Reminds me of when I was working in a computer bookshop and someone had ordered the "Microsoft Mouse Programmer's Reference" -- but somehow it came out as "Microsoft Mouse Programmer's Revenge" when she came to collect it.
this actually sounds kind of cool, but also it worries me that it's necessary?
Like, a knockout mouse is a mouse that's had a specific gene messed with so that scientists can learn about what that gene does. Some of those probably would affect a mouse's body or behavior in easily observable ways, but not all would be obvious so how do you figure those out? Interesting challenge.
More importantly: what the hell went wrong at your lab, that you have genetically modified mice but don't know what kind?! Did someone leave a window open and all the labels blew off the cages, and also no one remembers where *their* mice are housed? Did the rats of NIMH set all the mice loose in the lab? Was Paul in procurement drunk-shopping for mice? I am Concerned.
Once when I was a kid, my biologist uncle asked my sister, cousins and I for ideas on getting rats to pee, because he needed urine samples. (My sister was the only one who had an idea. It was, "just squeeze them!") Now I wish I knew how to make rats *not* pee while I'm holding them.
Yeah this is actually a really good simple breakdown of GOT as an algorithm that cuts through the FUD. and BS that shroud the real logic of how it works
well written explanation that no in fact this AI emperor has no clothes. Pattern matching. Yes. Getting quite good when scope is limited. But this is blatantly obvious because none of these AI firms particularly google are using these tools in their core business. Like detecting gmail spammers. And where used horrible results. Like current google search. Which is worst ever.
I was wondering if 10 series of Robot Wars taught us nothing? No srimech? No flipper? With the low gravity, imagine the potential for a backflip on the moon.
Combined answers from the Microsoft Community forum to the important question: "What's the maximum number of slides allowed in Microsoft PowerPoint?"
"Every slide is identified numerically by a Long number, meaning that the theoretical maximum is around 2,147,483,648" "Personally, I make it a rule never to include more than 10,000,000 slides in a presentation. One slide a second is about all people can absorb at best, and very few audiences will sit there and absorb information at that rate for half a year."
Americans wondering how on earth all the Taylor Swift fans got to last week’s concert at the Melbourne Cricket Ground when there’s no sea of car parking next to the stadium:
If you use a laptop with a trackpad which you can scroll with two fingers, and you don’t have a pinkie related disability, does your little finger do this?
There are white sauce, brown sauce, and orange sauce. The last one only just counts because it’s really named for the fruit not the colour. But ANYWAY can fedi think of any other sauces named for their colour?
'scuse the thread drift, but I really miss Lancashire sauce. It's a vegan alternative to Worcestershire sauce, which is aka English Garum (fermented fish sauce). I must see if I can get some Lancashire sauce smuggled.
@sesquipedality @karohemd this made me laugh, because as kids we used "pink flavour" to describe sweets which were pink in colour and vaguely fruity but you couldn't tell if they were supposed to be raspberry or strawberry or something else.
Dear Lady Chief Justice, We write on behalf of the Courts and Tribunals Observers’ Network, a UK-based initiative focused on how the public can be supported to observe courts and access court infor…
people say the big class one railroads don't do innovation, but here is norfolk southern demonstrating their new folding trainset on the acela mainline
There are a few weird differences between opposite-sex marriage, same-sex marriage, and civil partnerships. In particular, in the grounds on which the partnerships can be annulled on the application of one partner.
The first is that same-sex marriages aren't voidable for reasons of non-consummation; basically it used to mean "PIV sex" and Parliament didn't fancy trying to define consummation for same-sex couples in legislation.
The stranger one is that only marriage is voidable for reasons of venereal disease.
All sorts of people have tried to palm off doing real work on ChatGPT and friends. Has any legislature yet considered or passed legislation suspected of being autogenerated?
Bonus marks for working out how the rules of statutory interpretation apply to robotically created legislation
patreon.com/posts/98498779 has leaks about the Hugo censorship thing. I’m not convinced self-censorship is the whole story and there’s almost certainly more to come out. However if it is accurate about Kat Jones’ involvement she probably ought not to be involved in Glasgow’s Hugo admin.
I guess I will be grateful that I never get any of that kind of reaction. Didn't get much with laser either. Getting a bit tired of having to be fuzzy enough for them to be accessible though.
@Sion [main] The 2-3 days of growth before a zapping are horrid. I just hate that bristly feeling. (It doesn’t look so bad as so many of my chin hairs are white)
The Ukrainian navy is just trolling now: the original Major Kunikov died on February 14th, 1943. They literally waited until the anniversary of his death to sink his nautical namesake. kyivindependent.com/media-russ…
If confirmed, it would be the fourth landing ship from Russia's Black Sea Fleet that has been sunk since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
@addressforbots In the 70s the expected thing was particle accelerators. Math got done about how you hit a high altitude target with a gigajoule worth of protons.
