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Alaric Snell-Pym
@kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
mastodon 4.7.3The technical ramblings of Alaric Snell-Pym - https://snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/ for full bio
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50 Posts
Joined November 01, 2022
Replying to
@paul@notnull.space @gbraad@mastodon.social @doctormo@floss.social I am still baffled as to why they can't seem to build decent scrapers, like all the search engines, archives, etc did back in the 1990s. Why are they not rate-limiting?!?
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@mhoye I'm looking forward to the point when they realise there's better return on investment running a burger restaurant then building LLMs
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@GyrosGeier@hachyderm.io @mwl@io.mwl.io I feel we've dropped the ball with package managers; it's easy to download precompiled binaries and run them, sure, but if you wanna modify the software it's much less easy to get the sources checked out and a working build environment...
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@b0rk@social.jvns.ca I'm more familiar with other systems' explain output (and once I worked for a DB company on the thing that GENERATES plans and explains them, which was fun!) and I find it's also helpful to experiment with simple queries that you expect to go a certain way and just EXPLAIN them and compare what you get to what you expect.... Y'know just play with it :-)
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@leymoo @401matthall the station probably had 20-30 incoming lines so that was the maximum number that could be on at once! People doing this kind of thing in the US were called phone phreaks, if that gives you a lead - I don't know if we had a different UK colloquialism?
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@vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de @afewbugs@social.coop so about 0.2 attoparsecs per microfortnight! I always figured that would be a good unit for measuring snail speeds.
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@JulianOliver@mastodon.social also I can tell you - from bitter experience over the past months - that AWS is actually a terrible hosting platform, hard to work with, slow to deploy, and difficult to secure; and I've heard people say that Google Cloud and Azure are even worse. Dunno about the Oracle one, don't know anybody who's used it, but given its provenance I'd be absolutely shocked if it was any better.
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@JulianOliver@mastodon.social meanwhile, the little players who actually have to work to get and retain customers have, from the three I've worked with, been a dream to work with.
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@skinnylatte a friend of mine was writing a user interface to enter phone numbers, and wanted it to be aware of all the local formatting conventions - I suggested he create a Wikipedia page listing the ones he knew in a table and wait a month for it to fill out, then parse the table to get a comptehensive list. Apparently it worked!
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@JauntyArt@crispsandwi.ch I've been thinking about that scene a lot lately, as a Costco is being built about ten minutes' walk from my house
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@mattblaze@federate.social oh heh I have a bike light with that confusing property, too. In fact I'd go as far as to ban USB-C power delivery entirely as the specification is so hideously overcomplicated that it's trivial for implementations to have even subtler/stupider interoperability issues 😡
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@davva23@kolektiva.social if you don't find funding, you might be able to get some mutual aid from nerds keen to volunteer their time - have you talked to Bristol Hackspace?
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@leymoo @401matthall I remember hearing that the US version of the lines where the recipient gets paid by the minute let the line owner set the rate, so somebody set it to the maximum the form allowed ($9999.99 a minute or similar), went to random offices with a package for Mr Madeupname, then when they said there wasn't anyone by that name here, asked if they could ring their office - and rang their premium rate number. Apparently it was hard to prosecute aa they'd asked permission...
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@PermaSolarPotter even things that seem to fail can still be good, though. Doing things like that opens people's minds to the possibilities, and increases the chances that things will improve! Don't burn yourself out, but doing good stuff for your community often pays in there long run :-)
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@ifixcoinops not quite tue scenario you describe, but... it makes it clear yours will absolutely happen because there are millions of guys like him.
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@libbymiller the actual chicken, deep beneath the layers of feathers, is barely the size of a bee.
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@tamsin@toot.wales I'd love to find something like this too. A friend and I at university floated a business idea of making real-time dietary intolerance test strips - for gluten, lactose, peanuts, even animal fats to test for vegetarian-nese, etc - but never sat down and worked out the biochemistry of how to get colour changes for each of them :-(
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@ms_zwiebel@tech.lgbt I've got a plan for a game that has this as an element - not got time to build it right now though :-( But I'm delighted to hear somebody who wants that...
