WellsiteGeo

Another incremental step towards sanity and away from Thatcherite (hawk, spit!) dogmatic stupidity. BBC News - Chiltern Railways renationalised after 30 years as private company https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c68xk701d975o

@Lana@beige.party This is why an educated workforce is a deeply double-edged sword for the business (people exploiting) class.

@libreleah@mas.to I had (have!) a Libreboot Thinkpad. Stopped using it for sheer lack of grunt. But I should try recomissioning it ... oh no - I remember why the last effort stopped -I lost the charger. One of those "centre pin" connectors, IIRC (currently 500 km away). Have to find one of those somewhere. The software shouldn't be a problem, given power.

@Remittancegirl Not a president, but I suspect the dalliance between Edward the (mid 1930s, I forget the serial number) and the Nazis caused a lot of Brits of that era to think the same unthinkable thoughts. To be honest, I never grew up expecting politicians to have ideals much beyond getting and keeping power. (Corbyn being a notable exception.) America, being a religious country, may be more susceptible to worshipful thinking.

@Hokkaido@channels.im If ever there was a job that called for one of those Boston Dynamics murder-bots ...

@hmwilker@social.tchncs.de @cstross@wandering.shop What Charlie needs is for a Trump cabineteer to read it (or more credibly, one of their children), get offended, and have it proscribed, stocks to be publicly burned ... Times Square, and the Lincoln Memorial would suit (west coast pyre?) ... That should drive sales nicely. New catnip subsecription for Menhit? Connoisseur catnip? Kristallnacht instead of mid-term elections? That would be about on the accelerated timeline.

@michael_w_busch@mastodon.online @franciswashere@arvr.social @startswithabang@mastodon.social There is no "Near Earth Asteroid" on an Earth-like orbit, that will hit in the foreseeable future. That does not exclude direct-from-Oort-Cloud bodies, or even those which have a pas-de-deux with Jupiter. Or, for that matter, interstellar impactors. But they're very unlikely. We could feel genuinely aggrieved if hit by one of them.

@garius@mastodon.me.uk Wasn't there a "Radium" brand of condoms some time in the late 20s? There was a tooth-powder too, but I think you were expected to rinse & spit.

@benfry@information.garden That would have been something to see. Word ("for DOS", it went without saying) v.5 was a really capable non-WYSIWYG word processor that MS didn't match on Windows until about 2000. I almost dread to think what Word for DOS 5 was like on a Mac. Could Macs do DOS emulation then? (Shrug. My new employer used Manuscript mostly. Which was an education, indeed.)

@firebreathingduck @cstross I went through that process a few months ago, and settled on Opera. Which is pushing it's diseased AI willy in my face all too often.

@cstross @Dr_Bombay Hmmm. Most browsers have a "list of open tabs" function, which *implies* (big 7 letters!) a file containing that list (dynamically generated). Which if you could find it would be half the battle.

@Remittancegirl@mstdn.social @hkrn@mstdn.social Agreed, but I doubt it will be earth-shattering. There are many ways to be blind from birth, and no sub-group is specified. So there is unlikely to be unusual physiology/ biochemistry, but a support/ intense socialisation explanation. Which is "humans are social animals" in a hat and false moustache.

@flargh@mastodon.social @mpopp75@mastodon.social As in, "Larry knows better than to try *that* !"

@sophteis@lgbtqia.space @flargh@mastodon.social "Civil servants", who know they are servants, and required to be civil? (PMs have the top floor flat, and sometimes their own fur-coated-advisors (rancid lettuce in Truss' case) ; Larry gets to use the front door of-right, living in the office, not the staff flat.

@alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space @flargh@mastodon.social Larry doesn't want the PM job. Twice-weekly down to the lunatic asylum with the loud clock? Once monthly to the big house in the park? Pfffft! Meowl that for a game of tin mice!!

