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One entertaining detail from last night's bad dream: the loo doors in the building were labelled with various chromosomal makeups. (Wasn't a "plot" point, just something people tutted and said "yeah I know" at.). Anyway, one of the doors was labelled ZW.


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in reply to Sarah Brown

@John_Loader that makes sense. I was thinking if it was a real problem I would have seen one of the activists somewhere mention it at least once.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Wow. He was a bit OTT, but a lot of early rights campaigners in various movements felt obliged to be that way to force change and get people to sit up & take notice.


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Proud to present my enterprise architecture 2025 guide to modern firewall protection of critical internet assets, design pattern.

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in reply to Kevin Beaumont

no checkpoint, juniper, baracuda, f5 and even freaking iptables - waste of time.

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I've started looking for a job again. Not too strenuously, just seeing what's out there for a C++ and Fortran programmer with an engineering/physics emphasis who wants/needs something at least close to full remote.

Probably not a lot!

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in reply to Ghost of Hope

I checked in, and UK would be too hard for us to manage. Best of luck finding good gigs though!


in reply to Adam

@ifixcoinops I get this from my dad. He's been a computer professional since it was punched cards and I was brought up ab ovo that every extra function on a device is just another opportunity for it to go wrong.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@ifixcoinops This may be a good time to mention my new Sony TV came with two remotes, and I wish I was kidding. There’s the traditional TV remote, and the “smart” one. Where, and I kid you not, some buttons work via Bluetooth, others via IR.

I’ve never seen such a great example of what results from stitching two products together in something barely sellable. Sony is a shadow of what it used to be. Just like every other electronics brand.



#ukpol Suppose you wanted to institute some form of right to buy for private tenants. Possibly without the ludicrous discounts you see with council RTB. You'd presumably have some sort of time period a tenant would have to have lived in a place before they'd qualify. How do you stop the landlord evicting the tenant just before the tenant becomes eligible?


I’m an IT professional. Do I turn back into an IT amateur when my contract is up? Or do I enter some liminal IT dilettante state?

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I wonder if the higher than usual number of American accents I’m hearing in the Algarve is connected to the recent election results.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Possibly? Although emigrating from the US isn't that easy and Portuguese isn't a commonly taught foreign language.

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Mouin Rabbani on What Really Happened in Amsterdam Between Israeli Soccer Fans & Local Residents
youtube.com/watch?v=ttS8pKwvoI…

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Dear Apple, when the device is localised (see that S there?) into British English, "chips" does NOT go under "confectionary" in the shopping list.

Goddam fuckmuppet seppo nonsense.

in reply to Adam

@pseudomonas
oh, the US is VERY invested in deep-frying confectionery
@Adam



youtube.com/watch?v=jN7bQ0MnP3…

This is Porterbrook's protoype hydrogen train. It's kind of nice but to me it begs the question: why not just electrify the lines in the conventional way? Producing and transporting the hydrogen for these things is surely going to consume many times more energy than conventional electric traction.

in reply to Cyberspice

@Cyberspice Reopened Varsity line. The bit between Bedford and Cambridge is going to be on a different route and will be new build.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Ah yes, the south, where they spend three times as much per capita on transport infrastructure than the north!


I have nobody to shout this at right now but it seems like a shame for it to go unrecorded. So I offer this as a free piece of clichéd rage to anyone with occasion to use it.

Breathe my incinerated dick dust!

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in reply to Alexandra Lanes

There are more refined ways of saying it. youtu.be/17rOl7i55ag


Day made less good by the (male) cleaner who shouted at me in the ladies’ at St Pancras. “This is… woman!” he shouted. I calmly replied “indeed, and so am I” and shut the door of the cubicle. Gave him a cheery wave in his cleaning cupboard on my way out.

But.




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Americans: if you're thinking of leaving, beware before considering an asylum claim.

"Safe" countries have treaties recognising each other as safe, and do not recognise asylum claims from each other as valid. So if you as an American try to claim asylum there, at the moment you will be automatically rejected.

Instead, travel on a tourist visa. If things get bad for US trans people, this may eventually change.

