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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.

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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 Simon Tatham

@jackv the other almost unrelated question is: does a bug describe a user-visible misbehaviour, or an error in the code? They don't match up 1–1, because sometimes one code error can lead to what _looks_ like three separate bugs. And I've seen people have arguments about whether to merge them in the bug tracker, because some people want to count the errors in the code and others want to document all the user-visible badnesses.

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)

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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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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 (Thursday, October 24, 2024, 7:52 PM)
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I propose writing IPv6 addresses as Unicode:
- take each segment
- convert it to a codepoint
- ???
- profit

For example: 2a01:4f8:c012:fb3::1 would become

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I'm really really really not that upset if Iran tried to assassinate Bibi tbh. Given that preserving his political career and saving his ass from jail has been a not-insignificant part of the horrors unfolding across palestine. And Isreal's own assassinations have involved leveling city blocks...

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Israel's longest running paper, Haaretz, just confirmed that Netanyahu actively blocked every hostage deal since 10/7, Netanyahu meanwhile is openly planning to annex Gaza—& the conversation is still "why won't Hamas agree to a deal?"😐

This is how genocide perpetuates. Horrific.

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Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from Miradouro da Cordoama near Cape st Vincent, iPhone 16 pro, fusion camera, ProRaw, processed in Adobe Lightroom. 10 second exposure.

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Blimey. Even Gruber thinks Apple's gatekeeper nannying "for your comfort and security" has gone too far on MacOS daringfireball.net/linked/2024…
This entry was edited (Wednesday, October 16, 2024, 8:59 AM)

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Apple did the research; LLMs cannot do formal reasoning. Results change by as much as 10% if something as basic as the names change.

garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms…

Unknown parent

@anderspuck @dalias
LLMs are NOT doing *speech to text* translation -- doing transcripts from audio (podcast). That's a different set of AI technologies.

The industry has been developing "AI" technologies since before I was born. Some are quite useful.

It's the "Generative AI" subset (which includes LLMs, chatbots) that is so misleading, mostly useless, and incredibly wasteful.

in reply to Jeff Grigg

@JeffGrigg @dalias True. I kind of bundled ChatGTP and Whisper in that statement.
I don’t find generative AI useless, though. There are many tasks for which it is very good, but probably not those flashy ones many people are thinking about. For example an LLM is much better at sentiment analysis than older methods.
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Leica’s #aurora photo bomb may just be the best picture I’ll ever take
This entry was edited (Thursday, October 10, 2024, 10:34 PM)
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The payroll calculation service I use for the pub company is closing down at the end of the tax year.

I'm looking for recommendations for a replacement. It needs to have a decent API that isn't gated behind "become a partner and put your app in our store" (so that rules out Xero).

Pricing that's transparent and would work for a company of ~50 people would also be nice! I'm currently paying about £55/month.

SO many companies in this space seem to be "call us for pricing"! Really puts me off...

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Two years ago I painted anthracnose lesions on apples, strawberries and mango. The symptoms are caused by related fungi within the genus Colletotrichum.

hgpenningtonart.co.uk/plantspa…

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“Non passibus aequis” was my mother’s favourite phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid. Literally “not with equal paces”, it describes Aeneas’ son Iulus as he escapes Troy with his father, and immediately brings the scene to life. Who hasn’t seen a parent hurrying with a small child, after all?

Thought brought to you by a section of Travis Baldree’s “Bookshops and Bonedust” where our protagonist’s dwarf friend is walking “two strides to every one of Viv’s”

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domainincite.com/30406-five-ti… - Five times ICANN deleted a ccTLD, and what it means for .io

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Kind of reassuring to know my feelings on this aren't as much of an outlier as politicians want me to think.


But once again "fuck what you peasants think, we're in charge now"

#FreePalestine #Gaza #Israel #UKPOL #Ukpolitics #Labour #Starmer


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Why don't we format Unix timestamps like we do with IPv4 addresses? They are both just 32 bit integers.

"Hey, what time is it?" - "Oh, it's 103.1.0.185."

It even works for time ranges!
"The conference will be held in 103.1.0.0/19"

#unix #time #ipv4

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digitalpreservation-blog.lib.c… - Raw flux streams and obscure formats: Further work around imaging 5.25-inch floppy disks.

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