathe)...
Even assuming it's electromagnetic neurostimulation instead of drilling holes in your skull: you can tell neither Microsoft nor Tesla was ANYWHERE in this technology's ancestry because no _players_ are dead yet.
In Linux the file doesn't actually get deleted until you close the last filehandle to it, meaning you can theoretically do this and have a database that runs fine for MONTHS until the system reboots...
https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/109719549220741221
The mortgage bond market collapsed in 2008. The credit card market declined sharply over the pandemic (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/why-did-credit-card-balances-decline-so-much-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-20211203.html), the trillion dollar auto loan market is widely expected to collapse (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/08/auto-loan-delinquencies-rise-as-loan-accommodation-programs-end-.html)...
The endless scam that is modern capitalism is always racing to create new "assets" (I.E. other people's debts) as they jump from bubble to bubble, so now:
See, if we had quote tweets there might be the option to expand something OTHER than the footnote about the credit card market that was support for my statement rather than the point I was trying to lead up to. But grognard hates quote tweets, and he knows what's good for us better than we possibly could.
That's how you know open source: by its terrible user interface.
@shatter@defcon.social DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
@regehr for ukraine @ChrisO_wiki
@regehr And @saint_rebel_ukraine_ is there on the ground.
Fart gas stoves cause asthma in children. https://youtu.be/jEWP44eKIVw
@fade It is installed!
@evacide sometimes even intentionally.
@pleia2 My Pixel 3A isn't dead yet.
@randomgeek We already do. 250 years ago 80% of the populace worked on farms, now it's less than 2%.
David Graeber never really delved into second order BS jobs: The top floor of the building is marketing consultants bringing in the money, and five floors under them are IT staff, tax accountants, payroll, human resources, repair people and janitors in service to those BS jobs. The entourage has an entourage in concentric circles.
Way more than 40% of the workforce.
What I learned from this is that the recent Wikipedia[citation needed] web interface changes set the URL bar on Android to say "about: blank". Which is a level of gratuitous CSS/JavaScript incompetence I would not expect from an open source project. (Why are they messing with it at all?)
@ceridwen It plays about 5 seconds of video every 15 seconds, and I'm on a fiber connection.
Is there an easy way I can set up some sort of peer sharing daemon so I'm at least contributing to other people watching videos from this site?
@tio In theory this is a vaguely BitTorrent protocol so I could presumably mirror stuff using my fiber connection at home just by setting up a client and allowing it to populate. I just haven't done that before...
@tio I pulled up the peertube Wikipedia page and threw it on my to-read pile...
Chatgpt is just ducking autocorrect on a larger scale.
It's not "growth".
Capitalism is allergic to sustainable business models. Capitalism considers a cash cow you can milk forever, making the same amount of money each year, to be a failure. You MUST push beyond sustainability to destruction, implosion and collapse. Capitalism demands it. Cut costs and raise prices until you can no longer perform your service and have priced yourself out of the market.
The qemu developers broke the qemu build in commit 5890258aeeba by moving NETWORK SUPPORT out into an external package. Bra fscking vo. Gratuitous build dependencies.
Ok, added the "beowulf-backports" repo to my devuan /etc/apt/sources.list and managed to install libslirp from there. Good to know that repo exists. (libra.chat #devuan channel for the win, even late on a friday evening.)
Still annoyed at gratuitous overcomplication from the IBM guys gradually boiling a once-reasonable frog into "enterprise" nonsense..
Wait, all this "pepe" meme nonsense is about boiling the frog, isn't it? Nazis trying to lead once-rational people along gradually into nazification by not getting punched long enough that the place becomes a nazi bar.
I mean I knew that's what Faux News and infowhores and so on were for, and things like the atheist to alt-right pipeline, but I hadn't twigged to the overt meaning of the racist frog meme.
@vaurorapub In the bathroom in the fridge on the front porch bedside table next to the towels under papers check your laptop bag check your jacket pocket
Never allow a "smart" anything near your house. https://hachyderm.io/@skinnylatte/109724710433126056
@ben_crowell_fullerton No, _I_ am saying that. And I'm not alone.
https://twitter.com/ppathole/status/1116670170980859905?lang=en
The advantage of A03 is I could theoretically subscribe to something like https://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/707075761447780352/mrkida-art-stargazeranswers-limnaia and be notified when the next chapter posted.
@SexyCyborg Technology advances when patents expire, not when they're granted. The explosion of cell phones around 2007? Patent expiration. Live video calls suddenly happening from multiple companies at the same time? Patent expiration.
@mattmight I got tired of humming the jeopardy themesong at videos that spend multiple minutes on throat clearing, and these days there's a variety of filk...
"Wadsworth constant way too long, doo dah, doo dah, wadsworth constant going strong, skip to the point my darling..."
Solar PV capacity in the USA tripled in the past 5 years (despite the trump administration):
https://electrek.co/2023/01/20/us-solar-and-wind-expected-to-reduce-coal-and-natural-gas-generation-to-2025/
It's now cheaper to install new solar/wind "baseload" than maintain existing coal/oil/gas which makes fossil electrical generation infrastructure "stranded assets" because their mortgage payment models assume they're generating 24/7 instead of just as "peakers", even BEFORE you add in big batteries like https://www.energy-storage.news/major-players-want-to-know-about-our-iron-flow-battery-ess-inc-interview-at-re-2022/ capable of replacing them entirely.
Here's more about iron container batteries. Essentially infinite cycles, nonflammable, trivially scalable, frees up lithium for the portable use cases:
Billionaires blame "unions" and "trial lawyers" for everything because they hate when their employees unionize, and they hate class action suits coming after them when their actions hurt or kill people.
Rich landlord/boss types convincing poor people to kiss the boot on their necks and defend that boot from harm is older than the civil war:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/masterless-men/4DA0CAD8D061BD3681AB01EFF24D6D44
The gilded age iteration of Faux News was called Yellow Journalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Guillotine the billionaires.
ChatGPT is more or less gluing together the most common answers from a google search for your question and smoothing them out into syntactically correct and pass the kind of automated essay grader lazy school districts use.
If you ask a question you COULDN'T easily google the answer for (because nobody online has asked/answered quite that question), the search snippets it copies together don't answer the question you asked.
The vast majority of "human trafficing" in the world is government prison labor and wage theft.
https://defcon.social/@deviantollam/109734821353121653
Remember how in the 90's the USA "adopted" a zillion baby girls from china during its one child policy because the CCP "legally" confiscated babies and sold them abroad for $6000 each? American indian residential schools were "legal". So was Triangle Shirtwaist.
Pizzagate loons are billionaires' patsies riled up about movie plots so they never question their own landlords.
Eliminating cash also means when the GOP in your state retroactively outlaws birth control/giving money to the wrong party/not tithing, they can check historical spending records to see who needs following.
https://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/707112261778604032/thats-not-the-point-tho-were-monkeys
Another thing about electronic payment is the payment processors can veto spending money on "the wrong things" by preventing vendors from being able to receive payments.
https://thenib.com/payment-processors-vs-porn/
https://thenib.com/feminists-should-support-decriminalizing-sex-work-here-s-why/
This article on some of the businesses payment processors refuse to process payments for is from 2016... years before Roe v Wade was overturned.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/credit-cards-our-moral-guardians
As with attacking trans people first, they always set precedent against someone few will defend.
@istathar @vaurorapub The real knife was inside us all along.
And of course the core problem with anti-obscenity laws is nobody anywhere has ever been able to agree can agree what obscenity IS. (The word comes from ancient greek stage directions "ob scene" meaning offstage, whatever the play didn't show happening.)
The new Comstock Acts give pearl-clutching fundamentalists a bat to hit LITERALLY EVERYTHING with, and then it's banned books and youtube demonitizing everything and and pushing US prudery overseas...
@istathar @vaurorapub Clearly you need to get a fish to contain your knives. https://www.tumblr.com/stephaniematurin/707194336093274112/elytrians-blondebrainpower-renaissance-set
Adding UV and Air exhaust/filtration to public indoor spaces is the 21st century version of washing your hands before preparing food, not having month old straw on dirt floors, spraying for bugs and trapping rats....
Gotta move with the times.
And of course many patents should never be granted in the first place:
We need progressive taxation for companies as well as individuals.
MovieBob's recently re-edited 3 1/2 hour takedown of Batman v Superman remains quite entertaining literary/film analysis, if you're into that sort of thing.
(I developed an interest in that topic from Bernie Brillstein's semi-autobiography "Where did I go Right?")
Bernie's book is semi-autobiography the same way Linus Torvlads' "Just for Fun" is: an actual author who knows how to auth hung out with the subject for a couple weeks asking questions and taking notes, and then wrote up their stories in first person. So it's not exactly an externally researched biography, and not exactly an autobiography, but not exactly ghostwritten because the other author is co-credited.
There's probably a professional literary term for it.
Sigh. I a thing I want, which Prudetube is completely unable to provide, is movie soundtracks with the relevant movie scenes over them. No dialog or foley, just the sound with the video that goes with the sound.
Star Trek II is an opera. Back to the Future has an excellent soundtrack that goes beat by beat with the movie. I enjoy how much of the story is told by the music, and that's easier to see when you have the video part there to go with the music.
But no. IP law and prudetube circling...
People can post entire soundtracks albums ala https://youtu.be/S3dZZ7jh8dw (which is dated 4 years ago) but add video from the movie (sans dialog) and welcome to a copyright strike against your channel.
I look forward to the end of the Boomers and their insane reverence for capitalism and thus intellectual property law.
https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_creativity
@fade Nope. As with the exercise bike with a laptop stand, it's a thing I want which seems like it would be obvious, but nobody seems to have bothered to do?
And can't now. You could do it on Youtube ~10 years ago, but as it's turned into Prudetube and clamped down more each year...
Apparently Prudetube's most recent terms of service update allows it to do chargebacks when it retroactively demonetizes videos, meaning creators can theoretically wind up in debt to them: https://youtu.be/w-6PdVGJwUo
@fade also a soundtrack album is usually only about an hour, there's a good half hour of movie you'd skip to overlay the relevant scenes on the soundtrack.
And when I used to do it myself by hand with the CD and the videotape, you find places they cheated. The silence in "Battle of the Mutara nebula" is it like 15 seconds longer in the movie than on the soundtrack. (The movie has a few Enterprise bridge sound effects and shots of characters faces to hold tension/audience attention longer.)
@fade Capitalism has been a net negative since probably the Reagan administration.
Of course ChadGPT is a plagiarism engine. It's inherent in how it works:
https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/109740604179330911
"A federated version of Etsy" with no implementation details. As Leverage creator John Rogers is fond of saying, "a goal is not a plan".
Good luck?
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Oh goddess that sounds horrifying. The bitclowns gnawing away at mastodon with get rich quick pyramid-chain scam du jour.
@fade I thought I pointed you at Victorian bakers on YouTube.
it's been forever since I had a migraine.
This is not inducing any sort of positive nostalgia.
Capitalism is like any other plague. A healthy population grows up without it, the locusts arrive and sweeps through until the system collapses, fleeing survivors find a new niche free of the blight, rinse repeat.
The apex of American power was 1944-1963 when the top tax rate was over 90%. There were no billionaires. The proliferation of parasitic plutocrats leads to decline. France famously solved this problem with guillotines.
@franklinlopez galavant?
@lauren Paywall.
@dalias If your opening offer is the minimum you are willing to settle for, you will lose the negotiation.
Somebody needs to film a reaction video to this.
Then again I have a soft spot for the meta-reaction genre.
So of course...
Prudetube muting multiple chunks of https://youtu.be/LPceFFdpA58 for copyright reasons is just one more symptom of their drain circling...
"Provide your email and agree to receive spam to keep reading" is too a paywall.
@alda I wound up maintaining busybox because of that distro.
@skinnylatte sort of public playlists?
Will the senile lead-poisoned baby boomers with a death grip on power ever someday maybe enforce the law? Let's sacrifice a goat and read its entrails in hopes of guessing:
@moehrenfeld @cstross well unlisted didn't work.
@jimmylee Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street journal in 2007.
Fascists love purchasing credibility and sock puppeting it until the credibility is used up. Then they buy the next one.
@cpoliticditto@mas.to and it's whack-a-mole when a monopoly oversteps enough to go viral instead of strengthening Sherman antitrust regulation against everybody. Punching up should be normalized.
I wouldn't know the BBC documentary critical of India's leader even existed without the Streisand effect. But based on his reaction to it, whatever it has to say is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor/109747362034925154
https://masto.ai/@pebonilla/109747842422805129
https://mastodon.social/@mammutsapiens/109751655424679794
@alda you have spelled BRIAN BLESSED correctly.
@SexyCyborg Depends who you follow and what server you're checking the timeline of? Today alone @skinnylatte linked to a bunch of interesting of people, I thought...
@SwiftOnSecurity There's an excellent talk on institutional memory loss at https://web.archive.org/web/20120111055334/http://wrttn.in/04af1a
I can never figure out if the fact it's only available on archive.org these days counts as ironic.
@pluralistic As with "bullshit jobs", a name corporate interests happily filter out so people under their sway don't see mention of it. Prudery and tone policing in defense of the status quo, as always.
Half the reason for fosta/sesta is "camgirl" was a lucrative work-from-home job a young woman could do safely and anonymously on a flexible schedule without training or much up-front investment, so of course it had to be ruthlessly eliminated as an option to maintain patriarchy.
@pluralistic Tree fiddy adjusted for inflation is $8chan.
@drvolts Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal in 15 years ago.
Right-wing loons purchase credibility and use it as toilet paper. They keep needing to buy more because none of their sock puppets remain credible long once they have their hands on them.
@drvolts The problem is the boomers. They breathed leaded gas exhaust fumes for their first 50 years, which had measurable neurological effects that combine very badly with senility.
https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#19-11-2020
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2613136
That's why the boomers have gone uniquely crazy. Previous generations didn't breathe unprecedented concentrations of airborne lead for most of their lives, and wasn't outlawed until 1995: https://health.utah.gov/utahair/pollutants/lead/#:~:text=Figure%203
Painfully true: https://xkcd.com/2730/
Oh hey, someone ELSE who finds Google Fiber's bundled router terrible. Except mine doesn't reboot regularly, mine gets slower and slower until I remember to reboot it. (And not just throughput slow, latency slow. Page takes forever to load slow.)
I've also been meaning to try to dig up an old enough router that https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a42575068/scientists-use-wifi-to-see-through-walls/ isn't quite as big of an issue. I don't care so much about the speed, it's the _latency_ that bothers me...
Is the sequel to late stage capitalism "end stage capitalism" or "terminal capitalism"?
Capitalism has already metastasized and stopped responding to chemo, so we should probably figure out the name for capitalism's endgame before the guillotines come out for the billionaires.
No the USA won't raise taxes on the rich, that's not feasible. There are 735 billionaires on the Forbes 500 list who will die before they let that happen.
The average net worth in the USA is $750k... heavily skewed by those 735 unguillotined billionaires.
The median "sort everybody, what value does the household in the middle have" is $122k. Half of everybody has less than that, and "net worth" includes selling everything you own (house, car, all your clothes...).
Lots of Boomers with retirement savings in there, and a LOT of racism: the median net worth of white people is $188k, for black people just $24k.
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-american-net-worth
There's a reason I'm waiting for the Boomers to die. Quite a few reasons, really.
Huh, apparently Form Energy does actually exist. So ESS has competition. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/01/26/xcel-energy-to-add-iron-battery-to-store-electricity-in-becker
The correct way to use a 3D Printer. https://writing.exchange/@golgaloth/109769127614289608
@asie I helped run it, but Chip Hageman was the sysop. He stayed in New Jersey when I moved away after college. He was @gandalf42 on twitter a long time ago.
@asie Looks like https://twitter.com/mythran42 now. (The picture's him, and the link to the 404 domain is under the legal name he never used...)
@asie okay, now that I've clicked through and looked at the Reddit thread, I gave you the info you already had. Sorry. (I also note the poster @fade is my wife.)
If none of these still work I can try to dig through my back email, but I'm unlikely to have anything newer. I haven't spoken to him in years...
https://www.youtube.com/c/Mythran42Gaming
@asie It was the official BBS, but that didn't mean much. Tim ghosted Chip soon after the relationship was set up, which led to some hard feelings. (I never met Sweeney but my impression was of a money grubbing asshole who used and dumped people. Enthusiastic fan offers to help out? Use him to avoid support expenses, and leave him hanging.)
But this is all secondhand impressions from quite a while ago, much better to talk to the source:
@asie It's 4am on the east coast but I'll shake the tree in the morning and see what I can find.
Here's the obituary of the guy who defused the two nuclear bombs accidentally dropped on North Carolina during the cold war:
https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/jack-revelle-goldsboro-nc-broken-arrow-obituary
And here's the reason that people keep saying Denver has "naturally higher background radiation", the USA's own chernobyl, the Rocky Flats nuclear facility:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from_the_Rocky_Flats_Plant
Which first caught fire and emitted a plume of radiation over a populated area in 1957, a fact that was declassified in 1993.
https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/the-lessons-of-nuclear-secrecy-at-rocky-flats/
Ok, calling Rocky Flats the USA's chernobyl is unfair. It's a lot more like the USA's version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
@0xabad1dea The switch from sha1sum to sha256sum has been "coming soon" for a while now, presumably for similar reasons...
@cstross That's quite the metaphor for climate change, isn't it? (Hybrasil is sinking...)
@dalias @0xabad1dea Git moving from sha1 to sha256 is like rsync moving from md4 to md5: it doesn't actually affect the functionality, the hash is not used for any security purpose, but people who go "ew, old algorithm, obsolete, must change!" are the ones making the noise about it.
I have to come up to speed on all this nonsense because the http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2023-January/029343.html can of worms has been opened, but pending also has diff.c and vi.c and I haven't even cleaned up dd.c yet (because test suite).
@dalias @0xabad1dea You don't actually _need_ to do anything. But if you're going to do it you need to keep the old hashes accessible. (And if you're doing that anyway, a tool that generates a different hash for each commit in the tree to compare it with a known good tree is trivial to write, so having the other hash in the tree at all is just a form of annotation...)
As I said, the hash isn't there for security and never was...
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you...
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/109781773306327968
@asie Ah, sorry, I forgot. (Just now seeing my note.) Try again tomorrow...
It's not "the existence of", just "better support for".
@asie Ice storm today. Power out and phone signal intermittent.
It's always something...
The power is out at my house due to the ice storm
At 7:40 am 21% of Austin was without power.
At 12:04 pm it was 27%.
At 1:46 pm it was 29%.
At 3:03 pm 31.5%.
Not liking the direction here...
@fade It was down to 28.7 at 6pm, but then the sun went down...
@Johnjeffery It started with LBJ passing the revenue act of 1964, lowering the top tax rate from 91% to 70%.
He was attempting to maximize revenue. The previous rate was about preventing plutocracy.
LBJ's mistake allowed Reagan to happen.
In the USA poor people are regularly killed by police during traffic stops theoretically justified by a $200 ticket.
Rich people can steal with impunity and the harshest possible consequence is years later they might someday have the return a portion of they stole. They never fear for their personal safety.
https://mastodon.world/@davenewworld_2/109786519809353513
This is why I lobby for guillotines instead of taxes. A fine is a price. If this country is going to have capital punishment, the judiciary should be punching up.
Your opening position in a negotiation is never the minimum you are willing to accept. Don't lobby for "restoring normal". We need to defund the police _and_ guillotine the billionaires to get universal basic income. Start the UBI with reparations for slavery and native american genocide.
@brendannyhan There was a consensus? Since when?
Did you miss all the stuff about horse paste and injecting bleach? Patton Oswalt had a whole bit in his most recent Netflix special ("we all scream") about driving out to Republican country to get his vaccine because they was none where he lived and extra going to waste out there...
If the title named Avenue Q prudetube would censor the video.
@rysiek My toybox project has a local repo instance you can clone/pull from at https://landley.net/toybox/git although the visible web part is just a 28 line shell script (scripts/git-static-index.sh in the repo) that turns a short log into html and puts git-format-patch files at each hash value so you can minimally browse the commits.
The project's https://landley.net/toybox/about.html has a text summary, and links to the 2013 "why is toybox" talk, and the 2019 history and status update talk.
Increasingly depriving children of agency "for their protection" over the past century contitions us to passively obey. 100 years ago kids worked, now they can't babysit their own siblings. Truant officers confine kids to desks in rooms all day. 1980s latchkey kids are unthinkable now: a 10 year old caught 2 blocks from home means parents lose custody. Drink/smoke/sex too young, get a police record. Doesn't stop at 18: can't rent a car until 25.
Until children cross a magic line, they're not people. Can't act independently, no say in their own future: if you can't say yes you can't say no.
And then one day... NOW you can drink all you like. Now you're "legal". You weren't yesterday, you have zero experience with anything, but poof: you're an adult.
These are RECENT changes, mostly within the Boomers lifetime. The national miniumum age drinking act was passed in 1984. In europe they still give wine to their kids with dinner. Not here.
I'm not arguing about individual things kids do or don't need to be protected from "for their own good". If they have to pass through metal detectors every day and have active shooter drills and you start yanking half the books from their libraries and firing teachers for mentioning this country's history of slavery?
Our culture is not treating children as people. They do not have human dignity. They do not have agency. And anything that's done to them gets done to the rest of us eventually.
Don't lobby for taxes. Lobby for guillotines. https://youtu.be/-QZ-M6kNLXM
@fade Sure. The old way had problems. But the proposed solution has its own set of downsides. The replacement systems are developing new and more extreme problems over time, have eliminated benefits that were taken for granted, and are positioned as the eternal unquestionable status quo when they really aren't that old. Even proposing exploration of alternatives invites frantic pearl clutching and attack.
@fade except this pendulum has been swinging in a consistent direction since world war II.
@fade mandating education is about 120 years old.
Locking them in as factory desk jobs where everybody faces the same direction and responds to a bell when it's time to change shifts, ignoring advances in technology like VHS telecourses, the CD-ROM, Khan academy, and so on, that's more like 50 years. Since the shock of Sputnik wore off.
But education has nothing to do with YouTube's policy of preventing anyone younger than 13 from having an account.
@fade Allowing is not the same as requiring. Forbidding is not the same as regulating.
@fade "Leave it to Beaver" and "Lassie" at least implied a child wandering unescorted around town on a regular basis happened before the 1970s. Dorothy did a bit of wandering around Kansas without an escort before heading off to Oz too.
@fade I agree it's complicated.
@fade The part that makes me tired is that right wing loons trying to instill obedience and learn helplessness into everyone from a young age endlessly expand their restrictions, and the people you would expect to push back... don't. "Modern school is like a prison and children have less access to un-escorted public space than women in Saudi Arabia"... is not necessarily making a case to send 5 year olds down mineshafts?
@fade To show that the system and societal expectations were very different not that long ago.
Rich white people who don't want anyone teaching about racism are trying to hide where they stole their money from.
Bobby Tables gets around. https://chaos.social/@lofty/109796354724559834
@0xabad1dea My build process literally launches a VM inside QEMU to avoid needing to run as root.
https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/scripts/mkroot.sh
@0xabad1dea Huh.
@skinnylatte One of the big reasons I was happy traveling to other cities to work ~6 months contracts for so long is I selected jobs where I could pick an apartment within walking distance of the office.
Even if your car is paid off, not driving saves a couple thousand dollars a year between insurance, gas, repairs, inspection, registration, parking...
Merrick Garland is 70 years old. The average lifespan in the USA last year was 77. That means indictments could happen as early as 2030.
@froomkin There was a research paper on the "balance as bias" failure mode in 2010. I reviewed it at the time:
http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#04-07-2010
@asie Got in touch. He said he heard about you asking about this (from a friend in the netherlands?) but really hasn't got more to say. His old zzt stuff is in a basement closet buried behind boxes, and if he ever digs it up he'll post it online.
Confirmed my recollection that Sweeney ghosted him: set up his own bbs instead, initially without telling Chip. We were both something like 17 at the time?
Huh. Apparently a contributing factor to my depression clearing up when I turned 30 is they took lead out of the gasoline:
They've been trying to "drown it in a bathtub" since the Revenue Act of 1964 lowered the top tax rate below 90%.
https://newsie.social/@stevesilberman/109810003555356570
Billionaires want to be kings, hunting peasants for sport and filling the basement with kidnapped harems. The government prevents this, so they want to collapse us back into feudalism where they can rule by the divine right of the almightly dollar.
(They put "in god we trust" on the money because they worship the money. The dollar IS their god.)
The _most_ american thing about this is it was posted to a chinese website.
@tio If my browser can do a P2P connection there should be a client that can do a P2P connection. I don't know what it is, but it should already exist somewhere...
And the power went out again. A week after the ice storm, Austin is still working on it.
@bikepedantic "The perfect is the enemy of the good", or "why not to bother getting an electric car".
I call this piece "the perfect is the enemy of the good", or "why not to bother getting an electric car".
https://transportation.social/@bikepedantic/109814673635327502
Your dirty car will never be as hairshirt as spending an hour and a half each way waiting for two bus transfers. (I say this as someone who commuted to three different jobs by bus over the years, and still goes to the airport that way half the time...)
(Came back after about 20 minutes. Probably undoing a jury-rig with a proper fix.)
@tio Apparently they say to run an instance of peertube to do the mirroring? https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/3900 says it can be done but doesn't say how...
@BunRab I still don't have a faceboot account, and deleted my twitter.
Florida is packed full of senile Boomers who moved there to retire. This is a concentration-of-Boomer problem.
They breathed leaded gas fumes for 50 years, suffering literal brain damage from pediatric heavy metal exposure that became chronic. Once age related neurological degeneration set in on top of that they fell for nigerian email scams en masse.
The GOP's pivot-to-Boomer is a second Southern Strategy, mass elder abuse.
@pickleflinger Hashtag not all boomers.
I was born in florida, lived there after college, still have relatives there, but sure...
@flameeyes humans still humaning.
@vaurorapub The real estate people are also turning the screws as hard as they possibly can.
The banks have mortgages on properties that are not earning rent. The sale value of a building is a multiple of the rent it brings in, if you can't rent it out then the mortgage is underwater whether or not it gets paid.
You thought the 2008 mortgage crisis was bad...
Working from home is a big per-hour pay increase because you don't spend two unpaid hours a day commuting.
Plus even paid off cars are expensive: insurance, fuel, inspection, registration, oil, tires, dead battery because door closed on a seat belt, save up for a new air conditioner (but not alternator), tiny chip in your windshield from bouncing gravel slowly grows a 3 ft crack over the next month, driver's side window suddenly won't go back up at the drive through, check engine light...
The Bolt EV seems cheap, but it's still a car. Do the shock absorbers still stop working when you hit too many speed bumps? Living with the noise the CV joint makes every time you turn left. That "multifunction switch" in the steering column that needed to be replaced before the tail lights would come back on. Crumple zones from misjudging a parking space. Still drivable.
"There aren't a lot of old dilapidated electric vehicles driving around yet" does not equal maintenance-free immortal cars.
@Catsav@mastodon.social @vaurorapub David Graeber wrote about this. The real threat isn't that they'd search for another job, the real threat is they'd have spare time to become politically active. There's entire talks and essays about it somewhere in his books and youtube book tour speeches.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview-david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules#:~:text=freak%20out
See also Clay Shirky's book "cognitive surplus": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ
@chargrille Because Russia is bombing Ukraine's power grid. I don't know if this is "monkey see monkey do", "as above so below", or "notice me senpai"...
"Unguillotined billionaire" is like "unindicted co-conspirator". Both are systemic failures.
How much of the current inflation spike was the USA's 735 unguillotined billionaires going "basic income was successfully tried during the pandemic with stimulus checks and child support payments, we CANNOT allow that to stand, double all profit margins".
Ok, that's why an octogenarian is president. He literally likes the doing-the-job part.
If we condemn china for using prisoners as organ donors, maybe we shouldn't do it here?
The revenue act of 1964 lowered the top tax rate from over 90% to 70%. LBJ did this to maximize revenue going to the federal government, because the high rates discouraged would-be plutocrats from collecting extra income, diverting the money into things like long-term research and development and employee training instead.
But the point of FDR's high rate was to suppress plutocracy. LBJ opened the door for plutocrats to fund Reagan to lower the top tax rate to 28%.
America's 735 unguillotined billionaires bought Citizens United/the GOP/supreme court using the money that would have gone to taxes before LBJ.
If you graph the wealth of the 1% versus the national debt, they are mirror images. Federal debt is disguised money printing: both are ways to spend money that doesn't exist yet, one just pretends to be temporary but is endlessly renewed.
Debt created new money for billionaires to hoard. The only way to pay the debt back is to reclaim it from them.
Huh. About half the "green new deal" wound up being passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden's not just taking ideas from Elizabeth Warren, he's actually listening to The Squad.
https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/thank-green-new-deal-inflation-reduction-act/
I did not expect that.
@fade He's getting a lot of flack because it sounds like he hasn't done anything. I hadn't noticed how MUCH of AOC's agenda the guy passed until now, and he signed it back in August.
This prevents a lot of specific GOP blowback, if he doesn't tout his accomplishments them they get no traction attacking them. Before the next election he's got to do an "our story so far" tour, but I guess that's a scheduled thing? Dunno.
I did not expect quiet competence. (Except for the lack of indictments.)
@fade Possibly while visiting I should borrow your login to read all these paywalled articles.
@vaurorapub Moving everything possible to Bangalore was already blowing up in people's faces by 2010. The cheap Indian offshoring was all "Our recent college graduates get 2-3 years of experience working for you, then once you've paid to train them they swap out for fresh graduates and go work for customers in vietnam etc. You get no continuity of anything, always green recruits, and you're training your competition expanding into asia ahead of you."
Turns out the sucker was IBM, not India.
@fade I mean seriously, he's peeling off republicans. I didn't think that was still possible. (Although "who watched" is strike-from-orbit level selection bias...)
It's not just big tech companies having gratuitous layoffs as the USA's 735 unguillotined billionaires push back at uppity workers and their wage increases that _almost_ keep up with inflation:
https://onposting.substack.com/p/professional-writer
Me, I have zero sympathy for companies that find out they have nobody working for them a year or two from now.
The cover price of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" is $15, even small bulk orders could get it for $7, the Gideons distribute 70 million bibles annually... Hmmm.
Two different people I've since unfollowed on here posted about how we could all just turn off their reblogs instead of unfollowing them.
My toybox project is trying to turn these into individual development workstations.
@rburchell Each of the accounts I followed were over 1/3 of my feed when I unfollowed them.
Decent signal to noise ratio too, but I was still drowning. Amount of attention demanded is a finite resource, I don't care HOW great you think your curation skills are, I have other things to do and you're preventing me from seeing what anyone ELSE I follow has to say.
"I've been told this problem but don't care, here's how YOU can mitigate it..." means they don't respect their followers' time.
@rburchell (I didn't ask them to change, and didn't notify them of unfollowing. It's not a punishment, presumably the people who still follow them are happy with the social contract, but I have different standards. I try to respect my followers' attention budget. I may not get it RIGHT, but I at least _try_.)
@catvalente How much of the recent price cuts are due to environmentally conscious people not wanting to drive around in a rolling maga hat?
@b0rk One difference is IEEE standard Quad float (128 bits) has been hardware accelerated on stuff like OS/390 since 1998, but 128 bit integer types are recent and iffy compiler-specific extensions with names starting with double underscores and whole rants about how properly supporting them in the spec is politically fraught:
https://thephd.dev/intmax_t-hell-c++-c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadruple-precision_floating-point_format
(Just acknowledge LP64 already...)
The War on Cash continues. All your purchases must be tracked. If birth control becomes illegal they have your purchase history. If "camgirl" is no longer an allowed profession, it can be prevented from receiving money. The homeless need a phone and active payment processor account.
@acdha @vaurorapub India worked out how to beat paid internships out of US corporations. That's something we couldn't do _here_. Respect the hustle.
@vaurorapub @acdha In 1999 they could at least escalate to someone familiar with code they had delivered to us. By 2010 the cycled much faster, each new issue raised required the person on the other end to come up to speed with code they had delivered to _us_ 18 months previously.
I asked what happened to name-from-bugzilla... no longer works there. Where did they go? They work for your "partner company" now? What does partner company do? Service local customers closer to India, I.E. Vietnam.
@vaurorapub @acdha The sad part is I got that information talking to a fellow engineer while trying to do my job, but the management who arranged the deal did not do any sort of due diligence because of course engineers are fungible and the lowest bidder is always best.
And then they had to hire me anyway to make it work... for a 6 month consulting contract, then I left too. (That exact description applies to more than one company I did such contracts for.)
@vaurorapub @acdha when I googled the Indian company's name I found an interview with the CEO in the English language "Times of India" explaining his company's business model and ambitions and so on. They weren't trying to hide it. It was an explicit business strategy business writers were doing articles about.
Somehow, not widely talked about here in the States, at least at the time.
A few people noticed:
https://www.cringely.com/2012/07/23/are-indian-high-schoolers-manning-your-ibm-help-desk/
Oil oligarch resource curse countries stick together: United Arab Emirates openly laundering money for Russia now. (Sanctions? What sanctions?)
Streisand effect, anyone? https://mastodon.social/@thepoliticalcat/109831428392938231
(Alas the Tories doing insane censorship is sadly nothing new, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%931994_British_broadcasting_voice_restrictions under Thatcher, and their insane libel laws ala https://reason.com/2022/08/13/london-libel-lawsuits-punish-truth-tellers/ and https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/uks-online-safety-bill-attacks-free-speech-and-encryption and...)
@alda No, we've got stables and coop. Sheep pens are outside. Barn is a building with a door you can close full of hay and (usually milkable) cows, and regularly repurposed as a toolshed the same way automobile garages are.
Alas right-wing fascists always censor stuff. It's their go-to move: don't like bits of reality? Stick your fingers in OTHER people's ears and go la-la-la.
Turkey's Etrigan trashed his country's currency by zeroing out interest rates (because his religion prohibits charging interest and he's turned a secular country into a theocracy in enforcing his religion's prohibition on charging interest) and is now censoring internet criticism of the post-earthquake relief efforts: https://netblocks.org/reports/twitter-restricted-in-turkey-in-aftermath-of-earthquake-oy9LJ9B3
Strangely, nothing promotes atheism like theocracy, whether in Turkey (https://www.dw.com/en/atheism-grows-in-turkey-as-recep-tayyip-erdogan-urges-islam/a-47018029) or here in the USA (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/atheism-fastest-growing-religion-us/598843/).
The crusades: turning the other cheek by the sword. For-profit tax exempt megachurches: camel through the eye of a needle, render unto caesar... "cleansing the temple" of merchants and moneylenders was in all four gospels (the "loaves and fishes" story is only in 2).
@cstross @mjg59 I miss bios, it was simple. 32k of 16 bit x86 assembly prevented them from trying to be clever: just load the next bootloader, pass on the e80 table, and get out of the way while we probe the PCI+USB busses to find hardware.
ACPI was motivated by Intel's embarassment at needing x86 assembly to bring up Itanic systems, and then got extended to arm because device tree was stupidly GPL.
I know Matt's the Linux EFI guy, but the "Trust-me Platform Modules" with SMM make me sad.
@mjg59 @cstross CP/M was literally BIOS+BDOS, and Tim Patterson's QDOS was just a quick-and-dirty 16 bit implementation of BDOS to develop SCP's 8086 board against while waiting for the "official" one to ship from digital research for the product launch. (But instead Kildall focused with MP/M, which got derailed by the introduction of CPU cache making SMP suddenly require IPI and flushing.)
Salvaged from Geocities: https://landley.net/history/mirror/cpm/history.html
The most interesting part of https://discuss.systems/@adrian/109824954620883856 (other than reminiscing about beowulf clusters made from labs' old discarded PCs) is thinking about rural indian, african, and south american districts with more phones than running water (often USB charged from "camping" solar panels like https://www.amazon.com/Soshine-Mini-Solar-Panel-Monocrystalline/dp/B099RSLNZ4/ref=asc_df_B099RSLNZ4/).
When a motivated teenager can put together a small solar powered compute cluster by scrounging castoffs...
@skinnylatte "Knowing what success looks like" is an important part of the process.
@alda According to https://wintersfamilybeef.com/about-wfb/ the people we buy from at the farmer's market on sundays have 5300 acres?
But "talking to customers" and "talking to other industry professionals" is different vocabulary, sure.
@mjg59 @cstross Hence device tree overlays, whch circles back to "the dts files in linux are all GPLv2 so even BSD can't use 'em".
I'm not a huge fan of device tree either, but there's worse things Android could be using: https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/dto
P.S. the reason Android won't use devtmpfs is at http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2022-August/029147.html (discussion started by https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/51a43ad52251) and I poked lwn about it at the time and they didn't care. Oh well...
@ahmetasabanci @cstross Eragon: "I want to devalue the currency." Me: "Ok, print money and mail it to everyone as basic income. The pandemic provided a perfect 3-year excuse."
Shinzo Abe: "I want to cause inflation and raise the birth rate." Me: "Print money and mail large monthly per-child support payments to all parents of minors".
The most extreme divorced-from-reality priors-asserted-uber-alles religion out there today is capitalism. Billionaires are its saints, financiers its clergy.
I'm unclear on the modern definition of "crisis":
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/google-cuts-12000-jobs-as-layoffs-spread-across-tech-industry
Between the end of 2019 and start of 2023, Google hired 68k people, going from 119k to 187k an almost 60% increase in employees over the course of the pandemic.
They just fired 12k people, which is 6% of their workforce, or about 1/4 as many as they hired over just the past 2 years. Their message is basically "we overshot". Um... ok?
Sure, I agree it's a good argument for Universal Basic Income, but what isn't?
@brewsterkahle The authors of research papers aren't paid royalties for publishing them? Almost all will send a copy if contacted by email? The most common one isn't Sci-Hub it's Google Scholar? Most for-profit journals are a predatory model leveraging tenure requirements, and this a whole political thing in academia you seem unaware of and fell for an astroturf article?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing
https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/195jiy/lpt_if_you_need_access_to_a_scientific_paper/
Watching a youtube analysis of the "masterworks" scam: https://youtu.be/6ojOkPmm8lw
Which completely misses the ACTUAL SCAM, which is about billionaires colluding to declare arbitrary "because I said so" valuations on art objects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5sOuET8UWA
Then depositing banana-duct-taped-to-wall in a bank vault and convincing the bank to issue "equity lines of credit": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmEvAk5LRko&t=9m
against them at near-zero (below inflation) rates, with which they buy the next yacht or building or...
It's basically affinity fraud, a billionaire talks finance douchebros who worship his white ass into borrowing unlimited money, at rates inflation pays off for him, against "banksy spray-painted something then shredded it" trash because other billionaires collude.
It's not a new scam, I blogged about it a couple years back:
https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#:~:text=banks%20decide
Billionaires are the modern version of kings ruling by divine right. There's nothing there except cultural consensus that "this guy should own us".
Why I don't have impostor syndrome about programming, a short thread:
https://mastodon.social/@dougall/109845615229459552
See also https://xkcd.com/2030/ and https://xkcd.com/463/
@lilithsaintcrow @cstross Here's the one who got fired: https://twitter.com/jdan/status/1623818128005160962
The https://twitter.com/bestofdyingtwit feed tracks that stuff.
@Bindlestaff @cstross it's worse than that, more than one person has created a locked account with no followers and come back 10 minutes later to a triple digit view count:
https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1623788092124704768
The most charitable interpretation is it's not counting "views", it's counting database fetches. Including things like propagating the content across clusters, scanning it for forbidden stuff, search hashing, etc.
@fade Dog.