#trans #TransRights

Unknown parent

Trans Rescue
EU pol regarding refugees (it's bad)

Sensitive content


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Unfortunately, our university is discontinuing personal web pages for academics for incomprehensible reasons.

Fortunately, our department was allowed to set redirects to external web pages, so that the existing links still work.

My web page is now at gihub, accessible from the original links.

in reply to Conor Mc Bride

@pigworker @johncarlosbaez

Honestly I remember one university who's main IT help desk was comically incompetent, and incredibly user hostile. For example, you could customize parts of your user experience on lab computers, but the settings would never stay.

The CS department handled their own IT at the time, and it was a _much_ more tolerable situation.

I've yet to understand why IT departments are typically so incredibly user-hostile, like they forget what purpose they actually serve.

in reply to Leon P Smith

@leon_p_smith @johncarlosbaez They want to get away with the lowest common denominator and address nobody's specific needs. A CS department obviously has specific needs. (I used to specialise in manufacturing specific needs. In fact, I still do.)
in reply to Conor Mc Bride

@leon_p_smith @johncarlosbaez Essential context is that my father ended his university career as Director of Information Services at the Queen's University of Belfast. I have so seen both sides of this game.
in reply to Conor Mc Bride

@pigworker @johncarlosbaez

> I used to specialise in manufacturing specific needs. In fact, I still do.

Nice quote. That's certainly true of myself as well, to greater or lesser extent depending on whatever tends to capture my attention at that moment in time.

That's probably also why I found it pretty easy to get a bit crosswise with IT departments of all stripes.


in reply to mathew

@mathew i think zmodem’s lack of congestion control might be problematic or at least very rude 😈 and you would need to invent an encryption layer 😭

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This is a brilliant take by Gianmarco Soresi on the absurdity of comparing any criticism of #Israel to antisemitism

youtu.be/jhST1Q230zI

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Big fan of Bernie Collins on Sky F1. Whereas usually a lot of the presenting team is drawn from former drivers, she used to be a strategy engineer for several teams in the paddock, so she brings a lot of insight from the "behind the scenes" part of the sport. Also unlike some of her counterparts she doesn't feel the need to chip in when she has nothing useful to contribute!
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Leena Gade is similarly good in the Le Mans commentary (which we're about four hours into watching).


Advantage of intelligence: being able to catch up an OU unit and a Portuguese language unit in an evening

Disadvantages of procrastination: having to



Today's law study amusement. "Even taking into account that the bird had travelled from Leicester in a box on British Rail its condition was rough"

(Partridge v Crittenden [1968] 1 WLR 1204)


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Janey Godley has died.She's been going to do so sometime soon for a while now, and very soon indeed for the last couple of weeks, and now she's gone.
She was always a proper ally, and the world is poorer for her absence.
Long may she be remembered and celebrated.

Trump is still a cunt.

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So I know it’s all very funny, ha ha, but here’s why the orcas don’t go after the boats of the ultra rich.

Two photos. One a multi million euro luxury yacht. Notice it has two props. They steer by vectoring the thrust. There is no rudder.

The other, my boat. It costs what a new car costs (like if you were buying a low end Tesla. Expensive, but not stupid money). It has a rudder because it’s a sailboat. It can’t rely on thrust being present.

No rudder - no orca attack. People who can afford sailboats, which the orcas are attacking, cannot afford luxury motor yachts, which they aren’t.

A sailboat is like a mouldy caravan, but floating, and slower.

in reply to Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻

@Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻 same. I run the gauntlet next summer. Somewhat worried. I have a life raft and a phone that can do satellite distress, and I don’t taste like tuna.

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On my quasi-blog: "Separation of concerns in a bug tracker"

A thought about bug trackers I've used, how they make some kinds of database query difficult, and how one might be designed more sensibly.

chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtath…

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in reply to Luis Villa

@luis_in_brief @brainwane I've been known to get really angry at bulk or automated closing of old bugs, for purely sociological reasons. No matter how stale the bugs are, closing them without going through them by hand and attempting to reproduce each and writing a personal note for each is disrespectful of the original reporters' time and effort.

