Replying to
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
A few years back there was a giant syrup heist!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Heist
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lolcat
@lolcat@digipres.club
hometown 4.6.9+hometown-1.3.0remedial polymath
the only good god is a dead god
beware programmers who cary screwdrivers
119 Followers
104 Following
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Joined February 26, 2023
Replying to
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
Same sitch here - down to one serving of french toast's worth.
I've seen industry giants publish studies in academic conference proceedings which reach conclusions the complete opposite of what their own data show. In one prominent example, Google simply binned their data such that nearly all the entropy was smoothed away. I've seen the direction of entire industries, nations, cultures, and the world steered wherever industry wants, supported by academic trust washing. I've seen leading academics cynically sign on as lying industry stooges. We see you.
Just encountered the word "apolaustically". The OED says it occurs less than once per 100,000,000 words in modern written english. It has two definitions:
A. adj. Concerned with or wholly devoted to seeking enjoyment; self-indulgent.
B. collect. sb. A suggested synonym for ÆSTHETICS; the science of the pleasurable.
Replying to
@mlanger@mastodon.world
Also, as a fixed-wing pilot, your trip through smoke-filled canyons sounds wild.I can see why it's stuck with you.
@ChanceyFleet
I'm not sure I've ever intentionally used an emoji. Some software automatically replaces emoticons with emojis, and I know I've been bit by that when moving fast. But intentionally? I don't think so.
THIS, OTOH, I am here for :BreakDancingWombatWearingChapsAndClownShoes
Replying to
@MLE_online
I wonder if your subconscious was plumbing memories of having encountered "brivet" and "brevet", both of which seem right up your alley:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/brivet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randonneuring
Courthouse stairs.
Replying to
@saraislet@infosec.exchange
Coming at this from the systems side of things rather than SW dev, I can report that recent GenAI developments look a lot like the big cloud push in ~2008 - 2017.
IT "leadership" at my employer, a giant R1 US university, simply decreed that everything would move to "the cloud." The only assessment plan was simply to assert that cloud was "always better" for everything.
While the pitch was presented in tech mumbo jumbo, it was always just a struggle for budgets and power.
Replying to
@rose_alibi
A dear friend, colleague, and sometime officemate always answered the phone with a confident, baritone "Laboratory".
Yes, we were connected to a large proteomics, genomics, and biophysics lab, complete with thousands of square feet of wet bench space, but the two of us were nowhere near that stuff - sometimes in an entirely different building.
I liked it.
@sk76
A while back I tooted about being stuck in a small town near Rovaniemi one night in the early 80s when hitching in Lapland. Not sure if I mentioned how the high school kids would load up on food from these carts and "drag main" in their parents' old Volvos and Saabs. Made me laugh to see how similar small town life in Lapland and the American midwest were/are.
One elevator town on the westernmost edge of cultivated land east of the Rockies.
A sign that hasn't had a purpose for half a century.
By default, all Wikipedia pages now open with a site menu that consumes the left ~20% of the page width, and an editing menu that consumes the right ~20%. Why? I can't imagine I'm alone in only wanting to see either of those menus, maybe, 1% of the time.
In light of recent events which seem likely to have revealed considerable detail regarding US intelligence sources and methods, I went looking for information about the devastating November 1940 Luftwaffe raid on Coventry.
Several sources have claimed Churchill chose not to evacuate Coventry before the raid because he feared doing so might reveal the existence of Ultra - the Bletchley Park codebreaking effort.
Recent scholarship suggests these accounts are apocryphal.
Replying to
... accept, but this is and always has been a fundamentally racist nation. Every part of it. From sea to shining sea. From skid row to Wall Street. From the schoolhouse to the Ivy League. From the storefront churches to the National Cathedral.
There is no understanding anything about America without first understanding that everything - every last fucking thing - is about White Power.
/end
Replying to
... in the 1970s, the worst thing a white person could be was a "ni**er lover." It could get you killed. Adults and teens alike casually demanded genocide for the entire middle east and Africa. Mexican kids called themselves Spanish out of shame.
My TX university in the 1980s, was almost entirely white. Classmates referred to all Blacks as apes. The casual calls for genocide continued, but these kids were now voting adults.
In DC, which was only ~20% white at the...
/2
Replying to
.. time, it continued. Behind closed doors and curtains, twentysometing whites who worked on the Hill, writing for Congressional reps, felt comfortable unloading racist hate speech directed at entertainers, athletes, and public officials.
Visiting NYC in the early 90s, a white woman approached me at Penn Station to say "Oh! you're from DC. Your blacks are so much better than ours - they know their place."
In the twenty-first fucking century, I listened to ...
/3
Replying to
esteemed science faculty - all white - at a prominent PNW university confidently proclaim "There is no racism. I've certainly never seen any." Some of these are people you've seen on TV as they address the most prestigious scientific bodies on earth.
Now, I live in a near ghost town on the high plains. My neighbors live in constant fear of Mexican caravans. Most of them would faint if they ever say someone wearing a turban.
It is uncomfortable for many whites to...
/4
Replying to
... with increasing frequency. It feels like Meidas has figured out the formula for scratching whatever itches in the MAGA mind.
Sure, more than half of the comments on those sites are still hateful, unhinged, and detached from reality, but more and more now repost or reference Meidas content as rebuttals.
No idea if this effect is real, or if the fact/fantasy distinction has really opened a single Nazi's eyes, but thought it was worth mentioning.
/end
Replying to
@Erased_Citizen
Imagine spray painting murals on your model trains just like you see on their full-scale cousins.
