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The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
[...]
Client implementations SHOULD NOT be a place of honor. Client implementations MUST NOT commemorate highly esteemed deeds.
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Minesweeper on my DXY-885 plotter. A project that took longer than expected!
Uploading partly to test video-embed from mastondon.social.
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Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled.
> Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use?
There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text.
> Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...?
None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold.
> But are you / they in the cloud?
No. The webserver is in Newbury, in my garage.
> Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN.
*Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*
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Labour have proposed a transphobe, Mary Ann Stephenson for next chair of the EHRC. The Women and Equalities Committee of the House of Commons will want to scrutinise this appointment. Help them understand why she’s a bad pick by signing this letter! #UKpol
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Tapping a second time gives you blank, dragging only works in the line you started. Intuitive.
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It is time, once again, for me to tap the sign.
"Ant-ee-far" is a profoundly un-British pronouncation of "Anti-Fah", and is used by plastic "patriots" for precisely one reason - to obscure the fairly obvious question: "Who are the Fah that these people are opposed to?"
Likewise, the UK does not have "DEI" and never has.
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Male friends (I have male friends here right?) - have you heard of Ask for Angela?
(A man in The Archers didn’t know of it and I was wondering how likely it is for men to be aware of it.)
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lol omg i accidentally a massive rant
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I feel like there ought to be a discipline of something like "perceptual geometry", and I need to be better at it.
We all know that finding the "optical centre" of a glyph is not straightforward (but there are algorithms). Even something as apparently simple as "stroke contrast" requires thought. Stroke contrast is just the thickness of the thickest part divided by the thinness of the thinnest part, right? Not so. The thickest part of the O on the right is not relevant to contrast.
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Today is a GREAT day for the ocean. Not only is the new Attenborough Ocean film out today, but I got a sneak peak at the new Great Map being installed at the National Maritime Musuem in Greenwich, and it's just astonishing. It's the Spilhaus projection - a way of unwrapping the globe that keeps the ocean intact - and it's got beautifully detailed topography and plenty of other fun bits and pieces. The whole redecorated hall will be renamed Ocean Court and will reopen to the public on June 7th, World Ocean Day. Do go as soon after that as you can - it really is stunning.
#Ocean
32 s
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The commands 'cd $PWD' and 'cd .' in bash both look like useless no-ops which change into the same directory you're already in. But they're not, and both can be useful.
$PWD is a string variable which caches the pathname that your current directory had at the time you changed into it. It's not automatically updated in between cd commands.
So 'cd $PWD' (or 'cd "$PWD"' if you're being properly careful) changes to whatever directory _now_ lives at the pathname that your actual cwd _was_ when you changed to it.
'cd .' really _does_ just change directory to the same physical directory you're already in, but it's still not useless, because it causes bash to recalculate the value of $PWD.
For example, if one shell is in ~/test, and in another shell you rename ~/test to ~/newname and make a new directory ~/test, then in the first shell 'cd $PWD' will move to the new ~/test, whereas 'cd .' will stay in the original directory but update $PWD to reflect the fact that it now lives at ~/newname.
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That's remind me something i found amusing some times ago:
~/tmp/tmp$ rmdir ../tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ # where am i now?
~/tmp/tmp$ pwd
/mnt/vg00/diego/tmp/tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ echo $PWD
/mnt/vg00/diego/tmp/tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ # everything is fine, right?
~/tmp/tmp$ ls
~/tmp/tmp$ ls .
~/tmp/tmp$ cat /dev/null > x
bash: x: No such file or directory
~/tmp/tmp$ # ah!
~/tmp/tmp$ mkdir ../tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ # so does it works now?
~/tmp/tmp$ cat /dev/null > x
bash: x: No such file or directory
~/tmp/tmp$ #still no luck
~/tmp/tmp$ cd .
~/tmp/tmp$ cat /dev/null > x
~/tmp/tmp$ # now it works!
While the error in creating the file looks legit, why can I list a directory that doesn't exist? And I think that a new directory with the same name, it's still a new directory, but looks like "cd ." somehow fix the cwd of the shell.
Just for reference tests were made on linux on a ext4 filesystem (but does it matters?).
@diegor 'why can I list a directory that doesn't exist?' – it does exist, it just isn't linked from anywhere. On Unix, directories as well as files have the property that the inode (containing the actual contents) persists even after there's no path to it from the filesystem root, if a process has it open. So your cwd can still be in a directory that's been deleted.
'looks like "cd ." somehow fix the cwd of the shell' – assuming the shell is bash, yes, by default "cd ." will do that. It _doesn't_ do what I claimed in the head of the thread, unless you have the non-default 'set -P' option, which I set long ago for myself and had forgotten was relevant. If _I_ had done "cd ." in that situation, I'd have stayed in the deleted directory.
“i before e, except after c, and provided it rhymes with ‘key’ “
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THE BIGGEST NEWS! Rob and I are offering up a hand-signed hardback, first edition/first printing copy of Monstrous Regiment straight from the Pratchett archives. Those who know the story will know why it’s a pertinent one for this cause.
32auctions.com/organizations/1…
Monstrous Regiment (Signed 1st edition)
Auction item 'Monstrous Regiment (Signed 1st edition)' hosted online at 32auctions.32auctions
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I won't be able to partake in this but thank you for this!