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@neal@social.typica.us @mhoye@mastodon.social and all those resources taught you to use a UI that was shared by all the apps you had - nowadays every app and web site seems to want to invent their own so they can use their favourite colours. And then changes it every few years. Users just seem resigned to being lost 🤷
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@gumnos @vasilis @dillo ugh yes I also hunger for choosing my own styles.... I gather the original design of CSS was meant to allow for this, but we ended up with a world where CSS styles and HTML pages are codesigned rather than the HTML just using elements and the CSS saying how to style them. I think the class attribute was the crucial error that led us down this path...
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@PermaSolarPotter not just American, my mother in law was similar! She choked on some lettuce in a meal we made her once - blamed it on our "weird food" until we pointed out it was actually a supermarket salad anyway 🤣
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@PermaSolarPotter @gardening there's some economies of scale, that make it easier to do more with less if you can muck in with neighbours - IF you have suitable neighbours!
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@Thayer ahhh that sucks and I am now vicariously feeling that "suffering at the hands of stupid bureaucracy with no simple recourse despite their mistake having real consequences for you" feeling, which I last felt a week ago when the government made schools ban mobile devices (despite my child having dyslexia+ADHD coping mechanisms that rely on her phone) 🤬
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@optozorax@mathstodon.xyz (having watched it now) fascinating! My simple analysis before had concluded that between ceiling+floor portals there would be (roughly) weightlessness, based on the axiom that gravitational potential must be continuous through a portal. Glad to see I wasn't too far off!
I also concluded that dropping a portal into a black hole wouldn't provide a way out from behind the event horizon, as an event horizon would also form around the other end of the portal!
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@optozorax@mathstodon.xyz YESSS! I had always wondered how gravitational fields through portals would pan out. So glad to see that somebody who knows more physics than I has actually looked into it ❤️
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@mattblaze@federate.social I bet you'd find a market for super high res pornographic images taken with your fancy camera gear, the viewer would be able to zoom right in! Might need to invest in some different lenses though... 🤔
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@Jesticulated@mastodon.social @MeanwhileinCanada@ohai.social https://youtu.be/PEqJjzN4J7s?si=0dtf4jGyux0WdOCs (a remake of a trailer for the film Paranormal Activity, but it's a cat)
Purranormal Activity (with my cat OwlKitty)
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And, for those wondering about this, we need to ensure that @dansup (who seems well-meaning but IS human and fallible and will have bills to pay, maybe unexpected big bills one day) isn't tempted by increasing piles of VC cash by ensuring he's not worried about money. By giving him some of our own. It's an investment in keeping VCs away!
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@bloody_albatross@chaos.social @neuralex@neurodifferent.me @marmarta@chaos.social ahhh, and the classic "Are you sure.you want to cancel this operation? [ Ok ] [ Cancel ]" ambiguity: which button cancels the cancelling?
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@mwichary@mastodon.online upgrading @netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org has always been a fun adventure in reading the changes list and deciding what neat new features to check out!
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Although I note that URL says "for individuals", I wonder where the corporate subscription ToS is... 🤔
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@GyrosGeier@hachyderm.io @mwl@io.mwl.io my gold standard would be: with a single flag to the package install command you instead get dropped into a shell with all the sources checked out in front of you, all build dependencies in place, and shell aliases or scripts or some other means in place so you can build, test, and install with three standard commands (and don't need to set any env vars by hand or learn the build tool). The install installs it *as the package* so other packages that depend on it will use...
Sooo I've managed to log into my mother's laptop and phone. Facebook and whatsapp and email and texts. There's messages from her friends asking how she is; I need to sensitively tell them she's died, in a way that doesn't look like a scam, and direct them to my own contact details so I can tell them about the funeral when I've organised it. And then leave the accounts in a suitable in-memoriam state. Does anybody have any advice or experience to share?
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@mattblaze@federate.social do you need to work quickly taking multiple shots if there's moving clouds in the sky? I imagine it's not too hard to work faster than the sun moves, though.
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@ifixcoinops @mike @jpm ...I think this was in some library for logging in an app but SURELY somebody's implemented this in a page view reporting tool?
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@timrichards @liamvhogan if you want a more modern version of the basic (excellent) idea, look at Basser Lout or typst