One answer is that you build your particle accelerator emitter so it's coaxial with a laser and precede the protons with enough laser energy to create a vacuum tunnel to the target. (The laser won't work on its own because the target is shiny.)
The tunnel doesn't need to last or be very wide; it's energetically doable.
@rabidchaos @graydon @addressforbots More likely, I think, would be large nuclear-powered navy support ships. A multipolar world means fewer ports open to foreign warships for resupply, and also more supply chain disruption. Also, we may see another shift in warship design towards ship as modular mobile launch pad for different weapons systems, a bit like the [failed] Independence-class LCS's huge mission bay—or the FREMM/Constellation-class frigate.
@addressforbots This does assume the energy budget of a major ground installation or a CVN, and it did NOT assume today's solid state lasers, but in terms of plausible energetics, it's an implementation problem. (Magnets and the ability to control everything have massively improved, too.)
"Volume contests you" is going to be low altitude, low energy (except when it isn't), cryptic, and frequently immobile.
Attacking is going to look like faunal succession in a soil biome.
@graydon @addressforbots As DEW systems work their way down the TRL scale, I wonder if we'll see a return of the nuclear cruiser? In addition to the power aspect, they also have great strategic mobility. With the world getting complicated, that's going to be worth a lot more than it was in the cold war.
@graydon @rabidchaos @addressforbots@social.apcn.nz Also, aren't SSGNs a whole lot more expensive than even a nuclear-powered [surface] cruiser? The whole "submarine" angle doesn't come cheap ...
@rabidchaos @addressforbots That's more or less what the Zumwalts were meant to be without the nuclear powered part. It's apparently consensus that the highly experimental design mostly works EXCEPT for the guns intended as primary armament, and the plan now is to replace the guns with hypersonic missile silos.
SSGNs are a better way to evade the drone swarm for coastal bombardment than a large cruiser. On the other hand, for everything short of sink-them-all, the cruiser is better.
@rabidchaos SSGNs are more expensive[1], but this gets into expected effectiveness. No amount of money spent on useless is worthwhile; the least much you can spend for useful is exactly that.
It mostly comes down to the rumoured mass interferometer applications for submarine detection being effective or not.
[1] The USN stopped building SSNs some time ago; they're ALL SSGNs. The degree and flexibility to which they're SSGNs has tended to increase with time.
@graydon @rabidchaos fn[1] is a good point: the RN has done similarly (the Astute class SSNs all carry Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles as well as other stuff: the tubes are horizontal, not vertical, that's the only difference from a converted SSBN).
... although they do have six vertical tubes for cruise missile launch.
Note for potential use by Charlie:
"The third ship of the [Seawolf] class, USS Jimmy Carter (SSN 23), has a 100-foot hull extension called the multi-mission platform. This hull section provides for additional payloads to accommodate advanced technology used to carry out classified research and development and for enhanced warfighting capabilities."
NEWPORT NEWS, Va., (Sept. 27, 2023) — HII shared today (NYSE: HII) that its Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS) division has reached a significant milestone in the construction of Virginia-class submarine Arkansas (SSN 800).
I'd always taken it to have any one of multiple meanings, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Pretty much the same list as you: - be aware of it, know it's there - leave it outside at the door before you enter this space - keep it within due bounds
I’ve completely swiped these links from the sidebar at Official Shrub.com, and from Lake Desire’s list at New Game Plus. White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack This is Peggy …
Sometimes I love negative reviews: "While the inclusion of non-binary and lesbian characters was great to see, the sheer volume was disproportionate" 😂
@schrotthaufen Your assumption would be wrong: it's almost certainly named after Dr Alfred Aho, co-developer of the Awk programming language (Canadian, of Finnish descent): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_A…
For a long time I prototyped list postprocessing and other batch jobs in Python and reimplemented them in awk for production. But this is really on another level.
I'm 90% sure that the left one is "end the current call and accept the new call" and the right one is "put the current call on hold and accept the new call" but it's still a really bad design.
end & accept is when you want to end the current call and accept the incoming call.
Decline is decline new incoming call. And accept & hold is accept the call but put the old call in hold of the so you can to talk with new person, but the previous person is now on hold.
yeah, whenever this happens I just let it ring off and apologise to the person I’m talking to. Apple must have so many HCI experts on staff and apparently even they can’t figure out how to make this intuitive.
Even Elon Musk is laughing at this shit. At home, Russian propaganda can spin anything into a win for Putin, but it seems any hopes the Kremlin might have had of influencing American perceptions with the Carlson interview were misplaced.
No one in the US can listen to a two hour talk about anything. He needs to make a 30 second TikTok with some new dance moves if he wants our attention.
I had a transgender duck years ago. Our male duck died, and over the course of the next few weeks, one of the afab* ducks molted, grew male feathers, and started quacking like a male duck. The other ducks totally accepted that he was a male duck as he transitioned. It was very cool to watch.
*(I'm not sure if this is the right term to use for something that hatches... but it was absolutely a gender transition so I'll use that language!)