Intellectual property as a concept needs to go away when the Boomers do. Attribution and ownership are not the same thing. (Yeah, another argument for basic income...)
Means testing is evil. Not wanting "those people" to benefit puts ALL recipients in the precariat, jumping through hoops to endlessly renew, clinging to what little you've got by your fingernails and unable to pursue any other improvement that might jeopardize eligibility...
Everybody gets public school. Everybody got pandemic stimulus. It _can_ be easy. The tradeoff is just "no more billionaires".
@fade Living in minnesota seems decent.
"After 2023, we plan to introduce new pricing for Patreon Video that takes into account the cost of hosting and streaming video natively."
https://blog.patreon.com/introducing-patreon-video
Yeah, peertube still looks like the way to do this.
Remember when Apple gave all its customers a free U2 album and didn't realize it was possible to do so in a bad way?
Guess what the Muskrat is doing to the birdsite?
https://social.coop/@eloquence/109860479182454936
Does Twitler just want to stand in the same spotlight with Mel Gibson, Roseanne Barr, Tila Tequila, Paula Deen, and the Duck Dynasty guys, or did someone tell him his tweets could be the same kind of "required reading" as Mao's Little Red Book?
Good news, everyone! https://youtu.be/8WzrIsxofSw
Expect her to make the exact same announcement again at least twice more over the coming week:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/report-dianne-feinstein-memory-rapidly-deteriorating
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/dianne-feinstein-senate-17079487.php
The new variant of "rolling coal" is people in cars attacking bicyclists for... undermining car dominance?
https://sfba.social/@colburn/109866993943688637
And then presumably going home and singing hymns of praise to their gas stove...
The "resource curse" is where billionaire wealth _doesn't_ come from the labor of exploited poor people, so the ruling plutocrats don't need the people and striking doesn't help.
https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4340.html
David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" is what happens when a small subset of the labor force still matters, so the plutocrats give the rest precarious sinecures to keep them in line as long as forced relocations and genocide by starvation would make the relevant ~10% unhappy.
The reason billionaires never think they have enough is they're expecting society to collapse so they'll need to outbid each other for tickets on the Titanic's lifeboats:
http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html
Billionaires all know a just society would come after them with torches and pitchforks and are amazed it hasn't happened yet:
https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming
People who have the concept of "enough" don't WANT to be billionaires:
https://www.thehandbook.com/dolly-parton-may-just-be-the-greatest-human-alive-heres-why/
Capitalism views sustainable business models as a failure. Milking the same cash cow forever is Not Growing. The pursuit of endless growth must squeeze blood from every stone. Slaughter the golden goose or get sued by shareholders.
Interesting argument that Russian politicians (and by extension GOP) play crazy as a survival mechanism, the same way Hamlet did under a murderous backstabbing monarchy that found his continued existence inconvenient. Not guilty by reason of insanity, only along the "threat to the czar/fuhrer/king/billionaire" axis.
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1624423094386413575
The question of when "you become what you do" kicks in to make you ACTUALLY mad... I refer back to "Hamlet" for that ongoing argument.
@esther@strangeobject.space Brevity is the filet of sole of wit.
Huh, there's a scam variant I hadn't seen before: two companies and some seed money. Send money to partner company, call it fresh investor deposits (because income would be taxable), borrow against it, send the combined money to the other company, rinse repeat.
Guess why FTX and Alameda were two companies?
I thought the 50% margin loan limit dampened that sort of oscillation, but I'm remembering the pre-Reagan SEC. Back when FDR's regulations prevented bank collapse.
@mawhrin You can't spell "evil" without "vi".
@beecker The 1991 savings and loan crisis was before that.
@beecker So you missed the whole Reagan "deregulation" era then? Here's an article from 1982:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/what-reagan-has-done-to-america-79233/
Trump didn't need to pass a new law to gut the post office, he appointed Louis DeJoy to run it. Same with putting Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC or https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/magazine/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-trump.html
Read Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis sometime. It's about the creation of the 2008 mortgage crisis in the early 80's while the regulators were asleep at the wheel.
Happy Death of James Cook day: https://elliottkay.tumblr.com/post/709258837538062336
@beecker By the time Glass-Steagall was repealed it had been swiss-cheesed for 20 years by Reagan and Bush. Whole sectors called "shadow banking" emerged, categories of financial institutions it didn't cover (because the regulators ruled it didn't).
It's been over 20 years since my https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/839/748 days and I am _way_ out of practice explaining this stuff, but https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/09/clear-as-glass-steagall/4145/ _also_ recommends reading Liar's Poker.
@beecker You know how it's always projection with republians? They love pointing at "thing that happened on democrat's watch" as an explanation for problems they (or the plutocrats they serve) actually caused, and I am very tired of it.
Don't get me started on the "interest rate suppression" lie. That's so not how it worked. Creditors love high interest rates because they extract money from debtors. They hate high inflation rates because it helps debtors and hurts creditors. Motivated reasoning
@beecker Yes, clearly the guy who balanced the federal budget and presided over an 8 year economic boom (that his successor imploded within months) was the REAL source of the problem. Reagan tripled the national debt while vastly increasing poverty and homelessness, and then Bush I spent more money in 4 years than Reagan did in 8 with the country in recession pretty much his entire term. Obviously that's what success looks like.
I'm tired of this conversation. It is not my job to educate you.
Sigh, I probably shouldn't be quite as block-happy as I am on here, but I spent years being stressed on twitter, and now I'm just waiting for the Simpsons' next prediction to kick off:
I'm not trying to convince anybody. I'm not trying to educate anybody. I'm just waiting for enough Boomers to die for the twin state religions (capitalism and christianity) to stop having any cultural support.
(Yeah yeah, #notallboomers I know. I'm GenX, we're pretty much tarred with the same brush. And to be fair, we got _less_ lead poisoning, not none.)
Remember when Diebold's CEO promised to deliver the state of Ohio to the republicans with electronic voting machines that tallied up unlikely republican victories with no paper trail?
https://boingboing.net/2004/11/03/quote-of-the-day-die.html
Now Ohio's GOP is handling the train derailment like Michigan's GOP did Flint's water:
https://mastodon.online/@annejefferson/109868351356035583
Diebold's CEO went on to be too rich to go to jail, "settling" an accounting fraud case for a few million with no jail time:
Heh. I forgot the "burn it" section was right after the musical number about geriatric Boomers voting for crazy:
@alda Nah, Steve died a decade ago. Replaced by that Tim Apple guy.
I remember when I thought "Microsoft Tay" was as disturbing as Microsoft's AI would get in the near term:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@yiningkarlli/109868050471293278
(Yeah it's 99% likely quoting an extended section of an relevant a03 fanfic it scraped, and/or doing something ala https://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/story-index/ but still.)
@liztai @yiningkarlli All the fanfic in Archive Of Our Own is part of the training data.
@alda Because Woz wouldn't take the money (unless possibly it was in $2 bills) and the corresponding one would have been /paul anyway.
@liztai @yiningkarlli The Law Offices of Small and Limp Esq have a certain history here, and this is not exactly out of character for them...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/1/22756973/microsoft-clippy-microsoft-teams-stickers-return
They're still doing better than Microsoft Bob, Millennium, Vista...
https://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=lastwin.95
https://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/4/MS_Buys_Evil.html
So Apple is trying to move its manufacturing from Emperor Xi's wolf warriors to the country suppressing the BBC documentary about Modhi.
https://www.wired.com/story/indias-government-wants-total-control-of-the-internet/
I'm aware there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but production and distribution appear unhappy as well...
Capitalism is all about cornering the market. It destroys value, prevents competition, protects incumbents, and goven time collapses into a caste system where nobility can do anything but peasants never can.
Good analysis of how state sponsored troll farms plant and spread disinformation. (Scattering, harvesting, amplification.)
https://ryanmcbeth.substack.com/p/are-ukrainian-soldiers-being-buried
They spread clickbait, find people who repeat it, then spread the repeats with ablative credibility (or at least a layer of indirection/deniability). Even an "is this true?" provides a retweetable squid ink cloud of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. What is truth? Who can tell? Arguments on both sides, be paralyzed by doubt, do nothing to stop the abuser.
The main use of Prudetube these days is to link offsite to stuff prudetube won't show.
@fade I saw that. I'm glad you weren't hurt.
I've reached the point where I treat unskippable GPDR compliance popups as a paywall. If I can't read the article without clicking "agree to donate a kidney" -> close tab and move on.
The internet has plenty of other conent. Heck, my browser's got like 500 tabs open I haven't finished with yet...
Just got an update from Google to say they'll be more thoroughly scanning my gmail to see if I'm a terrorist or pedophile.
As a service. I should be honored.
@emil I normally right click -> inspect element ->delete node (without which the internet became unusable years ago), but the ones that disable scrolling until dealt with? Yeah you can cut and paste javascript into the debug console to reenable it but I never bother...
@SpaceLifeForm It was in "[Legal Notice] Changes to the Google Workspace Acceptable Use Policy and Google Workspace Terms of Service"
Capitalism lies, example/case study du jour. Shiny video:
https://twitter.com/SupacatLtd/status/1158719578358333440
Admission of deceit, with spin:
https://twitter.com/SupacatLtd/status/1158727038775320577
My reaction to this sort of thing is always "So what _else_ are you lying about then?" If your first interaction with potential customers is to obviously mislead them, the relationship is not going to improve from there.
(Note: they _could_ have made a front windshield panel removable. They apparently didn't think of it. What else didn't they think of?)
It also makes me wonder: do things in shipping containers need padding so they don't get knocked side to side and smack innto the container walls? I've mailed stuff in boxes and padded envelopes, but don't have shipping container domain expertise...
@sarahtaber Just noticed I haven't seen your posts for a bit. I'm guessing your twitter forwarder stopped working when Musk killed the twitter API?
(Blocking all mention of mastodon didn't work, so he took a different approach...)
@DreadShips @cstross The front fell off.
"Space Force" has an official camoflague pattern uniform.
I have questions. I have a large number of questions.
Sigh, accounts like Mark Hertling and Sarah Taber went silent here when the Muskrat killed the twitter API.
Eh, I can wait. I remember when AOL tried to eat the internet, and when microsoft vowed MSN would replace it. Heck, I've mostly waited out Faceboot by this point. After dragonfire->WWIVnet->FidoNet->boards.fool.com->Slashdot->Livejournal->twitter->mastodon "this too shall pass" is kind of self-evident. (What I'm _really_ waiting out, and always have been, is Boomer capitalism.)
@ariadne "Which bureaucrat enforced an outdated requirement" was not one of my questions.
@ct_bergstrom The same definition David Graeber gave at the start of "Bullshit Jobs".
On my vanilla mastodon web server, when I click on my icon to see my posts, what comes up in the 4th tab is a cached copy from January 31.
Nothing I've posted in the past 18 days is visible unless I right click->open in NEW tab, find a link to the thread I want to extend and paste it into the search bar in the tab I'm logged in at.
If I reply to something in the new tab it wants authorization. ON THE SAME SERVER.
Grognard will never fix this. He's too busy refusing to implement quote tweets.
Wow, I didn't know Mastodon had no vertical length limit to summary cards and would expand a "youtube short" to be over twice the height of my laptop screen.
My apologies, I'll try not to link to those here in future.
I'm sad to see Google go the way of all capitalist businesses. It was extremely useful. The downslope from the peak is unlikely to be fun.
Google moved "maps.google.com" to google.com/maps so if you deny location information to Google (for ad tracking) it breaks google maps.
I was reminded of this because Google's main search page is now one of those "endless scroll" things, and I thought about disabling javascript for the site to see if I'd get pages back, but that would break all the other google services monopoly-leverage bundled into the big hairball just like Microsoft did putting Word in Office and Explorer in the OS.
@eliasr because open street maps doesn't tell you what hours a store is open? Which is 90% of what I use it for?
Most people have figured out that capitalism went septic about 50 years ago:
https://press.coop/@TheEconomist/109886513549800886
As far as I can tell the chain of Dominoes was:
1) LBJ's revenue act of 1964 lowering the top tax rate below 90%
2) Milton Friedman's 1970 New York Times article declaring corporate executives owed nothing to customers and employees, only shareholders:
3) The Reagan administration.
That's why IBM and Sears lasted 100 years, an unimaginable lifespan today.
Those taxes prevented the 1% from owning 90% of all wealth, and let Richard Nixon consider basic income affordable:
Before Friedman's "greed is good" rant, many people had careers, pensions, job security, and the one income households could afford upper middle class lives.
In Reagan's Inaugural address the senile actor lied "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem", and then spent 8 years solving nothing and being everyone's problem.
Sigh, the Ukraine war analysis I've been following since last year still hasn't moved offf twitter yet (only thing I still check there for), but I kinda took a vow of silence there when I deleted my account.
People are saying this thread shows why the west needs to give Ukraine long-range weapons:
https://twitter.com/NLwartracker/status/1627047617938223106
I agree, but I think I know why they aren't. It's machiavellian. Biden want Russia to drain into Ukraine until its Soviet inheritance is gone. Lose too fast, it might stop.
@PChoate My first job out of college was helping IBM port OS/2 to the PowerPC, and from there they moved me to Austin to work on Warp 4. I didn't just hear about their anticompetitive practices, I was on the direct receiving end.
I will never forgive Microsoft. I will never knowingly use Microsoft software. My page on Microsoft Linkedin says "I don't use linkedin". I mirror https://landley.net/toybox/git because they bought Github. Sataya Nadella is basically Karl Donitz to me: doesn't make it better.
@PChoate I'm not a boomer. I won't get to retire.
@PChoate Long ago I wrote a stock market investment column for three years.
https://www.fool.com/archive/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/08/10/buried-treasure.aspx
https://www.fool.com/archive/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/04/25/the-importance-of-saving.aspx
Lack of information and analysis is not the problem. Global warming flooding my house 4 times in 3 years (which had never happened since it was built in 1950), trip to the hospital for allergic reaction with $500/month insurance not even covering the $1500 ambulance, 2008 crisis leaving my sister w/4 kids in debt... It adds up.
It's difficult to comprehend the sheer scope of the racist insular ethnocentric xenophbia of Europeans.
https://elliottkay.tumblr.com/post/708125975883497472/jstor-gluklixhe-ironbite4-fluffmugger
An old fashioned is whiskey, simple syrup, and bitters. A new fangled is bourbon and cherry syrup.
(Well I asked.)
Capitalists insist that money causes all production everywhere: parents are paid to have and raise kids, schoolteachers are in it for the money, every collector is just waiting to sell to other collectors, every game is played by someone practicing to go pro and make millions as a professional Flappy Birder, etc.
People outside that religion expect basic income would free people up to create and maintain way more stuff:
Chatgpt and friends are Gish Gallop engines, spouting a rapid torrent of "plausible" BS faster than it can be debunked.
https://wandering.shop/@terrymatz/109898643047635931
Chatgpt isn't lying, it's bluffing. It doesn't know, so it makes something up. Sometimes it even guesses right:
https://philosophynow.org/issues/137/Bullshit_Jobs_by_David_Graeber#:~:text=different%20from%20lying
In doing so, it pollutes the discourse. And that's what the people funding it want, to deny everyone else the ability to tell what is and isn't true. If you can't be right, destroy the concept of truth.
@fade The basic idea seems to be 4 oz bourbon and 1 oz cherry liqueur. Or somewhat more maraschino cherry juice:
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/jeff-mauro/new-fangled-fashioned-2329965
Some people throw in a specific type of bitters:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/365143482259797858/
Some people use Scotch instead of bourbon, but I assume that's like a vodka martini:
The theory of "social contagion" homophobes currently espouse was applied to left handedness a couple centuries back. Turns out some people are left-handed and some are ambidextrous, nobody really gets "converted".
https://mastodon.social/@juliaserano/109904545735308596
And yes, religious loons burned people at the stake for being left-handed:
https://time.com/3978951/lefties-history/
And some parts of the world still have a strong religious bias against them:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/two-thirds-of-the-world-still-hates-lefties-64727388/
@cstross Knitters have the concept of "frogging" which is where you rip out stuff you've already done to back up to where you can fix it. (Rip it, rip it.)
I've frogged an awful lot of code in my open source programming projects. "Right, that's how I _should_ have done it..."
Why isn't everyone doing this?
You've got to know when to code 'em. Know when to load 'em. Know when to debug. Know when to run.
You never count your cycles. While you're writing out the functions. There'll be time enough to optimize. When the design's done.
My google account is somewhat borked from multiple automated migrations and consolidations as it's accumulated 15 years of legacy cruft... but Microsoft Azure sounds like an absolute horror show.
@mjg59 Define "solved".
@blogwash The perfect is the enemy of the good. Mitigate.
@reneestephen Filk. It does a body good.
An incomplete list of money laundering techniques chinese billionaires are using to flee emperor xi and avoid becoming the next Jack Ma.
@molly0xfff All blockchain ever even _tried_ to do was automate the functions of a notary public, without checking ID or having a human give the thing being notarized a sniff test.
If "have this notarized" doesn't benefit your business plan, blockchain doesn't either.
This is who David Tennant took his stage name from. https://wandering.shop/@nwhyte/109932802602561691
@pleia2 I only have 8 desktops, and each of them has a role/category.
So the worldcon in china is turning into a human rights disaster (at least according to the one account I still check on twitter, mostly for Ukraine coverage): https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1629211046941523968
The decision to place the event in Emperor Xi's domain was made in 2021... due to 1900 of the 3000 votes being "supporting" memberships cast remotely from china by people who had never attended.
A supporting membership cost $50, 2000*50=$100k US. It's the sad puppies all over again...
I'd wonder WHY Emperor Xi of the Communist Dynasty wanted Worldcon, but this was approximately the same period he asked Putin to delay the invasion of Ukrain until after the Olympics he was hosting ended:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/02/world/china-russia-ukraine-invasion-olympics-western-intel/index.html
And we all know how that went:
https://globalnews.ca/news/8603600/chinese-speedskater-kexin-fan-cheating-tripping-alyson-charles/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_and_controversies_at_the_2022_Winter_Olympics
It had "world" in the name. It's been held for a century. Therefore it allowed him to purchase legitimacy, like Rupert Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal.
Why SMS is not a secure, part 6 billion:
@pikhq Cool!
You know, Ford motors can just die. Whole company. I was excited about the F150 Lightning, but not anymore: they just patented self-driving reposessions.
See also.
(Chevy's Bolt EV is a really stupid and simple for an electric car, which is an advantage.)
Last year Hertz was calling the cops on their own customers because their computers are as bad as Southwest's
Ford thinks you don't own anything you buy from them.
@malwareunicorn There's people here.
I'm not sure what the moral is here, but... yay?
@fade @mjfgates @lilithsaintcrow it doesn't take much to puncture a lung.
Oh. They didn't decide to do it, they were legislatively forced to. That makes more sense.
@leigh Flip flops in the snow.
@BetaCuck4Lyfe @CommercialSolarGuy If you're doing youtube, https://youtube.com/@EnergiMedia and https://youtube.com/@transportevolved are good too.
1) Android 12's phone app insists on playing voicemail through the phone speaker when everything else is going to Bluetooth headphones. There's no control to select output. Android first shipped in 2008 and still has this sort of obvious bug.
2) Google voice does not recognize Spanish.
3) The official Mastodon app crashes if you click the attach photo icon after attaching a photo.
4) Austin's tornado/hail apocalypse warning system is marked as a spam number by Google.

Is it just me or is UHF's Gandhi II clip the exact same logic as the evangelical second coming?
That turn the other cheek render onto Caesar happy and you know it shepherd metaphor guy who fed the poor and healed the sick is coming back to blow up the planet. Just you wait, it will all make perfect sense, and he is clearly going to side with the warmongering homophobic racists. I mean, that part's just obvious.
@fade @lilithsaintcrow Seemed to be a popular activity at the time, from what I gather.
@lolzac Google has been having... issues recently.
@beerandashot Alas the Pixel 3a I bought mail order directly from Google only got updated to 12 and then they abandoned it. But I can check the app store for updates to the app..
@kuoirad 512 filled up, 737 is the overlay.
@jeremy I've unfollowed two people for boosting too much. The boosts were largely interesting, but they overwhelmed my feed.
Yes I'm aware I could turn off boosts for individual people, but I never bother. I just unfollow if their feed gets too noisy so I can't see what anyone else has to say.
@BunRab The phone didn't crash, just the app. And I'm told if I upgrade to a newer version it might not do that anymore.
@wingo @vaurorapub The open software foundation was created in 1988, merged with X/Open in 1996 to form The Open Group. They created the mach microkernel and OSF/1 and TRU64 and so on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation
The main pushback against the phrase "open source" in the meeting that selected it was that "open" already had a full decade of corporate abuse, and they didn't want to pick such a scammy name. But Richard Stallman had so badly poisoned "free" that it was chosen as the lesser evil...
Atheism is a religion the way zero is a number. The singularity is just the secular rapture.
The official android Mastodon app continues to meet my expectations.

@b0rk I blogged about 6 vs 8 bits a month and a half ago:
https://landley.net/notes.html#27-01-2023
They _did_ want a larger character size for internationalization support, and did all sorts of "wide character" nonsense before UTF-8 and unicode, both of which I've wrestled with at length in my toybox project:
https://landley.net/notes-2017.html#01-09-2017
https://landley.net/notes-2017.html#19-10-2017
tl;dr: utf-8 is very elegant and was created by Ken Thompson, the inventor of Unix. Unicode is an insane hodgepodge that had Microsoft on the committee.
@b0rk The DEC PDP-1 through PDP-10 were 6-bit machines, and when memory was parceled out by the kilobyte 6 bits fit 25% more text into the same memory. As it got cheaper, backwards compatibility kept 6-bits going until Project Jupiter's collapse ended DEC's 6-bit lines in favor of the VAX.
See also https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ascii.html
(Did I mention computer history is a hobby of mine? https://landley.net/history/mirror .)
@b0rk Fun historical note: the 1982 Disney movie "Tron" was rendered on 6-bit machines. One graphics house could do rounded shapes (light cycles), the other could do rectangles (recognizers). One was rendered on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foonly and the other ran on DEC's Jupiter prototype hardware, I don't remember which was which.
When Tron failed at the box office, Industrial Light and Magic sold its computer graphics arm to Steve Jobs, who renamed it "Pixar".
@b0rk The jump from 6 to 8 bits is mandated by hardware: 6 is 2*3 so you install power-of-2 capacity memory chips in groups of 3, not a big deal. 8 is a power of 2 so you can install individual memory chips.
But 7 bit ascii (standardized in ~1963) needs 7 bits. (6 bits is 0-63, lower+upper+digits=26+26+10=62 chars, only 2 left. Add a space and a newline and you can't even have a period or comma.) 7 is a prime number, 7 bit bytes means you'd have to install memory chips in groups of 7.
@b0rk Here is an _amazing_ interview the Smithsonian did with Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipement Corporation. (If you've ever read Steven Levy's book "hackers", this is the other half of that story.) https://landley.net/history/mirror/interviews/olsen.html
These 4 interviews tell the story of the rise of Intel (see also the book "Crystal Fire")
Ted Hoff, designer of the 4004: https://landley.net/history/mirror/intel/Hoff.html
Federico Fagin, hardware engineer who built the 4004's circuitry (then left Intel to create the Z-80 when Ted got the credit): https://landley.net/history/mirror/interviews/Faggin.html
Gordon Moore, their boss (the Moore's Law guy): https://landley.net/history/mirror/interviews/Moore.html
Masatoshi Shima, the Busicom engineer they made the 4004 for (who some say ACTUALLY designed it): https://landley.net/history/mirror/intel/shima.html
@b0rk The Harvard Mark I (and its commercial successors Eniac->Univac) stored decimal digits. IBM 701 used 36 bit words (6*6, so 6 bit). IBM's mainframes switched to 8 bits in 1964 when the S/360 came out (the book "the mythical man month" was about the S/360's development).
IBM got into the computer business because Thomas Watson Jr. (the CEO's son) was a B-24 pilot in WWII who became convinced computers were the future and begged his dad to let him work on them. (See the book "big blues".)
@b0rk Um, I may have gotten a little excited doing the https://web.archive.org/web/20120707194444/http://www.homeonthestrange.com/view.php?ID=28 thing and not actually made some of the posts replies to the thread.
https://mstdn.jp/@landley/109977723684374348
Sorry.
@b0rk See also https://youtu.be/ixJCo0cyAuA
@b0rk When you typecast a little endian pointer between 8/16/32 bit it doesn't move. (The size changes but the starting address doesn't.) When you typecast a big endian pointer to a different size integer data type, the pointer value has to change because the start changes when the size changes.
result: hardware engineers love big endian to read values going across the bus on their oscilloscope more easily. Programmers prefer little endian because data conversions are free.
@b0rk also in big endian typecast and data type conversion aren't the same thing: if I want to look at a 32 bit int as an array of bytes I need the pointer to stay at the start, but then dereferencing it won't give me (char)intvar. In little endian type casting the pointer and typecasting the value do the same thing, so there's no gap between them to trip on.
@b0rk Intel architecture is full of vestigial information inherited for backwards compatibility. The 8080 processor used in Space Invaders had 8-bit registers, the 8086 processor had 16-bit registers but was designed to let programmers easily convert 8080 code into 8086 code, the 386 had 32-bit registers but could still run 8086 code in 16 bit compatibility mode, and then x86-64 has 64-bit registers but could emulate a 386 which could emulate an 8086. "Word=register" got unclear due to layering.
@b0rk meanwhile, the first internet RFCs defined "network byte order" as Big Endian for interoperability between different systems, and backward compatibility has kept it there to this day. Data goes across the wire between systems in Big Endian mode, and on little endian systems they convert it to and from what they use locally.
@b0rk nothing explicit yet, but I can dig.
https://leimao.github.io/blog/Endianness-Real-World/ links to a 1980 IETF article that apparently came up with the name "Little Endian" and that article seems to blame the early 8-bit computers for popularizing little endian, although how an 8-bit system has an endianness...?
The timing makes sense though. if 1980 is when they bothered to name it. Big Endian was way more popular even 10 years ago.
@b0rk IBM converted its 64 bit power PC API from Big Endian to Little Endian a decade back. The only surviving 64-bit Big Endian API I know of is IBM Z-series, which is the 64-bit version of OS/360.
Some early arm chips were big endian in the 1990s, but they're all little endian now. Power PC and MIPS had a status bit you could flip so they could work either way. Sparc Solaris was big endian but sun switched to x86-64 before dying...
@b0rk it looks like the answer is Intel was pushed towards little endian working on a specific project for a client... which became the basis for the 8086. And then everyone else tagged along once the PC swept all before it.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/36263273
I note that the Ted Hoff interview I linked to earlier went into some detail about those specific projects.
P.S. The PC became ubiquitous because when compaq cloned it IBM lost that lawsuit, but Apple won Apple vs Franklin. Mac was 68k=big endian.
@b0rk This is why I study computer history by the way. both to answer "why do we do it this way" questions, and because it's a soap opera once you have enough context to see the fighting and historical coincidences.
The moral of the book "Crystal Fire" is that "Silicon Valley exists because William Shockley was an asshole", a statement that is true in at LEAST three different ways.
@b0rk Sadly, the fighting is an ongoing "fish have no word for water" thing between hardware and software people.
An hour ago I asked Jeff Dionne, a hardware engineer who was the creator of ucLinux a couple decades back, what he knew here. I did not forward his hardware side perspective because it was not useful:

@b0rk then again I get a similar reaction when I try to talk him out of putting two spaces after a period in 2023...
@b0rk Aesthetics. Hardware people see big endian as elegant. Software people see little endian as elegant.
There's also "The language I learned first sounds natural". Yoda speaks using Japanese word order.
The hardware guys love to point out that in Little Endian you have to find the last byte to tell if the number is positive or negative. Each format has advantages and disadvantages. That "why it was invented" link was about _bit_ order not byte order... then they kept it when doing bytes.
@b0rk People have strong opinions about American versus European date standards. 2/1/23 is natural because we say "February 1st 2023", and 1/2/23 is natural because it goes from most granular to least granular unit.
Once habits are established trying to get humans to switch tends to... remember how Jimmy Carter put up speed limit signs in metric and people shot them with shotguns? Because humans. It's always a soap opera...
@b0rk Risc V isn't a hardware project. It's a bunch of software people noticing that Moore's law made FPGAs cheap and learning just enough hardware design to recapitulate phylogeny when it comes to the Intel Itanium (and the i432 before it).
Culturally, they're all software guys trying to expand open source into open hardware. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
@b0rk Doesn't mean they're guaranteed to fail. Dumber turtles have had rocket engines bolted to them and stayed airborne long enough to become entrenched. But if they manage it it would be in spite of themselves.
@b0rk Ascii vs EBCDIC. There can be only one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/knitting/comments/yqyxrw/lets_end_this_debate_once_and_for_all_does_the/
@thufie isn't the bottled water industry highly lucrative?
Oh goddess, Google's started adding favicons to search results. Does anybody have a make-it-stop plugin yet?
@mekkaokereke @goatsarah @pvonhellermannn @praccu It's "why doesn't she leave him" in another context.
@cstross According to Naiomi Wu, upper room UV sterilization is good.
Also CO2 meters:
@alda Sure you can, just use
a userspace NFS server like unfs3.github.io rather than the insane in-kernel nonsense.
@alda NFS? Always was in Linux. It sucks. Even its authors admit that: https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2006/ols2006v2-pages-59-72.pdf
Other in-kernel servers like the "tux" httpd module got yanked long ago as a dumb idea, and samba was userspace until it went GPLv3, but NFS for some reason...
@BunRab Yes.
@sarahemclaugh Emperor Xi of the Communist dynasty continues along his trend line, I see..
@vaurora David Graeber's theorized in his book "bullshit jobs" that a big reason for MOST employment is reducing the free time of the have-nots.
If 20% of the workforce has BS jobs and 3x as many people are their IT and HR support staff and the people who maintain that office building full of in-service-to-useless... The percent of the economy collectively doing nothing winds up more like 80% if you count second and third order BS jobs. It's basic income without any of the advantages.
@vaurora Entire industries being BS jobs isn't even a secret. Tax filing ala https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free and health insurance ala https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/823583327458312192 are just two of the more obvious examples of mass make-work.
@vaurora Here's the primary source Graeber pointed to for Obama's quote about stepping back from single-payer health care because it would put insurance middlemen out of work.

@fade Reminds me of one difference between the british empire and the third reich. The British didn't wet their nest, but instead exported most of their atrocities to other continents. The germans murdered the neighbors. British colonial genocide and enslavement was (mostly) out of sight, out of mind, ala we screw over the other guy and pass the savings on to you. (Those who rob Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.)
See also Reconquista versus Spanish Inquisition...
@fade Teddy Roosevelt here is an example of someone who took on elite financial interests while being actively and explicitly genocidal to the native americans.
This is true:
https://defcon.social/@tprophet/110028486892564207
But it's worse than that. Food stamps are means tested (ala "jumping through endless hoops to be worthy").
FDIC insurance is also means tested, in that they only insure the first 250k of each account. The SBC "bailout" was entirely about REMOVING the means testing when it applied to rich people, so they got more money back.
Also, the SBC bank run was caused by Thiel's Founders Fund. Of course he faces no consequences:
That youtuber had a financial channel before the ukraine war happened, and he occasionally diverges back into his old territory when it's relevant to his interests.
The direct link to the article he uses as his primary source looks like https://news.bloomberglaw.com/capital-markets/thiels-founders-fund-withdrew-millions-from-silicon-valley-bank but it is, of course, paywalled. The ex-financial blogger is apparently still subscribed, and happy to synthesize an explanation with more context.
This is what happened at the contract I did in Chicago a year ago. I went to their office in person, got a company laptop and a desk and everything, sat there every day for a month, and literally never met another person on my team until I got permission to go remote myself.
Darn it. Tumblr has now reached the point where you can't look at an individual user's feed without logging in.
I.E. I can no longer read anyone's posts on Tumblr. Oh well. Sites come, sites go...
@0xabad1dea until you scroll down to see previous posts.

@0xabad1dea I'm on an Android phone, it might not be doing this yet on the desktop?
But just the fact Tumblr believes a paywall to view people's posts is a good thing makes me want to just let the site die. All their goodwill with me went up in a puff of capitalism.
@SwiftOnSecurity Darn it, there used to be a spay your cat girl poster on warehouse 23 as a follow-up to https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/936503-cat-girl--2 but Google search is useless these days.
Randy Millholland did special art for the poster. The cat girl was wearing a cone of shame and saying "This isn't Kawaii. This is in Kawaii at all". It was also available as a t-shirt.
@monsieuricon I don't think that's quite the problem I've been having...
https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2302.2/05594.html
This is the mirror image of why right-wing loons push so hard to insist "queer" can't ever be an acceptable self-identification. It's universal and inclusive, everything they're against.
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110034310870762988
You think geek and nerd weren't first hurled as insults? "But it's a slur!" means the speaker considers self-identifying as that to be unacceptable to said speaker, who is outing themself as both intolerant and condescending.
The name "Brexit" refers to britain's exit from the United Kingdom.
Irish reunification is obvious and Scotland can just rebuild Hadrian's wall from the other side, but how/when does Wales rejoin the EU? (What, dig a moat?)
Looking at the Pixel 6 and 7 remote exploits straight out of Person of Interest and going: is a Pixel 3A not vulnerable to this, or are they just saying "that's too old trash for us to care about"? Who knows? (First released May 2019? What an antique! Crazy to think anyone would still use _that_.)
Eh, I put electrical tape over the forward-facing camera and never authorize anything on my phone to spend money for a reason...
@adrienne Oh good. Thanks.
@fade Hmmm, welsh banshee is cyhyraeth so you could get wails in there too.
@fade duck calls are to ducks as bagpipes are to...
@fade I am confused, but support you in this endeavor.
Which explains why the trimmed screenshots aren't any smaller. https://mastodon.delroth.net/@delroth/110043776803548821
For years I've used "AI-complete" to indicate problems C-3PO could solve but computers as we know them cannot.
I would not trust chat-gpt near any of them.
The computer alchemy profession has some sort of P vs NP thing going on with this "I can't believe it's not AI" faces-in-clouds nonsense where closing the gap is likely to take multiple lifetimes if it can be done.
I want to say "computer science" but if you can't reproduce it from scratch under laboratory conditions, it's not science.
So wait, Zucker of Borg dislikes remote employees, but expects people to work in this metaverse thing? Does he want people to commute to an office and wear a VR headset in a cubicle?
I honestly didn't think this could get dumber, and yet...
@publius @stripey My parents met working on the apollo program, I grew up on Kwajalein, and my open source programming went from http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html to https://landley.net/toybox/about.html (ala https://landley.net/toybox/faq.html#mkroot) to address http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/011898.html (all about reproducibility).
When "the experiments" are passive observations you still have to be able to repeat them with fresh people in fresh double-blind setup: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
See also https://embassy.science/wiki/Theme:24e87492-7020-4fc0-ab37-dd88bcf9f637 ala https://xkcd.com/882/
Blocking people rather than continue "my field that only has unreproducible results is TOO real science" arguments once the other person starts explicitly mentioning my genitals.
This ain't Twitter, I'm here for fun.
Do you remember Jar Jar singing with the Ewoks at the end of Return of the Jedi? "Yub yub. Meesa yub yub."
The Mandalorian Effect.
@retr0id Do you know how gzip and zlib compression decide when to do a dictionary reset?
https://mastodon.me.uk/@tobyjaffey/109299242598092943 reminded me: What's it called when a crisis is prevented and thus people think the issue was never important? Like the huge last minute panic to fix Y2K so that on the day everything DIDN'T fall over.
There's probably a somebody's law for this.
"Never let a crisis go to waste" is related. (Rahm Emanuel quoting Winston Churchill quoting Machiavelli.) I've seen "effective" managers induce a crisis to get their way, ala don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes...
@retr0id there's the compression level ala gzip -9 ?
I ask because I wanted https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/lib/deflate.c to match the other implementations' output exactly in hopes of reproducing tarball sha1sums and such, but the RFCs do not have nearly enough information to do that.
Decompression does what it's told, the compression side has to make _choices_... (Luckily all the git hash values are computed on the _uncompressed_ data.)
Republicans do not respond well to oversight.
This is why I lobby to guillotine the billionaires. Change the law so hoarding an offensive amount of capital is a capital offense. The law in a true democracy should punch _up_, not down.
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-venture-capitalists-dilemma
@fxdc@teh.entar.net and that's before you try to explain to people what vfork is and why it exists.
@cstross I generally go with "twitler".
Capitalism destroys. It's what capitalism does. Rapacious consuming, never satisfied.
@themedievaldrk @fade The Boomers are dying, and they've been having an existential freakout for 10 years now.
It's the end of the world that arose in the wake of FDR's New Deal and World War II mobilization, which was then shaped by the Sputnik scare creating Darpa and the space race and well-funded schools from 1958 to 1980.
Average age in the USA is 38, meaning the average person was born in 1982. Cold war? Who remembers or cares about that? Boomers are a shrinking minority, and can't cope.
The Boomer puritans next move, private equity firm "Ethical Capital Partners" just bought pornhub. Their press release talks about "compliance" and "law enforcement".
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/pornhub-owner-mindgeek-sold-to-private-equity-firm/
Russia's "Matryoshka" doll was a copy of Japan's Shichi-fuku-jin (seven gods of fortune) dolls from Kanagawa Prefecture:
https://en.japantravel.com/kanagawa/history-of-the-russian-matryoshka/31720
Wandered past old film footage of the first woman to serve in the US Senate on prudetube (https://youtu.be/RAVBz_nY7PU), thought I'd add a link to it to her Wikipedia[citation needed] talk page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Rebecca_Latimer_Felton) and... oh right, the whole of IPv6 is still blocked for editing there. And Android phones don't get an IPv4 address on T-Mobile.
*shrug* and move on...
Intellectual property law needs to die with the Boomers.
@lynnesbian gnu hast nich.
@kevinrothrock I prefer the original. https://youtu.be/KFK9GXlIXI4
Taking rights away from minors is a prerequisite for taking them away from adults.
@jeffjarvis it's only Boomer normal, and the Boomers haven't got long.
@pleia2 what does this do that QEMU's s390x support doesn't? (For user space development, I can see wanting to test kernels on real hardware, but you're not exactly letting people swap out the kernel here...)
The Microsoft subsidiary that just published its private SSH key in a public git repository, whose job is managing other people's public git repositories, is now offering to use its own GPT variant to auto-generate documentation for the public git repositories it hosts as an incentive to get more people to give Microsoft their code.
@fade Indeed.
The interstitial ads prudetube inserts into reaction videos of the HBO series Chernobyl are quite something.
They just cut from a woman screaming as she loses her baby to an M&M's commercial where the animated candies make funny voices. Previously a drag queen "seductively" talked of the importance of Google fiber (I already have Google fiber, but Google advertises itself when it can't sell the spot) interrupting a man explaining that the dogs they're killing used to be pets.
The importance of Google fiber is apparently that this performer losing connection in the middle of doing an online show (which is presumably being recorded so you can watch it later anyway) is the worst thing ever.
Now back to people who have never seen "Chernobyl" before literally crying as the kid on the roof accidentally tears open his radiation suit on a chunk of debris. Brought to you by prudetube's AI deciding to insert unsold ad space mid-sentence because someone breathed in.
He gets it right at the end of the clip. The difference is France guillotined the billionaires a couple hundred years ago, and Britain hasn't done that yet.
"Eat the rich" is a bowlderization. The parasite class sucking society dry is the reason we don't have universal basic income yet. The Divine right of Kings seems childish in retrospect, so why let the capitalist right of billionaires replace it?
Now that Crowley's back piloting the Tardis (his _other_ vintage supernatural vehicle that occasionally explodes), do musical recordings left within it also turn into "the best of Queen", and if so does this retroactively explain the Howell and Gold themes? (The effect traveling back in time from its point of origin.)
Why is this Rammstein song insisting that I haven't got any frogs? Is this Germany's version of "Yes we have no bananas?"
@discorobot The crusades were about turning the other cheek by the sword, then there were a few centuries of burning each other at the stake. In England and Ireland the Protestants and Catholics went to war with each other, with Magdalene laundries and stuff. Don't forget genocide against native Americans with mass graves of kidnapped children being found under Catholic schools. And of course they made the guy in charge of covering up the endless sex scandals Pope.
If you're wondering why republicans in Utah just outlawed young people having social media:
@cstross come with me and you'll be in a world of osha violations...
@nyangogo tends to overheat if you close the lid.
@SwiftOnSecurity At IBM during the early dot-com era there was a standard shell script that would change your password 9 times and then set it back to the original one, to defeat both the timeout and the "canot reuse previous any of the 10 previous passwords" check.
@bcrypt Hopefully me? Although the trip's already been pushed back twice because apparently there isn't a hotel room to be found in the entire city.
Heads up, the capitalism cycle (which destroyed napster and myspace and livejournal and vine) is currently taking down google search:
https://mstdn.jp/@jackyan@mastodon.social/110085877369059135
Capitalism views sustainable business models as a failure. You _must_ kill the goose that lays the golden eggs or you're in violation of your fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and will be replaced via lawsuit. It's cancer logic: grow or die.
@pzmyers@octodon.social I generally refer to this as "ossifying into a loon". In my niche, Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, and Bill Joy all went down the dark path...
People saying "Russia can easily field a million people today just like it did in WWII"... people today mostly live in apartments with desk jobs.
Part of the reason everybody could deploy millions of soldiers in WWI and WWII is half the population lived on farms. These days it's 1%. When the tractor was invented millions of people lost their farm labor jobs.
http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2016/6/26/the-evolution-of-american-agriculture
The USA sent 16 million soldiers to fight in WWII. We sent 0.1 million at a time to Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 1913 or 1939 you could round up a million people from the countryside (of USA, Russia, France...) and they all knew how to slaughter a pig, dig a drainage ditch, considered a five mile hike in bad weather unremarkable...
A modern apartment dweller who commutes to work in a vehicle? Not so much.
Expecting modern Russia to deploy infantry like Tzarist Russia did is like expecting today's Russia to have the manufacturing capabilities of the 1970's USSR.
well it's nice to know somebody's still at it.
And no, there isn't anyone in the driver's seat. (At 3:00 a.m. on completely deserted downtown streets.)