But I don't think this argument would carry over to a tracker with Simon's facts/plans split, as long as automated sweeping only applied to the plans side. "We don't have the capacity even to investigate whether this is still relevant, so we're not going to make plans to do anything about it" is not what a reporter wants to hear, but it's honest and doesn't disrespect anyone.

in reply to Simon Tatham

@zwol @luis_in_brief @brainwane The OldFoo bugs need not pollute a search for still-relevant bugs, because you probably already wanted to search for bugs in a specific component in any case.

But probably someone will still _want_ to check the OldFoo bugs to see if they're fixed in NewFoo. And if the dev team doesn't have time by 2 orders of magnitude, they'll still have to ask the users to do it, one way or another.

So probably the JWZs of this world would still have been annoyed about it!




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Oh no! They got beer and ketchup all over their legally protected beliefs!


Patrons douse TERFS in drinks & ketchup for staging an anti-trans protest at bar

lgbtqnation.com/2024/10/patron…

#transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA


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in reply to Katie Fenn

@transworld Hmm, the article says it was a London pub, but I’m fairly sure they were in Sheffield.


Day 2 in Oxford for medical trial fun and games. Today was the infusion, 50% chance of ketamine vs placebo. After doing a variety of questionnaires and having blood and urine samples taken it was time to be infused. It was fairly relaxing. Maybe a bit boring. I idly let my mind wander. I think I either didn’t get ketamine or I did and it had nearly no effect on me. I felt maybe slightly lightheaded at one point, and now feel a bit weird, but nothing especially noteworthy.

After that there were more questionnaires and computer tasks. Rather cruelly one of these asked me to remember things from another task, which they hadn’t warned me about. Testing memory when you’ve not been asked to remember stuff is a valuable thing to do.

Tomorrow afternoon is an MRI session where I remember various things while in the machine and they look at what bits of my head light up.


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A story I like telling is how I ran the AV at a place and when I deployed adblock the detections fell off a cliff. I wish more people had this visceral "holy shit" moment. "It was this easy the whole time?" ~2012. I recently deployed uBlock Origin to an F500, on my insistence.
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity

Horrifying/Fascinating thought:

Antivirus Vendors are already one of the richest sources of aggressive malware.

What if the false dichotomy was simply scrapped?

“Improve your corporate security with Phageware!”
“Self deploying”
“Eradicates all other malware undetectably”
“Attacks and cryptographically detains hostile actors on your network”
“Make the C&C seat YOUR seat for a change!”

DISCLAIMER: This is a fucking awful idea and under no circumstances should it be allowed to happen (as if we had any say in it)

in reply to SwiftOnSecurity

> I ran the AV at a place and when I deployed adblock the detections fell off a cliff

Switching from Windows to GNU/Linux has a similar effect. Do both, and you'll eliminate the vast majority of virus/ malware/ spyware vectors.

#GNULinux #virus #malware #spyware



This from Wikipedia made me giggle. "[New Zealand] Inland Revenue continues to spell its Māori name Te Tari Taake instead of Te Tari Tāke, mainly to reduce the resemblance of tāke to the English word 'take'"

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Noa-Lynn van Leuven becomes the first openly trans woman to qualify for the World Darts Championships #NOH8
#noh8

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Clocks go back tonight in case anyone still has clocks to go back.

(In Europe, at least. No idea what other bits of the northern hemisphere do.)




How odd. This Portuguese listening comprehension exercise has a person in who's invented a folk etymology for the English word "vintage". They've decided that rather than being < French vendage and ultimately Latin vinum + demo, it is related to the word for twenty (vinte in Portuguese, vingt in French, viginti in Latin) and thus vintage clothes are ones which are 20 years old.

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Bluesky now owned by crypto-grifters.

My "we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience through tokens, crypto trading or NFTs" t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my t-shirt.

jwz.org/b/ykbY

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
Unknown parent

jwz
I just noticed the time in that screenshot. That was a complete coincidence!
in reply to jwz

It's a sign from the internet gods. Don't know what for but a sign anyway. Interpret it the way you prefer.