Whaaa... ?Gobsmacked, followed by a few minutes thought and search. Ah. (NB: Sometimes when faced with abbreviations and #TLAs which clearly don't mean What I Think They Mean, I can't be bothered.)
Imagination on overdrive for a few moments there, though. Bombs may have been involved.
Permit me to suggest the claim on Wikipedia that His Majesty's Airship Number One "provided valuable technical experience for British airship designers" is an overly sunny assessment of the featured predicament.
I'm imagining a scene similar to the one with Caproni from The Wind Rises with the structural failure, crash, and taking the frustrations out on the cameraman.
@anne_twain No, it didn't. Initially it was three tons overweight, so a programme of removing essential bits and pieces started. One piece lost was the keel, which almost certainly contributed to the airship essentially snapping in half when caught by a crosswind as they took it out of the shed.
@chiffchaff FWIW I adapted to mine so much the only time they're weird is if I do it deliberately. (Unless I'm looking down from on top of a mountain or something).
@sesquipedality @chiffchaff I need to do so many different things that I have separate pairs of varifocals, plus three pairs of monofocals. Excluding sunglasses.
@Sion [main] @Sesquipedality @kæt Most things I do requiring near work can be done in the lower parts of the lenses. This doesn’t work so well for looking closely at fine print at awkward angles, like the RA dial on my telescope.
@sesquipedality My optician mentioned the existence of trifocals, apparently used by electricians, plumbers, etc, which become "close work" again at the top.
When I was working at Royal Mail I put my (reading) glasses on a string, but they got very bashed when I was wheeling trolleys round, etc, rather than reading addresses. In the end I left them on for walking short distances, but that wasn't good for my sense of balance. Luckily the glasses survived being bashed quite well.
@chiffchaff @sesquipedality Mine mentioned office trifocals, where the main portion is screen distance (like the pair I'm wearing right now) and the top is true distance (or at least, other side of the room).
@sesquipedality @chiffchaff A few years ago my optician (who kept telling me that my monitor should be placed low so that I had to look down at it) persuaded me to try varifocals. After a couple of weeks I took them back as I didn't get on with them at all, and had them replaced with monofocals. And I ignored his dreadful 'advice' about monitor placement.
The idea is this: instead of just blocking IP addresses that hit honeypot URLs, feed them a compressed document that massively expands on their end, making them run out of memory and crash.
@chebra As I said elsewhere in the thread, I have observed that many botnets are so crap that they don't know how to process 301 redirects. Also I strongly suspect that a null-bomb would be less effective since they're likely to just interpret the first byte as EOF.
there is no 301 in the comment I linked. Other people are reporting having observed a decrease in bot activity after deploying that, as the bots get stuck on it, while you are reporting errors in logs. It really does seem like the other solution is more proven, less hypothetical. Suspicions can be tested.
A solution that I have used many times. I also used variants that redirect a request to another url with large files, linkux kit, download windows, etc.!
I remember these from the BBS days. They were a nightmare for Sysops as all uploaded files would be decompressed to run them through one or more anti-virus products (F-Prot, Thunderbyte etc).
They'd unpack, run out of space and crash the board. Took some extra scripting to be able to recover and clean-up.
The mind behind this reminds me very much of my old college It professor, brilliant man who loved to deconstruct things just to see if & how they could be broken. The only thing he loved more than tech and teaching, was chain smoking & food. That ultimately was his downfall about 10-12 years after I last took his courses.
SkaveRat 🐀
in reply to a beautiful bitch • • •Irina
in reply to a beautiful bitch • • •Rat 🍕🐀🏳️🌈
in reply to a beautiful bitch • • •Audsbot
in reply to a beautiful bitch • • •mvyrmnd
in reply to a beautiful bitch • • •Eve, Go Listen to Dead Channel Sky
in reply to a beautiful bitch • • •a beautiful bitch
in reply to Eve, Go Listen to Dead Channel Sky • • •legumancer Davy
in reply to a beautiful bitch • • •this actually sounds kind of cool, but also it worries me that it's necessary?
Like, a knockout mouse is a mouse that's had a specific gene messed with so that scientists can learn about what that gene does. Some of those probably would affect a mouse's body or behavior in easily observable ways, but not all would be obvious so how do you figure those out? Interesting challenge.
More importantly: what the hell went wrong at your lab, that you have genetically modified mice but don't know what kind?! Did someone leave a window open and all the labels blew off the cages, and also no one remembers where *their* mice are housed? Did the rats of NIMH set all the mice loose in the lab? Was Paul in procurement drunk-shopping for mice? I am Concerned.
a beautiful bitch
in reply to legumancer Davy • • •legumancer Davy
in reply to a beautiful bitch • • •oh no! Lol
Once when I was a kid, my biologist uncle asked my sister, cousins and I for ideas on getting rats to pee, because he needed urine samples. (My sister was the only one who had an idea. It was, "just squeeze them!") Now I wish I knew how to make rats *not* pee while I'm holding them.