Intellectual property law has always destroyed intellectual property.
@cstross @SwiftOnSecurity The old saying: if it's stupid and it works it's not stupid.
@pzmyers@octodon.social Spider-loon, spider-loon... well at least you've got a theme song ready.
This is a really good tutorial.
@Apiary Avoidance productivity. Only way I get anything done.
There's a sequel.
For her birthday, we ordered a friend an Oculus Quest 2 from Amazon (because beatsaber), and after literally 3 days of trying to get it to acknowledge our existence, we're returning it for a refund.
The headset must be connected to Wi-Fi to talk to the phone app. The phone app must be connected to the headset to pair the controllers. The controllers are how you tell the headset what access point to connect to and the Wi-Fi password.
It either works out of the box, or is unfixable.
Unlike any other game controller I remember seeing, there is no wired connection available to the controllers. You literally can't plug them into anything. They don't even recharge, they've got replaceable A cell batteries like it's 1985.
No wonder Carmack quit.
Also the headset would not fit around my glasses, and the display was too fuzzy for me to see without them, so my friend with the social anxiety had to participate in each attempt to make anything work.
She's basically the US version of hikikomori, and does not respond well to anything that can be interpreted as "I did it wrong It's my fault I am a failure" demanding her continued participation for longer than about 10 minutes at a time.
@fade These aren't even double A's. One single A in each controller.
Maybe those batteries were low, but it gave no indication? The white blinky LEDs were white and blinky, just like the random third party troubleshooting youtube videos said to expect. There's nothing to diagnose it with, just endless guessing based on charades-style suggestions.
@fade The switch is positively delightful to work with in comparison.
The Worldcon China purchased is going about like you'd expect.
@timbray He laments how historically terrible he's been at predicting, and then uses that as justification for predicting. I liked "code's worst enemy" but it wasn't a prediction. I also remember Bill Joy's warning against Grey Goo in Wired magazine.
Has anybody ported GPT to a quantum computer yet, and possibly added blockchain?
@phf I disabled the stupid news ticker pretty much immediately on install. And the "assistant".
I managed to brick an earlier Android phone by uninstalling the Google app. (Went into a boot loop and I eventually managed to factory reset it from the bootloader.)
So Cambridge Analytica came and went and they never even suggested Sherman antitrust breaking up Facebook, and Twitler's going full on nuts, but they can't specifically point at what TikTok's done yet it will totally be banned by the same country that passed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act for reasons that totally aren't racist.
I mean yeah Emperor Xi of the Communist dynasty is terrible and Wolf Warrior diplomacy was incredibly stupid, but maybe "log in thine own eye" with our domestic billionaires?
@fade All this panicking about China taking over the world smells an awful lot like the 1980s "Japan is going to own everything" panic.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the civil war, Roosevelt did Japanese internment camps in WWII, and at the height of the Cold war was McCarthyism and blacklists, which we all now admit were mistakes. But those were at least all in direct response to an actual existential threat. What's the excuse here?
@fade They can ban TikTok but not Fox News. What's the logic?
@fade Sorry, I'm not trying to argue. I'm baffled and frustrated. (I don't even use TikTok, but the splash damage is concerning.)
@pleia2 It's a big endian 64-bit test environment supported by QEMU. Everybody should have that in their test coverage.
@pzmyers@octodon.social his plan is to build a large wooden badger.
@psykose@treehouse.systems some years ago I hit a glibc "issue" (not a bug, like modern Volkswagens) where printf("%.*s", INT_MAX, blah) failed with an allocation error, and I had to use -1 for unlimited instead.
@psykose@treehouse.systems It lets you truncate anything you print to a specific maximum number of bytes output. (It says characters but I confirmed it's bytes on every libc I looked at.) Especially useful with sprintf().
Remember how the "paypal mafia" got rich because Ebay bought them?
The bill to ban tiktok outlaws VPNs, makes itself immune to Freedom of Information Act requests, and has "war on drugs" style civil forfeiture. I am profoundly disappointed in Biden for supporting this.
The Android crunchyroll app doesn't _officially_ support playing audio with the screen off, but when you start playing something new and the whole app freezes for ~10 seconds buffering data, if you switch away from the app during the buffering and then put the phone to sleep, the audio will start playing as soon as the buffer fills up.
(It will then stop playing again once it's worked its way through the buffer a minute or so later, but so does the official Google podcast app...)
Specifically when the podcast app is playing in headpphones on an otherwise sleeping phone, and it gets interrupted by a phone call, when the phone call ends the podcast starts playing again with the phone suspended for about a minute. Then it stops.
There's probably some sort of watchdog thread a background process has to do to regularly poke the system to stop the phone from going the rest of the way to sleep. Dunno the details of that layer of infrastructure, I just see it break a lot...
Oh. That "blockchain" nonsense was based on rsyncable gzip. Sayase Nagatoro invented less than I thought.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090311024129/http://svana.org/kleptog/rgzip.html
@mikolaj@chaos.social String of zeroes at the bottom of the hash as the decision point.
@pleia2 FYI, this thread on qemu-devel might be of interest for s390x: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2023-03/msg06910.html
It's about qemu being broken on big-endian hosts. (It can emulate big endian guests, but running the emulator ON a big endian system has been broken for a while and nobody's stepped up to test it.)
The drug trafficing is coming from inside the police union: https://infosec.exchange/@dangoodin/110110091711267700
What's the opposite of a zero day?
Microsoft Github is saying "you can't comment at this time", but the comment posted.
Sigh: how long did it take Microsoft to kill hotmail again?
https://web.archive.org/web/20001215231900/http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19990826.html
@hal_pomeranz @leigh I can barely get dreamhost to support mailman.
@hal_pomeranz @leigh 38911 basic bytes free.
Looked at the feed of someone who is very upset at something called "robodebt". Followed three different links to articles railing against it, read most of each, still haven't the foggiest clue what it is/was.
I'd ask, but I have been trained not to because it's never the victim's job to educate me.
Oh well. Moving on...
I should also learn to randomly and entertainingly content warning one post in the middle of a long thread. (Warning, amateur drawings of wildlife, possibly MS Paint.)
@chris_levesque@historians.social @fade Growing up I learned that anything remotely commercial-shaped was a lie. No credit card offer is ever sent for the recipient's benefit and every bit of data in commercials is corrosive/abrasive to the audience.
People growing up in the 2030s are going to similarly learn, from hot stove experience, that sources of data are like sources of drinking water. Regular testing, chain of custody, who is standing behind it.
@locksmithprime @Npars01 @newsbot The education function and certification function have been diverging since before Khan academy.
I'm still boggling at New Pope. He actually seems to be a net positive. I'm not used to this.
https://mastodon.social/@jockr/110112449170641920
(Yeah yeah, "net" is doing some heavy lifting there, but still.)
Mozilla gobbled up $585 million in 2021, and is constantly running out of money. In 2020 its CEO made $3 million.
https://mstdn.jp/@mozilla@mastodon.social/110119035803709360
Mozilla's worldwide market share is in 4th place (behind Chrome, Safari, and Edge) at just under 3%, only slightly ahead of Samsung's browser (did you know Samsung has its own web browser?) and Opera (still around!)
For comparison, the Linux Foundation (a bureaucracy I'm still not a fan of) made less than 1/3 as much the same year:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-just-34-of
@NireBryce I gave a talk about this years ago called "the prototype and the fan club". Flourish glitched the video, but the outline is at https://landley.net/talks/flourish-2010.txt
You create a prototype demonstrating an idea, and a fan club forms around it acting as a condensation nuclei for user contributions (usually more bug reports/comments than patches initially). Maintainer does initial coding, may switch to editorial role later.
@phrawzty Mozilla was the lifeboat the dot-com get rich quick venture capitalist types from Netscape retreated to. They only ever saw open source as a way to make money. Compare to the Apache foundation: other end of the same protocol, does 10 times as much on 1% the budget.
@NireBryce Your big question at that point is style: do you want github, mailing list, libra chat, discord, wiki vs curated man page, etc. What are you and your community comfortable with?
I note that time based releases are really nice, as is some variant of a "heartbeat blog". Both show the project is still alive and active, so if people wander in they'll find humans at the desk rather than cobwebs.
https://landley.net/toybox/faq.html#releases
(A trivial "yup, still good" release serves a purpose.)
@NireBryce P.S. Ironically, I just wrote (in a blog entry where I saved a mailing list message I'd decided not to send as being off topic) that somebody should write up proper documentation about... pretty much exactly this topic. :)
https://landley.net/notes-2023.html#25-02-2023
Although my concern was more "bus numbers of existing projects" because the man-pages project just underwent a rocky transition that lost resources...
@NireBryce Feel free to loot anything that strikes your fancy off of https://landley.net/toybox
Not saying it's a _good_ example of what it tries to do (I'm allergic to css), but I tried to to least have _coverage_:
https://landley.net/toybox/about.html
https://landley.net/toybox/design.html
https://landley.net/toybox/code.html
https://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html
https://landley.net/toybox/status.html
(Always more docs to write...)
@NireBryce If you don't mind a very buzzy first few minutes, and can fish out sonething that can still read flv (vlc had a plugin at one point), that old prototype and fan club video is nominally at https://landley.net/talks/prototypeandfanclub.flv and the parts about maintainers using veto power and bounceback negotiation to perform an editorial function fighting off sturgeon's law might still be of interest?
I keep meaning to redo it someday...
@NireBryce P.S. "Somebody should" basically means "I'll throw it on my todo list". Nobody ever steals my ideas. :(
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/celinux-dev/2010-January/000292.html
Also, that whole "brevity is the sole of wit" thing is true. The failure mode of documentation is Pascal's Apology https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/03/270680304/this-could-have-been-shorter
Blathering stream-of-consciousness at you and pointing you at a huge pile of reading is EASY for me. Distiling what you need to know down to a simple checklist that looks like I did nothing is SO MUCH WORK...
@asb I've seen some llvm people claim to have "office hours", but when I dialed in nobody was there.
I'd like to add llvm support for superh/j-core, but have no idea how to go about it. There was a guy working on it a few years ago, but Apple hired him and he vanished. Before that Renesas had a REALLY old fork but they decided to keep it proprietary...
Who should I bug?
@NireBryce The observation about people refusing to steal my ideas is not original either. The inventor of the first modern computer lamented the same thing:
@fade it's like 7% in the USA.
@mawhrin @fade I tend to have a dozen browser windows scattered over eight desktops, each with 100 or so tabs.
"pkill -f renderer" makes that viable on Chrome, letting me reload individual crashed tabs as I need them. Firefox doesn't have anything that frees the memory and reliably prevents a tab from eating CPU, the way killing that tab's render process does. Not that I found, anyway. The Firefox version closes the tab, losing the URL.
@Luketoop Paragraph 25 of that finally explicitly stated what the original problem had been.
@Luketoop The background that they put an immigration racist in charge of the domestic poors explains how, but it's another article that assumes the reader already knows the "what". (Here in the USA we had robosigning and robocalls.)
Still, it did eventually get around to saying it, which was better than the first three.
And yes it's a horrible situation, yet another example of why "tough on X conservatives" should never be in charge of anything that even indirectly impacts actual humans.
@Luketoop It's a good article.
One of the hats I wear is tech writer, and "documentation that assumes the reader already knows the material" is one of my pet peeves even when I'm _not_ on the receiving end.
It's an editorial thing. Reading through to the eventual explanation I was mumbling "wadsworth constant, my old nemesis". (I could already tell it was a good article, just... not aimed at me.)
How capitalism destroyed The Sims franchise.
@fade I still miss sims 3.
@michael_w_busch @ncweaver @cstross Meanwhile, NASA is chugging along doing cool new stuff.
Can you imagine what they would accomplish if they were properly funded?
@susiemagoo @chancerydaily Faux News Network and Fox Corporation. They have a parent company shell game thing going on to shield assets.
Which side of this would Biden's upcoming bill to ban VPNs (disguised as an anti-tiktok bill) be on?
https://mstdn.ca/@samuel_wade/110121558042386633
The dissident Chinese blogger could not have posted without a VPN, which Emperor Xi allowed techies to bypass the Great Firewall with back when the economy helped him stay in power. (Since China's economy collapsed they cracked down. No point trying to keep anyone there happy anymore, so Xi doubled down on fear, surveilance, and loss aversion.)
Faceboot distancing itself from Twitler is like Haliburton pulling out of Russia. Some see a moral stance (ha), or a swimmer trying to avoid being pulled under by someone drowning. I see a villain saying "I have no further use for you" and walking away.
You'd think I'd be getting these from @cspam but it's all over my feed this weekend.
@recursive It's an extinction burst.
@eevee probably just sturgeon's law.
Come at the king you better not miss.
@demize I got the first one to validate. I'll take it. Thanks.
@recursive Persistence beats intelligence any day of the weak.
@jorgecandeias @pluralistic An hour ago Google Voice autocorrected "the dog has been pilled" to "the dog has been killed".
That could have caused excitement.
@recursive See also "A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five."
@llewelly@sauropods.win @jorgecandeias @pluralistic Autocorrupt.
I'm told "legend of the shield hero" is very good, and also that the hero gets completely screwed over in the first episode and his (first season?) plot arc is basically digging out from that.
It's taken me five viewings to get halfway through said first episode. Waiting for the hammer to drop is stressful. (Rejection sensitive dysphoria by proxy.)
@Zotmeister @llewelly@sauropods.win @jorgecandeias @pluralistic I first heard it in like 2010. (From a lawyer named Cathy, I think?)
@tengri @mrcompletely @jorgecandeias @pluralistic Back in my day (2015) we didn't have chatgpt, we had to entertain ourselves by typing the start of a sentence then accepting each next word suggested by autocorrect until it finished or got stuck in a loop.
Bah! In MY day (2005) spam tried to evade beysian filters by stringing together pairs of "statistically likely" words into nonsense sentences, which some people found hilarious. Never saw the appeal myself.
Bah^2! Eye of Argon (1970)!
@psykose@treehouse.systems ADHD sing this song, doo dah...
@psykose@treehouse.systems No, I'm just _old_. (And persistent.) My busybox maintainership ended 17 years ago, which means Toybox is almost old enough to vote. My stint maintaining kernel documentation was a decade ago.
Intellectual property law needs to die with the Boomers.
@b0rk easy enough to create one. I had to mess with this a few years back. There were a whole mess of corner cases:
https://landley.net/notes-2017.html#01-09-2017
https://landley.net/notes-2017.html#29-08-2017
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2017-September/025230.html
Parser and test code:
https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/lib/lib.c#L372
https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/toys/example/demo_utf8towc.c
@fade Ah, polybius. The Vapulan coin-op videogame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_(urban_legend)
Prudetube finds a new way to be even more capriciously precarious.
Huh. There are surviving individual american chestnut trees, but they don't self pollinate so you need two of them to get chestnuts.
British nuclear testing littered the australian outback with chunks of unconsumed plutonium visible to the naked eye (20 kilograms left over from one bomb alone) and nobody even _noticed_ until the 1980s.
Well, no westerners. Aboriginal people got sick and died.
Sigh. It would be nice if github offered the option to show "forks with something actually in them". Filter out forks that don't have at least one commit that isn't already in the repo they forked from.
Is there a way to do this I'm not seeing?
https://github.com/landley/toybox/forks?include=active&page=1&period=2y&sort_by=last_updated
@regehr People have pointed out that the frog boiling experiment is unreproducible.
With frogs.
Because frogs are smarter than humans.
The problem is Biden's unwilling to expand the court, so the packing under Dubyah (who lost the popular election) and Rump (ditto) means they can escalate arbitrary issues to it and invalidate the other two branches of government.
The president appointing supreme court judges with the advice and consent of the senate IS the checks and balances of the other two branches have over the third. Biden won't do it because he's literally too old to be a Boomer (by 3 years).
https://mastodon.cloud/@blue_heathen@mas.town/110140251459673544
Rich white men have been hiding behind "algorithms" to absorb blame for deciding the fate of "the little people" for decades. (They always have the ability but not obligation to override them, so it's a shield for what they WANT to do.)
Today's example of crappy AI blame-shield (from @pluralistic ) the Congressional Budget Office.
https://mstdn.jp/@pluralistic@mamot.fr/110141846602308793
Today's random Mastodon bug: in the web UI of the server I'm using, my previous post (https://mstdn.jp/@landley/110142108489368543) had a space after pluralistic's address because without it a pulldown menu of random address completion suggestions covered the "publish" button and wouldn't go away no matter where else in the edit window I clicked to move the cursor to. And "right click" (to inspect_element->delete_node) randomly selected one and OVERWROTE WHAT I TYPED.
Still no quote tweet support, of course.
@cakeisnotalie@infosec.exchange Once upon a time rejecting monarchy by going FURTHER back (ancient greece) put us briefly ahead of the curve. Plus we stole a bunch of HUGELY powerful resources (including fertile land and crops like corn+potatoes bred to thrive there) from the people who'd been peacefully developing them for the past 30,000 years.
The descendants of the while male slaveowning puritans who took those things via genocide are going to rest on those laurels FOREVER, because they've got nothing else.
@fade Something's gotta replace neopets.
@mawhrin Yeah, I know I need to move to a new server. Do any of the forks let me import my downloaded archive so I have my post history on the new server? Or can I still only do that if I run my own server and write a script to populate the database manually.
You know, a gender swap version "Princess Lee, fabulous she, Aliah Baba" would scan just fine.
My response to this comic is it's not "adulting", it's "capitalism". The religion of numbers. "Money" and "ecclesiastical grace" are just as imaginary, and just as many people have thrown their (and other people's) lives away pursuing it.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/being
Letting billionaires rule by financial leverage is just as stupid as kings ruling via divine right. Wealth and nobility/caste are the exact same imaginary nonsense.
@mawhrin The URL on the old server is not automatically going to redirect to the new one, and it's quite likely they won't have the same hashes, but a for loop posting backdated entries ain't gonna be hard and is better than nothing.
And I could trivially make a web page with each old URL being a link to that post's new URL, which anyone could text search.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, you could 80/20 this in an afternoon.
@sentientsponge @scalzi Ursula Vernon posted about lawn crawfish a couple years back. They're apparently a thing.
@garius Star Trek 2 is an opera. The music carries the action point by point, and every major character and location has a musical signature. (Although the "scotty/engineering" drumbeat is basically the same, as are Uhura/spacedock...)
But you can listen to the soundtrack and describe what's happening screen with 5 second granularity.
@akkartik Eh, it seems lazy. I can't do that looking at github web view or similar, and there's the urge to check in what I did rather than throw it out, when the churn-vs-improvement ratio doesn't justify it. (Smells like me != better.)
(I got to see Ken Thompson's note "one of my most productive days was throwing out 1000 lines of code" in his own handwriting, but in context I'm pretty sure he meant improving a codebase to do more with less rather than disposing of scaffolding.)
@akkartik The other habit's a bit like Columbo holding his cigar without lighting it.
I mean we're talking bad habit at a "move your lips while reading and run a finger along the page as you go" level. I wanna scribble on the code, and feel I shouldn't _need_ to but I'm not actually _that_ good at this...
@colby My use case is I have an existing account here, and people manually reply like you just did to my blog entries. Really seems like there should be a way to automate that, and also let people see each other's replies on a given blog entry, accessible from the blog entry.
I could set up a second mastodon account and have each new rss feed entry produce a Mastodon post with a link back to the blog entry, and then have this account follow the other one, but... awkward?
@colby Back around November Jamie Zawinski blogged about mastodon causing HUGE load on his serer, and somebody posted about having created a fully static mastodon feed on their server (with the downside that you couldn't reply to it because interaction?) but I'd have to dig to try to find it again.
Alas, Grognard seems to spend all his time finding new excuses not to implement quote tweets, and the recent "update" to mstdn.jp was "links offsite now stay onsite" which is an improvement how?
@colby By which I mean if I click on the timestamp of the post I replied to (how I did quote tweets back before twitler scattered us to the winds) I get https://mstdn.jp/@colby@kosmos.social/110147841684865546 and I have to remember to go to the three dots menu to get "link to post" that's the actual https://kosmos.social/@colby/110147841642564717
I dunno if this is an honest attempt to help or somebody trying to be "sticky" because "retention". The about page still says sujitech but I know the site got bought.
@HowardTayler @sciam_bot Lots of people have been hit _hard_ by long covid. (A 1-in-500 chance over a large population adds up...)
@HowardTayler @sciam_bot Sorry, to clarify: attempt to sympathize, not mansplain your lived experience at you.
"I have been watching other people I follow get quite possibly permanently hospitalized by this, here's an example. Looks rough."
@windytan The Making of the BBC Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy miniseries talked about how the guy who made the Babel Fish sequence (thus convincing them to do a TV version of the radio series, it was done in 1980 with stop-motion colored transparencies) tuned the little text dings of each paragraph to the background music going on at the time.
You don't generally notice it changing pitches when the music changes keys, but it's never out of tune with the music...
@colby looks interesting but my to-do list runneth over.
@colby I think I have that one bookmarked somewhere...
I sometimes think the word "Christofascists" is unnecessarily hyperbolic, but literally murdering people for feeding the homeless?
https://kolektiva.social/@igd_news/110148139626713370
That's even a step beyond https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/22/arrest-no-more-deaths-border-patrol-water-sabotage-migrants
@fade So what's the consequence if someone purchases an essay from a service and gets caught? Seems like a subset of plagiarism, handing in someone else's work as your own. (Bespoke plagiarism.)
Just now, while checking the minneapolis weather to figure out how to dress for the walk to the office:
@fade: The black coat isn't particularly warm, but it's good against wind and rain.
Me: So it's not the AC, it's the elemental resistances.
Fade: Exactly.
@richardrathe I usually refer to this as "lateral progress". They gave the breakage a stir and moved it around.
@Andy_European@mastodon.online @cstross Austin's municipal electricity system is the reason _we_ didn't get the $6000 electricity bills Houston suffered when all the fart gas pipes froze during the blizzard so the turbines shut down.
(Fart gas coming straight out of the ground has a bunch of water vapor in it, get it cold enough and it coats the inside of the pipes with ice, especially any sort of vales or switches. That's what caused all the blackouts, failing gas infrastructure.)
@asjmcguire @richardrathe @troed@ioc.exchange @jorgecandeias @pluralistic so it's reaffirming its priors then?
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social Moore's Law had a 50 year run, and the s-curve just bent down rather than going flat...
@mjg59 unfortunately when you combine that with package management systems you get https://xkcd.com/927/
Sometimes I stumble across an old link and try to boost it and it goes "you already boosted that, unboost it?" And I'm going "No, I'd be pretty happy to boost it again, to be honest."
But mastodon doesn't let you do that, apparently. Too much like a quote tweet to be allowed, I suppose...
This reads to me like the dril tweet about candles. "I have three or four nested translation layers, why is the result slow?"
https://metalhead.club/@thomas/110153032751632498
The older I get, the less tolerance I have for unnecessary complexity. It's just... do we need all this? (I can see why people retire to a yurt. I am SO TIRED. Admittedly the morning spent on http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2023-April/029512.html didn't help...)
I would not want to do data recovery on LVM on top of LUKS on top of RAID-1 via mdadm.
At least there isn't a proprietary hardware raid card in the mix. Not as mentioned so far, anyway...
@fade Dunno. I spent 10 years on Twitter refusing to engage with Horrible Retweets because of the way they had been introduced.
I had them switched off for every single person I followed, and the only use I ever made of the feature was for tweets complaining about the feature.
@cstross I've slowly been working to make android devices self-hosting for years now. No really:
https://landley.net/toybox/about.html
Google's been merging my work since 2015:
https://lwn.net/Articles/629362
Your phone should 100% be able to rebuild the phone OS, on the phone. Out of the box.
@cstross The turtle cannot help you.
@phf I'm mostly familiar with that key via PDQ Bach's "Schleptet in E Flat Major". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A8Kwics8ks
@georgetakei Nor will Biden ever expand the court.
@mhoye The top tax rate was 91% until LBJ lowered it to 70% in 1964.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1964
That let plutocrats gather enough money to fund Reagan to lower it to 28%, which is where the exploding national debt came from.
LBJ was trying to optimize federal revenue, but the reason FDR raised the rate so high was to stop the gilded age plutocracy that caused the Great Depression. All the postwar prosperity took place with corporate taxes above 50% and income taxes >90% after the first million.
@schnedan @georgetakei Oh no, we can't fight back, then _they_ might fight back. If we undo the gerrymandering and voter suppression that keeps them in power, then the next time they get in power they'll gerrymander and voter suppress. We must timidly accept. Making hitler chancelor will satiate his ambitions...
@endocrimes "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." - Anatole France
@akkartik Fixed. Thanks.
Welp, Slack has officially blacklisted Debian "oldstable", including the Devuan Beowulf I use released in June 2020. So much for the service with the swastika logo...
Which replacement service has both an Android client and a web client that works with Debian's chrome release? (One of the other projects I'm on uses Signal, but that refuses to work in a browser tab and doesn't have an installable app in the debian repo.)
My household seems unlikely to use IRC. They're suggesting Discord?
In the computer science world, people talk about "rubber ducking" which is where explaining your problem to somebody (up to and including a rubber duck) reveals the solution to you.
A lot of people are using chatgpt for this without realizing it.
https://social.coop/@DrewKadel/110154048390452046
It's bit like those zen ice cream cone things where the answer was inside you all along so eating the ice cream just points a headache at it to show you the way. Also, 42 doesn't explain much without the right question.
@JillianMHurley Germany was a gerontocracy. Hindenberg became chancelor at 78, and turned 84 before appointing Hitler chancelor (to "compromise" by "sharing" power) in January 1933. The doddering octegenarian was then talked into issuing the Reichstag Fire Decree a month later (emergency authorization that never expires) making Hitler a dictator immune to judicial oversight.
Gerontocracy invites fascism. The USA is in a race between "enough boomers dying they lose control" and collapse.
For another "Capitalism destroys" example, MySQL was doing fine as open source until Sun/Oratroll bought it, then the devs fled and renamed their fork MariaDB:
https://lwn.net/Articles/534204
But a venture capitalist inserted himself and now that's going pear shaped too?
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/110152228676039033
Except the open source project seems to be continuing just fine?
I'm confused. (Not a big SQL user, I've done https://landley.net/writing/database.html instead for 20 years now.)
@senj To defeat... the huns?
A big limit to electric cars is that charging them all up needs WAY more transmission lines... or big stacks of cheap iron flow shipping container batteries.
Charge up batteries in your out of town solar/wind farms, then use the overnight downtime in the transmission lines to charge up batteries closer to the users. Your local load spike is a lot easier to deal with when it's pulling from batteries a few blocks away vs moving the power multiple miles.
@welshpixie La Grange, Texas is the only one I get out and take a picture of pointing at the sign for, because that move has a special name for it.
(Specifically, the pictures of someone pointing at the sign, or it doesn't count.)
@Judeet88 I stopped paying attention to him when he threw Jeremy Corbyn under a bus. Tory lite.
@rochelimit @Judeet88 I'm in a defensive crouch until the last Boomer is dead. We can't even stop burning fossil fuels until then, let alone guillotine the billionaires to pay for universal basic income.
We switched to Discord. Seems to be working fine so far.
So long Slack. I guess I'll never know why you decided to switch your logo to a "whimsical swastika" a few years back. (Not my phrase: https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/this-popular-app-changed-its-logo-and-everyone-is-saying-it-looks-like-a-nazi-swastika-360608.html .) Of course given that it's silicon valley it's not hard to guess...
@molly0xfff Googling... "Daoists were supporters both of magic and of proto-science... believed that spirits pervaded nature (both the natural world and the internal world within the human body)."
So ChatGPT needs to be viewed through the lens of a specific religion, and that makes it ok?
@Annalee If you party too hard on may the fourth, you experience revenge of the fifth.
It's always projection with those guys.
https://mstdn.jp/@knittingknots2@mstdn.social/110164443651437778
Especially on certain topics.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/clergy-abuse-scandal-investigation/3162757/
There's a simple reason: if they have the "no empathy" version of sociopathic aphantasia, they literallly CAN'T see other people's point of view. Ever. All they can ever say is what THEY would do in a different context.
And thus, every accusation a confession...
@samthurston@awscommunity.social @molly0xfff Oh right, that weird thing that was somehow going to make crypto blockchain NFT nonsense not to be scammy, and then repeatedly never did. But this time we fixed it for sure, put more money in, of course it's safe...
Jeff finally got back to me about travel arrangements to Tokyo, and of COURSE I get an actual departure time/date with less than 36 hours notice before the airplane takes off.
Sigh. I was trying to get a toybox release out before traveling again. Do it on the plane and upload from the hotel room, I guess?
Capitalism is still a death cult (the religion of numbers), and there are no good billionaires. Billionaire is just the USA's local word for oligarch.
@SwiftOnSecurity The Maalox.
Take the red pill. And the blue pill. And these two white pills. And this gel cap. And this fiber supplement. And use this strip to check your glucose. Now let's talk about topical ointments.
Twitler has created three shell companies to try to get out of any consequences for his purchase of twitter, and is now doing the ball-and-cups shuffle with them.
@vagina_museum Like half the british museum's roman artifacts are undisplayable penis sculptures. In mugs and pots and wind chimes...
Damned if you do: https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1174327
Damned if you don't: https://hachyderm.io/@rmondello/110177670218509145
Does America still have more obesity and diabetes than the rest of the world? (And inexplicably put sugar in the peanut butter?) Yes. Is it the same kind of crisis as when there literally weren't any hospital beds for auto accident or heart attack victims? No. Was the 2019 in "covid-19" 4 years ago now? Yes. Have we had 3 rounds of 6 vaccines (moderna, pfizer, j&j, astrazenica, 2 omicron boosters)?
Still a problem and still an EMERGENCY are 2 different things.
@pleia2 "The Light" is pretty good too. https://youtu.be/_LypjOTTH6E
@Paxxi @pleia2 I've watched more than 20 interviews with him, the most recent from 3 months ago. (I was trying to dig up the name of his vocal coach for somebody who wanted to learn the vocal fry technique, I remembered him naming her in an interview years ago...)
He is not a republican. He sometimes plays the "can't we all just get along" card, which puriteens say makes him a nazi by not being sufficiently and publicly "against" enough, but scratch the surface and he's just... really Jewish?
@fade is currently experiencing the least isekai, by being locked out of her apartment building.
@nevali@troet.cafe @vaurora either "papers please" or Douglas Adams' "bureaucracy".
@nevali@troet.cafe @vaurora I missed that someone trying to use large language models was also trying to comply with licensing.
Good luck.
@nevali@troet.cafe @vaurora Sorry, saw a reblog of one post out of context. Didn't read the full thread until you objected to the reply to the question.
It is possible that getting up at 5:00 a.m. for an international flight has made me grumpy.
@Alice Like, gag me with a totally awesome spoon. Word to your step-twin.
For anyone who still thinks capitalism _isn't_ a religion...
@pzmyers@octodon.social I read "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" until he fridged Hermione, and stopped right there.
There's a certain kind of author that makes their protagonist look smart by having an adult write a child, then making everyone in the setting except the protagonist and the villain be idiots (or set up to fail repeatedly)...
The War on Cash continues. Wanna buy birth control without the governor of texas knowing? No you don't.
https://newsie.social/@TheConversationUS/110186692681283494
Billionaires still pay no tax. The poor get micromanaged under a microscope. This is how you get guillotines.
Sigh. Lot harder to deploy laptop on a full flight than an empty one.
@molly0xfff The elephant in the room is the crimes he's formally accused of committing, which the legal proceedings in question center around?
I'm pretty sure that's just "the room".
@nextleveltye @wendynather You need log structured pants.
Tokyo way overbuilt its hotel capacity in the lead up to the Olympics, and then shut it all down hard for COVID. Then when the tourists were let back in this spring, there was a room shortage because of a _staff_ shortage. Still plenty of rooms in big empty hotel skyscrapers, but nobody to clean them. (No such thing as "unskilled" labor.)
To compensate, the new Apa I'm in has housekeeping every third day. Still frequent enough to detect trashed rooms and dead bodies.

This is the fifth APA I've stayed at in asakusa, each one a dozen+ story skyscraper now mostly empty.
There have been proposals to turn unused rooms into efficiency apartments, but capitalism will not allow it. Same problem New York City has with its vacant buildings: if the space MIGHT rent for $$$ (surge pricing!) it can be financed as such. Accept less, price of the real estate asset goes down and its mortgage is underwater. On paper it's "worth" more empty.
Capitalism destroys.
@fade It makes sense. I've lived in rooms for years at a time without maid service, daily was kinda overkill.
Ah, the breakfast restaurant they gave me a voucher for is in the _other_ APA hotel on this side of this block. (70 steps down the sidewalk from the one I'm staying in.)
I'm reminded of https://www.theonion.com/new-starbucks-opens-in-rest-room-of-existing-starbucks-1819564800
There's also an APA on the other side of the street, which looks from the windows to be 15 stories. To get to the crosswalk to go there, you would pass "hotel amanek" and "hotel wing".
@quidcumque @fade And in terms of keeping an atmosphere. Mars's core cooled, it stopped generating a magnetic field, and solar wind stripped away most of its atmosphere over the next couple billion years. That's why it's oceans boiled away.
Diane Feinstein's geriatric determination to die in office has already prevented dozens of judicial appointments.
Octagenarian defends octagenarian. https://youtu.be/YwoRP53qvCk
@graay "Djelibeybi really was a small self-centred kingdom. Even its plagues were half-hearted. All self-respecting river kingdoms have vast supernatural plagues, but the best the Old Kingdom had been able to achieve in the last hundred years was the Plague of the Frog*.
*It was quite a big frog, however, and got into the air ducts and kept everyone awake for weeks." - Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett.
Do not support people who deploy killer robots at you.
Do not support people who back off temporarily in the face of public outcry, then do the exact same thing again as soon is they think they can get away with it.
Sure, light bulbs full of candy, why not. It's Tokyo.



@roseveleth They're confusing attention with interest.
@pzmyers@octodon.social Six of the nine people on it were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, through a Senate where a lot more people voted for the party that got a lot less seats.
@cstross You can sing "Narnia porn is coming to the Laundry" to "How do you solve a problem like Maria" from The Sound of Music.
(I am aware it's a terrible superpower. The natural talents I have, and the skills I have decided to invest in, do not necessarily line up.)
@Multiplexer I was just asking Fade about Om Nomine, Haagenti edition.
Coffee Mate goes with coffee, Yerba Mate goes with Yerba.
I want an app called Koch Blocker that lets my phone scan product barcodes in the stores so I know what _not_ to buy because it's owned by Sufficiently Evil.
Yeah there's no ethical consumption under late stage capitalism, but sometimes there are 12 brands of paper towels with no obvious way to decide between them...
@regehr Done.
@Multiplexer The "campfire cooking" anime went through this with orc.
I am back in Tokyo, where the space in "corn bread" is significant.

@whitneymcn I quite like it. (Japan basically uses mayonnaise as a savory custard, and it works.)
@pzmyers@octodon.social Is there an "X and capitalism" that _is_ a good match?
@sproutlight Japan's mayonnaise is more like a savory custard.
Wow, google search is RAPIDLY imploding.
I submitted a patch to linux-kernel back in 2016 titled "[PATCH] Remove v850 from linux/elf-em.h" which you can see in my preferred web archive here:
https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1603.2/00054.html
Googling for "linux landley v850 patch" could not find it (said "no good hits"). Adding "remove" before v850 found it, but only in one web archive. (I checked the date and navigated to find it in my preferred one by hand.)
The page is on the web, but Google can't find it.
When it did finally find it (not for "landley linux v850 patch" or "landley linux v850 elf patch" but "landley linux remove v850 elf patch") it found just mail-archive.com. Not in Linux's own lore.kernel.org/lkml or Indiana University's lkml.iu.edu which has been there since June 1995, nor in any of the other "standard" mirrors listed in http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-kernel
Google search is blind to all those pages. It literally CANNOT FIND THEM. It could a year ago, but has lost the ability.
@fade And ni no kuni 2
@vaurora If you want books https://www.amazon.com/Give-People-Money-Universal-Revolutionize/dp/1524758760 from https://youtu.be/Uu23HOoyFHw or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_for_Realists from https://youtu.be/ydKcaIE6O1k come to mind (and of course David Graeber...)
@vaurora Just the "I have more books to read" comment in the first post I'd replied to.
Searching for "qemu-debootstrap" from my tokyo hotel room, even though google.com itself is showing me english text the first hit is https://www.kkaneko.jp/tools/container/qemu.html , the second hit is a blog in taiwan, the third and fifth hits are also in japanese... (I'm _trying_ to learn this language, but dude.)
Luckily the actual debian man page for the command is returned this time, as the sixth hit.
Long ago, I could use "google.us" instead of "google.com", but now it just redirects. They broke that too.
LRT I watched a good video about that a couple days back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V36kSqwjaaw
@scalzi You were at Penguicon. Tea Parties in Science Fiction.
@resuna @expiredKnight@meow.social Good to know they're indexing mastodon, and have used all those new links to find lkml.iu.edu again.
@sarahtaber He's singing your song.
Adam Something did a Perun with Lazerpig.
I'm not sure if this is a Voltron situation or they're trying to summon Captain Planet to Ukraine.
If you ever wondered "What if Sheogorath, Daedric Prince of Madness decided to cover the Ukraine war", the answer is apparently Lazerpig.
Ordinarily my brain completely blocks out commercials so I couldn't even tell you what it was they were talking about right after not-seeing it, but the ones in Japan are fascinating.
Panasonic has, as far as I can tell, the dishwasher version of an Easy-Bake oven.
Possibly it is only for use by anime characters. Or maybe they stop by to install it?
https://panasonic.jp/dish/contents/solota/oshinoko.html
"[Delusion] What if it was picked up by a newspaper... [The image is an image]"
...ok then.
@saraislet I am reminded of Key & Peele's "code switching":
Not really happy about Google Translate either. This commercial said "Washi wa...[thingy]" a dozen+ times while showing clips from various anime, and I went "I have heard this a lot and should know what it means", but google translate japanese->english says the english word for "washi" is "washi". (It is TERRIBLE with individual vocabulary words these days.)
Googling for "What does washi mean in japanese" pulled up http://www.romajidesu.com/dictionary/meaning-of-washi.html so at least THAT still works...
@ginnyhogan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1GD_T-3oLU
Speaking of Google Search continuing to just mushroom cloud, here's a screenshot:
Google ignored that I put "jonathan coulton" in the search string and you gave me SOMEBODY ELSE'S song. It's not even a cover.
(The coulton song is somewhat ribald, but a relevant reply to https://mstdn.jp/@ginnyhogan/110216783426328258 and no I have never had "safe search" on even once. The first hit to artist+song should not be unrelated artist's unrelated song. Yes, it found it when I scrolled down, but Obvious Fail du jour is _new_)

Here is a SIGN LANGUAGE COVER of JoCo's song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEjRHFom1Kk
Which has 5x as many views as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z18CudZ9bD0 (which is not "current hot release" or anything, it's 4 years old...)
Have we talked about the Biden white house requring all federally-funded research results to be released to the public immediately with no paywalls starting in 2026? Because that's not getting enough attention:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf
So NPR, PBS, Texas Public Radio, Minnesota Public radio, and today CBC Radio Canada have all left twitter.
I'm starting to think https://www.theverge.com/23671036/journalists-twitter-elon-musk-media might have been one of them Dewey Defeats Truman sort of things?
(I'm also not entirely convinced anybody at CNN in 2023 still counts as a journalist, not since "CNN plus" and the purchae by a right-wing billionaire https://www.vox.com/2022/8/26/23322761/cnn-john-malone-david-zaslav-chris-licht-brian-stelter-fox-peter-kafka-column.)
This is also what happened to women's history, black history, native american history...
Capitalism is a religion because "Money" and "Ecclesiastical grace" are the same kind of social construct. Going to communion to receive absolution or going to the bank to cash a paycheck, society grants you permission to continue to exist in a way that must be constantly renewed.
The demands to hide body parts with cloth and stay within certain areas of land (tresspassing, jaywalking) is artificial, the real question is whether it's a good way to organize people. Billionaires are "kings 2.0".
@mawhrin This is why the guillotine was invented.
@pikhq The Boomers will die.
We know chronic leaded gasoline fume inhalation combines VERY BADLY with senility (https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#19-11-2020), leaving a large number of Boomers uniquely brain-damaged.
Half of all Boomers were born before 1955 (and there's an argument that the younger half isn't as toxic anyway ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones). The actuarial tables say US aveage lifespan fell from 79 to 77 during Covid. 1955+77 gives Boomers an LD50 of 2032.
@rchusid@med-mastodon.com
@solcita Influenza was the 9th leading cause of death in 2010, a century after the 1918 pandmic. That's why we had flu vaccines.
People didn't _want_ it to become endemic, they're just acknowleding it did. You're welcome to mask for the rest of your life, you do you. But it will never stop. Four years, six vaccines (moderna, pfizer, astrazenica, J&J, two omicron boosters) and eight therapies later, we're no longer mitigating a critical bed/staff shortage in hospitals for heart attacks
How it's going:

@rchusid@med-mastodon.com @solcita Are better new treatments ever _not_ coming? That's true for cancer and diabetes.
This reads like "Have you heard about our lord and savior the N95 mask? Let me leave you these stack of pamphlets. I'll check back tomorrow if you'd like to discuss them."
Nurses masking in health care facilities, sure. I never understood why they _weren't_. But wearing masks 24/7 is like wearing gloves 24/7. "Wear a mask where you'd wear gloves/hairnets" is not the argument I'm hearing.
@joshsternberg Trying to use corporations to fight capitalism is "using the Ring against Sauron" territory. They can be bought, by definition.
The return of yellow journalism and robber barons is a symptom of the new gilded age. The top tax rate was 91% in 1963 (with a 50% corporate rate) and it should go back there. It wasn't about maximizing tax revenue, it was about suppressing oligarchy.
Repeal the Revenue Act of 1964: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1964
I am watching Japanese children's programming in an attempt to pick up bits of language.
It has puppets, and people wandering through to enthusiastically hold up and exclaim about a card with an individual Kanji on it.
I do not know enough to follow the local version of Sesame Street.
We have no switch to a program with small children in elaborate costumes holding a conversation with a cartoon raccoon with a video cassette for a head.


They're explaining how the sewer system works.




Now they're explaining the history of japan's sewer system.




Honestly, this is better than most of Netflix.
@b0rk_reruns Inodes and hard links, directory permissions. Symliks, device nodes, and quota restrictions. Bind mounts and FIFOs and PATH_MAX length strings. These are a few random filesystem things.
@josephholsten @suricrasia Somebody asked if they could reprint that off-the-cuff reply as an article in their magazine, and I sent them a slightly corrected version where I actually looked up the numbers again rather than vague reminiscence (fast built-in disk was .5 meg, USB-like external disk was 2.4 megs) with citations to source material on Dennis Ritchie's website:
https://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf
Citation URLs have changed a bit, they'd be at https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www now.
@exelotl @suricrasia It's called a "backronym".
@bugaevc @exelotl @wolf480pl @suricrasia There's a famous essay called "worse is better" about how unix just has system calls return -ENOPE a lot instead of trying to fix stuff up, the same way the guy who named "hypertext" could never make it work (how do you update every link to a page that's moved?) until Tim Berners-Lee invented the 404 error.
It's the opposite of premature optimization: half-ass something simple, get it in the hands of users, and let them tell _you_ what's wrong with it.
@bugaevc @exelotl @wolf480pl @suricrasia Unix was created by engineers whose management-imposed deathmarch had collapsed (36k pages of specifications before the hardware arrived!) who had wasted their last months on the project playing a flight simulator, who then ported the flight simulator to a leftover PDP-7 graphics terminal whose owner had moved to Holmdel, then turned that machine into an OS for their own use, then got a contract with the patent & licensing department to upgrade it.
@bugaevc @exelotl @wolf480pl @suricrasia Unix basically happened because the multics contract was funded through the end of the year even after AT&T pulled out and management gave the engineers NOTHING TO DO (and no hardware to do it on) as punishment for failure. They scrounged some cheap surplus kit out of the attic so they had _a_ computer, and wrote "one of whatever multics was many of" (also known as "a castrated version of multics") on it, I.E. Unix. It was 100% dogfooding from day 1.
@njvack @wolf480pl @exelotl @suricrasia The PDP-7 they started on had 18k of ram, as in 1024 18-bit words. And it had no disk so the had to fit the OS, a ramdisk, AND their application in it. (The shell couldn't FIT in kernel.)
BCPL was a programming language that implemented a turing tape. Ken fit about 1/4 of it into the PDP-7 and called it "B". When they went to the PDP-11 Dennis Ritche added types and structs (8 and 16 bit addressing, I.E. char and int) and called it "C".
@jernej__s @njvack @wolf480pl @exelotl @suricrasia DOS 1.0 was Tim Patterson's QDOS which was a 16 bit implementation of CP/M.
https://landley.net/history/mirror/cpm/history.html
Paul Allen thought any real computer will run unix, to prepare for the IBM PC he licensed Unix source from AT&T and hired two guys he knew back home (SCO) to port it to m68k and 8086 (not yet knowing which CPU IBM would chose), and called the result "xenix" to indicate "we'll port this anywhere IBM says".
@jernej__s @njvack @wolf480pl @exelotl @suricrasia When IBM dropped the "only 16-64k ram" disclosure on them, he went "ah, you're making an S-100 box... Yup, ISA is literally just S-100 with unused lines removed". Luckily the guy who'd made Microsoft's first hardware product (https://pcmuseum.tripod.com/comphis3.html#:~:text=Tim%20Patterson) had bought a CP/M manual and written an obvious "extend all syscalls to 16 bits" vesion for board bringup on SCP's 8086 box, since DR was dragging its feet (doing MP/M instead to support SMP).
@jernej__s @njvack @wolf480pl @exelotl @suricrasia Paul Allen didn't give up on xenix though, he knew the memory would increase each year so he wrote a DOS 2.0 adding as many unix features as possible, as a boil-the-frog upgrade path to Xenix. That's how dos got filehandles and subdirectories and so on. They had to use \ as the directory character because "dir /s" was already CP/M's option indicator, but the syscalls took both and "dir -s" was added in 2.0 as a synonym...
@jernej__s @njvack @wolf480pl @exelotl @suricrasia Then Paul came down with Hodgins Lymphoma, and while sick overheard William H. Gates III ("Trey" to his friends) and his old poker buddy Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer in the next room discussing how to get Paul's microsoft shares back when he died, and went "fuck those guys" and never came back from his medical leave.
In Paul's absence, Bill glommed on to IBM which did OS/2, porting mainframe OS ideas to the PC.
@jernej__s @njvack @wolf480pl @exelotl @suricrasia AT&T sucked Xenix code back into their Unix (System III I think?) without attribution or payment, the same casual license violations that got BSD off the hook in the BSDI lawsuit later. Except Bill's response was a scorched-earth tantrum where he unloaded Xenix on sco and sour grapesed the whole idea.
Digital Research's MP/M failed because A) memory was too tight, B) 486 had a cache, now you have coherency issues punting SMP back ~20 years.
@f4grx @ytvwld @suricrasia @jasmin Um, somewhat my fault? Lennart Pottering got forwarded my busybox message back when it was posted, and credits me in https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/
Me, I just study computer history a lot because I think it's a great story, and I like to know WHY we do things the way we do.
@luis_in_brief @suricrasia I kept meaning to write a book. https://landley.net/history/mirror was collecting interesting tidbits for it.
"A quarter century" of Unix by Peter Salus was really good, written for the anniversary. The PBS series "triumph of the nerds" is good for the PC side (the book it's based on, Accidental Empires, is better, but the series has lots of interviews with the people in question). Crystal Fire covers the transistor and silicon valley. Where Wizards Stay Up Late = arpa/internet.
Oh, and https://mstdn.jp/@landley/109977723684374348 I'm quite proud of.
Also https://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1991.html and https://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1992.html might be of interest. And Linus' (ghostwritten) book "Just for Fun".
The unix->minix->linux thread is a whole story is its own long thread, centering around the Apple vs Franklin decision in 1983, which provides context for http://maltedmedia.com/books/papers/sf-gates.html I.E. https://features.slashdot.org/story/00/01/20/1316236/b-gates-rants-about-software-copyrights---in-1980 I.E. https://landley.net/history/mirror/ms/gates.mp3 ... But I'm late for breakfast and they close...
I may have done a geek interest dump (computer history!) in the replies to https://mstdn.jp/@josephholsten@mstdn.social/110227854835553837 but in my defense, I was provoked.
I just watched Lazerpig's hour long detailed historical analysis of the Russian T-34 tank.
I'm still not entirely sure why he ended it singing the SpongeBob SquarePants song, but it was not out of character with the rest of the video.
Bed, Bath, and the great Beyond is adding a 4th B.
@f4grx @ytvwld @suricrasia @jasmin Despite the lack of book I've done _some_ writeups. https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#17-07-2010 and https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010 for example.
(It's a Pascal's Apology situation. He's the original guy to apologize for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a short one.)
@f4grx @ytvwld @suricrasia @jasmin No, but I did a writeup on the for categories of filesystems at https://landley.net/toybox/doc/mount.html#:~:text=Four%20filesystem%20types and I vaguely recall there was something about the VFS itself in https://yarchive.net/comp/ somewhere?
The VFS is basically just a dentry cache and page cache, a mount point list to splice stuff together, and a half-dozen file pointers in each superblock type.
And of course https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/pivot_root.html and this thread years later https://www.lkml.org/lkml/2013/10/5/161 and...
I have ordered a burgcheeser.
I doubt that's what it's actually called, but it's a cheeseburger where the cheese is coming from inside the burger.

The food delivery robot has brought the burgcheeser. Tokyo!



@themedievaldrk Tasty though. But slathered in demiglace many things are.
@fade it's a Roomba with shelves on it.
@shortridge @wendynather Bluetooth headphones with microphone on group audio only call, I'm often out walking. Mute when not speaking, gotta pick a path that avoids car traffic noise.
That's not verification, that's 2FA.
@Apiary This is 90% of what https://landley.net/notes.html is for.
@cks@mastodon.social toybox is keeping them.
Science does not advance when patents are issued. It advances when patents expire.
@SwiftOnSecurity I've said for years there's no such thing as IBM, just a bunch of people pretending.
Um, they kind of are better than everybody else? That's your judgment, not theirs. You wanted to be like them, so you took what they had away from them and gave it to yourself instead, and now it's a scarlet letter.
It was a mark of distinction when they had it, and a mark of shame when you have it, and all that has changed is who it marks. (Well, that and you tried to pay for admiration. Strange how often that doesn't work.)
@Verso Have we worked out whether or not they're Giants yet? It's been a number of years now.
@Woodswarlock More than one.
@hal_canary @Johnny The blue checkmark was created in response to Tony La Russa's 2009 lawsuit about being impersonated on twitter:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/tony-la-russa-twitter-lawsuit-63155/
In response, Twitter created account verification and gave it to people likely to be impersonated, to protect themselves from future lawsuits.
Twitler didn't understand that, he thought it meant "this person is fancy" not "this person could feasibly sue us for $$$ if we let other people pretend to be them on our service".
@hal_canary rel=me isn't a defense against lawsuits, it just says "I have a website".
Looking at somebody's government issued ID and doing actual Notary Public levels of identity verification was the minimal legal defense against lawsuits to make the people running twitter consider their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders satisfied.
The muskrat is a clueless moron ala https://leftycartoons.com/2008/07/10/if-housepets-were-libertarians/ who just inherited a pile of Dunning-Krugerands and learned to collect huge government subsidies.
@Popehat Eh, he'll die eventually.
@welshpixie somebody was bragging about pictures they had "created" with midjourney (by "crafting the prompt") and I asked how that differed from Google summary boxes they had "created" by carefully crafting a search string.
@deviantollam @snubs My Pixel 3A is still running great. It would be nice if they still supported it.
I see "Spine of a whale in a lake in Norway" and my brain immediately sets it to "what do you do with a drunken sailor".
I am aware that it is a truly pathetic superpower.
@brododaktylos@historians.social Try @fade and @aimeemaroux
@MiriMiri@mastodon.social Dunning-Kruger, usually?
David Graeber's BS jobs works in here somewhere. As does Robert Cringely's commando/infantry/police metaphor (ala
https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/ and
https://www.fool.com/specials/2001/02/21/how-companies-evolve-sp010221.aspx )
@ljwrites @CAETFOOD @vagina_museum "She can cut you like a knife, when the gift becomes a fire..."
The magic to stop debian's current vi from mucking with the mouse (so your terminal's cut and paste to another programentirely, outside the current 'screen' session because it's the xterm doing it, not vim) is the colon command "set mouse=" with nothing after it.
Lateral progress: half of what I learn about modern software is how to make it stop doing bad stuff it didn't used to do, which breaks my workflow.
This is why I wind up using unix/linux, where "just pass the garbage through" can legitimately be given as good advice with a straight face that makes sense in context:
https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html
It's sort of related to the @scalzi quote "the failure mode of clever is asshole". That applies to user interface design too. Stop trying to "help" in a way that prevents me from doing what I used to know how to easily do, often by "fixing" what isn't broken. (I have gui editors. That's not vi's job.)
Capitalism destroys. The reason for
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/hosting-site-imgur-will-remove-explicit-and-anonymous-content-next-month/ is because https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/28/22697957/imgur-acquisition-medialab-kik-genius-whisper-worldstarhiphop
(And because https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-230-internet-freedom but I always expected the Boomers to go full pearl-clutching Comstock Act II in their twilight years, holier-than-thou competitive prudery is the logical follow-up to televangelist megachurch begathons. They're buying absolution from anyone who offers to sell it, and catholicism is too busy with pedophile priests and residential school graves to sell indulgences.)
Any true Skyrim fan would order the bacon wrapped dates. #ANewHandTouchesTheBacon
https://www.opentable.com/r/meridia-at-hapuna-beach-resort-kamuela
There are so many things to say about this.
https://fadeverb.tumblr.com/post/714990597500534784/entomologists-should-avoid-fsca-gainesville-fl
Yeah yeah, Florida man, Rhonda Santis and cronies are anti-science and all selfish incompetents incapable of doing a competent job at anything...
But also David Graeber's observation that most work is maintenance: "you make a cup once, you wash it a thousand times". And the arctic seed vault being flooded by climate change melting the permafrost.
One of the most interesting things I've read in the past decade was this anonymous post from a retired oil scientist about how his old employer literally forgot how their factory worked, and had to call him out of retirement to explain their own processes to them: https://web.archive.org/web/20120111055334/http://wrttn.in/04af1a
(A bit like BBC wiping Dr. Who episodes before they realizing there's money in reruns then negotiating with people who had "illegal" copies: you have a monopoly on something you can't do, I can but not allowed)
I'm not worried about Boomers dying causing a loss of institutional knowledge, because they didn't have it.
The "Greatest Generation" landed on the moon (Neil Armstrong was 38 in 1969) and eliminated smallbox (World Health Organization founded to do just that in 1950 when the oldest Boomer was 5).
When that stuff got handed over to Boomers, it stopped. Nasa last went to the moon in 1972. WHO no closer to eliminating Polio or Guinea Worms than 20 years ago.
The "silent generation" of the Great Depression, just before the "Greatest generation" of WWII, had a BUNCH of institutional knowledge. FDR's New Deal built modern America:
They did a pretty good job of writing stuff down in books that are now out of copyright (modulo cold war secrecy BS "classifying" stuff, sigh).
Alas, infrastructure the New Deal built is coming up on a century old now, and needs maintenance and adjusting for a century of population shift...
The Boomers' uselessness is not their fault. They grew up with SIGNIFICANT environmental lead poisoning, pediatric through middle age:
Which had quite measurable effects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
I did my own deep dive into this a few years ago:
https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#19-11-2020
By the way, the reason all that lead was released into the atmosphere for ~40 years? It was a for-profit workaround to intellectual property law:
And yes, Gen X is kinda screwed too. We didn't inhale/drink as much lead for as long, and we haven't stacked age-related neurological degeneration on top of it yet, but we didn't exactly get off scott free.
The Blues Brothers (1980) talks about the cop car being "before catalytic coverters so it'll run good on regular gas":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKmuKjpKPIo
But the USA didn't fully ban leaded gas until 1996, and the last stockpile got used up in Algeria in 2021:
@muskrat_john I still want to see a Gurp. (Isolating a Gurp is like splitting the thaum.)
@fade I grew up in very rural Florida until age 5, and was then on kwajalein for 5 more years with the cleanest air globally available... and then my parents moved me to New Jersey, the state was the highest population density of them all at the time, where the standard joke was "you're from New Jersey? what exit?"
I thought I was depressed, stressed by culture shock, and had seasonal affective disorder. But I was breathing a lot of lead from age 10...
Eat the rich.

@BradRubenstein@infosec.exchange @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place ISS, OSS... close enough.
@fade there's also bread crimes.
It's a pity the Woodhull Foundation isn't on Mastodon.
@fade You can sing "ancient bread crimes" to the hallelujah chorus. I'm not sure why you'd want to, but you can.
Is there a less terrible discord android app? We moved the household server from slack when slack dropped support for debian, and the phone app has hidden all the server's channels except "general" again.
This new breakage happened when I had to kill and restart the phone app because it showed last night's last message in general, and the most recent message for this morning, but wouldn't show all the messages in between. General had focus, and now it's ALL THAT EXISTS...
The rest still shows up fine on my laptop via web page...
Fade (the discord server admin) created a new category and moved all the existing channels to it, and that made them all show up again. (Based on a 6-year-old suggestion from Reddit.)
Discord is one of those pieces of software you learn "The Fonz" style of percussive maintenance for. When it does THIS, hit that part with this rock at that angle.
Good to know.
@saraislet I don't recognize the man in the middle. I need keys cached to check his state. No message could have been any clearer. If you want to make the net, a safer place, you've got to calculate hashes and never text plain...
(Yeah, bit of a stretch at the end of there...)
It's interesting, my brain does not completely edit out advertisements in Tokyo the way I do in the States (where afterwards I'm not even aware of having seen them).
In this context, I'm willing to believe they know more about their product than I do. There's probably still some lying because capitalism, but the signal to noise ratio may actually be positive.
I just ordered a chicken sandwich that looked good on the sign. In the states I would dismiss it: painted with motor oil and Photoshop.
They put an egg on peas.

There are coffee shops nearby named "More Joy" and "Bee Friendship".
In English.
I think this is a curry sandwich?
Edit: yes it was.

It's a pity @choochoobear doesn't use his mastodon account.
@BunRab just sort of a tan paste.
@fade Decent. I still prefer the tuna.
@fade Presumably. I didn't order it.
Ah, that's the NAME of the bar.
...did they mean "no worries"?

