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@netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org @cstross@wandering.shop NetBSD is a type of Linux, in the same way that the Playstation is a type of Nintendo
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acb
@acb@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Childless cat lad. Also opines about music at @acb@linernotes.club
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Joined November 01, 2016
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@jon@gruene.social Someone should make a T-shirt that reads
1435mm &
25kV &
ERTMS
in Helvetica, à la the Rolling Stones T-shirt
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@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech @aparrish@friend.camp Musk didn’t need Twitter to make his epic-meme forum and future “everything app”: he bought it to take it away from the “woke left”. Trump didn’t need the Kennedy Center either, but its existence spited him. Putin doesn’t need Ukraine, but cannot abide a thriving linguistically similar democracy next door showing his kakistocracy up and demonstrating that there is an alternative. The outcry over Codeberg existing in defiance is the same dynamic.
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@cstross@wandering.shop Mind you, I’d also accept a revival of North Sea ferries that were axed in the age of cheap flights. A catamaran ferry between, say, Leith/Newcastle and Gothenburg/Esbjerg/Bergen would be a good alternative to trains especially in northern Europe.
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@cstross@wandering.shop Knowing Starmer’s anti-liberal leanings, any attempts to bypass this will probably be a strict-liability sex crime against children by definition.
One possible silver lining of Debian voting to open the floodgates to AI-coded apps: their habit of being 18 months behind the current version of things means that by the time most vibe-coded slop apps make it to candidate status, they will have long been abandoned, as the “developer” moved on to the next dopamine hit.
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@davidnjoku@mastodon.world Thinking that steam trains are more authentic/have more soul than the current electric trains and wanting to bring them back is only slightly more silly than thinking that vinyl records are more authentic/soulful than CDs/FLAC files, which is apparently the majority opinion
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@cstross@wandering.shop I imagine that a North Sea crossing would be overnight at best. (Harwich↔Hoek van Holland was an overnight trip the one time I took it and it’s a shorter distance.)
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
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@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social Having written the Postmodernism Generator, a (non-AI) script that produced meaningless yet grammatically correct papers seemingly about the woolier end of the humanities
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@ana@starlite.rodeo @cstross@wandering.shop This. If the fediverse is suitable as personal media for confiding in/privately conversing with people one can vouch for, it needs robust privacy controls, perhaps along the old LiveJournal model only federated (which is the hard part).
There have been projects floated to add true DM functionality to ActivityPub with end to end encryption. If this comes to pass, it could be a basis for (reasonably) secure privacy controls.
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@cstross@wandering.shop @davidgerard@circumstances.run I thought the grift was growing clusters of human brain cells and implying that they’re being put to work as post-AI agents, with the man behind the curtain being some combination of LLM slopbots, old-fashioned algorithms and third-world sweatshops.
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@aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au @decryption@aus.social @BenLeverAU@aus.social @jamesh@aus.social The frustrating thing about Knox City is that it stands next to a dual carriageway with a broad median strip that would be ideal for a fast, frequent radial tram/light rail line connecting Dandenong, Glen Waverley/Rowville, it and the Ringwood line, not to mention currently car-dependent amenities in between.
(And also another road that has been proposed as the end point for a tram that would get you to the CBD in 3 hours, but let’s ignore that.)
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@jwz@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop @davidgerard@circumstances.run @pndc@social.treehouse.systems I had an iPod 5.5g with 1Tb of SD storage. It had Rockbox, as I wanted to provision it with rsync, and iPod OS/iTunes scramble track names to placate the RIAA. It worked nicely, except that USB disk mode was flaky in Rockbox and I needed to boot it into iPod OS to copy files.
I now have a (Rockboxed) Hifiwalker H2, which I can vouch for. Though Rockbox has no support for Bluetooth, apparently due to IP issues of some sort.
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@jwz@mastodon.social It’s a pity we never got the Chris Cunningham Neuromancer that was floated in the 90s
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@bastardsheep@aus.social @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au @pdcawley@mendeddrum.org I have memories of coding in Turbo Pascal and playing Sierra games on a somewhat boxy 286 laptop belonging to my mum’s employer.
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@aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au According to Wikipedia, a standard sydarb is approximately 562 gigalitres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-coherent_units_of_measurement
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@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz Maybe they can shine them on the solar panels between railway tracks that they recently tested in Switzerland and synergise two half-baked ideas
RE: @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz
In Australia, IIRC, Eora/Sydney has one or two canals, built too late to compete against rail. Not sure if any of them have locks.
Naarm/Melbourne has one in the bayside suburb of Elwood, though it’s a short, stubby affair that never became long enough to be a transport artery.
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@alice@lgbtqia.space Surely the burden of proof would be on them demonstrating that your car was there for those hours? Or do you need good lawyers to have such rights these days?
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@Tywele@corteximplant.com @ana@starlite.rodeo @cstross@wandering.shop Would the implementation lend itself to access-control lists and “friends-only” posts visible only to specific recipients (with replies inheriting their ACL)?
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@ptua@mastodon.social @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au Does anyone think that Jess Wilson and/or whoever One Nation puts up will complete the SRL, or even not fill the tunnels in with concrete and sell off the land to make sure it cannot happen?
RE: @terrypratchettquotebot2@mastodon.social
The belief in an afterlife seems inherently reactionary in the same way that stoicism does.
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@mhoye@cosocial.ca @cstross@wandering.shop @neauoire@merveilles.town @Kehvarl@furry.engineer Those who don’t understand metric are doomed to reinvent it, badly
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@Edent@mastodon.social One demerit for Basel: the free tram pass that comes with hotel accommodation is not valid across the border, but it doesn’t say anywhere that it isn’t. The first tram stop in Germany is swarming with ticket inspectors, who do a roaring trade of fining inadvertently fare-evading tourists. It’s a fundamentally predatory arrangement.
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@mathowie@xoxo.zone when I fly through either Singapore or Bangkok (between Europe and Australia), I often visit the pool at the airport (airside at SIN, landside at BKK); it makes the same kind of difference.
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@alice@lgbtqia.space In the UK, a man ended up on the sex offenders’ register after hotel staff walked in on him fondling his bicycle in his (locked) hotel room. Unless there was something not mentioned, like harassment of staff, the reasoning seems to be that sexual expression outside of socially accepted norms is itself an indication of danger to society. In which case, if a bike, then surely a couch as well.
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@Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt The Mayan football tradition may be gone, but it’s not forgotten.
@scarfolk@mastodonapp.uk
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@cstross@wandering.shop @davidgerard@circumstances.run @hlangeveld@hachyderm.io I bought one of those for the first time in my life when I lived in a top-floor (attic) flat in a Victorian row house in London, despite having lived in Australia before. The brave little air conditioner worked continuously for a few weeks each year and just about kept the place habitable.
(Did I mention that it was inadvisable to ever open the window on the other side, due to the exhaust from the ground-floor kebab shop pointing right at it?)
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@mapologies@mastodon.social is a behemoth specifically a hippopotamus, or just any unreasonably large beast?
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@EF@mastodon.bsd.cafe @davidnjoku@mastodon.world Are these fuelled by coal carried onboard like the old choo-choo trains so beloved by the public, or is this something novel like using diesel fuel/hydrogen to drive a steam turbine?
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@cstross@wandering.shop @quixoticgeek@social.v.st That makes sense. Back when I read the book, I did imagine the Tom Bombadil song having a reggae-adjacent riddim to it (or at least as much as Don’t Worry Be Happy)
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@EF@mastodon.bsd.cafe @davidnjoku@mastodon.world For mainstream applications, or for specialised purposes/as a historical exercise?