Courtesy of @kæt I’m reading about Indra’s Net, which is interesting to use as a metaphorical way of looking at the complexity (and futility?) of causes and effects in relational networks. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra'…
Just heard mention of the Celtic Sea on the Shipping Forecast. I never knew it was a thing.
Yeah. The original UNIX philosophy was "small single-purpose tools that do one thing brilliantly and can be connected like Lego bricks"; systemd pours a pint of cyanoacrylate glue into the toy box.
mastodon.social/@LinuxAndYarn/…
@jimcarroll I'm not getting into Vim vs Emacs, Gnome vs KDE, Debian vs Rhel vs Arch or any of their siblings and children fighting amongst themselves.But systemd is the most cursed, bastardized, overcomplicated and overcompensating crock that has ever been forced upon Linux users. (AI is still a choice, after all.)
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Some of you have been eagerly awaiting part 2 of my test date with Jack. HERE IT IS!
The conclusion: love yourself before you start #dating. You'll know you're ready to #date when you can accept rejection with a shrug and 'your loss!'.
(pls share if you like it!)
girlonthenet.com/blog/love-you…
Love yourself: Test date with a blog reader part 2
Part two of the test date I had with a blog reader, and a message I don't think men get to hear often enough: love yourself before you start dating.Girl on the net (Girl on the Net)
This entry was edited (Wednesday, March 12, 2025, 10:48 AM)
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That's a lovely piece.
(JHR's internalised transphobia) "But!"
(JHR) "No. I'm sure you think you mean well, but no. The core message is still correct."
I applied for a job a few weeks ago and got an invitation back from them to do an "matrix reasoning test": a sort of IQ type thing where you had to figure out which shape went in the gap. I think I failed pretty comprehensively and then ran out of time.
You know what sort of chat you’re having when you describe someone’s sense of self as “kinda ergative-absolutive aligned” and get a reply considering “if Descartes were from Cumberland”…
It occurs to me that Ken Thompson's classic lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust" has a LOT to say about code generation using LLMs.
The Thompson self-propagating UNIX hack that he described was a lot like a prompt injection attack (the right parsed input could trigger an unexpected output via opaque-to-programmer intermediate steps).
cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers…
mastodon.social/@gmh/114132067…
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@ShiitakeToast @graydon @bsdphk Yeah, going to prison for 11 years can also wreck a career. I DO NOT CARE. If you fuck people over for money, especially lots of money, you are a criminal and you might wear a $3000 suit but you're no different from a street mugger and deserve to be treated the same. If lifetime median earnings are on the order of $5M, then stealing > $5M through "white collar crime" is tantamount to stealing lives.
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Proof air fryers existed before we knew of them
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tiny blinky city
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Watching a waterwheel quietly turn in the sunshine, is definitely a welcome relaxing activity in these crazy times. #cornwall
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From a 1943 article. "Standard contracts in particular could thus become effective instruments in the hands of powerful industrial and commercial overlords enabling them to impose a new feudal order of their own making upon a vast host of vassals."
Well.
Cambridge doesn’t operate on the basis of teaching you how to do things; it just assumes you can and looks and says “how sad” if you e.g. turn out to have no idea how to write an essay.
(Thing I just wrote in DMs, and thought worth grousing about in public.)
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@xanna The OU does it better in that they actually seem to realise people do not spring fully formed into degree courses able to write essays.
Important discovery yesterday. My tutor pronounces EULA like the noise the Martians make in War of the Worlds.
Always feels a little bit of a privilege to play a part in someone’s transition. I’m at a solicitor’s helping witness a young trans man’s deed poll.
Enematopoeia - a word that sounds like it used to be full of shit.
Working in University IT, I'm sure there never used to be such a constant drip-drip pressure to make things more shit.
Elite on the Apple II contains code by Ian Bell and David Braben.
No surprises there.
But did you know it also contains code by Steve Wozniak, Randy Wigginton and Rob Northen?