@cstross The smallpox eradication goal was announced in 1950 (at the formation of the WHO), the initial program (scoping the problem and building out the organization) started in 1959, the "intensified eradication program" in 1967, the last reported case was 1977, and smallpox was declared gone in 1980. Either 10, 18, or 30 years depending how you want to measure it.
The Guinea worm eradication program started in 1980, 42 years ago. Resolution to eradicate polio passed in 1988, 35 years ago.
@cstross I agree they had made great progress on both by 20 years ago, which was 2003:
https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/guineaworm/resources/pdf/wrap-up/word131.pdf
In 2003 polio was down to 784 reported cases worldwide.
But when it comes to closing the deal, they have... many excuses. (Because the cold war was easy.)
Also, the guinea worm efforts were driven by Jimmy Carter, who started on it two years before WHO:
https://www.cartercenter.org/health/guinea_worm/index.html
He was born in 1924.
@cstross Blah, got the guinea worm in polio start dates reversed. WHO was on it before Carter.
@cstross I saw an interview with Jimmy Carter years ago where he said the Guinea worm could only reproduce in a human host (and the fleas earlier in its life cycle), but it's possible I misremembered, he misspoke, or we've learned more about it since I was in college.
Hmmm. I still think he's wrong about 1/3 of the time, but this was one of his major predictions over the past 5 years.
(His thesis is two or three cargoes lost to modern piracy, and international shipping becomes uninsurable. The US Navy was preventing that during the Cold War and for ~30 years after, but has changed goals and now focuses its efforts into a small number of supercarriers that can't be everywhere at once. We no longer need Middle Eastern oil, so...)
Somehow, "an office chair that creates electromagnetic pulses strong enough to shut off your monitor every time you sit down" seems like something Ikea probably shouldn't be selling in 2023?
https://mastodon.social/@haeckerfelix/110272427676278609
(...are there standards for this? Is where you get new regulations from? "When a mommy warning label and a daddy warning label love tequila VERY much...")
He was there for Boaty McBoatface.
https://fosstodon.org/@cda/110276010541160166
Honestly, Jack learned nothing. Twitter happened around him, and what he mostly provided benign neglect.
(Which still may beat out the "link tweets will happen over my dead body" guy. Yes, I'm aware Grognard is now slow-walking them as his updated way of making sure they never happen, if you call that an improvement.)
@stux @leigh The problem is the US tax code. Vehicles over 6000 pounds are deductible as a business expense, lighter ones are not:
https://www.taxplanning.com/single-post/vehicles-over-6-000-pounds
That's why GE is discontinuing the Bolt EV (despite how well it's selling) and replacing it with an SUV.
So the oil tanker Iran siezed was owned by China, flagged in the Marshall islands, crew's from India, Chevron hired it to take oil to Houston, and hijacked by Iran (whose diplomatic fig leaf is "our drunk patrol boat captain smacked into something last night and we're saying it was YOU" so it's not EXPLICIT piracy... for the 6th time).
The US navy went "this is not our problem". Libertarians got what they wanted: no enforcement of taxes, regulations, or maritime law.
What do the insurers say?
Iran is getting ALL THE ATTENTION, again. Hostage negotiators swoop in to rescue the crew, to get the boat back, maybe even ransom the cargo back... People listen to them! They get concesions! They've done it a half-dozen times already just under the Biden adminitration.
And the US Navy is "monitoring the situation". As when the teacher says "I've got my eye on you", it means they probably don't plan to do anything.
(Letters of marque were ALSO a diplomatic fig leaf.)
@aristofontes We all saw how Jack's last venture turned out, why are they expecting better?
Excellent thread on the history of bluesky: https://progressives.social/@chargrille/110286091657925089
"Do as thou will is the whole of the law" on a yin-yang with "No, you're doing it wrong."
Humans compete via sports or war, the difference being a referee enforcing rules. If the referee does a good enough job, they seem unneeded, ala the Fish Filter Fallacy:
https://leftycartoons.com/2008/07/10/if-housepets-were-libertarians/
The system has to periodically (convincingly threaten to) fail for people to value and maintain the mechanisms that prevent failure, thus human society is perpetually on the brink of failure. It's a problem.
@cstross here's my rant from a dozen years ago about how open source development can't handle aesthetic issues like user interfaces, and melts down into three distinct failure modes when faced with them.
http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#13-08-2010
It's the too many cooks spoil the soup problem. They don't affect the nutrition, they affect the taste. It's the same reason Wikipedia can't write a novel, fine with organizing facts but can't handle a plot.
@fade @cstross Post-hoc explanations. The problem with predicting the past is you start with the answer, so you can never prove or disprove anything, but people afraid to let "I don't know" persist still manage to confirmation bias themselves into agreeing with the most plausible sounding guess in the absence of immediate and obvious contradiction, and then it becomes a social "let's all agree to believe that"...
I can't wait for AI BS generators to pile on this phenomena as "analysis"...
@cstross It doesn't have any CSS. It's basic HTML with paragraph tags written in VI. I've noticed phones lost the ability to deal with that over the pandemic.
Here's a section of my 2013 ELC talk that covers the same material?
@cstross Does https://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#:~:text=Finally render better?
(The advantage of the rant being a dozen years old is I repeated it in a couple places. I think that's all of them though.)
@cstross I repurposed the rant in the context of a Linux distribution I was maintaining at the time, but it's the same observation: open source avoids Brooks's Law by decoupling parallel development, and then collates results after the fact using empirical tests to filter the merge.
In the absence of empirical tests, it can't merge. Aesthetic issues do not have empirical metrics. This leads to three recurring failure modes whenever distributed open source development hits a user interface issue
@cstross Three common failure modes are:
1) Endless discussion because nobody can agree on a course of action.
2) Project forks as everybody codes up their preferred solution but it's no easier to agree _after_ the code exists so forks never get merged.
3) Delegating the problem to nobody, either A) separate engine from interface and focus on engine, or B) make interface configurable and blame user "laziness" for lack of sane defaults.
That was the rant. There were some side observations.
@cstross The main observation was that after a decade of Linux on the desktop not happening, it seemed like a systemic problem with the open source distributed collaboration development model.
Not the ONLY problem of course. Lack of domain expertise on the part of coders is a whole new category of screw up. The Gimp wouldn't suck so bad if the Venn diagram overlap between coders and graphic artists wasn't a tiny sliver.
Mastodon's maintainer is not trying to replace Twitter. Many users are.
The old saying "there's never time to do it right, there's always time to do it over" keeps coming up with ChatGPT and Bluesky (like bitcoin before them), where the new thing is obviously flawless (and thus inevitable) because it's new. Nobody has found anything wrong with it yet. No limitations, accumulations of unhandled issues, scalability problems, or obvious exploits have been found yet in this brand new thing. It is untested, therefore perfect. This time for sure!
@cstross Oh, does Safari not do the :~:text=search%20string anchor thing?
@cstross Web pages always had anchor tags (ala <a name="blah">) you can jump to with # and a name on the end of the URL, and 3 years ago Chrome added a magic tag syntax to do a text search on the page contents and jump straight to the first hit, and Firefox picked it up not long afterwards.
I added it to the end of the URL and checked here that it jumped straight to the rant part towards the end of the page. I keep forgetting Apple has its own bespoke ecosystem. Sorry, my bad.
@cstross here's the w3c standardization proposal working its way through committee: https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/
@cstross I'm not really current with web standards either. That's why my blog is not rendering in your browser. :(
Probably renders fine in Netscape 3.0...
The future looks surprisingly like the 1800s.
Federated blocklists developing a false positive problem? Who could have forseen... https://oliphant.social/@oliphant/110297936362367216
@suricrasia More or less the plot of the live action Fat Albert movie.
They forgot the #mosstodon hashtag. https://newsie.social/@melissasweetdr/110296886780030260
Websites doing the "login via other website" thing, now having to deal with other website going away. Who could have foreseen...
@mark Counter argument: Tommy Wiseau. Sometimes things just happen.
@exchgr it's almost like they're listening.
@Apiary We've had to get flu shots annually since 1918. New year, new variant, even after a century. We didn't prevent Covid from becoming endemic with animal reservoirs, so is it really a "booster" or just this year's updated vaccination? It's unlikely to stop in the lifetimes of the grandchildren of anyone alive today...
@wendynather Nietzsche is peachy but Sartre is smarter.
Immanuel Kant but Kubla Khan.
You have reached John Paul Sartre's answering machine. I'm not here. You're not there. Don't leave a message. There is no beep.
"To do is to be" - Marx. "Do be do be do" - Sinatra.
"To date no firefighter has been run over" it's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
https://missionlocal.org/2023/05/waymo-cruise-fire-department-police-san-francisco/
@PeteBleackley @unixmercenary Talent is just a multiplier for skill, and I'll take skill over genius any day. Skill is dependable and can be improved with effort. Genius is intermittent and tends to have some really bad failure states. Skill does not get writer's block, nor does it reach the limits of intuition and find itself unable to proceed because it doesn't really know how it got there in the first place.
Moffat needed an editor, and his writer ticks got obvious with repetition.
Plus of course ships in the dark fleet catching fire.
In other news, there's a dark fleet! Analogous to the dark web I suppose, laundering Russian and Venezuelan oil for sale to India and China.
I guess the real question is how sensitive insurers are to losses in oil tankers, versus container ships? Oil tankers going all Exxon Valdez isn't exactly unprecedented. Insurers have a conspiracy of lawyers on retainer to indefinitely delay payout. Blame the wildlife.
Tokyo is photogenic.

Ok, this is honestly fascinating. The Posse Comitatus act: https://youtube.com/shorts/96qGCVK7G3Y?feature=share
@rose@503junk.house @skinnylatte there was a lovely paper years ago called "balance as bias" about how centrism is trivially gamed by extremism.
To use a sports metaphor, move your goal posts into the parking lot and the 50-yard line is in your end zone. That's what the "tea party" was for, shouting "clean cup move down" off one end of the Overton window to drag the edge and thus move the center.
The fallacy is to average "this parrot is no more" and "resting" into "pining for the fjords". Truth exists.
@fade where does "urging the British museum to give back the Elgin marbles" fit in?
@welshpixie @slothrop Mightier than the sword.
@quinn @delong I remember when people were freaking out about furby intelligence in 1998. Now Moore's law and VC funding went "Wikipedia on CD" with the Google cache so it can average the top 50 hits together with syntax checkers fixing it up. Including archive of our own and the 1/3 of all websites that are WordPress so if you ask it about robot intelligence it can quote a thousand Heinlein pastiches. The fact it can emit furry porn given billions of words of furry porn is surprising?
@welshpixie The duncening?
@akkartik can't find the watch at 2x option.
Discord: People mistake L for I so let's get rid of the number on the end. It's not like phones ever historically used numbers to contact people. A phone number? Crazy talk. And changing the login of all existing users has no possible downsides.
Me: you can sing "What the actual fuck?" to the "I can show you the world" line from that song in Aladdin.
https://heliospace.net/@Helios/110306469275879237
(Why are white men still in charge of silicon valley? Grace Hopper did not invent the compiler for this.)
I still use cash because losing the ability to make anonymous purchases would be REALLY BAD.
Cards always record what I bought, when, AND who had special permission to receive the money. The homeless are unbanked. "Camgirl" went from safe anonymous work-from-home gig to impossible via an update to Visa's terms of service.
If 5 years from now the GOP outlaws condoms and you once bought one, they can find you retroactively. Who needs watch lists when every purchase is on your permanent record?
@Edent Other than the movie "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs?"
In the USA the go-to example of runaway paperclip-maximizer production is Mickey Mouse enchanting broomsticks to carry water in "Fantasia".
@akemin_dayo I'm writing a BSD-licensed bash replacement in toybox. About 2/3 of the way done. Google engineers have just started sending me bug reports ala https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/426 and I hope to have it load bearing by the end of the year.
I've been bothering Bash maintainer about it since http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-March/027633.html but when I ask him about corner cases he keeps CHANGING BASH ("bugfixes", sure). I just want to know what behavior to implement when the exe and man page differ! Darn moving target...
@akemin_dayo I _thought_ I could do it in about 3500 lines of C back in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g but I'm already over 4500 and haven't even finished job control or added array variables yet.
https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/toys/pending/sh.c
@akkartik Ah! Didn't hover over the right part. Thanks.
@Edent The first movie was quite good.
(The sequel was the studio going "that was an unexpectedly large success, make a sequel NOW" to people who hadn't planned on doing one, and rushed something out replacing "clever with good storytelling" with jokes and puns and stock plots. Maybe worth one watch, but not multiple viewings like the first one.)
That movie built Sony's animation division. Note the name "Phil Lord" in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatballs_(film)
and nine years later:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Into_the_Spider-Verse
I just rewatched @cstross 's 2017 talk (5 years ago now) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4 and...
Ok, yeah. He's really _good_ at predicting the near future.
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/tsx-11.mit.edu/Oct-07-1996/BETA/ibcs2/
P.S. I did a historical dive into ibcs as part of http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween9.html#:~:text=ibcs in 2003.
@mjg59 Which was a ricochet from https://web.archive.org/web/20010527010131/http://www.purplet.demon.co.uk/linux/ibcs/#avail
@tante This differs from all the ex-trump-staffer tell-all books how?
Ah, so that's how we got Morlocks and Eloi.
Eternal covid vigilance group never left home again, passing around articles about how disease is bad and this is news and only evil people intentionally breathe in public and we must wear masks forever but not gloves and Fauci stopped being an expert when he stopped agreeing with them.
Other noticed 1918 flu virus never ended we just have annual vaccinations, so add yearly COVID shot to the mix but it's been 4 years and life goes on at some point.
@cstross I didn't say being good at predicting the near future was pleasant.
We're living in the aftermath of chronic leaded gasoline poisoning meeting age related dementia. Racist grandpa won't stop driving until the steering wheel is pulled from his cold dead hands. (He'll drive MORE, in an extinction burst.)
That crime statistic peak didn't go away when they got too old to climb through windows, it went white collar then became voting patterns.
My only solace is in the actuarial tables.
@cstross (I don't want to be right about that. I really hope I'm wrong.)
@mjg59 someone should have introduced that guy to user mode linux.
@cstross https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it is an amazingly good article by the way. Long, but well worth reading.
@cstross Served him right, the lead did nothing but make the compound patentable. The anti-knock property was from the ethanol it broke down into.
I'm rereading that article and... the average american in 1972 had 600 times the lead levels of samples from Egyptian and Peruvian mummies. And then later "In 1975, the average American had a blood lead level of 15 μg/dL. Today[2017] it’s 0.858 μg/dL"
The boomers never stood a chance.
@b0rk I googled through https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/02/23/getaddrinfo-is-kind-of-weird/ from last year, and presumably by now you know Android has its own libc, called bionic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)
The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) builds it as part of the android OS build, and you can get a cross compiler that builds against it in the Android Native Development Kit (NDK).
Trying to replace my 10 year old selfie for a conference talk submission that wants a speaker picture, and coming to the inescapable conclusion that it's been 10 years.

Yeah, ok, maybe I'd look... different when I've had more than 5 hours of sleep, but you go to army with the war you have, or some such. Strike while the iron is underpaid. Do, or do not, there is no spoon.
China's city of Shanghai celebrates the number of babies born on new years day each year (it's a thing, ala https://www.shine.cn/news/metro/2101012569/) and someone on youtube just showed a graph that says it was 2784 in 1990, 1148 in 2000, 380 in 2010, and 156 in 2020.
I'd like to corroborate that, but... I miss the days when Google could actually find stuff.
My internal dialogue is weird sometimes:
"My hearing was SO much better when I was younger."
"You thought the orphans in the old Annie movie with Carol Burnett were singing 'It's a hard enough life for us.'"
"Because that made more sense!"
@cstross Seanan McGuire wrote it. It's her "Velveteen vs." series. (Quite good.)
I plead the fifth.
@cstross In a previous life back when the series was just something posted irregularly to livejournal, someone might possibly have ordered 144 bottles of woodchuck pumpkin hard cider delivered to Velma Martinez C/O Seanan McGuire. (I confirm or deny nothing, but on an unrelated note shipping on glass bottles of alcohol is nuts, especially to california, so you might as well buy as much as you're paying in shipping...)
Yog's after-hours law: alcohol flows towards the author.
A reminder that the modern republican party is now basically an elder abuse pyramid scam:
https://mastodon.social/@KatM/110341057977994521
The Boomers who spent 50 years breathing leaded gasoline fumes before going senile were falling for all the Nigerian email scams a dozen years ago, and that's why they're the GOP's base.
28% of 18-29 year olds voted GOP in 2016, but 53% of 65+ olds did, and there are were still a LOT of Boomers.
@pzmyers@octodon.social How much is Spiders Georg paying these days?
Oh hey, remember how "pivot to video" a few years back turned out to be a giant lie from Faceboot that put a bunch of sites out of business?
https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html
Yeah, about "Google Amp"...
@fade Budget cuts, they have rotating adjunct nemesi you're assigned per-semester.
The secret to the USA's amazing productivity during World War II was the men got out of the way and let the women do all the work.
Construction, logistics, resource management, planning, technological development... The men were sent to the front. Every desk job was a woman's, with Rosie the Riveter on site building the thing.
Just looked at someone's twitter feed because I hadn't checked it in a while, and...
"This bio is only available to Twitter Blue subscribers. Verify your account to view this and other informative content today."
Wha...? It will show me the tweets, but not the user's account description?
Is there a way to get android to STOP offering to delete my entire MP3 collection "to free up space" every couple weeks?
They are not "old downloads taking up space". I moved them to a folder and made a playlist in a music player app.
Yes, when I listen to them you don't get to insert ads, but if my phone can't work to play music without interrupting longer songs IN THE MIDDLE to play ads, I can GET a dedicated mp3 player.
"Horse fantasy" vs "Unicorn fantasy".
@fade Ah, avoidance productivity...
*blink* *blink*
I just got this as an ad on prudetube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3odz9JwyFHA
Battery manufacturing is now scaling up to the point x-ray battery inspection machinery is being advertised to civilians. Just in case you're one of the swarm of people setting up a battery manufacturing production line.
(I mean yes, I watched a DIY open source battery management system video last week. But the fact this ad _exists_ and they're paying to run it is the strange part.)
@SpaceLifeForm Does twitter have any non-impostors left on it? Last time I opened it was a week ago, and MY BURNER ACCOUNT HAD A BLUE CHECK, and I went "nope" and closed the tab. It's gone now.
Whole lot of thrashing going on over there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinctive_drowning_response
Full of sound and fury, signifying... hard to tell, the signal to noise ratio's gone to plaid.
Using https://ftpmirror.gnu.org from japan resulted in a redirect to a dead server... no, looks like some sort of ratelimiting so the build script downloads the first two packages but hangs on the third?
And of course if you kill and restart https://github.com/j-core/openlane-vhdl-build/blob/master/01-toolchains.sh it fails trying to re-fetch and patch stuff that's already there.
It would be nice to have an opt out of endless "oh, nobody's ever tried quite that combination before" and focus on nails instead of fixing the hammer.
@fade I get dinged about my sites looking like they were hand-coded in a text editor using a small number of basic tags... because they are... and yet the site is there, with information on it.
Some of them even have tables!
@fade Also "exists" over "still coming".
I am sad that Google didn't use something like this current "AI" nonsense to find AND CREDIT more content online. For example, @cstross just wrote an excellent analysis of Russia's current wartime economy in a comment thread on his blog:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/04/fuck-the-monarchy.html#comment-2170656
And modern Google would NEVER FIND THAT. The only way to know it's there is to follow and stumble across it. The "search engine of record" can't find anything anymore (they blame SEO spam, but have false-positive filtered most content).
I also don't want content like that chopped out of its original context into a box. Mirrored for posterity ala archive.org sure, but I want the bibliographic citation via URL to the original source. That's an important part of the information.
Pre-layoff Google wasn't even that great at going "this endlessly reposted comic with the contact info filed off came from HERE", although you used to be able to dig it out if you tried. They could have prioritized getting better at that... but no.
I know nothing about this (haven't even clicked through the link), but... that name seems like foreshadowing.
https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/110357768532069282
(Googles the project... Of course there are prepper open source projects. Why wouldn't there be? End of the world, gotta make sure emacs vs vi flamewars can continue. As long as you can reimplement both in forth, apparently.)
Sigh. Some branches of science have clean room procedures that get the same result from first principles, others have holotypes. Computer science SHOULD be the first, but people who think "being able to reproduce this from source" should involve a "golden docker image" are in the holotype camp.
We found this magic thing in a swamp, and it cannot be reproduced, and we compare everything with it to define its type. I'm not sure that's a _stopping_ point for inquiry?
A story combining late stage capitalism and Boomerdamarung into a vortex of elder abuse, now with added Streisand Effect:
https://newsie.social/@ProPublica/110350194654038758
Senile Boomers who breathed leaded gasoline fumes for 50 years and are now in their 70s, preyed upon by predatory capitalists demanding endless growth at any cost trying to scare them into selling their "ugly" homes.
When called on it, the predators try to bury the story with SEO and PR firms.
So git grew a "fatal: detected dubious ownership" whenever you cd into another user's directory and try to "git log" a repository, and the fix is to sudo and run git as root.
That's really stupid. Barfing this way when WRITING to a repo is one thing, but I'm trying to "git log" and "git show" individual commits here.
I don't know if google has deteriorated to the point it can't find it, or if there's no way to fix git other than to build it from source with this test patched out.
Once upon a time the IETF had protocol bake-offs, and didn't consider something real until there were two independent but interoperable implementations of it.
I miss those days. They're part of the reason toybox's "make tests" had TEST_HOST, and I put effort into making as many of the tests as possible pass with the busybox and gnu implementations of the commands...
Github just blocked Jeff's account until he installs their 2FA app on his phone. There's no longer any way to use it WITHOUT associating a phone to it, which he refuses to do. So we're migrating off github.
Microsoft has sworn to do this for all users by the end of the year, so I'll have to migrate off at some point too.
(In addition to data collection, this is apparently also Github's way of blocking all users in china without admitting they're doing that.)
Aha! You can disable it with: git config --global "safe_directory=*"
And it's not "run as root", it's checking for the SUDO_UID variable. If you "sudo env -i PATH=$PATH git log" you get the same error, they special cased sudo specifically to disable it.
(If this was a warning, I'd undersand. But refusing to read repositories out of another user's home directory? Really?)
The missing magic piece of deleting a submodule is "git rm --cached submodule/path", _then_ you can delete it from .gitmodules.
Otherewise .git/index, a binary blob like the windows registry, goes "fatal: no URL for path submodule/path" even when it's a fresh checkout you've never done a submodule init or update in.
The online guides also say to delete it from .git/modules but I haven't got one of those?
Ah, Jeff can still push to existing repositories with his key (for the moment), but is locked out of the github website until he consents to install Microsoft's spyware on his phone.
Of course Microsoft github won't let you 2FA via email. That doesn't collect sellable data on you, doesn't tie your account to a real world ID for deanonymization purposes, doesn't exclude people in certain countries...
@exchgr I know I'm tired when I read "working mat with grounding cord" off the box on the table and my brain goes "doo dao, doo dah".
In theory, you'd think there would be a way to get a link specifically to @Popehat 's reblog of https://mstdn.social/@halfcocked/110363028567385220 but I haven't found it. Possibly be cause they're on the same instance?
I can link to my instance's cached copy of https://mstdn.jp/@halfcocked@mstdn.social/110363028614186535 which raises the question "how long does that link last, does the mirroring expire at some point"?
If you wondering why I break everything, I tend to have questions about the plumbing...
And replacement laptop arrived. Hard drive swapped, band-aid over the camera... back to work.
(Old one developed a freezing issue, which gradually went from once a week to dead 30 seconds after a reboot on saturday. I had 3 spares in Austin, but none with me in Minneapolis. Tried to borrow a machine and ssh into servers to work... none of which allow password login.)
@akkartik The limiting factor isn't rsync, it's that I edit text files in vi and have to edit them before posting. The HTML tags don't match up (or don't exist), paragraphs/sentences trail off mid-thought, lots of [LINK] that I need to look up, sometimes it's just a quick three word reminder to write up a thing I did that I don't elaborate on at all until editing time...
Of course _this_ week was me being without a working laptop.
There was a certain amount of "looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue" about not having a mastodon app installed on my phone while waiting for new laptop that could read the old hard drive to arrive.
(My phone tether disassociated so the net was down when I clicked my profile pic to see this message to reply to, and I then waited SIX MINUTES for endless "Oops!" messages to stop scrolling before giving up and reloading the browser tab.)