Replying to
@vxo@digipres.club The furthest east I've been in years is Branson, MO, and that was just a month ago, and only for 90 mins. Now I have an excuse to explore further!
Replying to
@vxo@digipres.club
You've given me hope that kids still ask themselves what's on the other side of that door, then go on to see for themselves.
Never would have guessed Miami was a productive hunting ground (tbh, my mental image of Miami is pretty bad, and probably unfair).
Was just discussing with a friend how the digital transition has, sadly, curtailed lots of opportunity for fun - no more clipping into phone lines in unwatched wiring closets, etc. Maybe I'm projecting and kids still play.
Replying to
@vxo@digipres.club
Wackenhut - always makes me chuckle.
Also, "casual urban exploration". No idea if these exist anymore, but in the 1970s a warren of tunnels snaked all around downtown Houston. Much like the tunnel system in Montreal, they allowed people to move from building to building without being exposed to life-threatening weather - heat in Hou. Bodegas, fast food, etc. Plus, unlocked doors. At night, a curious person might find himself alone in a bank or oil company C-suite, completely unnoticed.
Replying to
@vxo@digipres.club
Before pervasive video surveillance all sorts of adventure was available to a person who had a habit of testing closed doors.
Replying to
@christineburns@mastodon.green
This happened to the second Beowulf cluster ever built. Somehow, someone who had access to the machine room at Goddard Spaceflight Center where the cluster was located managed to discreetly remove half the RAM from all ~100 nodes in one night.
That was ~32 years ago.
Bought this back at the start of the GW Bush administration.
Replying to
@funhouseradio@mastodon.world
Enjoyed Curry as a late-night NYC DJ in the 1980 movie "Times Square". The final cut of the film is a bit of a disjointed mess, but the neighborhood - old, seedy Times Square - and the sound track - Lou Reed, Gary Numan, Talking Heads, The Pretenders, etc. - make for a great backdrop. Both of the leads do a great job in their roles, but the edit really lets it all down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Square_(1980_film)
Replying to
@ned@mstdn.ca
I also believe Pine was a better mail reader than anything anyone uses today (aside from lacking any support for encryption - but that was easily fixed), and Lynx worked just fine as a web browser. The fact that it's not easy (or possible at all) to use PGP with Gmail tells you all you need to know.
I'm feeling very, very irritable - can you tell?
Replying to
@gregkh
Reminds me of my very first coding gig in the mid 80s (where I began never having touched a computer before) rescuing data for a NASA conference.
The last hurdle was centering name tags in Helvetica, not having previously been conscious of proportionally-spaced fonts. I believe I built a table of experimentally-determined character widths. No kerning. Only sorta worked. But that was almost HALF A CENTURY AGO.
Replying to
@edwardk@infosec.exchange
I would have bet against them lasting even this long. No idea if all-disk backup is still their pitch, but it's a fundamentally stupid approach. There's a reason the hyperscalers copy everything to multiple tapes in multiple locations.
Who knows why they've lost money every year since going public, but it might have something to do with being tethered to that original bad idea.
[full disclosure: I'm in a super pissy mood today. Also, autocorrect can go fuck itself to death]
Replying to
@ned@mstdn.ca
As I recall, the late 90s Microsoft Office EULA briefly claimed ownership of anything created using that software before being revised in the face of public outrage. I don't think I'm hallucinating this.
At the risk of coming off all old man grumpy, I'd argue that what most people need, most of the time, is an editor, not a word processor or whatever PowerPoint is. Concentrate on writing instead of dicking around with fonts, or whatever.
Lately, I have had very strong cravings for donuts. Not any specific extra tasty donut, just donuts in general. Even shitty supermarket donuts will do. When I buy a box, I immediately sit down and eat three or four in a row.
What's that say about my overall nutrition? That my body is in critical need of palm oil or artificial chocolate?
Replying to
@coloradosun@mstdn.social
When I spoke with a local electrician about installing home solar in SE Colorado, he told me I would not be compensated for any surplus power I returned to the grid. Having lived in WA, I was surprised to hear this.
Can anyone point me at a reliable source of information on this topic?
Here's the Wikipedia entry for the "New" US embassy in Moscow, constructed between 1979 and 2000. Possible connections to current events in Washington DC are for the reader to imagine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_the_United_States,_Moscow#New_building
Replying to
@mlanger@mastodon.world
Back in 2021,I spent a couple of weeks driving around the WA cascades looking for someplace to move after retiring form work in Seattle. Wanted someplace where, among other things, I could afford to own and fly a small plane..
Everything was on fire. I'd drive up to an FBO only to find it filled with exhausted, soot-covered firefighters. Not a good time to be asking about hangar availability.
Ended up on the high plains of eastern CO. Cheap to live and fly, but also with fires.
Many years ago, I was sent down to the Lowell Observatory to set up a machine to stream data from an instrument straight to tape (DLT). A few things stuck with me from that trip. Flagstaff was still a little western town. Walkable. Independent bookstore. A coffee shop / hippie cafe called Macy's. The dorm at the observatory felt lost in time.
But the big standout among all the high points was the IT systems manager and what a great job he'd done. Don't recall his name, but he was first rate.
Replying to
This is mostly idle musing that's unlikely to lead anywhere. The question began by asking myself, could writing with perl and TcL/TK be sufficient for "modern" applications that played well on the modern Internet? And, would there be any advantage over, say, using Python instead.
Advantages:
super-duper lightweight
super portable
dependency light
more secure? (decades of use)
Disadvantages:
Fewer libraries for fewer things?
Looks old fashioned
Like I said, mostly just idle musing.