Find out why in my latest deep dive.
elite.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/…
#retrocomputing #retrogaming #8bit #apple #elite
File operations with embedded Apple DOS - Elite on the 6502
A deep dive into file operations with embedded Apple DOS in Apple II Eliteelite.bbcelite.com
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Some days severance (as in the TV show) seems very tempting.
(Via the OU Contract Law module). Are terms and conditions better with 1990s computer music?
Shortened Terms and Conditions
For Safer Internet Day this year, we focused on our Terms of Service and how familiarising yourself with them can improve your Habbo experience.YouTube
Things I say to therapists that I then have to unpick in my own head after I've said them, number 772 in a series. "She is a disbeliever in her own power, yet afraid of it."
I just had an appointment with my endocrinologist, which went very differently to what I was expecting. In particular, she prescribed me testosterone. Now, I know cis women have it too, but the idea of deliberately giving myself my nemesis is quite squicky.
There are no mature students at Starfleet Academy. Nobody ever decides to retrain as a science officer. It seems like there are almost no mid-career changes in the Federation ever. People make a choice in their teens and are stuck with it for the rest of their life.
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Or, more likely, retraining for a different role doesn't require going back to the academy, but rather a learning on the job style track.
That works for people switching within Star Fleet, but what if I were a yoga instructor with some sort of injury and decided to retrain as a therapist and became an expert on idk, space station agoaphobia? That would be moving from a civilian role to something at least Star Fleet adjacent.
... I guess there's the TNG bartender....
They end up in the Red Shirts section and quickly get destroyed.
The fleet thinking is 'mature students have good wide range of experience therefore should survive unfamiliar conditions'. Unfortunately, lack of O2 is not something you can get used to by experience.
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Every Tesla we saw on our walk to dinner last night had a similar message. This is North London.
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What a great idea!!!
we have also stopelon.eu
...but while I wait...
we have also stopelon.eu
...but while I wait...
Stop Elon - Against anti-EU propaganda
Elon Musk is using X to target the European Union, increasing anti-EU feelings and supporting far-right parties. Help us stopping him.stopelon
When shopping online, usually for clothes, I've seen the "Klarna" etc. buttons at checkout that allow people to buy now and pay later. It's obviously a form of unsecured credit, familiar enough. What I didn't realise until my OU course pointed it out is that these things come with no credit or affordability checks, making it very easy for people to land in significant debt.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that …The Poetry Foundation
Can't quite believe that an acquaintance of mine thinks people vote Reform because they're "concerned about government finances". I mean granted he's probably one of the the most middle class cis het white men I know but come on.
I'm so pleased Reform have settled on a reason to vote for them now: I used to get terribly confused about whether it was about states rights or ethics in games journalism.
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I strongly dislike the fact that we now basically have to reevaluate all domains under management, and the infrastructure that depends on the associated DNS records, in light of this new insider threat from an asshole with a sharpie.
Especially given how eager US tech companies are to comply with whatever these fuckers come up with next.
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More friends should send me unsolicited gifts of eg fudge. 😋
Why is there not a cereal called Brekekekex? It could come in little frog shapes and have knob jokes on the packet.
The Equality Act has a number of flaws, but I have a soft spot for a part of it. After the evening where it first actually occurred to me I could be trans, I found myself musing that having “proposed to undergo a process […] for the purposes of reassigning […] sex” I had acquired the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. It didn’t change anything practically but the way that was worded made me feel a little bit seen by whoever drafted the 2010 Act. A tiny legislative hug.
I think @goatsarah might have been involved in that... it was certainly one of the points we raised during drafting.
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My therapist is a Vorlon. Asks “who are you?”
I was thinking over/into my beer just now. I want there to be a website for trans eggs. Is there one? Not just useful information, but actually something much closer to advertising. There's this narrative that shapes being trans as undesirable, faulty, at best a disorder to be treated and pitied.
But being trans is amazing, and I think we should be shouting about it to as many people who need to hear as we can reach.
A friend is having surgery at the same hospital I was in almost three years ago. It's bringing back so many happy memories, of daft things and frets, of little surprises and joys.
When trans women make ourselves more truly who we are, we do amazing things. Ain't no power in the 'verse can stop us.