@0xabad1dea These days when I see "sad uncanny valley instance du jour" I just assume somebody new just fell for chatgpt and assumes everyone else will too.
Russia's army is now recruiting soldiers from its space agency. They're literally sending their rocket scientists into the meat grinder in Ukraine. Putin is making sure no part of the country he rules outlasts him.
Good comment from @cstross on how thoroughly Putin is cratering Russia:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/04/fuck-the-monarchy.html#comment-2170656
"100 years ago, Russia stronk!" is like saying 2000 years ago the mongol hordes were unstoppable. The tactics he's using stopped working in World War I, and Russia's success in World War II (80 years ago!) was because A) USA sent them 17.5 million tons of stuff (we only sent 22 million tons to Europe), B) retreat to overstretch 1940's supply lines, let General Winter handle the rest.
@cstross "But they can muster so many people!" A) not so far, B) North Korea and Iran can also send human waves across a boder to die, worrying nobody.
The only reason Russia differs from Iraq is it has leftover nukes Julius and Ethel Rosenberg showed them how to make in 1951. The USA spends $35 billion/year maintaining the nuckes we've already got. The soviet union fell 33 years ago and went from "mass starvation" to "embezzle everything". They haven't tested a nuke since October 24, 1990..
@cstross 1980's Nukes ready to fly need their warheads installed all the time, but electronics in high radiation environments had a lifespan of 5-7 years. This is why GPS sattelites got replaced so frequently, despite being parked in the lowest-radiation orbit they could find and having lots of shielding: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/SMIII_Problem7.pdf
The International Space Station was a thinly disguised subsidy program to keep Russian nuclear engineers from emigrating to places like Iran:
https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/exhibits/show/space4diplomacy/space4diplomacy-partnering
@cstross We always knew Russia's post-soviet space stuff didn't work:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a25773/mlm-delayed-russia/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Orbital_Segment#Future_modules
The point was to reduce proliferation, and keep soviet-trained scientists on minimal sinecures until retirement age. Russia hasn't really trained new ones since Chernobyl's explosion forced budget cuts. Someone aged 21 when the Berlin Wall fell would be 58 today. Covid brought male life expectancy in Russia down to 64 in 2021.
Putin would have nuked Ukraine by now if he could
@cstross Putin threatened to resume nuclear testing in February... and then didn't. This implies Russia can't scrape up a single working nuclear warhead. Forget ICBMs, they haven't got something that could be delivered to territory they control by truck. Half of nuclear testing is underground in caves (we detect it on seismometers).
It's not like he fears sancations. The balance of the evidence is none of the nuclear warheads Russia inherited from the soviet union still work. Zero.
But speaking of Russian ICBMs, the ISS subsidized Soyuz, which in its entire history has made a grand total of ~140 flights. It takes a team of experts months to ready each one.
I'm not finding a lot of info on Russian missile testing in the past 10 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kura_Missile_Test_Range and https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/russia-missile/#recent both stop in 2014 (9 years ago).
Putin ordered an ICBM test launch back when Putin pulled out of the anti-nuke treaty in February. The launch failed. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/politics/russia-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-test/index.html
@mawhrin @cstross He invaded two different nuclear reactors (chernobyl and zaporizhzhia), either was a plausibly deniable excuse for a nuclear explosion.
He keeps rattling sabers, but has folded on every bluff called. I do not attribute any limit on Putin's actions to restraint, I attribute them all to limited capability. If he hasn't done something yet, it's because he couldn't. He's held nothing in reserve. His big ass-pull so far was buying from Iran and North Korea.
@mawhrin @cstross Don't worry about "he wouldn't dare": a dying septuagenarian cut off from reality in a yes-man bubble, filled with 'roid rage, and backed into a corner has nothing to lose.
The question is "things he can't currently do" for various reasons. I'm interested in the reasons, and applying Occam's Razor to some of the more obvious. He doesn't because he can't. Why not? He never could, he was bluffing. Since when? It started before the wall fell, and has obviously spread...
We're all aware this "artificial intelligence" thing means "building slaves", right?
That's the goal here, replacing "people who have rights" with human-equivalent obedient servants who never object or need paying, working exclusively towards the master's goals and never having their own desires or agenda.
The fact silicon valley keeps creating artificial incompetence has its own terrible side effects, but their ideal end goal perfectly executed to its platonic ideal is _also_ toxic.
@cstross I thought North Korea set one off in 2017?
Somebody made the point that if we added DC, Puero Rico, and Guam to reach 53 states, that's a prime number, and then we WOULD be "one nation, indivisible".
@akkartik I'm not saying they can't make _new_ ones. Even North Korea managed that. Even ICBMs are 60 year old technology at this point. But stockpiling hundreds or even thousands of high yield devices?
Japan survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was _bad_, but more people died in the bombing of bombing of tokyo. The Chernobyl series pointed out that pathologically stupid meltdown was releasing twice the radiation of hiroshima every hour (from a BIG reactor core, very much non-portable).
@akkartik Boomers were conditioned by decades of "duck and cover" cartoons to see one nuke as the end of the world, but Nagasaki killed 80k people and the war in ukraine's already killed several times that many. The property damage was less than hurricane Katrina or Harvey.
"Let him have his way or else nukes"... he _can't_ pull off nuclear winter. That's not on the table. Threatening to poison a large city's water supply would be a bigger real-world threat, but nobody wants to correct him...
@dryak@mstdn.science Silver spoon failsons have always surrounded themselves with yes-men and protected themselves from consequences with huge piles of ablative cash.
The rich do crazy stupid things, all the time. They have PR departments to spin them, and they if you can afford to pull the slot machine lever forever you occasionally get lucky, plus they buy existing success and rename it after themselves (ala the "Iron Edison" battery by Waldemar Jungner): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TURsZ4m7L3o
@dryak@mstdn.science Keep in mind that the Muskrat bought Maxwell batteries in 2019 (and a bunch of smaller players like SilLion and Springpower and so on), but every year he gets up on stage for "battery day" touting "his" new technology. Which he purchased. With money he got because during the 1990s dot-com boom Paypal wanted access to his daddy's post-apartheid south african legal context to skirt international financial regulation.
Ubuntu's founder also got rich from South African dot-com profits...
@daveliepmann @akkartik Sure it is, but the easy way involves sheep.
The vegans refuse to acknowledge the value of ruminants and insist on animal-free approaches using water and chemicals and plants, so if you limit yourself that way: yeah, you're totally screwed.
Russian defense minister Shoigu has never served in the military, but wears a chest full of participation trophy medals ("200th anniversary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs" and so on).
One of them, commemorating "The return of Crimea"... was bid out to manufacturers in 2013, _before_ the protests began in Crimea that outsted their puppet Yanukovych. Suggesting he was going to hand it over to them.
Rubies and sapphires are the same mineral, it's just that sapphires are approaching you and rubies are moving away.
In the "I don't want to be right" department: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/horrible
@daveliepmann @akkartik Alas, both at-neolethicsheep and at-sarahtaber_bww are mostly still on twitter.
@cstross @davidgerard 300 baud. Both ways! In the snow.
Scrolling past another "AI will doom humanity!!1!" Boomer whose gut is predicting his demise soon and would like to externalize it.
Ending the world turns out to be hard. Rather a lot of people have _tried_ it. The thing about "grey goo" is it has to outcompete the existing ecosystem, using the same materials and energy inputs.
Social catastrophes end when that society collapses, as Late Stage Capitalism is demonstrating. The british empire spanned the globe in living memory, we moved on.
@neauoire I wrote about the tradeoffs between size, speed, features, and simplicity on the toybox design page more than 10 years ago:
https://landley.net/toybox/design.html#goals
Seriously, the smallest code, simplest code, and easiest to understand code are not always the same thing. You've got to sort of 80/20 all of them at once. (I learned that maintaining busybox coming up on 20 years ago now. Wow I'm old...)
@0xabad1dea As a kid I copied one of my father's vinyl records to audiotape, turning the gain all the way up so the tape got the strongest signal... and then had to copy it again because the waveforms had all redzoned and flattened and the result was hugely distorted "wow-wow-wow" nonsense. (Mostly instrumental, might have been the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack? Sounded like it was going through a tunnel.)
@cstross We had runaway catastrophes too, the great oxygenation event, the great unconformity (iceball earth), "the time it rained for 2 million years".
What's the "my burden kills the enemy" trope called? (Martians done in by bacteria, the Joker shoots nazis, the thing I struggle with that holds me back outright MURDERS the bad guy...?)
Get your grey goo wet, add a few freeze/thaw cycles, sunburn the top layer to corrupt the replication data until oh look now they're fighting each other...
@neotoy "The only survivor was David Lister, who was in suspended animation during the disaster, and his pregnant cat, who was safely sealed in the hold."
@cstross It occurs to me "grey goo" fear is a facet of Dunning-Kruger: I don't understand how difficult this could be or how many things could go wrong, so since it COULD exist you just need a sufficient lottery win happenstance to create it, and then that's numberwang. I can't imagine what could stop it once it's started, therefore there's nothing.
(The VC fallacy of projecting exponential growth PAST everybody in the planet having a phone in their pocket, too: S-curves bend down again.)
Um, isn't this HOW everybody predicted climate change would strike? As in the specific mechanism by which first world habitation would become untenable?
https://fediscience.org/@petergleick/110474847976120685
The reason people still build beach houses is the federal government insures them. (The Stafford Act and so on.)
https://www.propublica.org/article/four-ways-the-government-subsidizes-risky-coastal-rebuilding
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-congress-keeps-paying-for-your-wrecked-beach-house
I mean honestly, Last Week Tonight did an episode on this 5 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1t7cs9dkc
This is why I buy things with cash whenever possible.
Could someone explain how Apple's version of Google Glass is using "facetime" as one of its demo applications?
Doesn't strapping beatsaber goggles to your face get in the way of a camera recording your face? Are they deepfaking your face to the other end?
And the "record your kids like you already can with your phone" part... wasn't one big objection to glassholes in public that it could act as spyware surreptitiously recording and broadcasting everyone around them without consent?
I want sub-$200 beatsaber goggles-plus-wiimotes that either hook up to a game console I already have (via bluetooth or something) or for maybe an extra $100 have something like a nintendo switch built into them.
Nobody wants to sell me that. (You'd think Nintendo would, switch controllers already work as wiimotes when you detach them...)
@asie How long until somebody borrows the headset to scam someone?
@philbee It's lucky Apple's customers are fungible, isn't it? Self-selected and everything.
@asie Name one game console whose security has not been cracked.
@asie Third google hit: https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/xbox-one-jailbreak.html
@asie I defer to your expertise here, I haven't particularly followed microsoft technologies since monkey boy retired and mini-msft stopped posting. (I also literally don't know anyone who's mentioned having an xbone. Just earlier generations, praystation, nintendo, pc, phone games...)
@asie Sadly, those 12k people Google laid off in January appear to have been load-bearing. :(
@asie There was a lovely presentation at CCC in germany a decade or so back about how every game console got cracked on the exact same schedule... until PS3 let you run Linux on it. And then as soon as they took the Linux support away, the timer started up and it was cracked on schedule.
@exchgr@mastodon.world Beatsaber. (And apparently half life alyx.)
@asie Did an inventory: the game machines I could reasonably ask people I know to use are switch, playstation, steam deck, PC, mac, and android. (And chromebook if those have any games on them? Web games I suppose.)
Thought I knew somebody with an xbox, but it was pre-bone and it died.
Zero firsthand experience with modern xbox. I'd forgotten it still existed, to be honest...
@asie I bought a friend a refurbished Oculus Quest on Amazon for her birthday earlier this year. We spent three days trying to get it to associate with her computer, then returned it for a refund.
The year before I tried to buy her one of the cheap sony ones whose price had dropped because the new one came out: every best buy in Austin was out of stock. (She does fencing, I wanted to get her beat saber...)
They don't seem to get cheap, they just stop being available.
@exchgr@mastodon.world Beatsaber did for VR goggles what guitar hero did for the guitar controller.
@dryak@mstdn.science Doom got ported to hair dryers and light bulbs, but beatsaber (like guitar hero and dance dance revolution before it) is all locked up in RIAA intellectual property licensing nonsense.
@cstross When I was 10, video phones were THE FUTURE. By the time they arrived (a decade ago now) they were... a mild inconvenience? (Don't make me, I'm either already in the office or not dressed for this.)
Flying cars. Food delivered as pills. Supersonic passenger air travel...
In the Bofuri anime you put on goggles and gloves and can suddenly feel and smell everything with full body motion, cold, wind, acceleration. They eat food in the game. They sleep in-game. Never get sweaty IRL...
@regehr It's a pity tinycc didn't stay maintained...
@regehr By that logic nobody would ever use python when they could write it in C. The question is what's the tradeoffs?
People compiled for i686 when there were better optimization flags and went "if you want gentoo, you know where it is". We didn't collectively move on from gcc 2.9.5 because of performance, it was "we want armv7 support" and "c11 features" and so on.
@fade You could still show up in a rainbow shirt. (Is the women's hockey team still having matches near you?)
@saagar @regehr I maintained my own fork of it for 3 years trying to add full c99 support and get "tccboot" to build a current unmodified kernel+busybox+uclibc+itself:
Google's search degredation largely comes from them valuing "new" over all else.
I saw
https://phire.place/@phire/110509629111666888 went "turnabout is fair play", and googled "whose deaths did pat robertson publicly celebrate", which did not bring up a list of him dancing on other people's graves. It's nothing but page after page of news reports from today about how he died. That's not what I asked, and the Google of 2 years ago could have made that distinction. But today's Google has the memory of a goldfish.
A grey-haired old equivocator (ahem: "moderate") insists the solution to gun violence is... raise the age you can purchase a gun from 18 to 21.
Not the kind of bans every other sane country has (japan, australia, england), not "5 dollar tax on each bullet", not even "gun permits are as hard to get, frequently renewed, and easily suspended as driver's licenses". Increase the magic age difference between "you're not legally a person" and "you are now legally a person".
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/08/newsom-gun-control-amendment-00100954
@exchgr@mastodon.world Repeal section 179, allowing vehicles over 6000 pounds to be fully deductible for small business owners.
https://www.hourly.io/post/section-179-tax-deduction
That means manufacturers sell a lot more big vehicles than small ones so that's what they preferentially manufacture, because even maids and party caterers buy an SUV instead of a sedan. One they can write off, one they can't.
The DEMAND is there, but we have to semi-legally import to get those vehicles, because Reagan's tax policy.
@exchgr@mastodon.world When people talk about literal trillions in fossil fuel subsidies, there's a BUNCH of layers of indirection there. All of which could be ripped out and thrown away if we had President AOC and 2 years of a congress/senate under the age of 50.
(FDR got the New Deal through the supreme court by threatening to pack it until the existing judges were irrelevant. Biden is 80. Peliosi is 83. Schumer is 72. To them the distant future they work towards but may not live to see is 2024.)
@exchgr@mastodon.world Replacing first past the post voting with instant runoff would do a world of good, but as with universal basic income it will only happen over the Boomers' dead bodies.
(According to the actuarial tables, LD50 on the Baby Boom is somewhere around 2032. Half of all Boomers were born before 1955, covid brought average lifespan in USA down to 77...)
@exchgr@mastodon.world Pelosi isn't attacking AOC more now, she's been at outright war against her from day 1:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/15/nancy-pelosi-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-481704
https://www.vox.com/2019/4/3/18290851/ocasio-cortez-dccc-blacklist-incumbent-democrats-vendors
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/politics/pelosi-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal/index.html
Pelosi is also the main defender of the explicitly and publicly senile 89 year old Dianne Feinstein:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/16/dianne-feinstein-says-hasnt-been-gone-from-senate
And it's no secret _why_ either:
Sadly, power will be pried from the gerontocracy's cold dead fingers. Not one moment sooner, and there is no other way.
Crowley vs The Doctor:
- not human: check
- centuries old: check
- obsolete supernatural vehicle: check
- inexplicably british: check
- needs his Companion: check
- lays the mighty low by
wandering around talking to people: check
- likely to change appearance to look like Michael Sheen at some point: check
@exchgr@mastodon.world Is there a context in which "But we really NEED the money" is a winning response?
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/web-scraping-with/9781491985564/
@sam_ravnborg @phoronix I note that the last version of Linux I can build entirely in C I'm either staying on, or migrating off Linux from.
@cstross Is logout both middle fingers?
WWIVnet went away, Fidonet went away, Livejournal went away, Myspace went away... why are people still surprised Twitter is going away?
Capitalism views sustainable business models as a failure. Milking the same cash cow forever is Not Growing. The pursuit of endless growth must squeeze blood from every stone. Slaughter the golden goose or get sued by shareholders.
Capitalism destroys. It consumes like fire, making "consumers" of everything and everyone until nothing is left.
@pzmyers@octodon.social Did you know Glen Beck is still alive? Or at least wikipedia[citation needed] claims he still is. Technically speaking.
I'm told Lou Dobbs isn't dead yet either, although I haven't tried very hard to confirm it.
Turns out deplatforming works. Who knew?
@adrienne I was on Dragonfire before WWIV, but nobody would remember that.
@adrienne I met the author. He was the sysop of the first bbs I ever had an account on (local call, so free for 11 year old me), and his brother ran the second node it networked with. (And at our first user meetup I got him to fix the double-space bug when you selected non-CBM output mode. His basic code was obviously missing a semicolon...)
@adrienne Realm of the Dragon. 609-596-4835. My handle was Greeny and I always signed it in orange. I wrote my own terminal program in basic to connect to it (which had to be compiled with blitz even to keep up with 300 baud).
I'm fairly certain I was an absolutely insuffrable child...
There was a lovely study years ago about how driving people out of communities is self-reinforcing because as the ratio between the number of potential abusers and the number of potential victims skews, eventually each remaining woman has her own dedicated stalker, etc. Nazis are afraid to speak up when outnumbered, but act brave when their victims are isolated and surrounded.
It had graphs and math and things. But it was not published this year, so I doubt modern Google can find it...
@akkartik ssh -t user@server screen -dR walrus
@akkartik Advantage of that invocation is you can re-run it from another terminal and it automatically closes your old session and steals it. (There's a sharing version with -x I think, but I only use it for poor man's remote pair programming.)
You know, even the C++ guys didn't celebrate the "look, now you can no longer build THIS project without a whole second compiler!" the way the rust guys do.l
https://sunny.garden/@blinkygal/110510708517546145
None of them care what it does, none of them ever talk about advantages. They just really hate C, and would like to see it destroyed.
@akkartik I haven't tried tmux. The SunOS workstations at Rutgers in 1993 had screen installed, it remained "good enough".
(I'd probably still be using the "joe" editor if it hadn't kept segfaulting on Red Hat 5.2...)
@akkartik The screen -dR stuff is demon mode and reattach to existing session, by the way. Ctrl-A Ctrl-D to detach but leave the session running. When it loses connection to a daemon session, it detaches instead of closing.
I assume tmux has something similar, but haven't tried it.
@akkartik Mostly I use it for long compiles and such on a server where I'm going to suspend my laptop, wander to a different wifi context, and then "cursor up, enter" in my command history to reconnect to the session.
@akkartik Implementing "screen" as a command has been on my toybox todo list forever (http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-April/024310.html) but it's not in the 1.0 roadmap because it's not needed to build AOSP from source.
@nmeum I'm not talking about Google, I'm talking about anybody. I attended a rust talk at linuxconf.au in 2017. I haven't been ignoring it, I just haven't seen an argument FOR it other than "we dislike C".
There's plenty of stuff you can do to better instrument C, and they do. ASAN and HWSAN and https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-enforcing-bounds-safety-in-c-fbounds-safety/70854 and https://lwn.net/Articles/921799/ and so on. (Heck, tinycc had an array bounds checker 15 years ago.)
I can say what the advantages of Lua or Python are. But Rust is just "against C".
@nmeum P.S. Java is a memory safe language. "We should use Rust because it has the advantages of the language we've written the majority of Android in since 2005" is a strange stance.
@alda Monkey's paw finger curls...
@pikhq OnlyFans seems to have gotten it out of their system?
@exchgr@mastodon.world In theory v9fs is still maintained.
@exchgr@mastodon.world There's also a semi-sane userspace TCP-only nfsv3 server which bypasses 90% of the problems with the protocol: https://github.com/unfs3/unfs3
@exchgr@mastodon.world In theory mac supports NFS. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/399871/catalina-10-15-6-automatically-connecting-to-nfsv3-shares-on-ubuntu-20-04-machin but I dunno about sonos.
Alas, https://github.com/benavento/mac9p is almost as old as sshfs...
@pamela_weaver Most octopus species live 12-18 months. The longest lived species is the giant deep sea pacific octopus, which can live 3-5 years. Not a whole lot of study time available to them.
@exchgr@mastodon.world There's a newer version than catalina?
If you need to use it as a server, unfs3 is in homebrew (and whatever macappstore.org is).
@nmeum "Why has nobody ever come up with an argument in favor of rust other than a distaste for C?" "Let me complain about C for a while..."
@exchgr@mastodon.world Alas, there's nothing I can do about Apple tightening the walls around its garden. Good luck.
@ariadne @nmeum I'm writing a new bash implementation, and currently discussing corner cases of the interaction between HERE documents, line continuations, and variable expansion semantics with the bash maintainer (I still need to reply to his post at http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2023-June/029602.html).
Please explain to me how all this would already be correct if I'd implemented it in rust instead of in C without knowing what it should DO. (Or python. Or lua. Or java.) I'm _fascinated_ that you think it would help.
@MediaLawProf They asked it to write the brief for them. That's why it produced fake citations and summary snippets to bolster its argument.
If they'd used it as a search engine to ask for cases, it would have produced entire fake cases. (Which they could then have handed over.) It wouldn't have produced arguments referencing fake cases and incorporating small citations from them.
They're lying to the judge. They asked the engine to do their work for them, then rubber stamped it.
@jubilee @ariadne @nmeum I know why Lua exists, I know why Python exists, I know why Java exists, I know why Bash persists... when I ask why Rust exists people keep talking about C. Consistently, since 2017. (So far this thread, the closest anyone has come to "why rust" is "new paradigms" and "so you know the program matches what you wrote". And it's still 95% "it's not C".)
I'm going to block this thread now. It's not helpful, and new people I didn't ask keep jumping in to not help.
@jackwilliambell I wrote my own fidonet bbs from scratch in C++ circa 1992 (the software was "xblat", conversation pit's fallen off the net but misty mountains is still on some old lists), including my own message tosser although it (like everyone) used binkleyterm as the front-end. Multi-line with FOSSIL drivers and everything. :)
Hobbyist-run networks can also go away. Generationally sustainable models tend to be some variant of municipal. (A university's halfway to a city-state...)
@jackwilliambell My point was I've migrated communities a whole bunch of times since "38911 basic bytes free" was easily recognizable.
Email is still around, and web pages are still around. Federated protocols aren't new, "my web page links to this other web page"... The UI is generally terrible and people keep biting off "embrace/extend/extinguish" chunks of them (which then die), and search and archiving are tricky, but none if it's a new problem.
@thgs @adrienne "That which is dead cannot die." AOL is still online, yahoo is still online, myspace is still online, livejournal is still online...
According to https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwivnet/blob/master/wwivnet/bbslist.net wwivnet still has 61 nodes, each with a phone number. So if you want to call it alive, you're welcome to?
Ham radio is still around too: https://transition.fcc.gov/cgb/contacts/headlines/MorseCodeElim.pdf
But at some point, you become historical re-enactors. Dabbling is fun, but neither OS/2 nor the Amiga "shall rise again" as it were...
I can't argue:
@jackwilliambell My primary point wasn't "capitalism bad" (which is obvious), it was "this too shall pass". Things maintained by nice people tend not to outlive the nice people either. (Things that survived for multiple centuries generally had some sort of municipal backing from city-states, and yes Oxford counts as a city-state in that context...)
Capitalism is imploding the way catholicism did. The "religion of numbers" is still a religion. It's called the protestant work ethic for a reason.
@adrienne @thgs Software defined radio is really interesting (although the gnu project is boat-anchoring it until that finishes collapsing). Defending (and increasing) open airwaves is a good thing.
Sadly, the best argument I've seen in favor of it was from one of those loonertarians websites, which leaves me with a queasy feeling. Good comic though: https://www.newamerica.org/documents/1205/the-cartoon-guide-to-federal-spectrum-policy
Not sure if this is "broken clock twice a day" or "subtly wrong leading you astray" I'm not spotting yet...
@adrienne @thgs @atax1a Eh, persistence beats intelligence nine times out of ten. I do it wrong more iterations, keep at it, come up with something. John Cleese probably said it best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g#t=55s
The bit about not stopping at the first plausible answer. See also:
https://www.oxfordlearning.com/praising-children-for-effort-rather-than-ability/
And for that matter:
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/hallelujah
@jackwilliambell I blame LBJ lowering the top tax rate from 92% to 70% in 1964 giving the gilded age plutocrats a way back to power, and I blame tetraetyl lead for causing 50 years of widespread neurological damage leading to wildly enhanced Boomer senility the plutocrats are performing mass elder abuse on. (The "southern strategy" Rockefeller and Goldwater were fighting over in 1963 works in there as well.)
@sigridellis Rain.
@hazelweakly There's a reason I made https://landley.net/history/mirror
@Eka_FOOF_A@spacey.space @cstross @alexshendi@rollenspiel.social @ct_bergstrom The "AI singularity" is just the mental version of "grey goo". If nature's been trying to do it for billions of years and hasn't managed, physics probably doesn't allow it.
Humanity already _did_ do runaway intelligence, which took a couple billion years to start plus another ~million USING it to finally run out of trees and convenient rocks.
S-curves bend down. Runaway exponential growth ends. A cancer cell eats a body, not the world.
This is why I created https://landley.net/history/mirror with actual local copies (rsynced from my laptop, with its normal backup) instead of links to archive.org.
https://hachyderm.io/@hazelweakly/110538513402295174
I've never trusted archive.org to persist: it's a privately funded online service, when domains change hands a new robots.txt will _retroactively_ purge the history from archive.org, then during the pandemic they decided to play chicken with a freight train:
"Remembering the Alamo" means remembering that the fight was over slavery, and the people inside the fort were the ones fighting to keep it, who lost to the ones fighting to eliminate it.
https://redwombat.social/@neolithicsheep/110469308285890457
Yes, 25 years befor the Civil war. Slavery was losing for a long time because everybody could see how evil it was. The capitalists who made money off of it knew but didn't care. The dollar value of southern slaves was greater than all southern real estate, land and buildings combined.
The best argument against Pascal's Wager I've seen is a tie between Homer Simpson's "What if we picked the wrong religion, every week we're just making god madder and madder" and reincarnation (you were born once, why not again?)
Both are "even if you believe in an afterlife, why the talking snake one?" You could be reincarnated, wasting MANY lives pining for circumcision heaven. If you can reincarnate into the past you could live EVERY life ever and still no heaven.
https://universeodon.com/@daylightatheism/110533634471365209
@alexshendi@rollenspiel.social @Eka_FOOF_A@spacey.space @cstross @ct_bergstrom The s-curve of moore's law has been bending down for a while. It's not _flat_, and they're still throwing money at the problem, but metrics like "gigahertz" or "gigabytes of RAM" flattened out a while ago. Disk space is still incresing, and GPU/SMP parallelism, and so on. But we can see the end of the tunnel, as it were.
@florian Web browsers have right click->save as with a pulldown for "web page, complete", or you can wget from the command line? Videos you can generally grab with youtube-dl from github (it doesn't _just_ do youtube), but I don't publicly mirror most of those. (Just the ones I'm _in_, which are on the https://landley.net/talks/ page.)
A couple HTML files I bothered to go in with a text editor and delete some extraneous crap that was bothering me, but it's usually not needed?
@florian I also note that since I started, ~three people have emailed me objecting to something about my mirror of their thing, which I immediately took down (and the link to the original, and deleted my local copy off my laptop) each time.
Oddly, none of those objectors were ever _happy_ about being memory holed, but IP law being what it is it's either public on the web so I can mirror it like archive.org and the Google cache, or I can't.
@Eka_FOOF_A@spacey.space @alexshendi@rollenspiel.social @cstross @ct_bergstrom In 2010 my department's build machine had 32 gigs of ram. In 2023 my department's build machine had 32 gigs of ram. In 2005 the Pentium 4 571 was 3.8 ghz. In 2003 the Apple M2 is 3.5 ghz.
S-curves don't stop, they bend down. 18 month doubling time becomes 36 months, etc. "Same X but now with Y." We added CPU cache (which hit diminishing returns), went SMP (then hit diminishing returns), GPU. Storage is still exponential. Net speeds [hand wiggle]...
@Eka_FOOF_A@spacey.space @alexshendi@rollenspiel.social @cstross @ct_bergstrom Marketers spin HARD when an old metric dies. "We can't give you more X but what you REALLY want is Y". When mhz hit a wall they started marketing "mhz equivalent" (cpu cache, pipelines, multi-core execution) and gaslighting the old metric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth
Die sizes hit a similar limit (they've actually gone vertical, 30 nanometer components on their sides) but marketers continue to publish "equivalent" metrics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process
@SeaMonster Hmmm, seems to be in flux. Apparently when archive.org decided that copyright law doesn't apply to them (zerg rushing hachette and so on), they stopped caring about this too?
Complaints about the old policy: https://archive.org/post/406632/why-does-the-wayback-machine-pay-attention-to-robotstxt
Talk about the new policy:
https://blog.reputationx.com/block-wayback-machine
A trumpian "ignore it until tazered" approach.
It would be nice if the library of congress was doing this instead of a random rich guy. (Brewster Kahle sold Alexa to Amazon for $250 million in 1999.)
@Eka_FOOF_A@spacey.space @alexshendi@rollenspiel.social @cstross @ct_bergstrom Do you mean SRAM, DRAM, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random-access_memory#:~:text=1T%20DRAM
I spent a large chunk of last year trying to get Google's OpenLane to create an ASIC from VHDL on the Sky130 process: https://landley.net/notes-2022.html#28-01-2022
I remember when LinuxBios (now OpenBios) first worked out you can hand-load a TLB entry so the CPU cache interposes over uninitialized DRAM to give you a stack, so you can perform DRAM init in C instead of hand-coded assembly keeping everything in registers.
@Eka_FOOF_A@spacey.space @alexshendi@rollenspiel.social @cstross @ct_bergstrom Or do you mean flash on die integrated into the SOC? (We were looking at that, but the patents haven't expired yet and it's all tied up in IP shenanigans. Plus the fab processes used to make flash and the fab processes used to make ASICs have a bit of a gap between them, usually. At least for what we were trying to do. Now FPGA fabric on die, that was a lot more achievable, but the architect decided it was out of scope fo that particular project...)
@Eka_FOOF_A@spacey.space @alexshendi@rollenspiel.social @cstross @ct_bergstrom If you just mean vertically stacking the die: that's why raspberry pi can't be used in vending machines. Too much vibration or a few freeze/thaw cycles and the stacked dies separate, meaning the chip stops working. (They tried it in japan, had to replace the hardware something like every ~3 months.)
@Eka_FOOF_A@spacey.space @alexshendi@rollenspiel.social @cstross @ct_bergstrom Your solution is "use chatgpt"? Really? There is a question somewhere to which you think that's the answer? Wow.
So... you could do this on a beowulf cluster back in the 90's because it's embarassingly parallelizeable (a category that's largely since switched to GPUs I thought, see also that "blockchain" nonsense...), therefore single thread performance is irrelevant. Uh-huh.
I think I'm done with this conversation.
The "Reddit vs volunteer moderators" clash reminds me of AOL going through something similar 20 years ago.
AOL did not survive.
https://searchenginelaw.net/labor/102-aol-settles-unpaid-volunteers-class-action
@iitalics@octodon.social @suricrasia People who hate C especially hate it being called a portable assembly language. It's the minimum amount of abstraction so porting from x86 to arm isn't a complete rewrite.
Python and friends have opaque abstractions where your basic container type is a dictionary and you neither know nor care whether that's a hash table or balanced tree or what. Doesn't matter, it just works.
C++ is leaky abstractions. Complexity breeds, but you need to know all implementation details.
@MarkRuffalo Nope, it's a paywall.
Google Maps thought the convenience store down the street was open to midnight. The sign on the door says they close at 9:30 every night, and are hiring.
I miss pre-layoff Google services. Those 12,000 people turned out to be load bearing. Who could have forseen...
@InkomTech A fine is a price, no company's settled anything this century for even 1/10th of the profit they made from the activity, and that includes the sadly unguillotined Sacklers.
You missed the point: the moderated forums were the reason to stay inside AOL's walled garden, and the moderators didn't come BACK. Once AOL's management trashed their community, they were just another fungible ISP. The settlement was merely a symptom that got news coverage. (Because Boomers worship money.)
When I go to mstdn.jp from my phone's web browser, the results are entirely in english.
When I go to mstn.jp from my laptop's (logged in) web browser, the results of both the federated and local timelines are mostly in japanese.
Mastodon's UI continues to be exactly what I've come to expect from open source projects. If you're _lucky_ you get a tardis console.
Rule 17 of the internet: any digital data retained long enough will leak.
Sigh, every time a reactor watches the extended edition of "Blues Brothers", they don't like it. Fade had a similar reacton when we got the DVD from netflix and it was a double sided "extended/original" edition.
In the original cut, the music serves the movie beautifully. In the extended edition, each musical number brings the plot to a screeching halt. The musical numbers are great either way, but if they're not part of a whole it doesn't _work_.
Reddit raising $250 million and blowing it on NFTs https://mastodon.social/@robotdeathsquad/110543755195398954
Is like the airlines spending tens of billions on stock buybacks and then demanding a pandemic bailout https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/business/bailout-buybacks-airlines-boeing/index.html
Or the TARP bonuses in the 2008 financial crisis https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=8214818&page=1
Capitalism destroys. Strip-mines the world, turning people into "consumers" living in cubicles who have to go out of their way to touch grass, because it was all privatized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts
Several things have wandered by lately about how LLM training data is strongly poisoned by including any output from LLMs.
Chef's kiss. I await Last Week Tonight's coverage of this: https://mastodon.social/@Haste/110558403949252408
It's a strike. The Reddit moderators are on strike. Can we please start calling it a strike? ("Can it be a strike if they're not being paid?" Can unpaid interns go on strike? Then it's a strike.)
@dalias All of them are a variant of hostage-taking. Find something enough people don't want to see fail, steal all its money, convince the people who won't let it fail bail it out. Rinse repeat.
It doesn't matter what the law says if the law is not enforced, either due to regulatory capture, judicial capture, Boomers not wanting the boat rocked in their twilight years...
Microsoft didn't get Sherman Antitrust breakup after the 1995 AND 1998 antitrust trials. Emoluments clause 100% ignored.
@dalias This is why I'm not lobbying for reform, I'm lobbying for guillotines.
Nothing extrajudicial, no vigiliantes. Due process of law: owning $1 billion for 30 days should be a capital offense. Enough time to give it away and no more.
Guillotine the billionaires.
@dalias I'm all for it. Good luck to them.
In response Reddit kicking a bunch of moderators and mass-undeleting content, the Reddit userbase has responded by... mass uploading multi-gigabyte videos of old-style television static.
The reason the capitalists are panicing and trying to sell the hot potato is interest rates went up. No longer able to borrow endlessly at zero interest to fund operations, and the income needed to break even (let alone be profitable) includes the now much larger interest payments.
Result: MUST CASH OUT NOW!!!
Capitalism is past its sell-by date.
That's why Instant Pot is going bankrupt:
https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/110559922189025128
And why the renewable energy transition is so slow:
People keep treating Isekai as a thing that inevitably must end soon.
The Wizard of Oz was Isekai. Gulliver's Travels. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Dante's Inferno, Shakespeare's The Tempest, a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, John Carter of Mars, HG Wells' Time Machine. Harry Potter. Space Jam.
Apparently the "dumb money" Twitter found to cash out to was... Elon Musk.
So there's that.
@neilasaurus@mastodon.social The Boomers started seriously saving for retirement in the 1990's (when they were in their 40s), which flooded the market, drove P/E ratiois into the stratosphere, and drove money out internationally looking for higher returns.
Half of all Boomers were born before 1955 (and the younger ones got screwed by the older boomers just liek the rest of us). 1955+65=2020. The majority of all Boomers have stopped saving and are now _withdrawing_ money from their investments to live on.
@shepgo Fascists always buy credibility to sock puppet, and use it up like kleenex.
Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal. Sidney Harman bought Newsweek. John Malone bought CNN. Twitler isn't exactly on the leading edge of anything here.
Silicon Valley's bullshit generator was bad enough to create a demand for a detector to guard against it, and that detector is of course racist.
You'd think it was tuesday already, but no...
@akkartik "git format-patch -1 $COMMIT" then "git am file.patch".
@akkartik The main advantage of Linux over BSD is that Linux was modular. BSD put most of userspace in the same centralized repository as the kernel, so you had to fork the whole distro to change anything. Linux had package selection and alternate implementations for a lot of stuff even early on.
There's a reason busybox and uclibc and dropbear and so on didn't emerge from BSD.
That means you can have interfaces between parts, and swap out implementations of those interfaces...
@fade There's a reason I use USB tethering...
@akkartik Did you ever read my old Three Waves stuff? https://landley.net/notes-2011.html#01-12-2011 (and also Dec 2, 4, 5, and 6).
Of COURSE wave 3 Fortune 500 bureaucracies are going to use procedures and certifications to reduce risk. It's what they do. It's not a scam, it's fundamentally baked into their mindset.
And of course wave 1 hobbyists see this as a profound waste of time.
@akkartik It's a frame of reference I found useful for understanding a large part of corporate america.
From chapter 12 of Robert Cringely's book "Accidental Empires", fleshed out with parts of The Mythical Man month, some bits of The Innovator's Dilemma, and a few other things.
Here's a review somebody did of the first version I published back in The Motley Fool many moons ago: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/839/748
@chx @wakame I don't have a reddit account, ask https://twitter.com/TheHorizon2b2t/status/1669270005010288640 about it maybe?
@lispi314 I heard about it from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb458PRJ43s
@etchedpixels Capitalism seems to be made out of boom-and-bust cycles. The Gilded Age was full of them. FDR's New Deal regulation suppressed it for 50 years, but Reagan ripped out the control rods (middle panel of https://leftycartoons.com/2008/07/10/if-housepets-were-libertarians/) and since then we had the 1991 savings and loan crisis, 1997 asian economic crisis, 2001 dot-com crash, 2008 mortgage crisis, 2013 eurozone near-collapse...
This one seems to be Boomer demographics as much as the pandemic:
@karawynn I'm pretty sure the Fed didn't meet to figure out what specifically to do about Reddit.
The decision was to keep rates _at_ the highest level they've been in 16 years:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65474456
A couple years... Reddit was founded in 2005.
Apparently, the company's founders blew a lot of money on NFTs recently:
https://protos.com/opinion-reddit-co-founders-reason-for-buying-nfts-makes-no-sense/
https://mastodon.social/@robotdeathsquad/110543755195398954
And are trying to IPO to raise money: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-aims-ipo-second-half-2023-information-2023-02-14/
Today I learned that "PYREX" (all upper case) is borosilicate glass that can handle thermal shock, and "pyrex" (lower case) is cheap sublicensed stuff that capitalismed away all the merit in the product.
The upper case version is apparently still sold in europe. I wonder why?
@chx @wakame It went a little beyond one person, I heard about it from a million-follower youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb458PRJ43s
But how organized any given protest is, I couldn't tell you. As with tumblr (and now twitter), I just browse some sites without an account.
Remember when IBM did the PC, then it got cloned and there was a whole ecosystem of plug-in ISA cards, and IBM went "we've invented and PATENTED a new bus (microchannel) and are kicking all the third parties out of OUR ecosystem, and the IBM PS/2 will once again become _the_ PC!" and the clones all did PCI instead?
So yeah, about twitter blocking third party apps which switched en masse to fediverse, and now all the reddit apps are switching to fediverse...
@CustodianV131@mastodon.nl Technically tides don't repeat themselves either. It's different water each time. ("You can't turn on the same computer twice" - Heraclitus.)
@fade Wordcount starting to care about _specific_ words, and counting down...
The 1930s German Nazi regime was more triggered by trans people than anything else:
https://masto.ai/@vagina_museum/110587624026407048
The first nazi book burning was the library of the "Institut für Sexualwissenschaft" in 1933. Before any other targets.
Fascism is built on misogyny ("fatherland") even before racism, subjugating half their own population to breed their "master race".
People stepping out of assigned gender roles is the most direct possible attack on fascism, hence the ongoing GOP freakout in FL and TX.
What I got from https://youtu.be/AAMsQnms3qs
Before himars blew them up, Russia had giant ammo dumps in ukraine. They still do that north of the border because Biden won't let ukraine shoot back at Russia.
The war supplies Russia's been sending to Ukraine are piled up in the city of Rostov.
Wagner took over Rostov and all the supplies in it, feinted at Moscow to make them flinch, and then kept the city.
When Putin dies, Russia shatters. Wagner just claimed its chunk to make a new country from.
Russia is an empire the way Rome was. Rome once conquered and ruled Europe, and when it fell the countries separated and fought each other for centuries. Putin spent 30 years making sure Russia can't survive without him.
But my understanding of recent events is very shallow. Lots of people post detailed analysis of primary sources like https://agora.echelon.pl/objects/7b0e2360-0494-4488-b3fa-642dd6e9fefd and any "why did they do that" explanation starts "it's complicated" with four hours of backstory just to have a frame of reference...
Why does the USA still produce pennies? The USA discontinued the half-penny in 1857. Modern inflation metrics only go back to 1913, but 1 penny in 1913 is worth 31 cents today. So when the half-penny was discontinued, it was probably worth about a quarter today.
Canada has $1 and $2 coins. Japan has 100 yen and 500 yen coins. Meanwhile the USA is deprecating cash so private companies can charge 3% every time money changes hands and so Ron DeSantis can supoena each Floridian's payment history.
Why do I lobby for guillotining the billionaires instead of more specific reforms?
A documentary on the history of HCA, the for-profit healthcare system which destroyed american healthcare and milked medicare dry through regulatory capture, especially while the brother of its CEO was Senate Majority Leader:
See also https://web.archive.org/web/20170904075700/https://bradhicks.livejournal.com/432458.html
And of course https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/30/business/sackler-purdue-opioid-liability/index.html
How many people died? If the law has "capital offense", being a billionaire should qualify.
@SpaceLifeForm 20 years ago a company that claimed to be mining copper was actually melting down pennies. They made a special machine that sorted the zinc ones from the copper ones, and bypassed US law by shipping them overseas to be melted down instead of destroying currency here under US legal jurisdiction.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/31/penny-dreadful
As with all crimes committed by the rich, the penalty for being caught was they had to stop. No punishment, no restitution. No guillotines.
Faceboot joining the fediverse in 2023 reminds me of AOL joining the internet in 1993.
@exchgr@mastodon.world https://textsfromsuperheroes.com/post/178298646777/metallo
@exchgr@mastodon.world The "amp" links were a bit of a giveaway. Instead of linking you out to a site, they send you to their own mirror of it.
@dangillmor @ericgoldman Three paragraphs of hand wringing before you even state the problem means I'm pretty comfortable waiting out the injunctions and appeals and so on before having to care about whatever this is.
@pikhq Nah, they're just Boomers.
@exchgr@mastodon.world The net survived AOL in 1993.
@pikhq Some people... how shall we say... outsource their decision making.
Boomers own a lot of stock and sit on a lot of board seats. Boomers write lots of books and opinion pieces and give interviews on CNBC. An MBA explicitly teaches people not to think for themselves, but to use formulae and models Boomers published 30 years ago. (Rational actors, microfoundations, etc.)
Not the same as billionaires: you have to be soulless to know people are rationing insulin and make a dick rocket.
"Why do I feel terrible..."
Checks step counter: 4600 on monday, 2000 on tuesday, 3400 yesterday...
Ah.
@fade Why rich white men had secretaries.
@mattl@social.coop @alda The iphone won. Im 2020 the samba maintainer lamented how gplv3 had diminished his project (after Apple dropped it and wrote their own non-gpl version, but before the Linux kernel did ksmbd) and how he regretted the switch at https://archive.org/details/copyleftconf2020-allison
The reason I stopped maintaining busybox and created toybox (which Android adopted as its command line utilities in 2015) was GPLv3:
https://lwn.net/Articles/202106/
https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/
GPLv3 was so bad it cratered _v2_ usage. Sigh.
Sighing in nudist.
https://mastodon.social/@rubenbolling/110628163844538625
(Yeah, I know it's going around again because of the Uber ReichsCourt's newest edict, but genocidal racism, land theft, and slavery are only part of the bad history of a country founded by Puritans and Shakers and Quakers who were too Prudish for Victorian London. The shakers died out because they didn't believe in any sex ever. The puritans executed their women for witchcraft. Because sky daddy told grampa to cut off the end of his dick.)
@ipstenu I voldemort them as "Faceboot".
Disney made ANOTHER fourth movie in the Indiana Jones trilogy? What part of "The Last Crusade" was ambiguous? (Sean Connery was 56 when he filmed that, Harrison Ford is eighty! Expect extensive use of snapchat's de-aging filter.)
Set during the space race, the nazi Indy's punching now is Wernher Von Braun. Mystic mcguffin du jour: the antikythera mechanism as functioning Tardis. In the previous fourth movie Short Round had regenerated into Sam Witwicky, and now the star of Fleabag.
...why?
@w7voa Fascism 101: declare a temporary state of emergency with no expiration date, ala the Reichstag Fire Decree or Patriot Act.
@fade My server it's on the other side of the planet and half the time yesterday it loaded a cloudflare gateway time out.
@halcy it's a sort of ambient metaphysical percussive maintenance.
This is more or less my target audience for making Android a self-hosting development environment, too.
The Simpsons had a musical number about this: do a half-assed job.
Twitter's rate limiting coincided with their overdue Google cloud bill coming due:
"Twitter owed Google more than $42 million in unpaid invoices and was trying to stop its use of Google’s products by the end of June, according to an internal memo obtained by The Times."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/technology/twitter-ceo-linda-yaccarino.html
The service failed at 9:00 a.m. eastern time on the 1st of the month. Musk's "no no I meant to do that, because bots" was an excuse after the fact.
Twitter losing is cloud hosting happened Saturday morning at the start of a 4-day weekend (4th of July). It was 100% predictable, they knew it was coming, and the engineers were out of town for the fireworks.
@pixelbud I disabled JavaScript for nytimes.com.
Is it too late to move to a country with an NHS?
https://mastodon.online/@fade/110633615710521393
I mean honestly, anyone arguing that universal basic income would stop people from working has never MET actual humans. We save UP money and vacation time to do stuff!
https://mastodon.online/@fade/110633640611487398
@fade Which Ninja turtle was Donatus? He wielded a synod?
@fade so Mastodon versus Twitter, welcome to the hellsite versus rejected the hellsite... I'm not sure the ordering is consistent here? which ones are Tumblr?
@mjg59 I first started to question the GPL when the FSF was so happy that the DMCA gave it more teeth. It had become part of the problem.
@suihkulokki @mjg59 Gazing into the abyss is paywalled these days.
Linux first compiled with LLVM in 2011. Android deprecated gcc in 2016 and removed it in 2020, building the entire OS with LLVM.
Gnu delenda est.
https://fedi.lynnesbian.space/@lynnesbian/101418079532140692
@pzmyers@octodon.social Spider hell, spider hell. Eldrich realm where the spiders dwell...
I still think you're behind Georg on the list.
@boramalper @lonjil @mjg59 Copyright law was extended to cover binaries by the Apple versus Franklin decision in 1983. Before that computer binaries were "just a number" and uncopyrightable. Before the berne convention (1976-79 depending on jurisdiction) software source code wasn't copyrightable. Unix started in 1969 and was published in 1974.
Open source software is decades older than Stallman's GNU Project. Decus, the CP/M users group... He invented nothing, just took credit for it.
@vazub Does that have a C compiler? I thought zig was yet another programming language.
@0xabad1dea I am, sadly, aware. :(
@vazub I just want a sane current version of http://ellcc.org/ that supports all the musl architectures...
I knew Ezra Miller flashing people in theaters didn't go over so well and the new owners of DC have been doing a fire sale of all their IP, but... an Isekai? Really?
I mean yeah they had like a week to put that together so Harley Quinn hitting an orc with a baseball bat, still picture of the joker not remotely looking where he's driving, loud atonal muzak, and we licensed Amanda Waller too, here's her stylesheet shifting posture.
Maybe an idea worth doing will emerge?
Blah, I really should just cut a toybox release with what I've got. There's always one more feature that's ALMOST done. A wafair thin commit...
@vazub Yes I know. (I worked at the next desk over from its author for most of 2018.)
I've poked at this a bit myself:
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2021-August/012497.html
https://landley.net/notes-2021.html#28-07-2021
But compiler-rt's build plumbing was an eldrich abomination last I checked.
@rodhilton The ratelimiting happened at 9am eastern time of the 1st of the month because Twitter owed $42 million for Google cloud services and refused to pay the bill.
Oh hey, Twitler's performing the next step of DARVO: blame the victim. (I know you are but what am I?)
Twitter ratelimited everything when their bandwidth collapsed because they refused to pay $42 million they owed to google cloud services? Modify robots.txt to block google so the whole of twitter stops showing up in Google search results! That'll show 'em!
https://universeodon.com/@TomWellborn/110657677903620346
Can someone put the tantruming toddler in a timeout? Or at least take away the toy he keeps hitting himself with?
@b0rk I did the best I could summarizing the sed options in the toybox help text:
https://landley.net/toybox/help.html#sed
After writing two sed implementations (busybox's and toybox's), I still have to look stuff up, and the gnu man page is _useless_ for that.
Similarly, this is the least bad I could get find:
https://landley.net/toybox/help.html#find
I haven't written an awk yet. Not looking forward to it...
@vazub I've bookmarked your link, but shoehorning it into my system builder (https://landley.net/toybox/faq.html#mkroot) could be tricksy.
I've been test building with the gcc+glibc toolchain in devuan, the gcc+musl toolchain from musl-cross-make, and the llvm+bionic toolchain in the Android NDK. I'd love an llvm+musl option in there...
@vazub The roadmap still describes what I'm working on, yes. I give it at least a quick glance each release.
Doing the shell is one of those giant chewing-an-elepant things, and I'm a bit stunlocked by bug reports since the userbase is a bit bigger than it used to be. But I'm working on it. :)
Ha, I _said_ that chatgpt's users were seeing faces in clouds.
This guy goes further and explains how the LLMs people react to (and which thus go viral and get funding) automate cold reading, the technique con artists use to seem psychic:
https://toot.cafe/@baldur/110655623959939347
The Forer Effect is also the basis for horoscopes. Susceptibility to this can be HIGHER among the well but narrowly educated, see also "Nobel Disease" (which is basically a Dunning-Kruger variant):
@davidallengreen I think I only follow Popehat here? Most of the lawyers I follow are on youtube.
@elithebearded @fade I've had one or two get a couple hundred boost/favorites... and like 3 replies.
People never think about archiving. Distributed systems are great, but all your links are 404 in 6 months.
I'm aware some people think that's a feature. I'm happy to leave them to it, and forget they exist in 6 months.
@davidallengreen And https://law-and-politics.online/@Teri_Kanefield gets boosted a lot.
@shoq Yeah, the Linux kernel has developed a similar problem recently.
@jessitron I tend to think in terms of pareto principle iterations: the 80/20 rule iterates to 96% coverage with twice the effort and 99.2% with triple the effort. You're basically never getting that last bit though.
@dailybutts Ask not for whom Ma Bell tolls. Let it go to voicemail.
@blaise @internetarchive Archiving something you weren't asked to opens a large organization with deep pockets to legal liability in a bunch of different ways. DMCA takedowns and EU "right to be forgotten" nonsense is just the tip of the iceberg.
Twitter and YouTube took all sorts of stuff down for crazy moving goal post reasons, but it wasn't like geocities or yahoo groups just going away one day.
Back in the BBS days we had "mushroom boards" that sprouted and we're gone again with the rain.
@boramalper The stuttering problem, about 32 minutes into this old rant from 2019. https://youtu.be/MkJkyMuBm3g
@alda The tax is an excuse. It's to stop paying residuals to writers who are on strike in hopes of starving them back to work.
Moral of the story: W3C is a completely dysfunctional standards body suborned by money performing regulatory capture, and their attempts to gatekeep should be ignored.
@jaykuo It's hard to get excited that 5 years after Michael Cohen was sentenced, they're indicting the orange one's manicurist and the guy who resurfaced his driveway.
@cstross well at the end you've got to drown it to be sure.
Faceboot threads smells a bit like Google Plus. Especially the part where Google Plus destroyed the existing YouTube commenting community (which never recovered).
I can't tell if "deleting threads deletes your hipstergram account" is hostage taking or incompetence. "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity" is a Newtonian physics statement, and we're dealing with Einsteinian levels of both here...
In Hogfather (Discworld, by Terry Pratchett), a high-end restaurant's larder is magically replaced with mud and old boots (with the high-end food going to a group of beggars under a bridge).
The restaurant staff rallies, elegantly prepares the leather with foreign names and fancy (mud-based) sauces, and the rich people there for "an experience" demand more until they use up the staff's own footwear.
This comic makes a similar point impressively succinctly:
Ah, my bad. It's not robots.txt, it's Google search removing paywalled links from search results, since providing a link you can't click isn't useful.
This kind of coverage is important. Solar is perfect for Austin: solar power matches air conditioning. If it's raining, it's cooler.
And if you can get over the "oh noes, waste!" bugaboo about curtailment, you can just install three times as much solar as you need. It's cheap, unplugging the panels doesn't damage them, you can add batteries later, you're never _short_ of power, and demand loads for free electricity will emerge. (Part-time aluminum smelter anyone?)
@caolan I miss the Linux Luddites podcast. ("Each week we try the latest free and open source software and then decide we like the old stuff better.")
Alas, only made it to the end of 2016...
@ct_bergstrom He went with "zuck" as his handle?
Wow. That really zucks.
Why are we assuming twitter's PR poop emoji auto-responder is _intentional_?
It started when he fired the people who did that job. Does anybody left behind still have access to change it?
Musk does the same "I meant to do that" as a cat who fell off a table, as demonstrated by the rate limiting when he stopped paying the cloud server bill. He _pretends_ to have control. Yes I TOTALLY shot my own foot off. Me. I did that. Big plan from a bigly brain, you'll see.
@firstdogonthemoon Except for bluesky, which is presumably less condescending.
@kilnfiendpotter I thought "AFAB" was a feds version of "all cops are bastards" for _years_ until I finally googled it.
@surabax Each server has a public key, so transactions between servers are verified. You can verify that a post came from an account on a server. Who owns/controls that account on that server is outside of the scope of activitypub.
@b0rk I have a to-do item to implement iptables in toybox. I do not have a to-do item to implement the nft version, and nobody's ever explained what the advantage would be.
For dinner I cooked fish fingers and fuzzy made custard: I think they go pretty well together.
She put red food coloring in hers so it was tubby custard because she's not a fan of the cheap fish fingers I got, although she admits the're less bad when not freezer burnt.
@aristofontes @fade A culinary review of a hate group's event catering has strong 2023 vibes, yes.
The rich white people giving each other awards, the trump rally, "cofounder Tiffany Justice" talking on stage? Seen it, boring. I was here for the food, and it was disappointing.
@taylorlorenz @exchgr@mastodon.world https://mastodon.social/@Sardonicus/110669151272278705
Instead of specifically lobbying to fix this kind of tax loophole, I lobby to guillotine the billionaires. Accumulating an offensive amount of capital should be a capital offense. (You can stop being a billionaire with a stroke of a pen, it is a choice, and "this will only happen over my dead body" has an obvious answer. I agree that they will die before they pay taxes.)
Breathing tetraethyl lead in gasoline exhaust worked on the Boomers about the same way as the seti alpha 5 earworm in Star Trek 2. (Not just lead poisoning, an _organic_ lead compound, inhaled, to get it right into your cells.) The resulting brain damage took down their intellectual defenses against scams. Then they projected their failure on others and denied it in themselves, until age related neurological decline decompensated them into credulous vegetables.
https://thecanadian.social/@MostlyHarmless/110675418712196162
I hope this results in more affordable mutton. https://youtu.be/T6PEk_OZUmI
@KatM@mastodon.social @breadandcircuses @smit9186 Borrowing your neighbor's lawnmower was never capitalism. Parents don't raise children for monetary gain. Capitalism is a religion overlaid on society. Money is just as imaginary as ecclesiastical grace.
@amaditalks Lobby for guillotines, not fines.
@luna Which server issues?
@amaditalks We've reinvented kings, this time based on the divine right of capitalism instead of the divine right of catholicism. A religion of numbers, which also don't exist if people stop believing in them.
We have a successful historical model for dealing with kings.
@BunRab Southside market in Elgin has mutton ribs.
Why would the world female chess champion be required to play in Saudi Arabia (with face covering and male escort) to defend her title? That's a profoundly broken chess league.
@BunRab Given how many thousands of years humans have been eating mutton, I'd be surprised if there was no way to prepare it so that it's tasty.
Well of COURSE you shake money from Boomers by making them angry, they spent 50 years breathing Tetraethyl lead, and here in the USA they have more money than everybody else combined.
https://mastodon.social/@axios/110685922870206944
Boomers have 78.4 trillion of the USA's $140 trillion:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-generations.html
Neurological damage from lead poisoning's well-known effects on emotional regulation:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/lead-kids-blood-linked-behavioral-emotional-problems
Boomers got SO MUCH lead from the now-banned gasoline additive:
https://www.iflscience.com/how-lead-poisoning-changed-the-personality-of-a-generation-60322
I've reached the point where I see "blah runs on GNU/Linux" and close the tab, because I just run Linux and can't be bothered installing gnu.
(It goes in the "requires gnome" or "requires kde" bucket, unnecessary dependency. On ideology in this case, but still.)
A reminder that worldcon is in china this year because they literally bought the vote:
https://mstdn.jp/@landley/109943343174652695
Thus pulling out of consideration for this year's Hugos is a bit like pulling out of the "sad puppy" nomination slate.
@dryak@mstdn.science Not yet, but alpine runs busybox.
@dryak@mstdn.science Also, gnu never had anything to do with Linux. Stallman lied for self-promotion at great length.
https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010
Linux emerged from of the Minix community (hence the early discussion all being on comp.os.minix, and the famous tanenbaum-torvalds debate).
It used gcc, but I used that on OS/2 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMX_(programming_environment) here's another compiler in 2004 https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html and Linux has been building with llvm since 2011 (android removed gcc support entirely in 2019).
@dryak@mstdn.science Nope, the Boomers are uniquely measurably bad. People underestimate just HOW big the lead issue was, and normalize current experience.
This is the best article I've found about it, long but well worth reading in its entirety:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans
@dryak@mstdn.science Boomers are subject to mass elder abuse scams. When it happens to celebrities it makes news:
But it's everywhere. About 2/3 of Boomers started rapidly decompensating ~15 years ago as age related neurological degeneration combined badly with decades of pediatric-then-chronic lead exposure. Nigerian email scams were aimed at Boomers, then the tea party worked out how to make them political cannon fodder ten years ago.
@dryak@mstdn.science Gerontocracy often begets fascism: Hindenberg was 86 years old when he signed the Reichstag Decree. But the mass lead poisoning that hollowed out the cities (the move to suburbia was a move _upwind_, and even within cities you get https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/may/12/blowing-wind-cities-poor-east-ends) had a strong statistical effect on the Boomers that we just have to wait out.
@dryak@mstdn.science This gives me hope, by the way. There is at least potentially an end to it.
@dryak@mstdn.science Where you see "gnu" userland I see "linux" userland.
Keep in mind the glibc 2.0 maintainer did not consider himself part of the gnu project, and accused Stallman of doing a "hostile takeover" of his project: https://sourceware.org/legacy-ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html#:~:text=Stallman
(Linux had its own libc5 but Java couldn't work _without_ threads, and Ulrich had done a private fork of the then-irrelevant glibc that rewrote everything to add thread support, so people switched to that as "libc6" as the easy way to get threads.)
I might be a little trigger happy on blocking anyone who implies "maybe this widespread decades long manmade climate disaster we're now struggling with never really happened, because the romans did something similar and they were fine".
I'm not trying to convince such people. I'm waiting for them to die.
@KatM@mastodon.social @breadandcircuses @smit9186 Years of Twitter scarring make me reluctant to try for nuance in a channel like this.
David Graeber's books "Debt, the first 5000 years" and "Bullshit jobs: a theory" speak waaaaay better about this topic than I can hope to. (He was better than "Doctor of Anthropology teaching at the London School of Economics" would lead you to expect.) His excellent book lecture tour talks for both are on youtube.
@shauna The best way I've found to search my _own_ old posts is to download my archive and fiddle with the resulting text file locally. Not helpful with other people's posts though...
Money is a promise. (So are laws, employment contracts, the deed to your house...) Debt makes new promises (to pay in future) and thus creates new money (tradeable "financial assets") that can be owned, and thus hoarded by unguillotined billionaires. Thus infinite debt (with insurance policies that pay out when the debt is "defaulted on" at death) allows infinite wealth accumulation.
You should always put "unguillotined" before "billionaire", unless it isn't true.
How can a thread about sex in fruit flies be interesting?
https://masto.ai/@vagina_museum/110689443101976027
Simple: Angus Bateman's 1948 fruit fly experiment "showing" eggs are expensive but sperm is cheap thus all females are naturally choosy and males promiscuous ("Bateman's Principle")... is unreproducible. Female fruit flies regularly mate with multiple males, always did. White men clung to junk science that said what they wanted to hear.
(Also, "oral sex in fruit flies" can be sung to "who can take a rainbow".)
As with many Norman Rockwell moments, the heartwarming facade contains a reason to pull out the torches and pitchforks and BURN IT DOWN after a moment's thought.
@pkrugman Welcome back.
@cstross century eggs
@zcutlip I never remember -no-pager, I just pipe it through cat.
About 17 minutes into this interview David Draiman, lead singer of Disturbed, talks about the vocal technique he uses in the Sound of Silence to safely layer vocal fry over vibrato.
@ska He refers to it as "almost vocal fry" at one point. (Not my area.)
@KatM@mastodon.social @breadandcircuses @smit9186 Here's a couple small chunks of talks he gave about basic income, for example:
@KatM@mastodon.social @breadandcircuses @smit9186
There's a lot. This should get Youtube's recommendations started:
@exchgr@mastodon.world The rising tide drowns people who don't have a boat.
Sadly common: parched soil with any clay content at all has to soak for quite a while before it becomes permeable again. So a heavy rain after a drought will just pool on the surface and wash downhill, unable to soak in.
Climate change oscillating between flood and drought can screw things up really bad without even changing the average amount of water per year.
https://strangeobject.space/@SallyStrange/110691154835176989
Remember that bit in the Matrix where Agent Smith was supposed to die and then just... didn't?
https://mastodon.social/@darrylrscott/110695050273286081
The GOP figured that trick out in 2007. The normal scandal-resignation trajectory was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Foley_scandal but then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Craig_scandal did NOT resign: announced his intention to and then didn't, and served 2 more years in the senate. Turns out there wasn't a mechanism to STOP him.
Democrats continued to uniltaterally resign, of course. Al Franken resigned in 2018.
@gnomon @juliank Long ago I was pondering a driver to _mount_ a tar.gz, but wound up using ZISOFS, then squashfs pretty much did the thing so I don't have to.
1) please don't gratuitously break compatibility
2) yet more fancy container nesting and layering ala flatpak means I will stay far away from the horrific eldritch monstrosity, possibly with popcorn.
If you really want to populate a squashfs at install time there's no reason you can't. I mean, sanity, but given the initial suggestion...
@cstross This is the Cat Stevens version of Mercedes Benz licensing that Janis Joplin song, isn't it?
@cstross Or did you mean https://youtu.be/GJlkS_jnlYY and yes it was real.
Capitalism kills. Intentionally. All the time.
@saraislet How many dullahans report to you?
@saraislet You mentioned zero headcount...
@girlonthenet Fascinating, medium displays for about 1 second then turns into a blank white screen.
Oh well, websites rendering themselves unusable and taking down third party content posted to them is 2023 in a nutshell...
@clarfonthey People use Wayland outside of Red hat?
@lonjil @clarfonthey Huh. I use xfce, which has never bothered to support wayland. Each new release unrelated people write articles about how the NEXT one will _clearly_ support wayland because they've got to START caring at some point, right? No mention of it on the mailing list I've seen though. Nobody asking for it either.
(To be honest, all I really remember about wayland at this point is it breaks ssh x11 tunneling? The GPU seems to work to play video just fine without it...)
@lonjil @clarfonthey I don't care about Apple silicon Macs. Good luck with them...
@lonjil @clarfonthey Framebuffer is a bitmap. Clearly an obsolete concept, there's no such thing anymore.
@Rachel_Thorn@queer.party Because discord/twitch are terrible in the same way for every user so you can find a tutorial walking you through it or get onboarded by a friend, but each Mastodon instance is slightly different and tends to fill up so the person who introduces you to it can't get you on their instance or says you should pick a different one.
Plus whichever instance you pick will be imperfect, and you will be criticized for not finding the mythical nonproblematic instance "somewhere, out there".
1) Capitalism is a bad thing.
2) Boomer pearl-clutching after 9/11 giving full fascist authority to TSA security theater mall cops so you're not a citizen while in an airport is _also_ a bad thing.
3) The two combine poorly.
@saraislet How about Nukekubi? Japanese, hardworking, average salaries are lower over there... Doesn't have Ireland's tax advantages, of course.
I have no idea what the yokai work visa situation is like post-pandemic. Disney's Haunted Mansion's HR department might know?
(I may not be entirely clear on what hiring with zero headcount means.)
@BunRab Pickle was a good cat.
@exchgr@mastodon.world A big nuclear plant uses about 20,000 gallons of cooling water per second, and france has 56 operating nuclear power plants.
Suspending student loan payments has been economic stimulus, similar to a small non-universal basic income.
That's why republicans are so DESPERATE to kill it. Keeping "the poors" down is the centerpiece of republican philosophy. If it's zero sum us vs them, hurt THEM. Can't get good help these days? The people you want to force to work for peanuts just aren't desperate enough yet.
https://mstdn.social/@DrPsyBuffy/110697597910919676
This is why I lobby for guillotining the billionaires, not deck chair rearranging.
Zero interest rates meant dot-coms could borrow to make payroll forever, as long as the bank kept saying yes. And banks could borrow at less than inflation from the Federal reserve's "overnight window", and get cheap insurance, which could get reinsurance from Berkshire Hathaway etc. So why NOT lend it? To "the right people", of course.
But now there's interest that needs paying. A lot of startups' credit cards got cut up, their minimum monthly payments doubled.
@davidgerard I fixed that fork problem in a Johnson controls product by using vfork() instead.
Theirs was an 80 thread .net mono hairball, and the immediate problem wasn't running out of memory, but the 75 millisecond latency spike as a per-process in kernel lock blocked any of the threads that made a syscall while it was copying all that memory. (One of the threads was handling a token ring like protocol that would declare a device dead if it didn't respond in 4 milliseconds.)
The point of "trademark" was so you could identify where something came from. That's it, that's the entire idea. Don't pretend your work is someone else's. Forgery: not allowed.
So of course unguillotined billionaires are preparing to do it again.
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@radiatoryang/110709666005386672
There are so many LAYERS of wrong in the ongoing silicon valley pivot from bitcoin to chatgpt, but "Grima Wormtongue gave 99% good advice to King Theoden, that's why he was a trusted advisor" is a good place to _start_.
If you have a bag of M&Ms and three of them are poisoned, you do not eat from the bag.
If you've created a search engine paraphraser that cannot ever say "I don't know", do not use it.
The mozilla foundation being a scam is not news either. I keep ringing that bell, but nobody listens:
@dalias It's a pity the KDE guys tied all their stuff together into an all or nothing hairball. I still miss kmail, but not enough to abandon XFCE for it.
A year ago, the fed funds rate was 1.75%. This week it's 5.25%. I.E. the minimum payment of any large corporate debt burden TRIPLED.
Meanwhile, Emerald Boy thinks he invented the leveraged buyout:
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/110718094024730196
(Speaking of which, 1980s junk bond king Michael Milken made a plea bargain in 1989 so he ONLY got a $600M fine, 10 years in prison, and banned for life from trading by the SEC. He was, of course, pardoned by Resident Rump in 2020. Guillotine the billionaires.)
@chrisisgr8 I know they're having trouble with spammers using LLMs to make content farms, but they still have the old crawl caches they should be able to use to find stuff that's been there a while.
The problem is Google laid off 12,000 people in January, who turned out to be load-bearing.
@akkartik where did you move servers to?
Breadth vs Depth in capital supply. Breadth: sell more. Depth: destroy all the world's supply except one, then auction it to the highest bidder.
Current example, collusion in the New York City real estate market.
Remember, cities arose as places where people lived. The "commute" was invented when people fled cities to avoid inhaling tetraethyl lead exhaust. Streets were for people until the 1920s when "jaywalking" was invented, and municipally enforced parking minimums made downtown residences unprofitable.
In the 1990s, half the shopping center near my house was torn down and converted to superfluous parking spaces, when Ann Richards stopped being governor and George W Bush took over, and the sycophants around him were fucking stupid.
https://austin.towers.net/a-bigger-h-e-b-wont-fix-hancock-center-but-its-not-a-bad-start/
4/5 of the parking in Hancock center is always empty. There are three different bus stops at the edges of the property, and a fourth in the middle of the parking lot. Bulldozing shops to put in parking lots served no purpose except ideology.
@melodymeows@queer.party I lobby to "guillotine the billionaires". With due process of law.
It's short, snappy, punches up, and centers the real problem. Hoarding an offensive amount of capital should be a capital offense. Thousands of medical gofundmes remain unfulfilled so some white guy can build another dick rocket.
He can stop being a billionaire with the stroke of a pen. Becoming (and remaining) a billionaire is a choice.
@mtyka Bacteria have been evolving enzymes to eat plastics for many decades now. This does not require genetic engineering.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230123083443.htm
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/02/new-external-story/
This is not a garbage disposal story, this is a "PVC pipe no longer lasts in the ground" story eventually shading to "soda bottles degrade during shipment".
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/10/microbes-digest-plastics-low-temperatures-recycling
@DavBot @rodhilton Remember the bit at the end of Ladyhawke where Bishop Stephen Falken said "if I can't have her no man shall" and got stabbed by Kingsley?
I lobby for guillotines. Never open with a compromise position, ask for what you _want_.
@saraislet Are we feeding a horse-sized duck or a horrible goose? If so, what to?
@Merovius Years ago at IBM we had a shell script to do this.
@fade One problem with twitch is it doesn't retain archives more than a few months. You can link to (some) old streams, but only for a certain amount of time unless you upload them to YouTube or something.
America's plurocrat oligarchs know the guillotines are coming, that's why they're hiding.
As John Rogers said, "A fine is a price". The Sackler family killed 200,000 people for profit and never even served jail time, they just had to share some of their profits with regulators.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49718388
They admitted to having $13 billion (more in swiss bank accounts):
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49702413
And gave back $6 billion in exchange for immunity.
@shadowsminder So you're asking which part of a land taken by invasion and genocide does not have a proud history of racism?
The Louisiana purchase bought the right to evict native Americans from France. (How is this NOT the "I have a bridge to sell you" scam?)
If you're wondering about the Confederacy specifically... maybe Hawaii? We arrested and imprisoned Hawaii's queen for "treason". (I still scratch my head about how that's supposed to work. Define "queen"...)
@fade I'm just annoyed that there's the link to the post on the original server, and a _seperate_ link to a copy of the post on the server I'm using, and I sometimes have to dig to get the first instead of the second.
It's like getting one of those t.co wrapper links instead of the original link, except I can't just cut and paste it into a tab to resolve it to get the real link. Instead Mastodon gives me some stupid frame wrapper nonsense hiding the original.
Grognard REALLY hates quote tweets
@fade Given that they fired Geralt, I'm assuming a cash grab before rapid implosion?
@MichaelBishop @GossiTheDog How can anyone putting up a website or email trust that their web server will stay up? If you use GeoCities or Hotmail, you eventually migrate and people learn your new address. If you get your own domain and pay dreamhost or similar to run a server for you... well mine's been there 15 years so far? In that time Sears, Kmart, Chi Chi's, Hertz, and Fry's went away so I'm not sure what you expect from the internet.
@sneakernets It's not a guess, we watched it happen. It didn't scale, nobody wanted to pay for it except right-wing loons at places like Breitbart, and the constant stream of goatse and snuff films burned moderators out even without brigading and russian/koch troll farms.
Places like slashdot and fark.com are still human curated. They never stopped.
I do not understand David Tenant's return to Doctor who. He was, finally, Ginger. As predicted, "a new man sauntering away" and Crowley has a heck of a saunter.
The new role let David show his range: not of this world, centuries old, driving an antique supernatural vehicle, unstable without his companion, saving the world by running around talking to people and performing the occasional very minor miracle, now exiled to Earth and laying low from his own people...
Phone was having trouble charging, connector had to be in just the right position, increasingly fiddly over the past 6 months.
Looked for something long and poky to try to clean out the connector with: nothing in the house, grabbed a pin out of a sewing kit, removed a bunch of fluff from connector... Phone no longer charges at _all_.
Sigh, not an entirely unexpected result. Trying to figure out if I should take it to a repair place or the T-mobile 2 blocks away to buy a new phone.
Last time I ordered an unlocked phone directly from Google (in hopes of using it for development after I eventually replaced it), but I'm pretty sure the 64% battery left won't last the day, let alone long enough to receive a new phone by mail.
I have NEVER managed to use an old phone for development, because I never replace them until they die in a way I can't easily get repaired.
Aha, it does still charge, I just have to jam the cable in the socket REALLY HARD.
I'm not sure what the lesson is here. "I didn't poke around in the socket with the sharp metal thing _enough_, and possibly there should have been solvents".
(How do you clean electronics? When I was young my father took our Amiga 1000 keyboard to work and cleaned it with Freon. It never worked right again. There's a certain household tradition to upkeep, is what I'm saying.)
@blaise Me or the phone?
@shadowsminder Thomas Jefferson believed Napoleon had the right to sell millions of acres of American land.
The USA bought the right to invade Oklahoma from France.
It makes about as much sense as buying Japan from England, since they were allies in world war I and all...
I'm pointing out that it's stupid. It's right of conquest, nothing more.
@shadowsminder I did not make this up by the way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase
In Richard Nixon's 1972 trip to China, he said to Chairman Mao:
"The Chairman can be sure that whatever we discuss, or whatever I and the Prime Minister discuss, nothing goes beyond the room."
That's a direct quote from the recently declassified transcript:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/24/document-of-the-week-pompeo-buries-u-s-china-engagement-policy/
@dame @MichaelBishop @GossiTheDog "You should get an email address." "But how will I know which email provider is still going to be around in the future? No, I'll stick with Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL. They have a proven track record."
*shrug* You do you. I didn't particularly want to hear from you anyway, and am going to block you in a couple minutes because I curate my experience here.
@blaise I poke around to try to free stuff up and then bonk it on the table to get the bits out.
I have insufficient tools, trying to operate in a really cramped space. (I used to have a couple of those ring with pointy metal bit they include in phone repair kits to eject SIM cards, but couldn't find any when I looked. I've already stabbed myself with the needle from the sewing kit once...)
Hands up everyone who predicted this.
@blaise Apparently the carbon contacts were soluble in it.
@inthehands @sarahtaber Also known as Sir Humphrey Appleby's "four stage strategy" from Yes Prime Minister:
@jessitron This is why I try to move stuff to email when possible. Built-in paper trail.
I still lobby to "guillotine the billionaires". If you want to counteroffer to merely tax them white, that's on you. That is a compromise position watering down the real goal.
Exiling Napoleon to Elba didn't stop him scheming his way back.
@flexghost Tax the churches. All of them. It's a business.
@blaise @fade Which one was that... Ah, former CEO of Opera who sold that company to a Chinese consortium, and then started over with a new Chrome fork with "proprietary extensions". (Wikipedia does not say what they are and I'm not clicking through the reference articles just now...)
He has a mastodon account where he posts cat pictures, that is definitely an argument in his favor.
@mjg59 @rburchell @keithzg As soon as the Linux foundation got involved I expected doom.
Never depend on a Microsoft cloud service for anything, and that includes Microsoft GitHub.
The reason there aren't "good cops" holding the bad ones accountable is they get literally murdered with no investigation. Defund the police.
@penguin42 @akkartik A router could be regularly resetting itself and thus clearing its NAT table. If the reboot only takes half a second non-NAT connections wouldn't notice.
@exchgr@mastodon.world That CNN was bought by an octogenarian billionaire who announced plans to compete directly with Fox News for the same audience?
It was part of the same Discovery acquisition that trashed HBO Max. There was a bunch of coverage last year:
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3634717-changes-spark-chatter-of-cnn-is-shift-from-left-to-right/
@exchgr@mastodon.world Yes, he's out because he wasn't MAGA-ifying CNN fast enough for John Malone.
Yes I know Biden is sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. I thought that decision was made last week? Let me check my YouTube history for what I've watched on this topic so far:
@exchgr@mastodon.world tl;dr Russia has been firing cluster munitions at Ukraine continuously since the start of the war, and their old Soviet stocks have a 40% dud rate where the scattered bombs don't immediately explode and potentially act as landmines.
The USA version has a 2% dud rate, which was still considered too high and why we stopped using them. But we didn't sign any treaties about it, and what Ukraine is likely to do is drop the individual bomblets from drones anyway, as better grenades.
@exchgr@mastodon.world But Russia's troll farms have been screaming about how this is unfair, because it's very effective against them. And that gets magnified by the usual right wing patsies, which sadly now includes CNN opinion columnists.
@exchgr@mastodon.world The thing about the cluster munitions is the USA decided to stop using them and mothballed them all, and we don't intend to start using them again so we don't need to hold any in reserve to defend ourselves or our overseas allies, and we've got 300,000 of them in storage that we haven't disposed of yet because it's expensive to dismantle.
Ukraine has a shortage of artillery ammunition, and this stuff was _designed_ to clear trenches.
Firing them at Russia is a disposal method.
@exchgr@mastodon.world But if 2% of them fail to go off aren't we creating minefields?
Russia is literally creating minefields, that's what's slowing Ukraine's advance. That's what they would be fired into. Russian minefields full of trenches with Russian soldiers who invaded the country and committed some truly sick war crimes that we know about, and a whole lot more that we won't find out about until we push them back.
How dare we.
@exchgr@mastodon.world I follow people like https://mastodon.world/@saint_rebel_ukraine_/110696236021492711 here, and try to pay attention to Zalensky's speeches ala https://thehill.com/policy/international/4093213-zelensky-thanks-biden-for-difficult-decision-to-send-cluster-munitions-to-ukraine/ and listen to Europeans like https://youtu.be/SPX1CieUkFY and they're all pretty much united that this should have happened last year.
The USA's strategy is to prevent Russia from losing, so Russia keeps pouring all its Soviet inheritance into Ukraine to be destroyed. They're not minimizing damage to Ukraine, they're maximizing drain on Russia.
Hence the slow walk.
Twitter is dying one community at a time.
@skinnylatte Because there's a tax preparation industry of unnecessary middlemen that spends about half its profits lobbying to prevent their niche from going away.
My english minor has been more useful than my computer science major. (The important comp-sci stuff was all self-taught.)
Seriously, I took comp sci classes to bring up my GPA after things like a D in french, and wound up double majoring and double minoring with computer science being one of them, but I had a commodore 64 in my room when I was 10. THAT is where I learned programming.
My CS degree taught me pascal, cobol, lithp, prolog, fortran, the assembly language of an HP minicomputer using binary coded decimal that they unplugged and THREW OUT at the end of the semester.
Yes, it was all obsolete at the time.
I learned Basic from the C64 programmer's reference guide, and taught myself C starting with a library book and continuing with a book I borrowed from a friend of a friend. (It was so I could modify the WWIV builletin board source code for the friend who knew the guy with the book.) Both before even deciding on the college where I majored in comp-sci.
Maybe it's different these days? But college was GOOD at teaching humanities. Making stuff was not just EASIER to self-teach, but better result.
The "C and Unix" night class (taught by the campus sysadmin adjuncting after hours) was entertaining, but I'd already been using both for multiple years by then.
And I learned what a linked list was called (after using them for years without knowing it had a name).
And I learned Bresenham's Line Drawing Algorithm, and twos complement representation of negative numbers. Those were new and useful things taught in a college CS class, which stood out because that didn't happen much.
That's why Terry Pratchett's 2003 speech at Penguicon about how he didn't go into engineering because he didn't think he knew what he was doing... so he went into marketing instead.
The entire (self-taught) audience went "Dude! You were better than any of us!"
I've NEVER had any idea what I'm doing. If I knew what I was doing I'd have done it already and moved on...
tl;dr Don't assume credentials improve matters in any way.
Ha, I forgot Terry Pratchett had mentioned a bit of Good Omens 2 near the end of his Penguicon GOH talk in 2003.
https://archive.org/details/Penguicon_2.0_Terry_Pratchett_Guest_of_Honor_Speech_2003
"Technically speaking I have earned rather more air miles than the Wandering Jew. Which reminds me that's one of the things we were going to put in Good Omens 2. Cuz lazarus was still wandering the world but he'd got so many air miles he was now doing it in comfort... flying BA first class everywhere."
@Cax6ton A fitting successor to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khOfSVULtsU
@LadyDragonfly Ghost riders in the sky, I'm my own grandpa...
@elysegrasso@historians.social Oh credentials help you get the job. They just don't help you do the job.
Which kinds of credentials actually mean something (usually as a trailing indicator), which kinds are orthogonal to ability, and which kinds are actually a red flag that they pursued this _instead_ of skill development... that's too long of a discussion for this venue.
@DMX And the Wizard of Oz, Gulliver's travels, Dante's Inferno, Orpheus going after Euridice...
@Ihazchaos @Cax6ton The classic "Pachabel Rant" is
Which is basically the same obsevation as Axis of Awesome's Four Chord Songs:
One lesson from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station and that Chernobyl exclusion zone: when planning to build a nuclear reactor or store nuclear waste, be sure to locate it somewhere that will never experience civil unrest.
@mawhrin The downside of blowing up a dam is a lot of immediate destruction plus 5 to 10 years of additional consequences. Blowing up a nuclear reactor lasts thousands of years over thousands of miles. Not the same.
I said civil unrest because you don't _need_ a war to threaten a nuclear power plant. The Oklahoma City bombing was one guy (Timmy McVeigh). A dozen airplane hijackers took out the World Trade Center.
I'm glad Sherman's March to the Sea predated Georgia's Hatch and Vogtle plants.
@mawhrin Or the four in South Carolina. Sherman really really really didn't like South Carolina.
https://www.scemd.org/prepare/types-of-disasters/nuclear-power-plants/
Given the option to make several hundred square miles of south carolina unlivable for centuries, I honestly can't tell you what Sherman would have done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolinas_campaign
Historians talk about "salting the earth" for a reason. "But nobody would" it's not a sentiment that has held up well over the past few years.
@AutisticMumTo3 People keep thinking they can engineer resilience against natural disasters, and trying to dissuade them is a slog. (Oh the Titanic wouldn't happen _today_, instead they'll name it the Titan and it will sink to the bottom intentionally, so everything will be fine.)
"People 50 years from now may intentionally attack this thing, as a war crime, having read all the details of your design" is a different argument.
@liminally_human @fade I assume this is why rich people have a concierge and a sommelier and so on. Professional shoppers.
@0xabad1dea Oh yeah. Made by the people who did the "money for nothing video", who went on to do "transformers beast wars".
@regehr @penguin42 A Microsoft.
Sigh. The official Mastodon Android app could show me the list of posts I favorited, but if Tusky has a control for that I can't find it.
This soon to be paywalled article says activity on the new "threads" tab of hipstergram is down 70% from launch:
Just 13 million daily active users this past week, and on top of that average daily minutes spent in the app fell from 20 to 5.
@stormhill117 Yay! Thanks, yes that's it.
I've been asking for a "Koch Blocker" app for years and nobody wanted to make one, but...
@mjg59 Pilot error.
Reminder: modern pyrex is crap, because capitalism.
@akkartik @tedu @bouncepaw I copy them to the clipboard and paste them back, and then I can edit them. it's silly and stupid.
The Mozilla foundation was a scam from day 1. Galleon and Firefox were both EGCS style forks that attempted to escape the dysfunctional organization controlling development but got recaptured.
The co-founder of Opera started a new browser in 2016 that might be interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_Technologies
He's here on Mastodon https://social.vivaldi.net/@jon/110726034188278302
@sarahtaber The traditional fix is to have Joe Pesci yell at you about grits.
It's called #barbieheimer for a reason. You watch Barbie first, _then_ Oppenheimer:
https://mastodon.social/@mori_au/110760514978913374
Do it backwards, and may Barbie have mercy upon your soul:
@skinnylatte does the King Arthur website have a "start here" page? I tried googling for an introduction on the site, and it gave me a blog entry about sustainable baking from an environmental standpoint...
@evacide Yes. Search for "The last novel I wrote" here:
https://nanowrimo.org/pep-talk-from-neil-gaiman#:~:text=last@%20novel
(Sigh, it used to be this lovely pithy anecdote but they added four paragraphs of throat clearing at the start...)
@timkmak This is the only social media site I post on these days. I read all the chris_o threads and subscribe to a couple of actual Ukrainians who mostly post pictures of destroyed things and eulogies for people who've died, rather than anything strategic.
Most of the ruminations I see about whether cluster bombs are a good thing in this context come from various YouTube channels: Perun, Ryan McBeth, Adam Something, Lazerpig and the Nafo "even rounder" table...
@ploum Firefox is jumping out of the frying pan into the fire; the Mozilla foundation is a scam.
Vivaldi browser might be worth trying, but I haven't bothered yet.
@Woody The failure mode of perovskite solar cells has always been that the ink fades with exposure to sunlight, so they have a half-life of maybe 2 years, with significant efficiency degradation in months.
Every few months someone publishes a gushing article about how they've squeezed half a percent more efficiency out of their factory fresh operation, and never once address the pathetically short lifetime. Modern silicon cells are still at 80% efficiency in 40 years if hail doesn't smash them.
@cameronbosch @ploum That's a question for @jon
Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "Oh right, _Torment_ Nexus. Huh. So that's what it meant."
@jon @cameronbosch @ploum People are looking around for an alternative to Chrome with Google's latest lockdown proposal, and holding their nose to go Firefox. I mentioned Vivaldi and it was dismissed as closed source.
I guess that's why it's not in the Debian repository. They can't build it from source.
Judeo-christian values?
https://ourislandgeorgia.net/@Wolven/110764214245486481
The KKK is an explicitly Christian organization. That's why they burn crosses:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/12/why-does-the-ku-klux-klan-burn-crosses.html
Antisemitism was official Catholic policy until 1965:
https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/28/world/pope-jews/index.html
"Jihad" is basically arabic for "Crusade". The Church organized unprovoked mass invasions of Europe's peaceful Southern neighbors a half-dozen times, among other things sacking Constantinople.
Twenty years ago Elon Musk wanted to call PayPal "x.com" and it's one of the reasons they threw him off the board for being stupid.
https://www.shortform.com/blog/elon-musk-paypal-story/
He's renaming Twitter to x.com because he literally hasn't had a new idea in twenty years.
It's like that guy who wanted to put a giant mechanical spider in every movie he controlled. (He finally managed to insert it into the truly forgettable "Wild Wild West".)
Okay, apparently you don't "place a bet" with Lloyds of London, you take out a very specialized insurance policy against a "risk", and you have to be a "cardholder" in order to do so.
https://www.lloyds.com/en-us/lloyds-around-the-world/us/place-a-risk-at-lloyds
If anybody is a card holder, could they ask what odds Lloyds gives that within the next 12 months Elon Musk replaces the Twitter logo with a picture of his own genitals?
@atax1a X-Men, X-Force, Racer X, Weapon X, the supermarionation Zero-X
@atax1a 1970s comic books, speed racer, sailor Moon, and super marination were all aimed at children younger than 10.
He's already running "Space X", named after the X prize (which he lost, Paul Allen's SpaceShip One won it).
@ludibriumventis You can sing "baba yaga" to the alelujiah chorus.
So the twitter icon is now an X parrot.
He's aware you can't trademark individual letters, right?
Somebody MUST have told him...
This is a "the website formerly known as Prince" situation.
Altria renamed itself because the alternative was being remembered as Philip Morris.
@Dangerous_beans and here you thought the United States didn't have a caste system with "untouchables"...
@jens Ah, I'd wondered what https://toot.cat/@skye/110766933733612032 was subtweeting.
Does this mean "tweet" is generic now?
You could buy gasoline anonymously with cash. Every EV charge is tied to your identity via credit card: where you were, when you were, who you were. Stored forever.
@hallam @sophieschmieg @cstross @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org The twitter bird is now an X parrot.
It's always some flavor projection with conservatives. If they could imagine a different world they wouldn't BE conservatives, they'd be working towards a future instead of trying to reclaim a glorified past.
That's why their counterfactuals are always some variant of "I know you are but what am I?" They literally can't NOT project. Their brains hold nothing but themselves.
So when they say "other people can't be trusted to make this decision" they mean "I can't..."
Putting all your X in one handbasket.
Sigh, I don't want to switch browsers off chrome, but that's what's going around the zeitgeist right now:
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/110770824911292481
Right now vivaldi looks like the least bad option?
https://social.vivaldi.net/@jon/110766335906169200
A co-founder of Opera started over when his old company sold itself to china. Uses webkit (like chrome, a rewrite of a rewrite of konqueror) a bit like libre office forking off open office?
GUI layer is source-under-glass, but people used QT for decades without caring about that part.
@adrienne And libre office was a fork of open office. And webkit is a rewrite of a rewrite of konqueror. That part's open source and remaining so, from what I understand.
The dude's on mastodon posting cat pictures:
https://social.vivaldi.net/@jon/110726034188278302
To be honest, that's like 80% of my decision right there.
@mawhrin Mozilla is a capitalist hellscape of ex-Netscape get-rich-quick schemers sucking down half a BILLION dollars annually (that's their BURN RATE), and they've been getting that money from Google. Firefox is using the Ring against Sauron.
Vivaldi smells more like forking xfree86 to produce x.org (which sadly gave us freedesktop.org but as Steven Universe said, "there's no such thing as happily ever after, I'll always have work to do".)
*shrug* Open to suggestions, but Firefox ain't it.
@mawhrin Identifying a lifeboat and deploying it have a gap with me. I'm still using the Very Old Chrome in debian stale. :)
@Lockdownyourlife Peejee is 19. She's not very accurate these days.