@noodlemaz@mstdn.games @flargh@mastodon.social According to Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Mouser_to_the_Cabinet_Office#List_of_chief_mousers) no. I'm not sure if that says more about Wiki, or about British politics.

@maccruiskeen@social.linux.pizza @RolloTreadway@beige.party @flargh@mastodon.social Fat chance of running out of PMs, we're about 60 million from the real bottom of the barrel. Approaching 9 billion form Farage.

@dedicto @Remittancegirl @ApostateEnglishman I wasn't aware this was a nursery rhyme. I learned the story from watching "I Clavdivs" in the late 1970s - it's a cautionary tale told by Herod to Claudius (Clavdivs, per the title sequence). So I'm guessing - it goes all the way back to Aesop?

@garius@mastodon.me.uk @medieval_illuminations@mastodon.social More classic Mastodon serendipity. (So much weightier than Twitter serendipity.)

@CatsOfYore@mastodon.social Kitteh + glassware has never gone, uh, sideways? Evah? Now *there* is a "theme" if you ever do a "day of.. " or clickbait "vote for the best" poll. "Perched kitteh + delicate glassware".

@MostlyTato@mstdn.social @spytfyre@mastodon.scot @IndyRichard@mastodon.scot They'll have a WILD time up here!

@Remittancegirl@mstdn.social @raganwald@social.bau-ha.us Many *people* in the US support the death penalty, regardless of the legislators. No supporting retribution is political suicide. What shocks me is that jurors are allowed to *not* witness the murders they vote for.

@MissConstrue@mefi.social It's a major failure of biosecurity. Thank Cthulhu (and by "Cthulhu" I mean Menhit) that we ran a literally tighter ship off West Africa during Ebola. (2014, for clarity).

@dckim @cstross 5GB is *very* small for a training set. Small fractions of a percent. So how are they divvying up that task (à la SETI@home) and sending digested data back? Now you've got me thinking. How much compute has Google (Alphabet) "donated" to BOINC - the generalisation of task distribution that grew off the back of SETI@home?

@cstross @JustinMac84 Sorry, Pyrrus. It's immortality, of a sort.

@_tillwe_@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop But SF doesn't have "future gazing" as a part of the prescription. There's enough cross over between Fantasy (sword & sandals, even) and SF for them to be shelved together. There's a story to be told of Imhotep's repeated efforts at getting "pyramid" to work, using the science of 2500 BCE which should shelve under SF, not "historical fiction".

@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social Drilling assembly gets stuck in hole. We'll there's a situation I've had to deal with on a monthly basis since the late 80s. From 915mm spudding assemblies to 30mm side-wall core tools spiritually closely related to the drills on your rovers. It happens. And your (well, NASA's) drill designers clearly included gearing, torque, and tension capabilities to resolve it.

@Remittancegirl@mstdn.social Omlette with tortilla (?) delusions? What's the colour - 3-ring burner chillies?

@nholzschuch Some day some teacher is going to implement an anti-AI strategy called "handwritten work", in bound notebooks (printer-hostile), with crossings out and (corrected) spelling errors accepted as "proof of work" (a concept from bitcoin mining).

@newsthump I had heard of the statue, but not seen it well. Until now. Well done, that Banksy!

@rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf I gave up on the normal suspects (conspiratorial thinking) about Trump years ago. My big question these-months is "if Melania isn't his handler, who is?

@ObsidianUrbex@mstdn.social Over the decades, Dad built up a modest collection of ... first, laboratory weighing scales (from kg to mg); then microscopes (biological, petrological, metallurgical, projecting (classroom) ... I'm going to be Muggins for this lot when Dad dies (or moves into sheltered rooms). Is there a Microscope Museum? Or Scales museum?

@BashStKid@mastodon.online @garius@mastodon.me.uk Is ignorance a defence in your mind? Yes, there was some real evidence of radiation-induced disease pre-WW2 but not huge amounts. (The Manhatten project, then Hiroshima/ Nagasaki, made that impossible to ignore. When it was declassified. In the 1950s. At the same time, *starting* smoking was still a recommendation by some doctors. We have learned a lot since, which was not known at the time. Did radium-dosed tooth-powder survive from the late 20s into the late 30s?