I am listening on Radio 4 to Labour handing the next general election to Reform. It’s scary just how stupid they are that they don’t see that this is what they are doing.
Also, for far too many people, fucking terrifying.
This is not good: Apple ordered to open encrypted user accounts globally to UK spying. The secret order would give the UK access to encrypted backups belonging to any user — not just Brits.
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@ajlanes Fuck ‘em. Just ignore it and make the Government make it public that they are trying to do it!
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Time and space are the hardest things to wait for.
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Do I know any psychologists on here? I'm wondering if there's been significant study of the variety of ways trans people relate to and think/feel about their pretransition selves. If that's even psychology!
(I could just go diving in, looking for papers, but that often fails in subjects I know little about because I lack the terminology to know what I'm looking for.)
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@Zumbador I think I agree. I think there are a lot of great counsellors in this space with kind of "meso" scale experience, things they've learnt from many patients, etc. I think this and support groups etc is probably the best place to look.
But psychology in the paper-mill" "Professor of Brainiology, OBE, CBE, bar, bar, sense at the University of Old", I'd be very skeptical about.
Throughout history, as a profession they always seem to be playing catch up with reality and enabling lots of horrible things done by states. It seem like quite a foetid hunting ground.
@Zumbador
I don't like to be abstract political, so here's a concrete example from a paper on Autism.
There was an experiment which showed that autistic people were more consistent in applying professed beliefs in private (a faked experiment where subjects were asked to eat taboo-animal meet in exchange for money, in company and alone).
This increased consistency was pathologised as autistic people failing to adapt to social situations by not being hypocritical in private. They did brain scans and stuff to show the hypocrisy nexus and suggested interventions to fire it up in autistic people.
I suspect this is very likely how that kind of psychology works in the trans space too.
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My therapist introduced me to the concept of RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria) last week and it is a very powerful match for a lot of what’s in my head.
It makes sense in this context that I appreciate my strength training sessions because I only ever get positive feedback and encouragement.
Signs you may be working with mathematicians...
my $default_quota='9.8G'; # Based on 1st Feigenbaum constant
“In Our Time” on radio 4 is discussing Pope Joan and a rumour from shortly after the time that popes had genital examinations to stop this ever happening again.
Arturo Serrano
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Charlie Stross
in reply to Arturo Serrano • • •Zeugs
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •What would this flavour of Linux would be worth to you? Greenland, peace in Ukraine, Panama canal, A blockade of the Suez canal by Black Rock, one of the Baltic states, The NHS, Elons friend Nigel becoming the Zar of the British Iles? (Like in you can keep your iPhone if you accept Nigel as Zar if you do not obey we will brick it, using the Brick update you installed last week to get GenEmoji2)
Charlie Stross
Unknown parent • • •Refurio Anachro
Unknown parent • • •Thanks. I have more ideas! Don't we all hate ./configure? Make it part of systemd! It would also tell your credit card number! And the length of your dong*.
*: If it goes inside that would be a negative number and be called a ding. If that scale doesn't fit you, just use an imaginary number. If that scale doesn't fit you, just use a quaternidong.
@leeloo @mathew @quixoticgeek @hector @cstross
Refurio Anachro
Unknown parent • • •Log capturing in binary is cool and that, but doing AI based analyzing built-in to systemd when?
Also, why do I need a separate shell when I have systemd? Built-in bash when?
@quixoticgeek @leeloo @hector @cstross
mathew
in reply to Refurio Anachro • • •Wilfried Klaebe
Unknown parent • • •@lproven I have a separate ext2 /boot partition, and rEFInd is perfectly capable of booting all my Linux kernels with their initramfs from that. This worked very nicely on the 2011 MacBook Pro I used for 14 years and now works very nicely on my Framework 16 Notebook.
@quixoticgeek @leeloo @hector @cstross
Liam Proven
in reply to Wilfried Klaebe • • •Wilfried Klaebe
in reply to Liam Proven • • •@lproven We have to realize that EFI is how things are now - Legacy BIOS boot will be phased out.
@quixoticgeek @leeloo @hector @cstross