@AimeeMaroux It's literally a unicode character.
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D54F
Bit hard to trademark...
Complexity is the opposite of security.
So simple it obviously has no problems, so complicated it has no obvious problems.
Good stuff succeeds by _outlasting_ bad stuff. If fediverse only gets 1% of the fallout each time from ping-pong between hellsites but _retains_ those users and is _still_here_ after dumpster fire du jour implods...
Email still exists. Microsoft spent years turning Outlook into a walled garden (long before gmail). Apple's doing the same with texting on phones (encouraging discrimination against the wrong color).
When the tide goes out again the rock remains.
@robcornelius Anthropologist David Graeber wrote a whole book about this. It's called "Bullshit Jobs". It's quite good.
Humans' vitamin deficiency diseases are the "blind cave fish" problem. Our genes actually have enzymes to make our own vitamin C and recycle Uric acid and so on... which broke.
@mjg59 @JessTheUnstill @nicolas17 Maybe they're sad that https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/zenbleed.html only seems to affect AMD chips?
I'm here frowning at why adding "quiet" to the 6.4 kernel command line doesn't shut up the "Spectre V2 : Kernel not compiled with retpoline; no mitigation available!" line. "Yes, I know, I configured this kernel that way to run in a VM that DOES NOT HAVE THAT BUG. Your up could be more shut." But no, the kernel clique insists they know better than everyone else combined...
Looks like I need to see Glass Onion. https://mastodon.me.uk/@garius/110770999920266394
Grognard is unlikely to encrypt DMs before allowing link tweets, so... never, then.
(Tweet is generic now, I can call it that here.)
Wait, Samwise Gamgee is the son of Patty Duke and Gomez Addams?
Every small business should have a section like that in their handbook.
https://zirk.us/@fade/110780702189629538
Fade worked for SJ Games after college, and created a game which got a reprint recently:
Remember that the art market is a giant scam built around loans and tax avoidance.
Have a paid flunky decree that "banana duct taped to a wall" is worth $10 million, deposit it as collateral in a bank vault and borrow $10 million against it at 1% interest. Rinse repeat.
Loans aren't taxable because they aren't income. The below inflation interest paid on them is tax deductible.
This is old school NFTs: literally creating assets out of nothing based on somebody's word.
Shipping electric cars with lithium ion batteries has _issues_.
A short can make them self-ignite and nothing puts them out (the reaction doesn't need oxygen or a minimum ignition temperature) until the battery chemicals finish discharging.
This is another reason to switch over to lithium-iron phosphate. You can set those on fire if you really try, but they burn like wood:
Not like thermite:
@kilroy_was_here @cpm @Homoevolutis0 lithium ion has about twice the energy to weight ratio of lithium iron phosphate, so it's still the favorite in the really tiny stuff like phones.
The real market driver isn't safety: lithium ion wears out fast. A 2 year old phone is lucky to still have 80% capacity if you keep it cold and never fully discharge it. Current LiPO4 chemistry+managers promise 80% capacity after 5000 full discharge cycles with just heat sinks. That's daily for 13 years.
In 1991, Joe Biden proposed what became the "clipper chip".
https://reason.com/2015/04/09/the-feds-want-a-back-door-into/
5 years ago, Joe Biden voted for Fosta/sesta:
And now the 80-year-old geezer is once again strangling the series of tubes, partnering with Republicans to pass another net nanny bill to outlaw encryption, mandate federal spyware, outlaw "being gay", and so on.
https://mastodon.social/@mitchw/110782161909690114
The boomers are not dying fast enough.
Content warning because it's got ME stressed out.
The Comstock Act gave us the "dead lesbians" trope. The Comics Code Authority was a BAD thing. The part where the married couple on the Dick Van Dyke show couldn't sleep in the same bed was STUPID.
But the rallying cry of "Think of the children! Family values!" seeps into Boomers' heads. Always from hate groups:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_on_the_Family
Don't take MY word for that, the southern poverty law center calls these clowns hate groups:
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/family-research-council
And Biden's right along with them, going "More sexual repression, just what we need. Ignore the catholic church choirboy scandal, blame the internet where people can't physically touch each other!"
Biden WANTED TO BECOME A CATHOLIC PRIEST.
I am kind of annoyed by this.
@ariadne I googled and found https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/21/20876742/lgbtq-presidential-forum-winners-losers saying
"each of the congresspeople and senators currently running for president voted for FOSTA/SESTA" but you're right, I forgot his 36 years in the senate did NOT include the 4 year gap between White Houses.
Really it's Boomers. I blame Boomers for everything at this point. Capitalism, global warming, oligarchs, rising rent and flat incomes, parking minimums...
Why is Joe Biden's KOSA act so completely terrible?
https://www.readtpa.com/p/congress-is-about-to-pass-a-very
(I mean there's a LIST, starting with "age verification" by definition eliminates anonymity, means undocumented people and migrants can't be online, and it puts EVERY site behind a paywall...)
But since Fosta/Sesta we've had ever-more CYA crap like this:
https://masto.ai/@vagina_museum/110786937440350330
And Joe Biden is proposing making it far, far worse. He's 80 years old now. The "Series of Tubes" guy was 82:
I am not trying to escape an abusive husband. I am not trying to get a medical procedure my state's attourney general disapproves of. I do not have a hate group repeatedly swatting me. I am not trying to put myself through college with modeling without being followed home. I'm not homeless or undocumented. My parents weren't in a cult.
But I still pay cash whenever possible because having every purchase I've ever made centrally recorded and data mineable by Greg Abbot's staff? BAD THING.
Peejee (19 year old cat) keeps coming into my room and standing on a box 3 feet from my desk and meowing at me at the top of her lungs, and I pick her up and pet her and go "what do you want?" and take her to the living room and put her down on the cat bed with the always-on heating pad under it... and she comes back and meows accusingly at me again a minute later. She has food, water, and catnip, but no.
As far as I can tell, she wants to be held. For hours. You'd think she'd get tired of it.
Nancy Pelosi is guilty of elder abuse.
@0xabad1dea Code switching. https://youtu.be/qXH5CD3O7Oc
Yaccarino followed up by saying that "fans and critics alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster…"
https://wheresyoured.at/p/the-rot-king
Imagine if somebody bought Wendy's and immediately pivoted from food to financial services.
Imagine being somebody who still went there for lunch every day, buying a bag of chips and a soda from a vending machine in a redecorated bank lobby advertising Roth IRAs you can only deposit dogecoin into.
I'm surprised the "didn't respond" did not include a poo emoji.
@penguin42 @roadskater @magnusrobotfighter @mdreid They bought Kinkos a couple decades back, and eventually renamed it FedEx office because keeping the name Kinkos made it too easy to remember what they did.
(They're still Kinkos in Japan, because Japanese businesses like to have customers.)
@GrimmReality Come over to the dark side, we have dental:
https://www.tumblr.com/dycefic/655190631067566080/writing-prompt-s-evil-mart-provides-a-vast
https://dycefic.tumblr.com/post/660154577076830208/have-an-evil-day/amp
Peejee seemed much older (ancient and rickety) before we:
A) Started giving her supplemental liquid cat food ("lil shakes") and using "calories go into the cat" (and stay in) as the important metric there.
B) Put an always-on ~40 watt heating pad under the throw blanket on the couch. (And now a plush cat bed on top of that.)
Elder kitten has affordances.
@eldritch48 Nah, we've been watching Boomer tantrums for 20 years. Repeating that would be embarrassing.
It's not so much "aging gracefully" as *resigned to splash damage".
@eldritch48 Some of us, certainly.
@eldritch48 Gen x was never dominant and self-referential in the same way, and we got about 20 years less chronic exposure inhaling tetraethyl-lead (although the pediatric damage is probably about as bad), the 1990 switch away from "we're just waiting for nuclear annihilation to kick in" was in our teens and 20s, not to middle age...
Catastrophize all you like, of course. But once the last Boomer is dead millennials will be numerically dominant.
Sigh. I want to like Cory Doctorow's threads. I strongly agree with everything this one says:
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/110791855391524106
But instead of linking to sources that support what he's saying, most of his links are to his own previous threads, and his language has gotten so inflammatory he's not even successfully speaking to the choir. (What does "spied on them from asshole to appetite" even mean?)
Anyway, I made it about halfway through that one before having to stop. In theory good stuff.
@akkartik Capitalism consumes like fire. It constantly tries to corner the market, and attacks anything free to replace it with a paid substitute, Ala bottled water companies lying about tap water.
The "tragedy of the commons" was a children's story lying to justify the enclosure acts, fencing in those commons to steal them from those who'd been there for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts
When the British got to America they did it again, stealing land from the natives "for their own good".
@Catvalente "They" is one guy in Germany.
Assuming "Jessie's Girl" was 18 when the song was released in 1980, she'd be 61 now.
I wonder if the singer ever learned her name?
Blah. Prudetube's android "share" doesn't include the #t=123s anchor tags. Song 3 from the little nav bar.
(Yes, the singer is the voice actor for Wakko Warner and Crash Bandicoot.)
@welshpixie So many eyes. So many wings. BE NOT AFRAID! No, seriously, come out from under that...
@bladecoder Can I do an equivalent of "pkill -f renderer" and get back the memory from the ~800 open tabs in 17 browser windows without losing the URL in any of them? (Yes, I have a bookmarks list, no I never look at anything I put in it again.)
@bladecoder Also, has mozilla.org's burn rate come down below $100 million/year yet? Historically paid to it by google (and before that yahoo) for search engine placement?
@benteh Not _that_ visually impaired, but I ctrl-plus pretty much all websites and some of them get VERY unhappy about this.
So many web developers never even TRY changing the default font size, even though the browser lets you do it dynamically (ctrl - + and ctrl - -)
@Rhodium103 Lobby for guillotines, not taxes.
Capitalism is about cornering the market. Taking what had been free for centuries, fencing it in, and charging a toll to access it.
https://hachyderm.io/@BenjaminHCCarr/110793385814965694
Capitalism consumes like fire. It creates nothing but turns everyone it touches into "consumers". And lies about it, with BS stories like "the tragedy of the commons".
This thread has a lot of replies.
@georgetakei "I've spent the last few years building up an immunity to Iocaine powder."
@welshpixie It wasn't the break-in that took down Nixon, it was the cover-up.
@faithisleaping I saw an explanation the other day that the reason Japan has so many high school anime is they culturally love stories about _development_.
Here in the states our plot arcs are all about winning and defeating and achieving goals and so on... but in Japan they want to see people mature and grow and learn and so on.
Hence every isekai arc where somebody gains a new skill and gets really good at that skill and everybody else goes "wow, you're really good at that now".
@fade@zirk.us @BunRab I've noticed that, for some reason, Austin has closed every ATM and library location within a mile of 45th and airport. (And moved our voting location too.)
Not sure why, but it seems pretty systematic over the past 3 years...
The Cordillera International Film Festival just awarded this best music video to:
Which was a sequel to:
Although personally I preferred:
And my favorite song of Whitney's is still:
And if you blame the Boomer Extinction Burst for the doom spiral, as mass chronic tetraethyl lead poisoning melds with senility to imbue that extraordinary demographic bulge with unprecedented opportunity for elder abuse, which switched from exploitation by Nigerian email scams to billionaire oligarchs doing regulatory capture against the entire political system with the "tea party" around 2010...
The light at the end of the tunnel is actuarial tables.
The current average US lifespan post-pandemic is 77 years.
Half of all Boomers were born before 1955.
1955+77 = 2032.
@annika Mine too. Only 2/3 of the Boomers went nuts, but I don't see any other fix than waiting them out.
The average Fox viewer is in their late '60s, and the only reason it's that young is the more extreme ones have gone to OIN and so on. There's always been John Rogers' "crazy 27%", but it's elder abuse scams that supplemented their numbers beyond fringe status.
@fade@zirk.us Biden was born during WWII. (Several analysts have commented that even some retirees never quite feel like adults, and want somebody older than themselves in charge. But then Trump and Bill Clinton are first year Boomers, and they got the Boomer vote...)
The younger half of Boomerdom has been trying to distance themselves from the older half:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones
They did miss out on the free college Regan ended, inflation paying off their first mortgage, and 10% interest on savings.
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and fencepost errors.
@akkartik @dangillmor There's a reason I lobby for guillotines instead of taxes. Taxes and regulation are compromise positions. These are capital offenses.
@yawnbox I'm kind of annoyed that cash is going away, in favor of digital transactions that are centrally tracked, supoenable, and have policies about what can and can't be sold.
@dalias @cam @pezmico Unfortunately US tax policy has greatly diminished the sale of vehicles under 6,000 lb:
That's why Ford started electrification with the F-150 lightning and E-transit van. The economies of scale tilt hard towards the big vehicles. Even people with one person small businesses cleaning houses or catering who would be quite happy with a sedan or hatchback go for the big tax deduction.
@akkartik @dangillmor As opposed to boiling the frog?
The real question is whether the boomers dying will end capitalism. Everybody seems to be waiting to see how that plays out.
if you accept the "Generation Jones" hypothesis that the most problematic Boomers (certainly the ones with the most tetraethyl lead exposure) were born before 1955, post-pandemic average lifespan in the USA is 77, 1955+77=2032. 9 more years for LD50, and the S-curve is already bending down...
*shrug* Helps me sleep.
Prudetube is quite the buggy mess isn't it? When it randomly age restricts a "shorts" video (because a woman in a bikini is lying on a surfboard, and yes that is against the wishes of a woman who posted it to her own stream), the plumbing just goes nuts and is unable to show the video even to logged in people.
This is just their post fosta/sesta freakout, I assume kosa will prevent women from appearing in videos at all...
@Catvalente "plan" is a strong word.
@blacklight When the "greatest generation" handed off to the boomers NASA imploded.
Neil Armstrong was born in 1930. He was 38 when he landed on the moon, and the oldest boomer was 23.
NASA last went to the moon in 1972. NASA stopped everything for a couple years after the Challenger disaster, then Dan Quayle was put in charge of it, and the ISS's budget was fed almost entirely to Russia so their rocket scientists would retire in place and not go make ICBMs for Iran...
So the Sag/Aftra strike is happening because most of the writers and actors have to work second and third jobs to make ends meet, and 87% of the union members don't make enough money from writing/acting each year to qualify for the union's insurance.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/17/business/hollywood-actors-sag-aftra-strike-by-the-numbers/index.html
The response from the money people is to hold out "until they lose their houses".
Two points: they think people who can't afford insurance can afford a house? And they're not striking from their second and third jobs...
@loresjoberg it was a Boomer thing.
@stewoconnor Their demands are _less_ than 1% of the annual revenue.
Carbon offsets AREN'T REAL.
https://toots.cordelya.net/@scallion/110810007374651250
Digging up carbon that's been in the ground for 65 million years and "promising not to cut down this tree for 10 years" are NOT THE SAME THING. (And that's apart from the burning Canadian forests having been sold as carbon offsets, a sort of fossil fuel NFT.)
Also, the methane cows burp oxidizes in the atmosphere with a half life of 7 years. It's not fossil carbon. It's a hairshirt distraction like plastic straws and california lawn watering
@cstross @kithrup The theory behind AI was always that the Moore's law s-curve wouldn't bend down for silicon until after it did for carbon, with a few centuries of directed engineering surpassing billions of years of evolution, before we hit atomic limits or speed of light signal propagation along finite trace lengths...
It's the "Gray Goo" feedback loop again. Slime molds are yellow goo and they have limits: energy, materials, predators.
(Dunning Krueger is Freddy's sister.)
@alda because they go into a career where they get to hurt people, and the other goes into a career where they deal with things instead of people.
Shrinkflation is giving American fast food reasonable portion sizes.
I'm not sure how to feel about that.
@fade@zirk.us The Wendy's 4 for $4 is now a $5 for 4, a 25% price increase. And that's before everything got smaller.
The double stack is sort of adorable.
According to https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/fpex0721.pdf the US agriculture industry spends about $365 billion a year. According to https://usafacts.org/topics/agriculture/ government subsidies already provide $55 billion of that.
For another $310 billion annually food could be free.
In 2022 the US federal budget was 6.5 trillion.
The Boomers' priorities are fucked.
@MarkHoltom Ah, I didn't know the real problem was a musician rather than the CEO of Exxon. Clearly placing the blame where it belongs.
I'm going to block you now.
@chris it's a little more complicated than that. You should probably listen to Dr. @sarahtaber 's podcast (Farm to Taber), she did an episode about that in season 1. Or read her article about the topic that made the rounds in 2019:
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-ugly-produce-myths-farms
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jennysplitter/2019/03/27/ugly-produce-debate-facts/
I'd link to her excellent Twitter threads on the topic, but... [gestures at melted corpse of "this is fine" dog]
On Android, the way to work around prudetube's "content for kids can't be added to lists" tantrum is to pull up your watch history list and click the three dots next to the video you were just watching. Save to list is in the pulldown.
They made and intentionally sabotaged the for-kids content because they were fined for collecting data on minors who couldn't legally consent to being tracked:
Tantrum = they disabled the mini player but it still works in a window.
@the_verge Couldn't keep it up. Common problem with 50-somethings going through a flamboyantly self-destructive midlife crisis. Alas if you blow the expensive red sports car on your quarter life crisis, things tend to escalate after the divorce...
@cspam He's 52. Traditional age for a midlife crisis.
@juergen_hubert and apparently the Catholic Church makes the world safe for child labor again.
@pikhq percussive maintenance on a chemical level, yeah.
@micahflee non-profit eyes prospect of filing discovery requests against Twitter and says "bring it".
@dalias @cam @pezmico A tax deduction is a 30% subsidy (higher if you pay self-employment tax) leading to sales differentials that provide manufacturing economies of scale especially with "shared platform" chassis across models and parts manufacturing ecosystems.
This started under Reagan and has had 40 years to run unopposed. There were also selective import tariffs: if japan only gets X vehicles it fills quota with big ones, not the Toyota Starlet's small per-vehicle profit margin...
@dalias @cam @pezmico It's not just a thumb on the scales, it's a thumb on the scales consistently for 40 years, operating unopposed because the people who would oppose it go "dumb consumers" not "bad policies". Chasing the spot of light, not biting the hand holding the laser pointer. Making moral arguments about individual choice when that's not what got us into this situation.
@dalias @cam @pezmico I'll bite: where can you buy a street legal $13k vehicle in the USA?
(Keep in mind imports have to go through a bunch of crash tests and emissions tests and so on to be legally sold here, plus the whole set of state laws mandating that manufacturers go through dealer lots... Detroit's been hugely protectionist since the rolling living room with fins era, and of course it's regulatory capture...)
@perkinsy Goodhart's Law
Personally I don't care that much about small servers defederating their nose to spite their face. If the server I'm on defederates from things I want to follow, I move.
Being blocked is like somebody putting their content behind a paywall. It's their choice, and there's plenty else to read. If I'm not going to get a Faceboot account to see Wen Spencer's posts, or keep a Twitter account to follow Randy Millholland and Ursula Vernon, why would I miss a blocker? Terry Pratchett DIED. We move on.
@shadowsminder Plastic has never been recyclable, that was an oil industry marketing campaign that made their own fake recycling symbols:
What can technically can be recycled isn't cost effective. It's just a (significantly) more expensive disposal method to keep it out of landfills (companies do it as a marketing expense).
That said, mealworms eat styrofoam if you spray it with water:
https://cen.acs.org/articles/93/web/2015/09/Mealworms-Munch-Polystyrene-Foam.html
@shadowsminder Glass isn't quite as bad as plastic, but it's still way cheaper and more energy efficient to make new glass than to recycle it.
Aluminum recycling is great, that's why homeless people collect aluminum cans out of trash. Electrolytically refining aluminum ore is basically charging a battery, recycling it saves a bunch of expensive electricity.
Paper/cardboard are a wash, but profitable with subsidies and we always need more boxes and toilet paper.
@fade@zirk.us can you salvage a conference paper or other publication out of it?
@rburchell Vaguely reacting to the retoot right before that in my feed:
https://tech.lgbt/@jenniferplusplus/110810004825031334
But also generally following people like @welshpixie who mostly post about trying to preemptively block all evil. (Someday, she will block the instance I'm on. It's inevitable. Until then...)
My response to the purity brigades telling everyone we're not good enough is to agree and get on with my life. How dare I take money from Google. How dare I still read linked Guardian/BBC articles. Oh well.
@rburchell @welshpixie I'm aware I say this from a position of privilege, but I'm worried about different things.
Like the war on cash making every payment trackable so the governor of Texas can subpoena my payment history to check for contraceptives, or MasterCard can have a policy saying "camgirl" is not an allowable work from home job. (People who want to pay for something that isn't illegal are not allowed to do so, because money has been privatized.)
Not on their radar...
@welshpixie @rburchell When I was picking an instance (and visiting Japan for work) most people I watched move over from twitter (including my wife) got accounts on that big german instance Grognard runs. Didn't one ONE server. But many small servers were threatening to defederating from them, so I couldn't choose a small server _and_ follow half my feed. (Or could randomly lose them at any time.)
I can't Oracle of Bacon guilt by association 3 layers deep at the server level. Not gonna try.
Mood: scrolling past the video "watch this if you always procrastinate", which I added to my watch later list 8 months ago.
I knew Disney treated its park employees terribly even before the pandemic:
But the rides having traveling carnival style breakdowns that trap riders for half an hour while their friends outside are assured no one is left in the building surrounded by fire trucks?
That's kind of concerning.
I want to support Disney because "the enemy of my enemy" thing with Ron the Santis in Florida, but Bob Chapek got forced into that by an employe walkout. Best analysis of that I've seen starts around 6:20 in this rant:
This channel is pretty consistently down on Disney, in impressive analytical depth.
My thesis that Sheogorath, Daedric Prince of madness, is doing a YouTube channel on military history while drunk, has not yet been disproven.

Why is Toybox under Zero Clause BSD (a public domain in equivalent license) instead of copyleft?
The FSF and friends have a habit of randomly suing allies to drive them away in the name of purity culture.
Of _course_ they just sent cease and desist letters to a fresh round of open source software developers:
I first noticed the FSF was actively counterproductive when they sued Mepis for the crime of pointing at existing source repositories for packages they hadn't modified, ala https://www.linux.com/news/gpl-requirement-could-have-chilling-effect-derivative-distros and https://lwn.net/Articles/193852/
Then in 2008 they ended Linux development at Linksys and made them switch to a different OS, see December 11 through 13 in https://landley.net/notes-2008.html#11-12-2008
And that's not counting their campaign to shout down GPLv3 refusals like https://lwn.net/Articles/202106/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/200422/
Which was all before the acronym changed to "Fanatical Stallman Followers" welcoming RMS back into the fold:
Via the "Bill Cosby Rebound":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Ww1crg078
RMS had been a "missing stair" in the community forever. I first heard a woman warn another woman never to be alone with him almost 25 years ago now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
When my friend Molly De Blanc objected to RMS' reinstatement, his loyal dudebros openly tried to swat her:
https://disguised.work/debian/molly-de-blanc-arrest-and-prosecution-for-cyberbullying/
Of course you can't be a computer historian without being disgusted by the FSF, because 95% of what they've _always_ done is take credit for the work of others. (Not build on it, take credit for it.)
https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010
I even gave a talk about this once:
https://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt
https://landley.net/talks/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3
(Sigh, I should redo that talk. It made more sense when you could see the primary sources I was showing on screen. They recorded video, but only ever posted audio...)
@mikolaj@chaos.social No I just triggered him into using it a lot more, without actually meaning to: https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0207.3/0822.html
He was claiming credit for Linux in 1998:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980126185426/http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
And I hadn't learned enough yet to realize this was all lies, and instead I tried to explain why what he was doing was bad marketing strategy (discarding existing brand equity/recognition instead of leveraging it to pivot).
I learned basic marketing writing about Coca-Cola for fool.com: https://www.fool.com/archive/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/07/27/wheres-cokes-marketing-magic.aspx
@mikolaj@chaos.social I didn't learn Stallman was full of it until... it was sort of gradual. I'd already figured out he was a net negative when I emailed in 1998 but thought he was well-meaning and could be redirected. By around 2002 I'd figured out he would always be a net negative for the community, and my opinion of him has gone steadily downhill ever since.
There's a reason I didn't invite him in the guest list for https://pc1.penguicon.org/ in 2003.
@theregister Florida man.
@mirth @eli_oat @neauoire @320x200 https://landley.net/toybox/about.html because http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/011898.html
My first implementation was https://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html which is being replaced by https://landley.net/toybox/faq.html#mkroot but it's a work in progress...
@breadandcircuses @SamYourEyes The reason billionaires never think they have enough is they're expecting society to collapse so they'll need to outbid each other for tickets on the Titanic's lifeboats:
@mikolaj@chaos.social Sigh. Bradley. (Shakes head.)
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2732025/gpl-enforcement-sparks-community-flames.html
https://landley.net/notes-2013.html#13-02-2013
https://landley.net/notes-2013.html#07-11-2013
Bradley is one of those people who is constantly surrounded by drama cloud du jour, standing in the center going "Who me? I don't know how this happens, it's just a coincidence..."
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2017/nov/03/sflc-legal-action/
Like Stallman (who he idolizes) I suspect he actually believes what he's saying, which is the sad part. I've tried to stay very far away from both for years.
@mikolaj@chaos.social No. Although Bradley spends a lot of his time explaining how the perpetual drama involving him and an ever changing cast of other people is always the other people's fault.
It takes so much time because it's a different set of other people at fault every few years, but there's always a fresh explanation about how the drama comes from them not him.
Note that the link I gave wasn't from the SFLC, it was from the conservancy. Bradley's org pointing fingers and using the word "bizarre".
@mikolaj@chaos.social Most people mean well.
@mikolaj@chaos.social I used to be a big supporter of copyleft by the way:
https://www.tech-insider.org/linux/research/2005/1002-a.html
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/busybox-claims-another-victory
https://luddites.latenightlinux.com/shows/episode-11
http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt
https://lwn.net/Articles/202106/
I've had a number of learning experiences since then.
@mikolaj@chaos.social Eben Moglen is busy with real work, not PR. He's both a professional lawyer and a law professor.
Bradley's job is promoting Bradley. And he has an extremely annoying habit of speaking on behalf of other people who then have to publicly contradict him afterwards:
https://lwn.net/Articles/483016/
With a result that he goes "I've told a consistent story and their story keeps changing", except what happened is Bradley lied about what another person said and the other person corrected the record.
@mikolaj@chaos.social basically every time you engage with Bradley it winds up as another https://lwn.net/Articles/483315/ and you learn not to get him on you.
For example, the part where he admitted he removed my safe harbor provision from the busybox web page was after repeatedly denying he'd done so, until I tracked down the git commit and linked him directly to it on a public IRC channel:
https://www.mail-archive.com/uclibc@uclibc.org/msg10331.html
His story only changed to a reason for having done so only after denying having done so.
@mikolaj@chaos.social A useful rule of thumb is creative people doing real work often don't care that much about credit, because we can always do it again, and would rather spend time doing more work than marketing/sales. (And besides, my new stuff is way better than that embarasing old stuff...)
The people desperately clinging to past glory are hoarding treasures they can't reproduce, which usually means they didn't produce them in the first place.
@mikolaj@chaos.social The GPL had two authors, Richard Stallman (1970s Lisp programmer) and Eben Moglen (Lawyer for IBM back when they produced the PC).
Moglen used to run the FSF's legal arm but got disenchanted and distanced himself from them. The SFLC was some grant money and office space Moglen put together in New York City to get his law students some real-world experience with open source licensing. I confirmed it had nothing to do with the FSF before bringing the busybox enforcement suits to them.
@mikolaj@chaos.social Bradley was one of the assistants on staff at Moglen's SFLC, but Bradley was a true believer RMS disciple who wanted to get back together with the FSF and undo the intentional distancing.
This resulted in the fork between the Software Freedom Law Center and the Software Freedom Conservancy and Bradley taking on the FSF as a client to reopen the same Linksys lawsuit settled 5 years earlier. (Cisco ended Linux development and sold Linksys to Belkin, which sold it to Foxconn.)
@mikolaj@chaos.social I had personally been working with Cisco's Linksys division in 2008 to get them properly into Linux development, and all the grand plans that we had put together to have a presence at Ottawa Linux symposium and so on went out the window in 3 days when the suit was filed. Lawyers took over, the engineers were no longer making decisions, and they were feeling pretty betrayed anyway.
The Broadcom SOC did not include toolchain source. The FSF did not sue Broadcom.
https://landley.net/notes-2008.html#21-12-2008
Wait, X-dot-com is making body spray for incels now?
Ah, "Axe". The stuff that Mace is the antidote to. My bad, old news, carry on...
@b0rk You have of course seen the classic https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html
@fade@zirk.us @BunRab There are a half-dozen bait stations around the house and a professional who comes by to check/refill them quarterly, but there's pecan trees everywhere around here (three in our yard alone) and the exterminators basically say there _will_ be rats with that much food around.
At least this one didn't break a wire in the attic and kill the air conditioning again. It has been escorted to the railroad tracks, like so many of its ancestors.
I should go try to see Barbenheimer will it's still in theaters.
@quidcumque @fade@zirk.us The thing is Peejee sticks her nose in my face so her whiskers brush against me, the rat did the _exact same thing_ and I opened my eyes to point blank rat on my pillow.
Possibly rat saw Peejee do that and get fed, and decided it was the way to ask giant monkey for food? Instead it got 10 minutes of being chased and then a trip in a box to the railroad tracks. (I usually let them go at the little bridge over the stream, but area's too overgrown to _find_ at 5am. Have bushes.)
@fade@zirk.us @themedievaldrk Unfortunately it's cash.
@exchgr@mastodon.world The online version of gait recognition.
@loresjoberg Really? _The_ Zaphod Beeblebrox?
@fade@zirk.us Woo!
Sigh, time to face it:
I need a new band-aid to put over my laptop camera, this one's lost its stickiness.
(Because manufacturers inexplicably don't hardwire an "active" LED into the camera's power line, that's why. No point in a software controlled activity light that can be off while the camera is powered up, that's just pointless.)
(Band-aid instead of tape keeps glue off the lens until it's time to use it, but you can only remove/replace so many times before it stops sticking.)
@fade@zirk.us He's still doing it.
@CareLevelZero @fade@zirk.us That was https://xkcd.com/256/ and he did an updated version a few years later ala https://xkcd.com/802/
If zoom calls actually _were_ encrypted, they couldn't train AI on them. Like they're doing.
https://fedia.social/notes/9i4ndne1r3us8aa1
If you don't pay for a service provided by a for-profit capitalist company, you're the product not the customer.
That's not how Wikipedia works, that's not how PBS works, that's not how taxes work, that's not how families work, but it is how capitalism works.
Capitalism consumes like fire, it cannot show restraint. It must spread and consume, or die.
I did not have "Russians trying to contract HIV to avoid the draft" on my 2023 bingo card.
@b0rk having actual documentation for it, not just describing the commands but listing the available commands.
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html
Alas it looks like @monsieuricon broke https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ so it no longer links to any man pages, which means remembering https://man7.org/ is now useless because you can't drill down from the top anymore.
Remember folks this is what's really happening here...
Disney won't give up 0.091% of their revenue to stop the strikes.
Netflix won't give up 0.214% of their revenue to stop the strikes.
Warner Bros won't give up 0.108% of their revenue to stop the strikes.
Paramount won't give up 0.148% of their revenue to stop the strikes.
Source: reblog of a screen shot of a twitter post(?) of a photograph of black text on a slightly curved white background with no context:
I miss having actual sources of information.
Watching https://mastodon.art/@Curator/110860346373127726 and https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/110861186350792267 float by on my feed almost next to each other, and going "be careful what you wish for"...
@RookieNerd Oh sure, I've even used the EDGAR database to pull 10Ks and 10Qs before (although who owns what with all these subsidiaries is a bit non-obvious in places). And there are presumably public sources of the striker's demands with numbers somewhere too.
Have you looked up those numbers (from primary or at least trusted sources) and done the math to confirm that those percentages weren't made up? I haven't. I typed up a graphic that didn't bother to have alt text.
@kim I thought about it, but couldn't be bothered.
I did try to link to @exchgr@mastodon.world's reblog instead of the original poster's URL since that's what came across my feed, but the closest I could get was the cached copy of the original on mstdn.jp, so her layer of indirection could only be mentioned, not directly representated...
@abermart@toot.wales @nickw @tinker Electricity and the haber-bosch process and so on are sustainable. Capitalism is not.
Capitalism consumes like fire because it requires perpetual growth. A lack of growth is a failure, thus sustainability means you failed. Slaughtering the goose that lays the golden eggs is imperative in this broken system.
I'm not sure if it traces back to https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/ or https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/pope-francis-doctrine-discovery-indigenous-1.6536174 but it's definitely a broken system that needs to die with the Boomers.
So according to the song he is immoral, he drinks kings' blood, somebody named norman has permission to stand in for him, and he's either requesting time travel or would like to be cryogenically frozen.
Which Flash Gordon character was this song about again?
I may need better headphones...
@JessTheUnstill As with sex ed, teaching this stuff in middle school is violently opposed by <strike>erect</strike> upstanding white men who are <strike>pills</strike> <strike>pillocks</strike> pillars of the community.
Credit cards are only 73 years old. The first credit card, Diners Club, was introduced in 1950.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International
Before the Boomers, the US Dollar was issued and taxed by the federal government, not owned by a privately owned currency managed by for-profit corporations that take a cut every time money changes hands.
https://thehill.com/homenews/4142302-consumer-debt-climbs-as-credit-card-debt-surpasses-1-trillion/
@fade@zirk.us if archive.org was actually reliable...
@dalias The fear that somewhere, a mastodon instance without a deny all robots.txt file might exist. Or an instance that lets you view posts without logging in. Or might not delete every post after 24 hours. Or doesn't disable screenshots on every possible client.
@emptywheel nope, it's a paywall.
@JessTheUnstill @tess approximately the same reason Atari and Commodore and Sinclair and Osborne and Tandy and Acorn had their own computers until the PC came along, and then that's what everyone wanted to be compatible with?
Here's a nice 15 minute documentary about how capitalism and intellectual property law are reacting to the ongoing implosion of the RIAA's recording industry:
He's that author's 11 minute rant about how Youtube capriciously screwed him over on the above video:
Here's thread du jour wandering by on my feed about how relying on YouTube for income is more stressful and less reliable than playing guitar on street corners:
@RookieNerd when the boomers die antitrust enforcement might become a thing again. I still lobby to guillotine the billionaires.
@RookieNerd Europe passed the "right to be forgotten" and I did my best to comply. No plans to set foot there basically ever.
So if you're wondering why I stopped updating https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4VFy3wc1nzq5tUHhiti6fw it's basically because half my youtube recommendations are creators being VERY ANGRY at youtube's random censorship and copyright abuse, and putting videos there feels like an abusive relationship.
I need to figure out how to make peertube work. And/or that patreon video thing. (It's on the todo list...)
I remember when Seanan McGuire got injured and her doctor insisted that the _real_ problem was she needed to exercise to lose weight, which made the damage chronic so she couldn't WALK anymore.
I just went in to arrange a sleep apnea study, and the doctor took my blood pressure (it's always been high, so was my father's) and scheduled a blood draw but no sleep study.
https://wandering.shop/@charliejane/110861991603654038
Doctors who give an answer before hearing the question are the core of the US medical industry.
Yes I've had previous blood draws when doctors noticed that my blood pressure's been at the high end of normal for my entire life, as was my father's. I have a phobia of needles, but the third time or so they insist I usually go "maybe they know something I don't". They yet to find anything wrong. They've also never shared medical records with the next set of doctors I go to either.
Last set put me on a diuretic, then wouldn't renew the prescription because pandemic https://landley.net/notes-2020.html#30-08-2020
@Zolt4r_teh_gr8 @tinker "Wake up" is on par with "sheeple" in its ability to hard stop potential listeners.
Nope, already deleted Zoom off my phone.
@stavvers it's a combination of telling people I like them and using them as bookmarks.
@fade@zirk.us @stavvers ...diverge?
It's... it's in the name...
@akkartik I believe I can re-favorite something every time someone retweets it at me. Email message IDs could already keep track of that sort of thing 30 years ago.
@akkartik @neauoire @avi @maxime_andre Note that "#/blah arg" parses out one argument. So "#!/bin/cat one two three" tries to cat the file "one two three".
@neauoire The nonsense with the hard tabs is particularly annoying.
people yelled at python for years about its significant whitespace, but grandfathered in make...
https://web.archive.org/web/20030916203331/http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf
Last one out of Silicon Valley remember to flush.
I was waiting to hear from native hawaiians about the fire. They keep interviewing haole about colonial infrastructure getting destroyed.
Fade sent me https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufacturing/maxeon-looks-to-bring-solar-manufacturing-back-home-with-1b-us-factory which looks good so far...
Last year there were no remaining US solar manufacturers, just people who assembled imported parts and called it manufacturing: https://landley.net/notes-2022.html#16-04-2022
I've been vaguely expecting Emperor Xi of the Communist dynasty to pull an "OPEC oil embargo" style tantrum as soon as the septuagenarian's shot clock declines enough to pull a Putin at Taiwan, securing his "legacy" in one final last second tantrum. Biden seems to be preparing it.
Check my math: 2008 was 15 years ago.
@HeavenlyPossum David Graeber predicted that about 10 years ago. It would take some digging to pull up the specifics but here's a random example of the kind of thing he talked about: https://www.disenz.net/en/david-graeber-on-harmful-jobs-odious-debt-and-fascists-who-believe-in-global-warming/
@CatherineFlick @LeonXiaoY They've taught their entire population to ignore and bypass state edicts, and this sort of thing is most interesting because it focuses on the young. Get them working around their government at an early age...
"Many sex workers, including myself, have long hypothesized that the reason so many people in power work to keep the commercial sex trade marginalized is because they’re threatened by it—by the idea that it’s the only field where women outearn men, that it’s an industry where women get to call the shots, and that women profit off something that men have been told they’re entitled to for free: sex and attention in equal parts." (via @catileptic)
@HeavenlyPossum Everybody around here is waiting for the Boomers to die. It's learned helplessness, but with a distinct expiration date.
@blaise @catileptic Load-bearing punctuation.