@guardeddon@mas.to @Stevenheywood@mastodonapp.uk Booze and other, more potent, drugs. "We can't return to port until all the recreational pharmaceuticals have been consumed."

@Remittancegirl@mstdn.social "Massaman" a derivation/ mangling of "muslim/ mohammedan"? So ... Pakistan (East or West, if you go back that far)? Probably. I thought that was more a Portuguese stamping ground than Spanish. But you didn't claim it was "local". I'll still take the red as a warning flag. It's definitely sending messages.

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @marymessall@mendeddrum.org AIUI, Russia now manufactures drones locally to Iranian designs. Depending on military supplies from a country lagely the other side of the one you're at war with? Do I need to explain it like you're Donald Trump? (OTOH, both Russia and Iran have ports on the Caspian Sea, so as long as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan turn a Nelsonian eye ...)

@Photo55@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop Didn't that line get used at least once in "Empire Games"? In the "US". It has probably been used, unironically, in USA history. Cromwell would have had SUCH a field day suppressing the US terrorist insurgency (Revolutionary War).

@medieval_illuminations@mastodon.social Ermintrude! (Magic Roundabout, to date myself.)

@cstross@wandering.shop Hmmm. Self wonders how much of that 4GB is D/L, and how much setting up ginormous data tables. An array of SIZEOF(wordlist) vectors in SIZEOF(wordlist) dimensions is going to be chunky, even unpopulated with an efficient sparse-array algorithm.

@androcat @Remittancegirl Someone, somewhere in America, needs to produce a 3d printer plan for a "this is not a gun" Guillotine. Or for true, homespun American Founding Father vintage feel, a lumber cutting list (haha!)

@gknauss@mastodon.social I don't even remember the name of the film with "Colossus" (I bet there were several, WW2 Colossus &c) ... but I read the books of LoTR, and the Palantiri were neutral-to-good objects (like the mattocks of the Iron Hills dwarves), which were put to bad uses by evil people. Which makes Thiel's name choice much more appropriate. "Stupid" and "evil" are nearly orthogonal. Being "smart" and "evil" is as credible as being "stupid" and "good".

@cstross@wandering.shop I thought the Onion was meant to do satire, not news?

@cstross@wandering.shop The answer will be "with AI-filtered audio and guns"

@CatsOfYore@mastodon.social Serious absence of delicate glassware. Poah kitteh !

@meduza_en@masto.ai "Medusa", the Classical gorgon? Odd choice of ... mascot to name yourselves for. I vaguely recall the *start* of her, and her sisters, story involving arbitrary punishment and imprisonment but The Authorities (gods, probably Zeus ; and when he's involved you can bet there was a sexual assault too). The end of her story is better known. Is that the reason behind your name, or something else? (OK, that may be Ovid's version I'm remembering reading. And it was Neptune, not Zeus.)

@SecureOwl@infosec.exchange Who are you to claim to know what you, or your customers, want? Do you think you're Edsell Boeing or whatever the founder's name was?

@da_667@infosec.exchange Heil Elon! Seig heil!

@FranceskAlbs As "Special Rapporteur" to the UN, you have access to better linguistic resources than I do. I am seeking a (Hebrew?) neologism to encapsulate ... recycle ... Israel's founding justification - the Shoah - with the "novelty" (1949 et seq new ?? ) of their holocaust against their Palestinian citizens. ZA citizens never reached Israeli levels of Apartheid. "NeuShoah" is unfairly Germanic. We (the world) need a word (neologism) to really lay the blame on the right people.

@rien@mastodon.green Someone has been spraying with broad spectrum insecticides? A landscape like that should be rich with insects doing their various things, often noisily.