Not only do you carry on Terry's legacy, but you are so much of an amazing person in your own right and I love your work.
Please help push back against the transphobic UK Supreme Court judgment. Philippa East has created an excellent letter that you can co-sign using this link. forms.gle/FZXBWzWFx4fHhPAL8 #TransRightsAreHumanRights
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The Transphobic Guardian practically jumping for joy today, as is 'White Feminism'
How well things are going for that rich bigot in her castle, a new TV Series, Trans people being punished for simply existing.....and Westminster just shrugs and follows Gilead's lead
I feel ill, as a Queer man I fill ill and alone in this country, it's not hatred mostly I see, it's indifference....so when the Fash come for us, nobody will make a stand.
I don't feel British at all.
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Sorry man
You're just a victim of the human condition, apathy 🤷
Or
🎵💃🕺📯Derrr da derrr
🥳👯♀️📯
Da der da der dadud derrr🎵
YOU CAN GO DOWN DANCING!
FUCK EM
Young man
there's no need to feel down
I said, young man
pick yourself off the ground
I said, young man
'cause you're in a new town
There's no need
to be un happy
THEY MARCH YOU TO THE TRENCH, ASK IF YOU WANT A SMOKE/BLINDFOLD, TAKE THE SMOKE, KEEP DANCING. EVEN IF THEY TELL YOU TO STOP, WHAT ARE THEY GUNNA DO, SHOOT YOU¿
Ah, I see that GNOME has started throwing X out the airlock. According to the Fedora 42 release notes, GDM no longer supports X-based sessions, leaving Cinnamon, XFCE, and various other desktops out to lunch, and if you switch to another login manager, GNOME itself may not work properly.
Good job, everyone, right when Windows 11 could give desktop Linux a great opportunity to pick up users.
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Good practice for RSS Feeds, about which there seems to have been some fedi chat mendeddrum.org/@fanf/114324807…
linkspam!RSS/Atom feed best practise.
kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-fee…
saved 2025-03-27 dotat.at/:/JTER8.html
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One of the more unhelpful trauma responses that’s resurfaced this year is the fear of copying. When I was a kid I was mocked for picking up interests from friends, so I used to try hard not to do that or to be cautious or contrary in how I developed interests.
I learned not to do this at some point, especially with transition initially (which I think I knew had to be about me and nobody else whatever my brain said) but it’s come back this year. I have to fight against an urge to reject for myself anything people I know find positive.
I always feel there should be a mirror image of the heart emoticon "❤". We talked about this - after all, Unicode should offer some possibilities - and so far we have:
E> - robot heart
∈> - lewd Jack-in-a-box
∑> - sideways cat.
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#BabyGoatCountdown
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The Witch of Crow Briar
Unknown parent • • •eblu 🐘
in reply to Vashti • • •Sensitive content
Show Bookmark | Archive of Our Own
archiveofourown.orgRexo the Trans Bus 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🚌
Unknown parent • • •@crowbriarhexe@tech.lgbt
eblu 🐘
2025-07-04 22:12:48
Simon Brooke
in reply to Vashti • • •and this is why we shouldn't store numbers in fixed width fields, or compute using 32 or 64 or 128 bit or any other fixed size integers.
Bignum arithmetic has been a solved problem in computing since Maclisp in the 1960s.
#Lisp
Catelyn
in reply to Simon Brooke • • •Simon Brooke
in reply to Catelyn • • •@catgirlQueer As I myself wrote, years ago,
"At nanosecond resolution (if I've done my arithmetic right), 128 bits will represent a span of 1 x 10²² years, or much longer than from the big bang to the estimated date of fuel exhaustion of all stars. So I think I'll arbitrarily set an epoch 14Bn years before the UNIX epoch and go with that. The time will be unsigned - there is no time before the big bang."
So, yes, if you're content with nanosecond resolution...
github.com/simon-brooke/post-s…
cons space
GitHubPoul-Henning Kamp
in reply to Simon Brooke • • •@simon_brooke @catgirlQueer
Fun fact:
Until 1972-01-01Z we used rubber-time, because astrometry is not nearly as constant as most people seem to think.
But it is worse than that.
We literally have no idea how long nanoseconds took before 1958-01-01Z
If you go back before observations of solar eclipses, we even barely know how long days took.
Any epoch before 1972-01-01Z by defintion causes wrong timekeeping.
Poul-Henning Kamp
in reply to Poul-Henning Kamp • • •@simon_brooke @catgirlQueer
Also:
Until we ditch leap-seconds, we cannot predict how many seconds there will be until some timestamp in the future, since that depends on what the director of the Paris Observatory decides twice a year.
And on top of that, time-zones are political decisions, so even without leap-seconds, it is anyone's guess how long time there is to 2026-01-01 09:00 in Mississippi.
Poul-Henning Kamp
in reply to Poul-Henning Kamp • • •So there is no "fix it once and for all" solution to timekeeping, and the best and most robust strategy will always be store timestamps the way the user provided them, and interpret them as best you can, given the knowledge available to you, when you do.
Poul-Henning Kamp
in reply to Poul-Henning Kamp • • •And as for nanosecond resolution: Now you also need to think about which relativistic reference frame to use.