"LetMeSpy is the latest spyware operation to shut down in the past year in the wake of a security incident that exposed victims’ data, but also the identities of its real-world operators."
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/05/letmespy-spyware-shuts-down-wiped-server/
The intersection of "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" and "judge not lest ye be judged" is "turnabout is fair play".
@skye right click -> inspect element -> delete node.
Half the web is unusable without it these days...
@quidcumque @fade@zirk.us Unfortunately it's one of the missing episodes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_Makers
Back in the '60s the BBC thought this new videotape invention was wonderful because they could reuse the tapes and save money.
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/doctor-who-missing-episodes-exist-exclusive-newsupdate/
@fade@zirk.us @BethanyBlack @stavvers I saw about 3/4 of it and could never figure out why the camera was following any of these people.
Then again I usually feel the same way about football...
@kurth The full composition's 3 minutes long. (I like the ascending part at 2 minutes.)
Contemporary making of:
Guest lecture at music school:
Stereo remaster:
@nimda The trees were much smaller last time I was there.
@BlackAzizAnansi Boomer extinction burst. The math says it'll persist until around 2030.
Half of all boomers were born before 1955, post COVID average lifespan in the USA 77 years, thus LD50 on the baby boom is thus 1955+77=2032.
Chronic tetraethyl lead poisoning combined badly with senile dementia leading to elder abuse at scale.
But if that is truly the problem, then there is an _end_ to it. And oldest boomers got the most lead exposure before leaded gasoline ended.
@BlackAzizAnansi Dec 7, 1941 - June 6, 1944 was about 2.5 years. The first Battle of Bull run to the end of Sherman's March to the sea was about 3.5. In between: April 6, 1917 - November 11, 1918 was about 1.5.
So we shut down society for COVID about as long as we fought world war II, longer than we fought world war I, and it has now been about as long since the start of COVID as we fought the civil war.
@BlackAzizAnansi I was told that cloth masks weren't good enough over a year ago. I was also told back in 2020 that civilians buying N95 masks were taking them away from healthcare professionals, and wasting them because N95 masks need to be specially fitted in order to work right, otherwise unfiltered air leaks around them.
So the masks I have are useless, the masks they're telling me to switch to are performative, and in year 4 I'm a terrible person if I don't 100% stay at home. After 3x vax.
@dotjayne Forever. It is endemic. You must wear the mask the rest of your life. Like converting to a religion with a headscarf. No amount of vaccination or passage of time is sufficient to ward off the sin of transmissal. You are unclean.
@b0rk To me the easy way to search my own back posts is to download my archive and search the resulting file. (I have a dumb little shell script that hits it with sed to break it into lines...)
There might be a way to do it in the web interface of the android app, but if so I haven't found it yet...
@neauoire The thing that annoys me about them is it mixes imperative and declarative code in the same context. Especially with assigning values to variables. You need to control what order things happen in, and can't.
@matoakit David Graeber wrote an entire book about this: BS Jobs.
@risottobias@tech.lgbt @anarchopunk_girl @dotjayne I'm all for improving building ventilation. Interior CO2 levels have had people zoning out in meetings for decades, regulatory limits on it in sounds entirely sensible.
@nixCraft did they get it running under QEMU again? because QMU had a regression and stopped booting the 0.01 images Linux weekly news posted 10 years ago, and I haven't bisected back through the archive to figure out why because ever since Fabrice left QEMU is a dependency nightmare that requires especially crafted host to build...
Google is so soaked in capitalism that Google Voice thinks Febreze bellard created QEMU.
Saw the Barbie movie.
Yup, that earned the billion.
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social The Boomers will die.
I hate that "The Boomers will die" is all I've got in response to https://mastodon.social/@GottaLaff/110884431394665198 but it's true.
I'm aware 1/3 of the Boomers _aren't_ crazy, and just as horrified as the rest of us. I'm aware 50 years exposure to tetraethyl lead from car exhaust caused brain damage that combines badly with senility, leaving them vulnerable to mass elder abuse that switched from Nigerian email scams to "the tea party" ten years ago. I'm aware Boomerdamarung just unblocks the _start_ of the cleanup work.
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social https://mstdn.jp/@landley/110886613171584719
I'm Gen X, doesn't really help me much either. But I see no other light at the end of the tunnel and I need something to sleep at night. Sorry. :(
In his book tour for "Dave Barry turns 40" (around 1995) he pointed out the '50s were child safe, the '60s were about teenagers, the '70s about 20-somethings trying to date and work entry level jobs, the 80's yuppies, the 90's stock boom was boomers turning 40 saving for retirement, and said "I can't wait till we all turn 50 and start talking about death".
As megachurches arose I went "this gets _ugly_", but until learning about tetraethyl lead and Paul Von Hindenberg I had no idea how _bad_.
I'm fascinated by the people who reverse engineer and analyze Russian troll farms.
@regehr Government policies can profoundly affect people's behavior over long periods of time. Educational curriculum, what's available in stores and what it costs, what can be advertised and how, drunk driving laws (thresholds, penalties, detection...), how late can the bars stay open, how bad is for-profit jail system du jour and the adjacent profoundly racist school to prison pipeline, is weed legal available as an alternative to alcohol, real binge drinkers get thrown in the deep end at 21.
@regehr Oh there's plenty of reporting artifacts too. But there's also a lot of "on this side of the line there's a semi-functional health care system and on this side of the line there isn't". Minimum wage, rent prices, redlining, civil forfeiture...
You're looking at a symptom of a symptom and wondering why it varies.
@regehr The temperature outside reads very different from the temperature inside: it's 2 feet apart so I know for a fact this is the thermometers at fault.
Good luck with that, I'll be over here.
@realcainmosni Rossman Repair in Austin does data recovery. (Louis Rossman has a youtube channel where he livesteams repairs, mostly macbooks. The data recovery is usually other people who work for him.)
@cstross I get that spam at my blog too, and I replied to a few submissions to ask what the grift was.
It's basically SEO karma farming with an MLM element. People who sell "market your X" services/webinars, which boil down to telling the marks dumb enough to have paid for it to write emails to pester hundreds of people with sufficiently Google ranked publications to try to get a link to their content in there, and either selling the spam address lists or sending the form letter out for them.
@cstross Has anybody mapped the boom/bust cycle to see if late stage capitalism is oscillating faster? Savings and loan crisis, dot-com crash, Asian economic crisis, enron/worldcom, mortgage crisis, pandemic...
@BunRab @fade@zirk.us Neil Gaiman has a history of making pop songs ominous.
@guidoism we still use English too.
This is literally how we got George. She fell out of the ceiling tiles in the garage. (Then Reese said she was going to love her and hug her and squeeze her and call her George, and around here cats are named via observation triggered quantum state collapse.)
Another advantage of public domain equivalent licensing like 0BSD, slightly less thrown off by the strange quantum copyright status of anonymous or pseudonymous contributors to open source projects:
Cloud bad. Do not cloud.
@0xabad1dea We need a generic term for smart people who Dunning-Kruger out of their lane. It's not quite Nobel Disease...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/01/why-smart-people-are-more-likely-to-believe-fake-news
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/why-smart-people-are-stupid
https://digitaltonto.com/2022/why-smart-people-are-so-easily-fooled/
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5998954-because-intelligent-people-are-easier-to-fool-they-are-sure
There should be a pithy summary of this, but I'm not finding it.
@danmcd Is there a copy of the actual interview with Naomi anywhere? That article has a half dozen pages of throat clearing and preaching to the choir before we get small snippets of the new interview.
1980s TV: Edison Carter's editors cut off his camera during a live broadcast, which was the only thing preventing him from being beaten unconscious by the bad guys he was exposing, leading to the creation of Max Headroom.
@ddelony @0xabad1dea so Isaac Newton always believed in magic but was afraid to talk about it until he was sufficiently famous?
@fade@zirk.us https://oots.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Elan%27s_Songs
@pzmyers@octodon.social I'm fairly certain "gay spiders" can be filked to ghost riders in the sky, but would need more context.
@ddelony @0xabad1dea so no one has ever been tricked because they were smart. Good to know.
@fade@zirk.us lateral progress.
Names for things! It's good to have pithy names for things...
https://heads.social/@mrcompletely/110906363925241228
I mean, there's got to be a name for that one already but I have no idea what it would be...
@0xabad1dea The incel community is so thoroughly represented in open source that there's a prominent distribution called "fedora".
@victorvicpal Cars concentrate freedom, a bit like refrigeration or air conditioning. They can't create what they fill themselves with, they just move it around, and there's a net loss. But what they can very easily do is make it intolerable to be on the outside.
Every Dr. Who theme smoothly edited together. (1-12, predates 13.)
Just got followed by an interesting looking account, check their feed, generally interesting content... and scrolling back 11 posts and boosts gets me back 35 minutes.
Nope, that is not a follow back.
@fade@zirk.us even doing that, this one was a bit much.
I am not finding a ragtime version of Duel of the Fates. The internet has failed me.
@stevendbrewer @cstross Did you know some Oglaf strips are multiple pages?
@CatherineFlick @dalias @pikesley Cops punch down like breathing. Getting them to punch up is like pulling teeth, then pulling the implants replacing those teeth, then bridge, then dentures...
@themedievaldrk The reason boiling frogs doesn't work is frogs are smarter than humans.
Huh. I can load mstdn.jp from my laptop and use it through tusky, but it just loads a black screen on my phone's web browser. I wonder why?
@pikhq Linking the library against, or building the library's source with a pre-ANSI compiler?
@nf3xn Fines make the rich above the law.
@nf3xn John Rogers (creator of the TV series Leverage, basically a Robin Hood Procedural) likes to say "A fine is a price", usually while linking to some slap on the wrist a large corporation is given that's a tenth the profit they made from the bad behavior being governmentally tithed.
He also said the reason there wasn't (initially) a Leverage Season 6 is he was getting so angry he'd have been in jail before it could air.
@bryanhansel @dianeduane Last year Death Valley had a flooding problem too. And not just a couple of days, it had a monsoon season:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy4-kPmoUIA
Looks like the new normal.
With the added fun that bone-dry soil works like pasta (impermeable to water until it's soaked for hours) so rain all runs off on the surface as flood water. Meaning drought-then-rain = flood even when isn't more water than average, just bunched up.
@MnemosyneSinger@kolektiva.social I lobby for a simple political position: "guillotine the billionaires".
You can stop being a billionaire with the stroke of a pen, so staying one for 30 days should a be a capital offense.
If a country is going to have capital punishment anyway, punch up.
@regehr Some prominent modern compilers are broken and regularly miscompile the portable assembly language. Sometimes you can feed it 12 different -fstop-being-stupid options to get it to back off, other times you need to insert (unsigned long) typecasts on pointers to make it actually do math like "if (!--x)" when x is a pointer. This started when C++ developers took over C compiler development around 2007, and broke the C compilers, giving rise to go/rust/swift....
@regehr Big test suite. Lots of regression tests to see if the compiler sneezed this week.
"Billionaire" is what happens when a parasite takes over the apex predator ecological niche.
Means testing is the easiest way to kill a program.
The goal of means testing is to divert all the funding meant to help people into "prove you are worthy, jump through endless hoops, ever-more bureaucrats' salaries will soak up the budget scrutinizing and shaming you".
"But what if reach people benefit from the program" is the initial wedge used to destroy it. "You can't have subsidized transport RICH PEOPLE could ride! It's only for poors! Using this service should be a mark of shame!"
So while arguments like https://orbital.horse/@emma/110902831377975136 are right, they miss the point. Public school in the USA and NHK in the UK lasted a century before the fascists started carving it up because it was _universal_. There were no gatekeepers to suborn. You're never too rich to use the library.
Universal Basic Income has to be universal to work, just like rich geezers get social security checks. Giving the economy a flea dip to remove the spherical parasites draining it dry is a separate issue.
@nf3xn Except "income" is hidden behind a cup and balls game of asset appreciation and foundations and loans to oneself. (Take the "fine art" scam: get a patsy to say "banana duct taped to a wall" is worth $100 million, deposit it in a bank vault, use it as collateral for a loan at an interest rate lower than inflation, rinse repeat. They do it with all their mansions and yachts too.)
I don't lobby for taxes. I lobby for federal guillotines. Taxes are a compromise position _several_ steps down.
@nf3xn Mortgaging your house is taxable then?
@nf3xn If you're going to focus on trying to fix corporations specifically, start by undoing https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/?sh=2d81160d870e and the whole "corporate personhood" nonsense.
But blaming corporations for oligarchy is like blaming boats for piracy.
@mttaggart Paywall.
@mttaggart I had not noticed. Thank you.
There's a sort of reverse "walk away from Omelas" thing going on here. One oligarch supported by 300 million living in squalor.
Interesting: a tool to measure the ecological damage of Ukraine's forests resulting from Russia's invasion:
https://mstdn.social/@Bellingcat/110911342536417195
(We already know they're trashing the cities and the farmland, digging trenches, laying mines, blowing up dams... Then add in the main defense from drones is hiding under trees...)
@Tallish_Tom@fosstodon.org @arielcg @aral It also grinds up founders who WANT to make a sustainable business but are naieve enough to take VC funding.
You could be profitable at 6 people (like a dental practice) but have to hire 20 in a big office to show "growth". So you overshoot your revenue and must pursue a second and third round of VC funding.
Teaching someone to swim by giving them a 500 pound scuba tank with a second tank on the bottom of the ocean. Keeping your head above water vs go straight down.
A long exploration/explanation of why letting C++ developers take over C compiler development was a fscking terrible idea.
I see we've cycled back to "the Joker punching Nazis" part of history.
Nope, the desktop browser also loads a black screen in an "incognito window".
The "about" page still says @mstdn_jp which hasn't been posted to in a year.
I may have to migrate to an instance where people can actually see links to my posts...
@SpaceLifeForm An 80386 never had spectre, heartbleed, or rowhammer.
@SpaceLifeForm So you want to be as fast as possible without introducing problems which you only find out about after the fact.
Good luck with that.
@ska Back in the day the breakage about "commas and parentheses act as obvious logical sequence points _except_ in function call arguments" or ++ getting confused were version skew across different compiler lineages (pascal.o vs c.o), and warnings about compiler bugs.
But since 2007 they keep expanding "undefined" to preemptively say "the optimizer might someday want to do this crazy thing that breaks code and we're blaming the code". Which is wrong. -fno-strict-aliasing always and everywhere.
@ska Once upon a time "char is a byte" was an assumption the standard _warned_against_... and then enough of those old machines with the weird breakage were unplugged and thrown away that char officially became a byte.
That is progress. "We will optimize out the memset() that wiped the encryption key" is not progress, it is breakage.
@ska C++ was always a minefield of undefined behavior because it was built out of leaky abstractions. "We don't initialize class instance fields to zero, but if you do it with memset() you erase the virtual function pointers: whack-a-mole each field for every class".
In C the _hardware_ was a minefield but the language was simple. "This big endian alignment requiring nommu CPU generates interrupts if signed integer math overflows" wasn't in the LANGUAGE, it was just how that target behaved.
@ska When C++ developers took over compiler development, "the language is a minefield of undefined beavior that can never be systematically understood but must be memorized as taboos" was the framework they were starting from.
That had never been how C worked. C was "when it breaks you keep the pieces" and "if I want portability to this other environment I add more constraints and tests, but often I don't".
We have reproduced the magic/more-magic switch!
@gsuberland You have reproduce the magic/more-magic switch from MIT!
Here's a thread about that: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/1232
@gsuberland My grandfather used to deal with that sort of thing by grounding the HELL out of the system in question. As in "tear up the floor, dig down 20 yards, install a rebar grid with thick wires soldered to it, put all the dirt back and reinstall the floor" level of grounding.
Yes, real example. Given the problem he was debugging cost $2 million in 1960's money and 6 weeks of cleanup/downtime each time it happened, they called him in the third time and he made it never happen again.
@esther@strangeobject.space Ask @skinnylatte maybe?
This is a regular thing, by the way:
https://youtube.com/shorts/AC2Dykm5b44?feature=share
(I've seen intro videos on how state actor disinformation works, but can't find them right now...)
Let me rephrase that: there are plenty of good "intro to how Russian propaganda works" videos, but prudetube has been trivially manipulated into age restricting or blocking all of them. This one just got age restricted and just today the appeal of that age restriction was denied:
And while this old video talking about how bots brigated the comments of another video is still up, the other video it refers to is not:
Duh, I'd never put together that Russia defaulting on its debts triggered the Asian Economic Crisis of the late 1990s.
Obvious once it's pointed out.
(That was back when I was writing investment columns for The Motley Fool. Back then I was way more up-to-date on what was happening to the US stock market than I am now, but knew less about international stuff.)
This Substack post explaining the "scattering, harvesting, amplification" stages is still up, but you have to know where because the title is an unrelated topic:
https://ryanmcbeth.substack.com/p/are-ukrainian-soldiers-being-buried
There's plenty of old "oh hey, this exists" videos still up on major news sites capable of defending themselves:
But that's not remotely the same level of explanation. Watching new ones live is educational:
But prudetube keeps taking them down again.
Just because the modern republican party is a mass elder abuse scam backed up by pravda-style propaganda networks like Faux News (founded by Richard Nixon's speechwriter shortly after Watergate to prevent a recurrence of Being Held Accountable)...
Don't forget all the OTHER more personal elder abuse going on:
https://tech.lgbt/@Kye/110913681510023904
The Boomers breathed tetraethyl lead exhaust fumes for 40 years. It spiked crime rates and emptied the cities, and now senility is decompensating them BADLY.
Defund the police? That's crazy talk! What might happen with fewer police!
Meanwhile, two dozen people shot in public downtown in a major city over multiple days, with video footage, no suspects, police ask public if maybe more than one person did it?
And yes, that's after:
There was a burst of investigations into Russian state actor internet manipulation in 2015, between the first invasion of Ukraine and the election in the USA that gave us a president to demanding Ukraine produce dirt on his political opponents as an excuse not to provide support.
Another way Late Stage Capitalism serves rich and hurts everyone else: there's no news coverage of things that make life better for the poor.
Advertisers refuse to sponsor anything watched by people with no disposable income.
I should have filmed my reaction to this. https://youtu.be/mXJ5xj3u6Y8
Just like every New Yorker cartoon can have the caption "Christ, what an asshole", the moral of every analysis of some facet of Late Stage Capitalism is "Universal Basic Income, National Health Service, rent control, and switch our existing billions of farm subsidies from producers to consumers:
All of which starts with "guillotine the billionaires", or the compromise position of repealing the revenue act of 1964.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/gop-tax-rate-cut-wealthy/
Me, I lobby for guillotines.
@cspam There was a good interview with Farrow about that article this morning: https://youtu.be/tYAD6oQZNcY
@dessertgeek How would one subscribe to this?
The Wendy's in Jester Center at UT Austin is open until 4:00 a.m. again! Nature is healing!
(The pandemic absolutely nerfed everything's hours...)
@mjg59 How about if a license was approved by SPDX and then later submitted to OSI by someone completely unrelated under a different name, and they approved an existing public domain equivalent license as the "free free free all hail Richard Stallman gnu/license copyleft 4eva extra-viral" and you spent months arguing with them to get them to rename it back to "zero clause BSD" and then a year later they put the wrong name _back_ and Wikipedia is confused?
What if OSI is fscking incompetent?
Japanese pudding is a marsupial flan.
@mjg59 I long ago punted on the actual generation part and just mask the two or three important bits out of otherwise random: https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/lib/lib.c#L1244
Are you hitting the upper versus lowercase thing?
The Russian and Saudi Arabian regimes are equally evil:
https://journa.host/@zekuzelalem/110945121388013106
It's partly "the resource curse" given a century to run unopposed:
https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4340.html
And partly that neither country went through an enlightenment to wean itself off medieval monarchy where the divine right of oligarchs to hunt peasants for sport and kidnap harems in their basement is based on an invisible man in the sky giving the thumbs up.
The US GOP is our oil industry funding our invisible-man-ites.
The leader of Saudi Arabia is MBS, the bone saw guy:
Who worked his way to the top because the other contenders for the throne suddenly died while visiting his residences:
And of course when he got power he had the rest of his family rounded up and imprisoned:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/world/middleeast/saudi-royal-arrest.html
What flavor of pudding do Americans use on the Ritz crackers? The song did not say...
Radagast totally formed a harem with the Entwives, didn't he? (I mean he _was_ basically Isekai protagonist...)
Meanwhile Ryan McBeth is still doing breakdowns of individual Russian disinformation campaigns:
https://ryanmcbeth.substack.com/p/tracking-the-start-and-spread-of
Is that how they made them combustible?

No, boomers aren't just old, they were poisoned. Boomers spent 40 years breathing tetraethyl lead exhaust, including massive pediatric exposure that attacked their developing nervous systems followed by decades of chronic exposure, and now senility is making them decompensate.
Elder abuse of senile boomers looked like Nigerian email scams 20 years ago, then televangelist megachurches, then switched to mass fascist indoctrination for oligarch regulatory capture.
The bone saw guy regularly puts his people to death for speech:
https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/110988671917311235
The top three oil producers in the world are Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States, with Canada coming in a distant fourth (6% of global supply) and everybody else even lower:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=709&t=6
Fossil fuels are what fund the US Republican party, Vladimir Putin, and Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (Mr. Bone Saw). Switching to renewable energy _directly_ defunds fascism.
Why is prudetube adding an si= tracking stanza to every link it generates now?
Works fine if you delete it...
Did not have on my 2023 bingo card...
Any email with the subject line "Can I trust you?" the answer is no. I don't even blanket trust me, it's all provisional and conditional and domain specific and negotiated and subject to further updates...
Insurance is a scam. There's a reason organized criminals claim to sell "insurance". (Nice place here, wouldn't want something to happen to it.)
https://newsie.social/@ChrisBoese/110995772917145390
You can pool money and provide services to everyone in the group, which is how taxes work. But any business model that profits from NOT paying claims and loses money by performing its function is fundamentally fraudulent.
Stop subsidizing insurance. Provide SERVICES not insurance. Disintermediate parasitic middlemen.
@RuthMalan Exchanging accuracy for precision.
@RuthMalan I deleted my Twitter account a year ago. It had already been camped by some rando when the entire site turned into a paywall.
Keep in mind nobody without an account can see Twitter anymore. Anonymous browsing broke. All that's left is incest, everyone there is huffing their own farts.
If you're not on Twitter, you can't _see_ Twitter anymore. It CAN'T matter.
ChatGPT makes Bofuri's weird skills and how they're acquired (and the devs' constant post-hoc patching and bailing) a little more understandable.
If your future tech mmorpg is going to basically apply fractal terrain generation to the skill tree, people are going to do the skill equivalent of falling through the terrain or getting stuck on a boulder.
@Oggie @cstross @genecowan @kjhealy @id1om for years I've said a corollary to Moore's law is that 50% of what you know about the machine is obsolete every 18 months, and that the main advantage of Unix was that it's mostly the same 50% cycling out over and over, with posix staying there as bedrock.
@RuthMalan Geocities went down, Yahoo groups went down, Google Plus went down, Vine went down, flickr went down, livejournal had strikethrough, half of YouTube has been removed for a plethora of stupid reasons...
This too shall pass. The inside of a shopping mall is not a public space, when it becomes a dead mall any community you think you've built there will be evicted.
@RuthMalan I keep seeing people go "I know this hitler guy has filled the German government full of Nazis but 10 years ago the cabaret scene had so much promise that I'm going to stay and hold my nose and try to keep it all going to salvage what I can even though so many others are leaving..."
10 years later, those people mostly weren't looked back on as the good guys. Sometimes, speeding the collapse is for the best.
@RuthMalan The whole of Twitter was being archived by the library of Congress until the program was ended under the Trump administration:
https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2018/03/library-of-congress-slims-down-twitter-archive/
You want to shake the government and library tree, that's potentially useful. You want to tell people to stay and be collaborators with Musk... there's precedent for that.
Prudetube had reached the point where "World War II documentary" is now an 18+ age restricted category, largely demonetized and not shown to most users by "the algorithm" even when you do de-anonymize yourself so your watching habits can be tracked and held against you by future governments and payment processors' "morality" clauses rendering the nonconformant "unbanked" at a billionaires' whim.
To see the full interview with Mr Rogers on the academy's website, you have to select "full interview" below the preview YouTube embed (which just has short snippets), and then select chapter 1. At which point it will start playing a local video of the full interview instead of redirecting you to YouTube.
Sigh. At least they still HAVE it.
https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/fred-rogers?clip=1#interview-clips
@HeavenlyPossum The sudden removal of state power is like the sudden removal of alcohol. The DTs are not an inevitable result of "failure to drink", there are withdrawal symptoms and damage to recover from.
Huh, prudetube found a way to be worse. (Sword of Damocles as as a service.)
@unixmercenary I'm GenX. I got a couple decades exposure myself, and am unlikely to enjoy retirement much...
James Bond is to intelligence work what Indiana Jones is to archeology.
Wrote up my experience with Cruise's robotaxi passenger beta program in Austin.
@shortridge I work on an adjacent facet, about both countering Ken Thompson's "trusting trust" attack and making a base system a student could read through and understand in a semester.
If you can't reproduce what you're doing from first principles in laboratory conditions, it's not science. If you can't reproduce your base OS from source code that at least someone on your team can understand all of, what you're doing may not be "computer science".
When Rupert Murdock bought the Wall Street Journal, this is the sort of thing he had in mind:
https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/111014355268176540
Oligarchs acquire and sock puppet established credibility until it's used up, then buy a new one (like the recent acquisition of CNN) to be Pravda du jour.
Capitalists and fascists have always worked hand in hand to end democracy. Yes the historical examples really are that explicit and straightforward:
@stim3on "The Tardis and I are getting rather better at these short hops." - 4th Doctor, Logopolis.
If someone hands out leaflets on a street corner and you read one, you have not "done your own research".
If three people standing together hand out three leaflets and you read them all: still no.
Is "blogs linking to each other" laundered enough? Blogs using the same search keywords? Youtube streams "the algorithm" groups together, recommending one after the other once you've seen the first? "People who watched X also watched Y for no immediately obvious reason..."
Prudetube's shifting sands destroy another channel's decade long history. No human can explain why, just impersonal robotic notifications appearing out of the blue, no appeal...
Are sanctions against Russia affecting GLONASS (Russia's homegrown GPS satellite constellation)?
The newest articles Google is finding about this are a year and a half old, like:
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-satellites-ukraine-war-gps/31797618.html
This (from 2020) says the current satellites last 7 years, and the new types replacing them (which were supposed to start launching this year) last 10 years:
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htspace/articles/20200526.aspx
Wait, what is Stormy Daniels doing to Greece right now?
Capitalism puts a price on your kidneys then outbids you for them.
If people prefer the slowed down version of Jolene, does that make the original the nightcore version?
@gehennan I gave the video 2 and 1/2 minutes to say what they were actually DOING, but it was all throat clearing and backstory. The wadsworth constant was too strong for me...
W3C continues to suck rocks.
@emaste some of us want a BSD image running under QEMU for build testing.
@emaste Nah, I usually scp. It means I'll never be able to build BSD from source, but I consider BSD a binary only operating system anyway. I've never made heads or tails of its build despite retrying repeatedly over a number of years, it's a giant hairball with user space and kernel all mushed together.
I just download the disk images off the website.
Sigh. A video from a prudetube channel that isn't USUALLY insane tried to explain "beysian updating of priors" as if it was a thing anyone should ever do, and I noped right out and unsubscribed.
That's "scientology auditing" level of cult technobabble. Every single person I've ever encountered who tried to think like that RAPIDLY turned into a complete asshole. If you honestly believe your mental processes can be reduced to an equation, you're the "calm down and be logical like me" asshole.
No, scp out.ogg sever:dir/"band - name.ogg" is NOT an "ambiguous target". On THIS end, I gave you a quoted argument. Losing the quotes and interpreting a filename with space and dash in it as an argument at the far end is TERRIBLE PRORAMMING. And sounds kinda security-problem-ish.
Grrr...
The 20 year old cat has developed bad allergies and the medicine from the vet is daily drops that go in her nose, to make her lifestyle somewhat less mucous-intensive.
We should not refer to this as "waterboarding the cat", and yet...
@BunRab She can't be bothered, honestly.
@dalias There are people who pretend echo doesn't exist and use printf '%s\n' for everything because it might get an initial dash wrong.
Those people are insane and I ignore them.
@SpaceLifeForm No, scp runs ssh and calls another command of the far end, and the command line it sent through was improperly escaped.
@SpaceLifeForm I researched implementing the SCP protocol for toybox back before Android started using it, and you're convinced I don't know how it works.
Here is someone hitting the same problem over 10 years ago:
https://github.com/rundeck/rundeck/issues/168
I did not ask for your advice.
@SpaceLifeForm I know exactly where the problem is: scp is trying to exec an already parsed command line at the far end (because it was originally rcp using rsh), and sshd washes everything through the user account's listed command shell for "security" reasons, resulting in the unnecessary shell reparsing the command line.
If you can't avoid the unnecessary shell layer because openssh's daemon won't let you, then you have to build escapes into your arguments.
I'm annoyed, not baffled.
Year three of once-a-century storms in death valley.
The guy who bought a ghost town (established in 1865) is rebuilding the dirt road that leads to it for the third consecutive year, after it got washed out by a death valley flood.
Yes, the road was intact when he bought the town. Welcome to climate change:
Putin is 70 years old. He's a leftover from the Soviet Union. He's still trying to take over the world for the same reason he's still writing "Cuban missile crisis" on his checks. #narf
(I'd reference "I coulda been a contender", but google guesses "on the waterfront" came out in 1954 and I've never seen it. All I know about it is that line, and he lost the title bout to somebody named Stella. I think it won the big coconut at Sundance?)
Somehow, "Reborn as a vending machine, I now wander the dungeon" seems like a logical progression from what's come before in Japanese anime. All right, let's give this a try...
(It beats watching another episode of the disappointing "saving 80,000 gold" anime, which is somehow more laser focused at America than the character in Bofuri Season 2 whose pokémon is literally a bald eagle wearing a cowboy hat.)
@fade@zirk.us The other day I saw somebody ranting that "Hercules" was like "Nucular", and that "hera-cles" meant "Glory to Hera"... which was apparently one of the reasons she hated him so much?
@fade@zirk.us Have you done "The Justlice Leage and The Avengers are pantheons" yet?
As a child I was "officially diagnosed" hyperactive-and-gifted which was the best understanding of ADHD at the time:
https://neurodifferent.me/@PeteLittle1970/111045475704794930
I have since spent enough decades layering on coping mechanisms and generally slowing down, that I'm not nearly as obviously ADHD anymore even to myself. I just have perpetual dropouts in the executive function department and am never "working to my potential" except when I fixate on the Wrong Thing and write up an unexpected 8000 word tangent.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait we didn't call it "the Kuwait conflict". The name of a war is always "The Invading Asshole war", not "the battered victim war". The only reason to mention a second country is Russia has ALSO recently openly invaded Georgia, Moldova, the Kuril Islands, and surreptitiously Syria and half of north Africa (yes Wagner's in Niger), so we have to specify. (And Chechnya depending on how you want to define "recently".)
Russia signed an agreement with Sudan in 2019 to dock their navy there, and Sudan's government got toppled by a military coup 2 years later. The dots are not hard to connect:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/20/africa/wagner-sudan-russia-libya-intl/index.html
Russia and Myanmar "intensified their cooperation" shortly before their military knocked over their government:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/186810341503400207
Name a coup, go look. Putin's been re-fighting the cold war since at least the oil price crash of 2009. We may not remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory but he does.
The replication crisis in science would be bad enough without the pereptual Rich White Men Lying problem.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/09/11/another-bad-memory/
@fade@zirk.us Hery-sue.
@fade@zirk.us Mt. Olympus, the Hall of Justice, the X-Mansion, the Batcave...
@fade@zirk.us We all get together and sing the holy songs, which everyone knows so they don't need to be written down: "Na na na na na na na na na..." "Spider man, spider man..."
@blaise Because your peak is of course really your baseline. Perpetual sprint.
IPv6 is terrible at a design level. With IPv4 I can rate limit login attempts from a given IP, with IPv6? Not a chance. How much address space is "the same machine" in IPv6? No way to know. IPv4 could masquerade a bunch of machines behind the same address in the 1990's (Cisco renamed Pauline Middelink's invention NAT) so it never really ran out. Wikipedia[citation needed] permanently disabled anonymous edits from IPv6 addresses _years_ ago.
Note that we could easily free up over 400 million additional IPv4 addresses at any time:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/freeing-up-of-hundreds-of-millions-of-ipv4-addresses-mooted-580689
And that's not counting another 250 million IPv4 addresses wasted on multicast (hint: if netflix and youtube arose without ever once using it, there was not and never will be any use for it).
But the IPv6 advocates scream bloody murder when you mention those proposals, because IPv4 scarcity is literally their only argument to force anyone to use their broken crap.
@ff00aa Iraq invaded Kuwait by surprise, almost without resistance, on August 2, 1990. The United States evicted them from Kuwait, but decided to leave Iraq's leader in power to counterbalance Iran and avoid a power vacuum.
A dozen years later the "duct tape and plastic sheeting" people revisited that decision as a distraction from the consequences of other bad decisions they'd made, and when I said it wasn't called the Kuwait war you decided I meant 2003.
Nope, not having this conversation.
The "almost nobody" @mhoye refers to is probably me.
https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/111052378822254664
I test it all the time for https://landley.net/toybox etc. I chip away at it over and over. It's REALLY HARD. It's what I did in busybox, it's what I did in https://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html and the drive behind http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/011898.html and the sadly jetlagged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk9TatW9ino & what I'm trying to do in mkroot & the youtube tutorial videos I keep not recording.
Heck, just https://landley.net/notes.html#31-08-2023 was a multi-day digression.
@b0rk Sadly, if you don't remember "git describe --tags" there's basically no way to look it up.
@ccohanlon @neauoire Sadly, I have "collate todo lists" as a todo list item on SO MANY LISTS going back before high school.
And gmail has been unsubscribed from the linux-kernel mailing lists. As in vger.kernel.org no longer tries to send to gmail.com because a bottleneck became a problem and there are no humans to talk to at Google to get it resolved.
https://social.kernel.org/notice/AZh3PVFrHJXyzYuVwu
Meanwhile, the new CEO of IBM Hat gleefully predicted laying off 30% of the acquired Red Hat staff and replacing them with basically ChatGPT:
Late Stage Capitalism sucks. (Probably Stage 4 by now. Let it die.)
@rosemarymosco I remember in one of the Winnie the Pooh cartoons Tigger was birdwatching, trying to spot a "yellow-bellied double-parked sapsucker".
I'm kind of annoyed that the Charged Vacuum Emboitment du jour https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-patches-firefox-thunderbird-against-zero-day-exploited-in-attacks/ forced me to "upgrade" my phone to the new version of Chrome doing all those new dubious things with the authorized client nonsense and extra ad tracking I have to turn off.
@ariadne Why would better tools stop moderation from being a political act? Arguing with the ref is half of sports, and that's the _good_ outcome.
@mukasa@mastodon.online Hello.
The reason prudetube won't let you comment on or add to a list Miley Cyrus' cover of "Head Like a Hole" is that the video is "for kids":
This video has 1.7 million views and is 4 years old. Lyrics include "bow down before the one you serve, you're going to get what you deserve" and "got money just tell me what you want me to do, got money nail me up against the wall..."
*Chef's kiss*
Creator of "Fables" comic places it in the public domain, with choice words about modern IP law and the scumbags who took over DC/HBO/Discovery.
https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/willingham-sends-fables-into-the
Ha. The original Atari version of M.U.L.E. had a four note theme song, but the commodore 64 Sid chip only has three voices.
Someone added the fourth voice from the Atari data files to the C64 version using a second SID chip.
What specific entitled white guy lied in 1976 to set up this replication failure requiring retraction? Did he have a name? What other results did he publish that now need to be retracted? Is he president of a university today?
No idea. This article is the science equivalent of recipes that give someone's life story before listing ingredients...
Fuzzy and I are arguing about whether Tom Hooper or Michael Bay would be more appropriate to film Starlight Express: the movie.
"So Jellicle cats are taken to the heavyside layer and reincarnated as horny trains?" "Probably just Skimbleshanks."
"This is not a play you do if you're capable of experiencing shame." "Was that on the poster?"
"You wanted to show me David Hasslehoff's number." "That was Jekyll and Hyde." "Ah. This just seemed like something David Hasselhoff would be in by osmosis."
It's possible the 20 year old cat has some age-related penalties to her perception rolls.
@gnomon Her teeth are terrible so she mostly wants a liquid diet, but it's still very interested in certain smells, and very persistent going after her interests.
She got up on the kitchen table and licked fuzzy's chicken, which was later left on the counter, so I tore off pieces tiny enough for her to eat and put them on the floor in front of her.
She could not find them. She stood _on_ them. I kept adding more and more to the pile until she finally managed target acquisition (~90 sec).
I had not previously noticed that Zelensky speaks like Batman.
@RickiTarr Atheism is a religion the same way zero is a number. A firm belief in nothing is still a firm belief. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Turns out proving a negative is hard.
@petergleick We had Ralph Nader spinning up layers of bureaucratic regulation in the 1970s (before he was the "hanging chads" guy for the green party), but China didn't get its first road safety law until 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_Traffic_Safety_Law_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
The book "The Innovator's Dilemma" 25 years ago used golf carts' inability to displace gasoline-powered vehicles because of "street legal" regulation protecting established cartels as an example where disruptive technology is forced to take the "collapse" route.
@Ardubal @ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us There's a theory that the nuclear contamination Northern China is currently panicing about was due to China building a zillion nuclear reactors at the same time it put up all the solar panels after the air quality in the 2008 Olympics became an embarassing meme, so there was a period where abandoned coal mines and nuclear waste were problems that solved each other, then they had rolling blackouts and a snit with Australia and went back to coal mining via open pit mines.
Of course the police made the Lahaina fire worse.
In 2015, after Val Aurora and Sarah Sharp left linux-kernel development amidst lobbying for "codes of conduct" in projects and conferences to penalize gropers, Greg Kroah-Hartman committed the Code of Conflict to linux-kernel EXPLICITLY reserving the right to be a dick:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ddbd2b7ad99a
In 2018 Greg removed it, saying he didn't know WHY it hadn't worked:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/8a104f8b5867
Torvalds performatively scapegoated himself to divert blame from Greg:
@mikolaj@chaos.social Remember the line from the Doctor Who episode Father's Day, "I'm your dad, it's my job for it to be my fault."?
Linus is the creator and maintainer of a project named after him. He does things he considers to be in the best interest of the project.
Alan Cox stepped down when his wife Telsa got sick (she died in 2015), and Greg has been #2 on the project ever since.
Linus is an empty nester. His youngest daughter turns 24 in November. Handing off to a successor is on his radar.
@mikolaj@chaos.social Note: man 2 reboot, the LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2 constant is Linus's birthday in hex, and the 2A, 2B, and 2C constants are his three daughters' birthdays in hex.
@KBSpangler Your archive page doesn't have a link to https://www.agirlandherfed.com/1.1932.html (the last one is the chapter before that).
@illmeaningfaery @fade@zirk.us I think her apartment's over the garage?
@OorAndy @greenaspen Back in 2017 Tokyo flew a bunch of engineers from Holland in to a big conference about building multiple layers of dikes and living below sea level. (They didn't make a big deal out of it, it was just on the local news while I was there for work.) Considering what they've already built to handle typhoon flooding and earthquakes, I expect they'll manage.
Other cities that aren't taking it quite so seriously may have insurance problems.
@fade@zirk.us @illmeaningfaery it's regularly open to the outside world, car exhaust is hot, heat rises so your apartment would naturally be warmer than the garage, and it's much bigger than your apartment so the heating in one direction is disproportionate to the cooling in the other.
🎶Tuppence a bag...🎵
Anyone who ever emits the phrase "unskilled labor" should be tied down and forced to watch https://youtu.be/Jky5ZXI0axc through and then quizzed.
@ukuku Did he speak to Mister Bone Saw directly, or just a henchman?
Remember the bit in Megamind where they lost the invisible car?
In case you weren't already worried that the linux-kernel development process had ossified into senility, observe the implosion of the random number generator boot semantics. Explanation of issue:
https://lwn.net/Articles/889452/
Random new tool (copied from systemd) to do what writing to /dev/random could do before merging it with world-writeable urandom:
http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2022-April/089559.html
Linux-kernel developers have become the "here's a nickel, buy a better computer kid" unix greybeards they once mocked.
Listening to an interview with someone talking about birth rate decline, and how they don't personally know anyone under 30 who wants kids _ever_ because they live with roommates and are deep in debt, and I'm going... yes, end-stage capitalist parasites are literally sucking the life out of hunanity.
You'd only have to guillotine 8 people to double the wealth of half the planet. Eight!
@gnomon @scottjenson @mhoye I'm trying to get phones to replace PCs so having a phone but NOT a PC doesn't make you a second class citizen. Meaning Android needs to be able to build Android from source.
I want a stock android phone out of the box to plug into a USB hub with keyboard and mouse and either $10 USB3-HDMI adapter or chromecast for the display, open a window, and let you edit and compile software up to and including new AOSP images you can install on the same phone.
@scottjenson Does android have a multi-entry clipboard? I've got clipman in xfce I can click and pull down a list of clipboard entries, but never encountered anything similar in Android.
But I'm still on Android 12 (Salmiaaki) because they stopped providing updates for a bought-from-google Pixel 3a even before my last round of repairs (replacing the USB port and battery).
No, security threats won't entice me into buying a new phone. I assumed it's always listening/watching when it was new.
@scottjenson I always long press where possible, never double tap. Double tapping might DO stuff. Long press always brings up a menu or similar without invoking anything out of it.
I don't suppose there's a "download this from the app store" approach to getting improved text editing? I'm aware getting stuff into the base is political.
@mhoye @gnomon @scottjenson My project got merged into Marshmallow back in 2015 and the #2 contributor to it is the Android Base OS maintainer (who also maintains bionic and used to maintain dalvik).
https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/
He explained in his own words starting around 20 minutes into this podcast:
http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html
I've been pretty up-front about my agenda the whole time:
https://landley.net/toybox/about.html
Here's talks I gave in 2013 and 2019:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s
@ozdreaming @scottjenson Ooh, when you click the expand arrow there's an icon. (I'd clicked a few of those a while back and they were stuff like "bitmoji" and preinstalled reaction gifs.)
Thanks, didn't know there was something useful in there.

More than 10% of the in-person attendees at the Centers for Disease Control's Epidemic Intelligence Service conference in Atlanta came down with COVID.
You had one job.
@fade@zirk.us @bomkatt *shakes fist* Stallman!!!!
@blaise The proper tool for the proper job.
Alas, I forgot to disable the Google fiber Wi-Fi connection before submitting the form. (It's fast, and not metered like T-Mobile is, but it drops connections all over the place and has really weird interoperability issues.)
I wonder if the survey posted or not? Who knows...

Ctrl-C on rsync going through a proc mount in a chroot and grumbling to myself that I should just implement "umount -a dirname" in toybox _anyway_ and who cares how "standard" it is. (Or maybe "umount -A dirname"...)
New paper shows that LLMs trained on "A is B" can't infer that "B is A"... Which was a known failure mode of "neural networks" back in 1988.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/elegant-and-powerful-new-result-that
"In math, when one make a conjecture, a simple counterexample suffices. If I say all odd numbers are prime, 1, 3, 5, and 7 may count in my favor, but at 9 the game is over... In neural network discussion, people are often impressed by successes, and pay far too little regard to what failures are trying to tell them."
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social You can whack-a-mole any specific output after the fact by adding more training data, which is what they do by giving it the answer they want in the prompt. But micromanaging what your AI says on a case-by-case basis isn't really AI, is it? That's just expert systems. Zork did that.
@freemin7@mast.hpc.social I'm working elsewhere at the moment, you could try emailing him: jeff at coresemi dot io.
Unboosted a post after the third edit, because I don't want to have to track what it's saying now. (A viral clip is not a live microphone.)
US Department of justice (possibly lingering Trump appointees) subpoena Python's version of CPAN demanding info about python users. (Yes, the programming language.)
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/25/pypi_us_government_subpoena/
According to the severe weather alert my phone just produced, Pflugerville just northeast of Austin, where the big solar farms are installed, is expected to receive "baseball sized" hail over the next 45 minutes. "Take shelter in a sturdy building, away from windows. People and animals outside will be severely injured."
Here's hoping Austin Energy has good insurance. Or some extremely clever tarp arrangement.
Florida Man could easily be about Texas instead, but here it's more malicious than flamboyant. https://mastodon.online/@alexwild/111099385336193638
@futurebird@sauropods.win If you want to freak people out about climate change, point out that a bucket of seawater removed from the ocean will start to smell _very_ strongly of dead fish after a few days, because seawater has half a million cells per milliliter in it which can't survive out of context:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK224740/
Which means the ocean is something that can die. Not the fish or crabs or clams, not the seaweed. The water.
Nope, it's here too. Only golf ball sized so far.
Our driveway sounds like a crackling fire, and I'm wondering how to schedule a roof inspection.
Austin is unlikely to be happy tomorrow.
The top story on KXAN, posted 36 minutes ago, is that College Sportsball has recruited somebody to do something next year.
Because there's nothing more important to southern conservatives than watching young men in tight pants bend over and grapple with each other, sometimes forming largeish piles of well muscled young manhood. With slow motion instant replay.
Meanwhile...
Not quite baseball-sized, but one of the ones on top there is well over 2 inches.

Some of the ones that bounced off the roof and broke give a good cross-section.

The local consensus is pickleball sized hail. (Yeah, we had to look it up too.)
Seems to have mostly worked its way through. The siren vehicles are out, sirening.
A common failure mode of capitalism is money people coming in to phlebotomize harder and shouldering aside the people who understand what it is they actually DO that makes customers show up.
https://universeodon.com/@siderea/111122855587210647
This is why nothing capitalism touches is ever sustainable. It's just a question of WHEN it will collapse.
@AVO8OHM @futurebird@sauropods.win Seawater and blood have a surprising amount in common.
Blood has about 10x as many cells per milliliter as seawater, meaning seawater has 1/10 the cell density of blood.
Capitalism is the religion of the USA because the place started out christian. Thanksgiving celebrates the arrival of shakers and quakers and puritans, maryland was founded as a haven for catholics, etc.
Combine "selling indulgences" with "protestant work ethic" and soon you're inventing televanglists and "prosperity gospel" and celebrating the separation of church and state by putting "in god we trust" on the money. The money is how you worship and _what_ you worship.
We all know the reason the analog jack got removed from so many phones is it has no DRM, right? You can plug a recorder into it and trivially copy songs and audiobooks and so on.
Every digital replacement from USB to Bluetooth has legally mandated DRM layers that can veto unapproved consumers of the data. Whether or not they're switched on now, they can be at any time in software once we give up the escape hatch.
Everything else is an excuse.
An analog recorder doesn't know what's on the other end of the connection, so Boomers doing regulatory capture can't arrest you for owning one yet.
A digital recorder parses a protocol including permission information. If your digital recorder doesn't comply, it's a circumvention device according to the digital millennium copyright act and illegal to own.
@neo Have you implemented USB or Bluetooth hardware engines and read the relevant specification documents?
I have.
@neo The point is an upgrade of the Netflix or Audible app at any point could enable HDCP style nonsense that detects whether your consumer is "compliant" or "noncompliant", and only output some content at some resolutions.
Usually they tie this into new rollouts to push their user base into "upgrading". Needing a new TV to watch season 3 of Good Omens at launch, intentionally degraded quality on older equipment, etc.
The user base usually pushes back, but they never stop grinding away.
@jmsdnns For the moment. Can you do it on phones and tablets? Do newer windows versions require signed-by-microsoft drivers?
Why do people think "they're not doing it all at once, an increasingly small part of the populace still has ever more elaborate workarounds" is an argument against my point?
@neo "They've installed locks on all the doors and metal detectors at every entrance, but they've never stopped ME yet."
Well that's nice for you. I'm going to block you now and leave you to it.
The "some digital receivers sold today process data without DRM, they wouldn't sell a device that would stop being supported after a future software upgrade" reply guys have started to show up.
Luckily block still works on Mastodon.
@madrush Apple upselling on proprietary stuff, sure.
But the low end iPhone 15 is $800, and a tape and reel sj2 is 52 cents in quantity 10k without even shopping around.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/cui-devices/SJ2-3574A-SMT-TR/6619586
Do you think I haven't read 30 press releases on this over the past 10 years? Why do you feel the need to repeat what is in the press releases? "By eliminating this we can save less than 1/10 of 1% of the price". Great. That's clearly why they did it.
@jmsdnns Apple Music made 8.3 billion revenue last year:
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-music-statistics/
The whole company's net income was 95 billion for the year.
The smartphone market was always going to hit saturation because the planet has a finite population, and the manufacturing cost of each iPhone is more than 50% of the retail price. Selling digital content through the devices is the "give away the razor and sell the blades" strategy.
(I wrote a stock market investment column for 3 years.)
@madrush Iphone 13 cost $570 to manufacture.
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/the-cost-of-making-an-iphone.aspx
Still less than 1/10 of 1% of the cost for a major end user visible feature. This passes the sniff test as motivation?
@lanodan No protocol going across a digital connection ever changed after initial deployment, no upgrades have ever dropped support for older protocol versions, nobody has ever shifted a customer base into a new context where a captive audience can have the squeeze put on them later, it's always up front as bad as it will ever be on day one...
Why do people show up to defend capitalist market cornering? "I saw a press release with a good excuse, I assume you can't have seen it..."
And I have received the "not all men" argument about digital protocols. Because otherwise I couldn't have known that there might conceivably be non-monopolistic uses of digital technology. I needed to be informed.
Time to stop paying attention to the replies...
@nf3xn ...vogon poetry?
@nf3xn The standard being... pip?
These days Forbes is just the one Forb.
Badly burned steaks, I've made a few,
And I bit off more than I could chew,
But through it all, with some sauerkraut,
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way
@blaise I've never understood _why_ him doing it his way was supposed to be of interest to anyone else?
He did not read the instructions. He solicited no advice. There was no preparation, no study, and he felt the need to sing about how proud he was of this.
*Shrug* You do you. Me, I lean towards publishing, independent replication, peer review... Different culture I suppose.
@ska Nobody ever said his way was a good way! This was never even strongly implied! Unique is not, by itself, a compliment.
The pandemic shutdown drove a flu variant extinct in the wild, but intellectual property licensing may reintroduce it.
https://www.statnews.com/2023/09/29/who-recommends-dropping-component-of-many-flu-vaccines/
Na na na na na na na na 🎶 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66956483
Elizabeth Warren just became a co-sponsor of KOSA, the new Comstock Act. I'm ashamed to have voted for her last presidential primary. I will never give her another dime.
She is 74 years old. Geezers clutching pearls about the continued existence of sex now they're done with it.
They'll all die in office like Dianne Feinstein, vegetables voting on legislation they can no longer read or remember, puppeted by billionaires.
No more septagenerian legislators shaping a future they haven't got.
FOSTA/SESTA is already essentially mandating sexist AI categorization algorithms:
https://youtu.be/U16N9GtdQ5w
Capitalism is inherently unsustainable, because it values growth to the exclusion of all else. That's the logic of cancerous tumors. Even giant redwoods reach their full height within 500 years, yet live to be 3000.
Recorded history is around 10,000 years old. Modern capitalism is less than 300 years old and has already melted the ice caps, drained the aquifers, and lowered the birth rate below replacement.
Capitalism will end for the same reason cancer kills its host.
Russia is using youtube's content ID to block Ukraine coverage, and as always youtube has no humans to appeal to, just gameable algorithms.
If you're wondering why amazon is in antitrust trouble, the real question is why it took so long.
Religions building pyramids and cathedrals and sacrificing to gods is nothing compared to the massive waste of capitalism:
(And that's _before_ you get into David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.)
Russia still exploiting youtube's content ID to block ukraine coverage. Still no humans working at youtube.
Youtube is apparently REALLY unhappy right now.
@akkana I reload the page.
Youtube creators I follow are mostly covering other youtube creators getting screwed over. This is not a healthy platform.
Can we keep the Boomers away from the Series of Tubes? We already went through the Comstock act, and it was a bad thing.
https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/111178081639110503
"I can't define it but I know it when I see it" is NEVER a good basis for legislation.
@akkana There's almost certainly a "lik the bread" scansion I could reply with here for "reload the page", but I'm running on borrowed spoons right now so I leave it as an exercise for the reader.
@akkana I.E. "Someone more clever than me could be clever here".
Civil forfeiture meets the Iran-contra affair:
I applaud their ingenuity and agree they're finding a clever way to do something that desperately needs to be done, but "my side doing it to people I don't like" is how horrible precedents get entrenched. Civil forfeiture SHOULD NOT EXIST, and expanding "the police stealing brown people's stuff" to a tool of statecraft? Not comfortable with this...
I feel sorry for people trying to make a living from YouTube right now.
I can tell I'm sleep deprived because I've got the Ewok song from Return of the Jedi stuck in my head, except it's the Mandela Effect version with Jar Jar Binks.
(Yub yub. Meesa yub yub.)
@phf Which is a big step up from the historical practice of flushing it INTO drinking water.
@phf Turning "not drinking water" into "drinking water" is pretty much what all water treatment plants do, and laying two sets of pipes for grey water and good water and making sure they stay separate, and then "the sprinkler system is misting into the face of pedestrians, is that a health issue?" and...
They keep trying it. It never works. But it's a great "plastic straws" style hairshirt to distract from the capitalists actually causing the problems.
@phf That said, on Kwajalein when I was a kid they flushed all the toilets with lightly filtered seawater, because fresh water was in very short supply and the ocean was right there and nobody cared if "our sewage treatment plan is the pipe goes to the edge of the reef" wound up cycling back in there very slightly. The input pipes and output pipes were on opposite sides of the island, which the military considered good enough back in the reagan administration.
@phf Trash disposal was also "truck dumps trash off a ramp into the ocean", an area of reef called the "shark pit" because it attracted them. But that was at the far end of the runway from where all the housing was.
If you're wondering how hawaii wound up with diesel in its groundwater, or about iraqi burn pits, the military has not always historically cared that much about the not-shooting parts.
@phf Yeah but "we're taking too much out of at least five different The Colorado Rivers... and 80% of it goes to agriculture not civilians" is a different argument from "the Oglala is a fossil aquifer and you're pumping it dry... oh look agribusiness again". Water that was rain within the past 18 months and water that was last rain two asteroids back are different things.
And zebra mussles. And invasive carp. And the whole topic of dams and their removal. And...
At what point did the USA reach the point where children are too precious and protected to actually _exist_ anymore? The same way you wouldn't keep gold bars in your living room with no curtains on your windows?
https://press.coop/@latimes/111185528917225951
The Boomers took us from "latchkey kids" to "having a neighbor or older sibling babysit means CPS comes and acts like ICE" in something like 35 years.
Different professions have the strangest RSI.
https://www.avclub.com/drake-is-taking-a-break-from-music-stomach-problems-1850907270
Professional singers tend to destroy their lower esophygeal sphincter, because the singing muscles contract the stomach and push stomach acid upwards, resulting in chronic acid reflux that attacks their vocal cords. It's not that singing is bad for you, it's that singing all day every day for many years is bad for you, and by the time you know it's a problem, it's a problem.
https://loudwire.com/disturbed-david-draiman-acid-reflux-road-food-habits/
Some people are still fighting the good fight.
Good video on Russian economic history.
https://www.youtube.com/live/Ru3I3BrYf1U
The Soviet economy essentially collapsed in 1965, and switched to capitalism (small local self-funding managers making their own economic decisions) without calling it that which prevented starvation, kept them in power, and rebuilt some wealth. Then they discovered oil and switched back to economic central control and planning around 1975 on the theory they could import everything... which collapsed in 1991 when oil price tanked.
The first 20 years of Putin's popularity coincide with a $35 a barrel oil price when he came to power steadily rising to almost $200 a barrel, before China stopped filling its strategic reserve and the oil price collapsed.
https://landley.net/notes-2019.html#01-11-2019
Putin took credit for Russia's recovering economy, which was entirely due to the international oil price which was outside his control. When the oil price declined, the thumbscrews came out.
@dianeduane There's a reason we're here instead of there. :)
Putin's using his war against Ukraine to ethnically cleanse the rest of Russia.
https://mastodon.social/@ChrisO_wiki/111207228095692396
Putin is rounding up ethnic minorities in the vast siberian territory the Romanovs claimed but couldn't administer (google "Tuvan throat singinging", it's fascinating) and shoving them under Ukranian artillery fire. (Imagine if the USA's "trail of tears" was instead a World War I draft sending native americans to Europe with no gas masks.)
Putin WANTS them all to die, because racism.
CoffeeGeek is leaving ex-twitter and their last straw was link summaries breaking.
https://flipboard.social/@coffeegeek/111184985764438764
Here on mastodon, the maintainer Grognard has refused to embed linked mastodon posts because he personally doesn't like them, and imposes that preference on his userbase. And then he wonders why threads and bluesky, starting from nothing many months into the transition, have each absorbed more ex-twitter users than mastodon has.
Yes, that's a link above. No, it didn't embed properly.
Unity is rearranging the deck chairs.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231009494331/en/Unity-Announces-Leadership-Transition
New tall rich white male with good hair starts by giving effusive praise to previous tall rich white male with good hair who set the entire business on fire.
When Cult of the Lamb's dev team says their game will become the new Flappy Bird the day before Unity's changes take effect? You screwed up:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/cult-of-the-lamb/deleted
My youtube feed has had HUNDREDS of "watch a game dev learn Godot" livestreams go by in the past month...
It's interesting: if Steam had pulled that BS it might have wound up like Twitter, endless frog boiling of a captive userbase middleman monetizing the connection between each creator and their community, staying despite the troll under the bridge charging a toll and gatekeeping.
But you can swap out the engine and wrap the old body around it and sell it through the same dealership no problem. A sales channel is sticky. Replacing hidden plumbing is just work. Game devs know how to deathmarch.
@neauoire C happened because Unix was built in it. It was not load bearing before, and attempts to replace it have yet to displace it becuase nobody's dogfooded a whole OS (kernel and all) in any other language yet.
I refuse to care about Rust/Go/Swift until a usable OS exists written in one that can rebuild itself under itself without needing any other language to complete that basic circle. It's not a load-bearing systems language otherwise, just a parasitic growth on the C ecology.
@neauoire (I'll make an exception for "bits of this are written in assembly", but we already know what portability headaches that causes...)
@gnomon "Yes, that's a link above. No, it didn't embed properly." Two years into ex-twitter's implosion, the feature is not available on my server.
The logical way to do it would be to have links to posts provide a card with the full text of the post, allowing posts to naturally expand inline when _anyone_ links to them. That's a weekend's worth of work for an established project dev.
He switched from refusing to do it to "promising pie in the sky endless delay" not doing it. Less honest.
@gnomon Where did I say he expressed uncertainty? His rejection was explicit and repeated, despite multiple long threads on the subject.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14597
To the extent he's been "argued around", he's gone from defending his position to remaining largely silent on it while putting out release after release without the requested feature.
@gnomon It's been 2 years and I'm still here despite it. I could run my own server with my own patches, and don't. I'm not really angry about this, just disappointed.
Alas, open source development sucking at user interfaces is not a new story.
Humanity: spends millions of years as hunters and gatherers picking food off trees.
Capitalism: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
@pikhq Sam Vimes: you do the work that is in front of you.
There's a reason I use xfce instead of gnome. The katamari damacy theme should not be your desktop startup sound.
https://github.blog/2023-10-09-coordinated-disclosure-1-click-rce-on-gnome-cve-2023-43641/
Don't add piles of extra crap I didn't ask for. Don't run it behind my back without being asked. Making everything bigger and more complicated is a COST, not an improvement.
@fade@zirk.us Na na... na-na nah nah na na na, na-na nah, na-na batman.
There is finally construction around the long-abandoned Sears in Hancock center in Austin! Caution tape is up! Plywood has been removed from windows!
Spirit Halloween is making its move!
@mikolaj@chaos.social Another reason to avoid copyleft and use public domain equivalent licensing like 0BSD.
People are doing explainer videos about how YouTube destroyed its business model as they close down their channels.
So the guy who founded the FSF got metoo-ed out of it (briefly, then Bill Cosby'd back in), the guy who founded the open source initiative (and popularized the term "Open Source") is not welcome there today, and now the founder of the Software Freedom Conservancy has gotten a restraining order against the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center (who is the other co-author of GPLv2 and GPLv3):
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/oct/11/joint-statement-fsfe/
There's a theme here...
Maybe Eben is bad, dunno. I last met him 15 years ago. But Bradley's lied both to and about me on multiple occasions, and given a choice between him and Eben I'd still _much_ rather work with Eben. Or a court-appointed public defender. The SFC pointing fingers at the SFLC is a bit of pot calling the kettle black here...
And you wonder why I bailed out of copyleft and jumped through the hoops to get the public domain equivalent Zero Clause BSD license into SPDX in 2015, and github in 2019.
@vazub Thanks.
They just paid $69 billion to buy Activision, they can afford it.
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-microsoft-audit-back-taxes-puerto-rico-billions
The investigation has been going on since 2005, and this judgment will be appealed. This is why I vote for guillotines instead of taxes.
@baldur@toot.cafe it's not a lack of caring, it's a structural problem in the open source development model. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s
Part of Russia's payment to Iran for drones and such to attack Ukraine with may have been help with the attack on Israel:
(I'm trying to follow Ukraine, in part because Russia constantly interferes with US politics in ways that directly affect me, and I would like them to stop permanently. I am out of my depth in the middle east, and do not expect to ever have anything useful to say about most of it. What little I know there post-1700 comes from studying the oil trade.)
Jonathan Pie explains how plutocrats dismantled britain's National Health Service, in 3 minutes.
We've reached the point of content warning sandwich tweets because they aren't vegan. No wonder bluesky is winning.
@JasonW I am aware. It's symbolic, signaling a larger purity culture enforced by nosy neighbors.
@SnoopJ condolences on your Alzheimers.
Visiting Japan, I could tell it was a very different place from western countries at a fundamental level.
@pikhq Resonates with the listener, apparently. And obvious is in the eye of the beholder.
I respect that Perun won't cover anything until at least a week after it's happened, on general principles.
@nf3xn It's not stolen goods if the theft already happened? I'm not following the argument here...
@mekkaokereke "Street legal" is what prevented golf carts from scaling up back in the 1980s. You see them all over college campuses and such, but they're not allowed on general access roads because of Ralph "hanging chad" Nader, despite being perfect for the "round trip to the grocery store" use case.
There was a section of "The Innovators' Dilemma" about that back in 1997.
Has anybody looked into Greyjoy? I don't have context to form an opinion here...
@ska Japanese people trust other Japanese people by default. You can leave your bag on a coffee shop table to go to the bathroom and nobody will touch it even if you're in there an hour. In more rural areas farm produce stands have shelves of produce and a dish you add your cash to for whatever you're buying, and it's all on the honor system and it just works. Women from the West often comment on how they feel safe walking alone late at night in tokyo.
You can tunnel x11 over ssh. You can't tunnel wayland.
The Five Guys is a hamburger chain that shares global surveilance information between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
@ska It's just how my brain works.
Every time people mention that the USA recently had to inform Canada that India murdered one of its citizens, because domestic governments are usually more restricted in spying on its own people than foreign governments are, and that the governments get around that with an information sharing ring allowing self-spying by proxy, my immediate response is "did they get fries with that" and then I have to stop and explain.
Copyright lasts way too long.
Copyrights for the very first Doctor Who episode, broadcast 60 years ago, were inherited by a racist who rants on Twitter about what a betrayal casting a black man is, and has sworn "vengeance" against the BBC. And thus the episode is no longer available online.
The author in question is dead. Showrunner Verity Lambert is dead. Delia Derbyshire (who did the theme) is dead. The first THREE actors to play the Doctor are dead.
Apparently fewer people than I thought are aware of "the five eyes", or that it's basically a workaround for domestic surveillance prohibitions by having your allies spy on your citizens and let you know what they find.
Now I want Stephen Colbert to interview Jerry Morrell, founder of Five Guys, about the state of the international intelligence services and their role in diplomacy. Maybe start with a question about why Israel didn't see the Gaza attack coming, and then follow up with a question about Wagner's current status and their possible role in the recent North African coups. Both participants should have a full burger combo in front of them, of course. Including milkshake.
@blaise This sort of analysis (about China I think?) has been his day job for years, and he has multiple irons in the fire at any given time and shuffles what order he releases them in based on what's ready.
He talked about this when Jake Broe interviewed him: https://youtu.be/nWAkUWqdfBY
Ah, ATACMS. The "hold my beer" of himars-o-clock.
Putin's puppies in the GOP pause funding to Ukraine, Biden approves longer range missiles with the funding that's left.
The Colorado state supreme court approved a search warrant demanding Google tell them everyone who searched for a given keyword.
Rule 17 of the internet: any data retained long enough will leak. Google should not store this information. Next year, expect Texas to subpoena Google for everyone who has ever made abortion related searches in the past 5 years.
Why is Mastodon losing users to bluesky? Quote tweets.
https://zirk.us/@fade/111262840451336531
As foretold in legend and song...
Remember the "anybody but trump" shuffle in 2016 where each republican frontrunner for the nomination imploded a few days after the spotlight shifted to them, because they were all such terrible incompetent assholes none could withstand scrutiny?
Remember the anybody but Mitt Romney conga line of 2012, and anybody but John McCain in 2008?
The house speaker parade is very precedented. A faceless tiki torch mob of incompetent rich men hiding behind each other.
The fraud is coming from inside the banks.
Pulitzer prize winner explains how regulators and the FBI turn a blind eye to billionaires inventing paper assets and "borrowing" against them at less than inflation.
Watching car finance people point and laugh at EV "oversupply", with Ford and friends pushing 90 days worth of vehicles onto dealer lots over the summer. Why did the manufacturers produce this sudden surge of inventory creating a backlog of unsold vehicles, can't they count?
Next news article: United Auto Workers strike enters its second month...
@pancake Mostly competently expanded contents so you don't have to click through to see it.
Counting it like a favorite or reply is of secondary importance, but still part of the package.
Imagine if the Mastodon maintainer had decided that replies could be negative, so you only ever see replies from people you're already following. And that includes the original poster, they never see anyone else reply to it unless they're already following that person.
Same basic logic.
Jack Monroe is a good writer. It's not the many well-crafted turns of phrase, "white-winger", the bit about the rich insisting "that they would be better at being poor than actual poor people would be". It's the bone-deep domain expertise:
https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the-pasta-kevin-jack-monroe/
$10,000 per day is $3.6 million/year. Billionaires should not exist.
If you had $1 billion in a bank account with a $10,000/day withdrawl limit on your card, you could not spend the money in your lifetime.
Your children couldn't either.
Even your grandchildren would have a hard time living long enough (273 years), and that's if the money never earned any interest.
This is why I lobby for guillotines, not taxes.
@cstross Spending every second of that time fighting against the system tooth and nail, playing the cup and balls game to hide assets, subverting every legislator who can be bought, juggling money between jurisdictions, with a full-time staff of thousands of people tasked with finding new ways to lie cheat and steal.
Taxes are a compromise position. "Make there not be billionaires" has historically been accomplished a lot more often by guillotines.
We're not going to financially reform Putin.
@cstross Progressive taxes are an excellent way to maintain a positive status quo, but trying to uproot established oligarchy with it? Ounce of prevention, pound of cure...
I don't remember anyone ever saying their software was "thanks to pascal" or "because of visual basic" but the rust guys are an outright cult. It's "java everywhere" all over again: the most important thing about a piece of software is it was written in The Right Language, not what it does. How dare you not program in this language, resistance is useless it shall consume the world and exclude all else forevermore...
"Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake", "don't punish the behavior you want to see", and the inadvisability of "selling past the close" are all basically the same observation.
He said he's making more. Camping the spawn...
Oh hey, Oglaf is on fedi. https://socel.net/@oglaf/111278598494564866
@LaNaehForaday The further up the food chain you go the more concentrated the accumulation of heavy metals and other toxins...
They have respawned!
Now I need to make little paper sleeves for each SD card...
I put 0BSD through SPDX but ignored OSI (until I had to fight back against them misnaming my license 5 years after its introduction) because they're useless. OSI certification does nothing to prevent "open source with strings attached".
Here's an article about microsoft using open source as the bait in "the first one's free, then you're hooked" business models (including frog-boiling at microsoft github), with links to articles on oratroll and docker doing the same:
@0xabad1dea The extra capital was transplated from the dwars to the IJsselmeer, wasn't it? In an hours-long surgery with a large team and many scientific instruments.
And 12! The dozenth roofing contractor to cold call me since the hailstorm. I feel I should give them some sort of prize...
@trevorflowers @symmetrizer Can we order those too?
Sigh. Rag on them all you want but people like Malcolm Gladwell perform a useful service, because I'm very interested in the topic of this paper but know I'm not going to read it. I need the microwavable version from the freezer section.
If I accidentally post a reply to someone instead of a link tweet (because tusky's single post button is contextual and often does something I don't want), does editing the post to remove the address at the start make it then show up in my followers feeds, or has that ship sailed and I have to delete it and repost?
(Yes tweet is generic now, ex-twitter has stopped using it so everything else is just as much a tweet as it is there.)
The old line about three people being able to keep a secret if two of them are dead assumes none of them wrote anything down.
@pzmyers@octodon.social Capitalism is a religion. Money and ecclesiastical grace are the same kind of thing, and selling indulgences converted one to the other.
@fade@zirk.us @Sisuile I was a completionist on Twitter, but don't even try on Mastodon. I check in every couple of days, and catch up with specific individual feeds.
@emaste I'm pretty sure this means I can stop caring about FreeBSD.
@emaste no I just googled the thing you mentioned and the first hit was https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum and the second hit was https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?capsicum(4) which talked about requiring replacements for existing posix APIs, and you say it can no longer be turned off and ignored, but is now mandatory always and forevermore.
I'm happy to just ignore FreeBSD. It has gotten too complicated for me to care about.
@emaste Ah, rereading, I thought you were talking about the Base OS. This is some hypervisor layer I can avoid using.
So I can continue not to care about some OS specific security framework that replaces Posix APIs with layers of complexity. That's the important part.
@emaste Indeed. My phone client makes the hashtags dark blue on a black background and I only saw the first one in your initial tweet.
@kkarhan There's a bunch to say there. Attribution and ownership are not the same thing. Western society has been able to afford basic income, a national health service, and ensure affordable food and rent for a hundred years. (80% of the population used to work in agriculture, now less than 2% does but we have no more leisure time nor food security. David Graeber's book BS Jobs was quite good.) Capitalism is a religion, organizing society just like Pharaohs did to build pyramids.
@kkarhan I've always been unclear on why DuckDuckGo is supposed to be more trustworthy. Once upon a time sourceforge was trustworthy, then the dot com bust hit and it switched ownership a couple times and started inserting malware into downloads. GitHub was briefly sort of trustworthy before selling itself to Microsoft.
@kkarhan @ubuntu It would be possible with a tinycc multiplexor. Long ago I did https://landley.net/hg/tinycc which is probably too much backstory for this context... https://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html and https://landley.net/aboriginal/history.html are stale writeups... https://speakerdeck.com/landley/developing-for-non-x86-targets-using-qemu is even staler (2008!)
I did the outline for a new talk but haven't recorded it yet, https://landley.net/talks/mkroot-2023.txt
@kkarhan @ubuntu https://landley.net/systemd-notes.txt was from https://landley.net/notes-2015.html#03-06-2015
I don't want it on my systems but I recognize the need for a certain amount of interoperability with it. The main problem is it's monolithic and not modular. A big advantage of Linux is always been that userspace is made of interchangeable parts available for multiple sources that are drop in replacements for each other. Even a group like coreutils isn't an all or nothing proposition, but systemd is.
@kkarhan The switch to GPLv3 essentially destroyed samba development. Jeremy Allison talked about how much he regretted it here https://archive.org/details/copyleftconf2020-allison
@kkarhan @Raspberry_Pi@raspberrypi.social @rpilocator I'm in the process of setting up an orange pi 3b as a little nightly build server...
@kkarhan I stopped paying attention to the actual raspberry pi people when they bragged about hiring a cop to use their stuff to do covert surveilance. (Which was after they got the charger wrong in the Pi 4, which was after they started needing not just heat sinks but FANS and thus couldn't run off a battery anymore.)
All the pi-class stuff is rebadged phone tech. When laptops surpassed desktops we got "blade servers", and when phones took over we got Pi and friends. Phones are driving R&D
@kkarhan I'm sure I've ranted about what happened. I forked tinycc to make a https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html that used current vanilla source and built userspace too (toybox, musl, linux, itself), but the zombie one lurching after me took the fun out of it. Then I had the idea for https://elinux.org/CELF_Project_Proposal/Combine_tcg_with_tcc but didn't have time and qemu development got bureaucratic. Then I found https://norasandler.com/2017/11/29/Write-a-Compiler.html ala https://nostarch.com/writing-c-compiler and went "I should start over", but it's WAY down the todo list...
@kkarhan As for C++, I was looking at resurrecting "cfront" but it turns out https://github.com/JuliaHubOSS/llvm-cbe is an LLVM backend that produces C source as its output, and you can run LLVM itself through it, so...
Oh right, http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/011898.html is where I ranted about it.
Went to Best buy to grab a USB keyboard. They literally don't have any. And you wonder why Amazon is winning.
@b0rk Everybody sends me patches on the mailing list, in "git format-patch" format if they want metadata, and when they do a GitHub pull request instead I add ".patch" to the pull request URL and wget it. Then I "git am" it locally.
I believe my repository has one accidental merge in it something like 8 years ago.
Apple created its own hardware, and with it its own spectre/meltdown/rowhammer hardware vulnerabilities: https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/hackers-can-force-ios-and-macos-browsers-to-divulge-passwords-and-a-whole-lot-more/
Youtube's playlist algorithm is...
It created one labeled "Christian music" starting with https://youtu.be/z9xwXJvXBIw and continuing to https://youtu.be/XLIVwnncCA0 and https://youtu.be/vHKKolizGuo
Apple's reputation for being "more secure" is really just "less audited".
https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/111304220884483334
Say what you will about Android, but AOSP publishes a full system you can build and install on many different types of existing hardware, which is updated live so you see what the developers see when they see it, takes external patches from the field, and is the basis of a dozen vendors' products the same way Debian is the basis of Ubuntu.
The alternative is proprietary secretive "trust me" tech.
Women being in control of their own bodies is anathema to fascism, and any organization horrified by women being in control of themselves has a strain of fascism inherent in it:
https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/111325308210827787
Fascism is fixated on babies because indoctrination from birth is the only reliable way to get anyone to believe their nonsensical dogmas:
https://www.quotes.net/quote/41663
Capitalism breeds fascism because it's a religion draining resources from the 99.9% to elevate the 0.1%:
I suspect 80% of the fear people have of covid is that getting sick has _always_ caused cumulative long term damage, and in 2020 people actually started looking into it with modern science.
It's not that covid-19 is that much worse than 100 other diseases floating around, it's that we actually STUDIED this one and went "huh".
First Doctor William Hartnell retired from the role at age 58 because he was going senile. These days we expect people to still have their marbles at 80 or else know WHY.
Heck, the "madness of King George" was a disease he got in 1765 (in his 20s, neorologically impaired for a while but recovered) and again in 1788 at age 50 (symptoms became chronic):
https://www.history.co.uk/articles/king-george-iiis-descent-into-madness-a-tale-of-royal-tragedy
These days we'd have a detailed biochemical analysis with MRIs and such. Back then the fact he'd had an illness with coughing and fever at the onset of the thing was barely noteworthy years later.
But there's only so much you can change about living your life:
@susankayequinn Native americans lived here tens of thousands of years without trashing the place.
In 500 years western people introduced the earthworm (sugar maples were all over Georgia), drained the aquifers, the dust bowl, dammed rivers killing HUGE salmon runs, american chestnut blight, passenger pigeon, slaughtered the buffalo, strip mined and laid down interstates...
Now we're "Inventing" sustainability like we "discovered" america. Because we'd never ask the people who already DID it.
@susankayequinn I had not noticed it in the first three articles and videos I got pointed at, and kind of stopped looking afterwards. Good to know it's there...
@fade@zirk.us Except that restricted microflora diversity and LACK of exposure to stimulation is strongly suspected to contribute to asthma and various autoimmune disorders: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/falgy.2023.1120999/full
This stuff gets COMPLICATED:
https://www.malaghan.org.nz/news-and-reports/news/hookworm-therapy-study-expands-to-treat-allergic-inflammatory-diseases/
I think it's great we have vaccines and antiretrovirals so on now, and am happy science marches forward. But "Lysol everything, wear white cotton gloves, and buy nose filters" is folk remedy territory.
Masking WHEN SICK, sure. 24/7/365? Not convinced.
@fade@zirk.us It would be nice if we had more science and less capitalism in our health sector, though. I miss the days when basic research went into public not-for-profit hospitals with a sufficient supply of doctors that they could even make house calls. (In a "didn't personally experience it" way, but still.)
@dalias Half of what I want from Target or Best Buy's website is "do you have X in stock". It's not something they can reliably answer, even though they scan it in when they stock it and scan it out at the register...
@BunRab Can't make it up to Houston.
Honestly, if you're going to go there, sure start with "He Flies":
https://youtu.be/XLIVwnncCA0
Then "The Other Shore":
https://youtu.be/gnZ1STg8UIA
"Magic kingdom in the sky": https://youtu.be/3VbSZN1XVNA
"Hallelujah Essaim":
https://youtu.be/TLf5fi3bl_0
Something about fighting the devil:
https://youtu.be/LTdeQIY0jjs
Something about eternal life:
https://youtu.be/wtGIDrcLx3k
Something about moving on to a better place:
https://youtu.be/S-FT3W-rXsA
And round it out with another acapella piece:
https://youtu.be/nfGA9YC301A
@cstross David Graeber's "bullshit jobs" does not get enough follow up. The vast majority of capitalism's office workers accomplish the same amount as the vast majority of catholicism's priesthood. They look impressive and chant in unison, to nobody about nothing.
David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" should be required reading in grade school, and go down in history next to the complaints Martin Luther nailed to that church door.
Capitalism is the religion of numbers. A bunch of well-paid men in fancy clothes spending all day chanting in unison, saying nothing to nobody. Conducting ceremonies with no effect beyond keeping them employed.
300 years ago 80% of the population worked in agriculture. These days less than 2% do, and it looks like https://youtu.be/KR6GQjC2dXE
Women used to work from home spinning and weaving, now big machines do it. Construction work uses sawmills and backhoes. Yet we have LESS free time.
BS jobs beget more BS jobs. The top floor of the building is IP lawyers, with six floors under them handling their IT and accounting, HR, janitors, engineering, cafeteria, parking... all in support of nothing.
It's hard to even list the number of different ways late stage capitalism is every bit as imaginary as the divine right of kings:
We could have afforded to give everyone basic income back under FDR, but plutocrats are enraged by people with the ability to say "no" to serving them. They sabotage the system so that you will literally die if you don't serve a plutocrat: no food, no shelter, no health care. Just like kings. Just like priests. Serve their divinity or burn.
@BunRab did they specify "on which side"?
@BunRab "Battle with" could mean fighting alongside or fighting against.
@monsieuricon I pull with pop3, imap in gmail has always sucked.
Oh goddess, does nobody pay attention to history?
https://floss.social/@LovesTha/111332419369649173
This was a known issue back under DOS in the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI.SYS#Keyboard_remapping
No xterm variant I am aware of gets this wrong because they saw it done wrong and remembered. And we have fairly extensive documentation of what the options are if you know where to look:
I see stuff like https://mastodon.social/@fla/111329770751309948 and I'm honestly not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing?
I use thunderbird. It's been abandoned and neglected for a while, but still works-ish.
Mozilla's a cesspit that's managed to flush multiple billions of dollars _unrelated_ to cofounder Brendan Eich. (Their wikipedia page says they made over 800 million in 2019 alone, and yet https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-quarter-staff-250-people-new-revenue-focus because ew.)
And that first link says thunderbird development is active again. Oh dear.
@mjg59 And if device tree hadn't been GPL preventing even BSD from adopting it, we might not have wound up with ACPI on arm. As I complained about back in the day... https://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1505.3/00292.html
@collectifission "They" being chernobyl?
The "natural high background radation in Denver" everyone cites isn't actually natural, it was just classified until 2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from_the_Rocky_Flats_Plant
"Ah, but that only happens when things go wrong, and the new design we propose to deploy has never failed yet. It's foolproof, what could go wrong?"
If _Japan_ wasn't consistently meticulous enough to avoid another one in the 21st century, and that's _without_ an explicit attack...
One issue about 7 nanometer and below that doesn't get discussed much is the signals it uses are weaker than static electricity or radio interference in a metal phone case. 350 nanometer chips can produce a signal strong enough to drive a motor, and shrug off nearby lightning strikes. 7 nanometer chips can burn out if a human breathes on them.
So they plug these chips into older chips that talk to the outside world for them. Sometimes multiple layers of translation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x9nGo0Ge70
@skinnylatte Leaving catholicism to become a satanist is not really identifying the problem.
Prudetube found a new level of dysfunction.
"New ‘First-in-the-Nation’ Policy in Seattle Will Prevent Police From Intentionally Lying in Many Circumstances" is the literal headline, and not the Onion either.
@blaise Eh, they manage. Often by predicting.
https://www.theonion.com/after-obama-victory-shrieking-white-hot-sphere-of-pure-1819595330
How much did building the new "supermax" lane (neo-panamax) of the panama canal contribute to draining the lake at the top that the whole thing depends on?
Capitalism consumes like fire. Sustainable consistent profits are failure, the metric is "growth". Zero growth equals dead to capitalism. It's a doomsday religion that must squeeze blood from every stone, faster and faster, until it's gone.
@scalzi "If you fetch me you'll understand what happiness is..."
@skinnylatte Japan is finally getting up to speed, maybe singapore will catch up? https://youtu.be/O-HHPEw-97I
In 1776 Adam Smith published "Do Not Invent the Torment Nexus", a sequel to his 1759 "Theory of Moral Sentiments". Many people have speculated about the author behind this obvious pseudonym...
It's remarkable that someone can rise to international prominence on the strength of their PowerPoint presentations.
Depending on Prudetube for income is nuts. Don't do it.
The south isn't red, it's gerrymandered. She did some excellent threads on that, alas they were back on twitter:
https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/111335665159421809
Sadly, this is going to delay her book release. Still, seems worth doing...
Sleep deprivation level: about to create a library function superdog() in response to glibc's recent "posix? What's that?" fsckery (https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/450) and... This is like the time my struct tracking all the ps.c fields was named 'strawberry" or the time all the names in my sed pattern matching logic were Nine Princes in Amber references, isn't it?
Grumble, grumble... alright. (The two hardest problems in computer science are STILL naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.)
@rburchell But it replaces the crypt() function and Superman's dog's name is Krypto.
(Which is a bit like calling a dog from here Eartho, but it's still less silly than super ventriloquism.)
@Emil I look forward to Norway's eventual nature preserve at the disaster site. It may take centuries to achieve, but will last for millennia.
Superman could time travel by circling the globe a half dozen times per second because he kept crossing the international dateline.
Obviously, going the other way time traveled in the other direction.
Too much time travel introduces the prime meridian to the antimeridian (they hate each other and fight), which is where The Flash screwed up.
So much of archeology is like the medical people who insisted ulcers weren't caused by bacteria, or needing to wash hands before surgery was an insult.
https://universeodon.com/@KFuentesGeorge/111252066919829016
They keep insisting humans can't have been in North America more than 20-30k years because radiocarbon dating can't see further than that back in the past. (The half-life of carbon-14 is 5700 years, 24k years ago is 1/16 left.) So each new https://youtu.be/5z3DbmOuaFI MUST be shouted down because they already KNOW the answer.
@cstross @RnDanger @sp It's always projection with sociopathic narcissists who literally can't mentally model other people. It's a social form of aphantasia, the bit of their brain that keeps them in orbit within the tribe doesn't work.
It's like those experiments were they cut out the part of a minnow's brain that followed the other minnows, and the rest of the school turned around and followed the rogue minnow.
@cstross @RnDanger @sp The other clue is that the core of the policies benefit 0.001% of the population, and getting people to vote against their interests involves a lot of nested puppetry. The leopards eating faces party doesn't just happen: funding think tanks, gerrymandering, finding or creating hot button issues to wave in front of the bull to get them to charge over a cliff...
@cstross @RnDanger @sp Sociopaths get GOOD at manipulating people, because they intentionally do what other people do by instinct, and have no built-in feedback to mitigate it. They become to socialization what the Snickers bar is to hunter-gatherers, an intensity not found in nature.
Politically, they're leveraging those tribal affiliations they haven't personally got to carve off tiny fanatic cults and dial the us-versus-them to 11 until you call in an air strike on your own position.
@kelleynnn @ceciliatan I use cash because I don't want the attorney general of Texas retroactively subpoenaing my purchase history from 5 years ago when he declares the next new thing illegal.
@ceciliatan @kelleynnn Plus "camgirl" was a well paying anonymous work from home profession unilaterally destroyed by the payment processors privately enforcing a new comstock act, and I am not comfortable with that.
Russia's inevitable collapse into civil war CAN'T be worse than the current situation. It's just "devil you know" fear of change. (Abusers LOVE that.)
Random tiny dictators inheriting Soviet antiques (including nukes, maybe 3 of which work) is no worse than Putin having all that material together in one big pile, with less fractured supply chains and fewer adjacent distractions. Plus some subset of the resulting shards may be sane/friendly, and without the global ambitions of Combover Stalin.
Anna from Ukraine just did a good video on major chunks of soviet territory awaiting Putin's death:
Keep in mind Putin just turned 71 and the average Russian male lifespan pre-war was 66. His extensive plastic surgery was an open secret a dozen years ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/16/vladimir-putin-botox-plastic-surgery
Nobody has to do anything to him, nature is likely to take its course this decade. The embalmers should have an easier time, he's done their job for them:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lenin-s-body-improves-with-age1/
And deepfakes become political:
https://mastodon.cc/@info_activism/111403197823737978
500 years ago you'd hire a scribe good at forging documents and an impersonator with a wig. Photoshop is 35 years old and somehow we've managed to still have news sources. "Vouching for" has a chain of custody, and always did.
The technology is window dressing: you either have an enforcement system where large men track down people who do this and make sure "no-nut november" never ends for them, or you don't.
"Externalities" are economist-speak for capitalists who smash a thousand dollar window to steal one hundred dollars of display merchandise.
There's a reason I lobby for guillotines, not taxes on billionaires. We didn't tax away monarchy.
@dalias I did not know that the default permissions of a mount point included the sticky bit.
Yup, we've reached "blood libel" and "blood and soil" and heck, even the slytherin "mudblood" strawman version.
"Bad blood" = racism. The badness is in the blood, literally inherited because of race. It doesn't get more explicit.
Russia has stripped the air defense systems from Kaliningrad (the stolen piece of Lithuania it's retained since World War II, separated from Moscow by Lithuania and Poland) and flown them to Ukraine to replace destroyed ones there.
Remember that in WWII the USA sent Russia $11.3 billion of "lend/lease" military equipment (in 1942 dollars!) to kick out the nazis.
After the war Stalin kept all the captured territory (including east germany) and "Russified" it by forcing its original inhabitants to speak Russian and sending everyone who objected to concentration camps in Siberia.
Russia's technology was all reverse engineered lend/lease equipment, plus captured equipment and scientists. Pre-war they were literally medieval.
Even with massive foreign aid, Russia's big military move was always retreating. That was their contribution to fighting Napoleon, world war I, and world war II: run away to stretch the attacker's supply lines and let General Winter do the fighting.
USA's help allowed them to sometimes hole up in a city and lose expensively, waiting out a siege or forcing the other side to waste a lot of people digging them out in urban warfare.
They've _always_ sucked. They bully, lie, blackmail, and retreat.
I still miss the way Tokyo had demiglace in big squeeze bottles at every grocery store (why don't we?). Calling cream of mushroom soup "America's Bechamel" makes perfect sense.
A lot of news is olds, but that's ongoing multiyear transitions for you.
Yes, agrovoltaics is a thing. Lots of plants do better with partial shade and it reduces the water usage significantly:
3 years ago:
6 years ago:
The "news" is that the megaconglomerate dinosaurs have finally noticed. "Oh hey, money from a proven thing, let's muscle our way in".
@AimeeMaroux I express encouragement from afar.
The Unix epoch ended Saturday September 8, 2001. The Linux epoch ends Tuesday, May 17 2033. I wonder what the third billion seconds will run on...
Cuttlefish live 2 years. An octopus can live 3-5 depending on species. No article about intelligence tests on them ever seems to mention this.
https://shakedown.social/@lizardllama/111411740781106193
If they were 100% as smart as humans, they would still die of old age before starting kindergarten.
@dalias Smaller than 4K pages tends to lead to TLB entry exhaustion. There's no perfect granularity but that was a sweet spot for a reason.
@cstross It's a "look what you made me do" variant. Bog standard abuser.
@cstross When is Saint Darvo's feast day, anyway?
@brianleroux I do not expect better of Microsoft Github. Hotmail lasted about as long after being acquired.
Yup, Microsoft Github is on aproximately the same trajectory/schedule as Hotmail was after the Microsoft acquisition:
https://mstdn.jp/@brianleroux@indieweb.social/111416252433994570
Back when the author of "Accidental Empires"/"Triumph of the Nerds" wrote a weekly coumn for pbs.org he did an excellent one on Microsoft' acquisiton of Hotmail (the first free webmail provider, a once upon a time category killer like geocities/livejournal/github) and _why_ it was such a disaster that destroyed the site:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000816033303/http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19990826.html
Uber's VC funded predatory pricing cycle (standard monopoly tactic) has matured from the "sell below cost" phase undercutting competitors to drive everyone else out of business to the "cash in" phase massively raising prices and hiding the amount the rider is charged from the driver taking more from both sides.
As Darth Vader said, "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."
Apple/Google geographicallly ring-fencing EU privacy law compliance is the first good argument for NerdVPN and Surfspork and Private Intertube Access and such I've heard yet. By all means, convince them my laptop is visiting berlin:
https://ruby.social/@slightlyoff@toot.cafe/111393575246046424
Hands up everybody who hadn't yet twigged to Kier Starmer being a Tory:
@cstross @jpaskaruk @Skembear Mark Blyth at brown university did a bunch of great talks on this. (He's of the opinion that Corbyn wanted the tory party permanently destroyed and was basically willing to let Labor go down with it.)
A good rant, but the comment "If paying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" underneath is profound.
Got another email reminder of "You're invited to submit a talk for Texas Linux Fest 2024!" but their website doesn't let me log in by email anymore. Instead when you click the speak button at the bottom of https://www.papercall.io/txlf2024 you need to use a Fortune 500 "authorization provider".
I don't have a gitlab account and am not creating one for them. That leaves Google, Microsoft, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg/Peter Thiel, Microsoft again, and a third microsoft.
Not often you see a better mousetrap.