I've recently been doing some cognitive behavioural therapy care of the NHS, with a particular emphasis on activation (getting up and doing things) and self esteem. The last session is this coming Thursday. I think it's been net beneficial, in the sense that it's given me space to talk about things and think about things, and acquire a few more tools to manage my mind.
And the past week or so working for Hughes Hall to understand their Linux and database systems has been a big boost; it's clear that I'm actually pretty damn good at doing this kind of stuff and people seem impressed as if I'm working some kind of deep magic. And yet somehow when I'm sitting here alone it all feels like some kind of illusion in the face of that sense of stuckness and uselessness and yearning. Which I know is lies. I can effect change, I am capaable, I am cared about.
Could all be hormones. My tits are aching with another growth spurt.
The trailer for the new Avatar: The Last Airbender show looks decent, but even if the show turns out to be a faithful recreation of the original I'm not sure what for? The original is already perfect. It's still there. Why does it have to be recreated again?
animation > live action because the amazingness of the fights will never be recreated irl, in the live action we'll have doubles hitting each other with the camera changing angles every 5 seconds to hide the fight articifiality, in animation they could shoot sick angles and wide views of the characters movement and hits
As someone who came to #ATLA in the last year or so (and watched the entire show in less than a week) it was clear the show wasn't meant to be binged. It was written for an era when you might not catch every episode, or catch them out of order. Being remade for Netflix opens the possibility of telling the story in a tighter way.
Right? That's EXACTLY what I said before the trailer even came out. Not knocking the show, I'm just extremely uninterested...to me, ATLA but not animated = ATLA but less interesting π
as many have already said, itβs a great way to bring the material to a new audience.
I also think people put the original show too much on a pedestal. The show being animated is not the only reason people might not be watching the original. Compared to βadultβ animated shows like Arcane and Castlevania, Avatar is quite cartoonish. Iβve recently finished season 2 which I really loved, but season 1 couldβve done without much of the slapstick humor aimed at kids IMHO
Can we just all sit back and appreciate just how good this joke is? It plays on folklore that many English-speakers know about, it references two similar wading birds, and there's a double-entendre about cranes (one being a bird and the other being machinery). This may be my favorite yet!
We have finally got the nomination statistics for the 2023 Hugos, and understandably there is a great deal of concern being express. Some very strange things have gone on. Believe me, I'm not happy either. Fairly inevitably there are plenty of people who know little about how WSFS works who assume that there must be some overriding authority who could, and should, have prevented Chengdu from doing what they have done.
maybe itβs time that there is. Certainly, they should be required to adhere to the transparency and open meeting discussions that kept the Hugos from being politically derailed previously.
I seem to recall certain people noting that this was a possible outcome of holding Worldcon in China, and being told it wouldn't matter because... reasons?
The more I look at the stats, the less I understand how they got the results.
I just don't know what to say. It's depressing to see it. Another blow to the reputation of the Hugo awards.
Can anyone who knows about the Hugo Awards/WSFS Constitution explain under which section of the latter R F Kuangβs Babel was deemed ineligible as a Best Novel nominee? (thehugoawards.org/wp-content/uβ¦ , p 20)
you need to ask the Chengdu Hugo Admins. Youβll note that when there was a constitutional reason for deeming a work ineligible they cited the applicable clause.
@CherylMorgan I will. I canβt see that the Constitution permits exclusion of any otherwise eligible work without a justification from a clause permitting this to happen - would you agree?
my reading of the Constitution agrees with yours. Nevertheless, a decision was taken. I understand that Chengdu had their reasons, but I canβt speak for them.
Yesterday our remote sensing team did 3 ortho surveys over the eruption area, the latest acquisition at 16:15 UTC. The team is a cross agency effort combined with people and equipment from Icelandic Institute of Natural History, National Land Survey and the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland. These have now been made publicly available as an #opendata tile service and can be explored here for example: umbrotasja.gis.is/mapview/?appβ¦
I did indeed miss the point about diesels rather than turbines. Thanks!
Improvements in operating costs and noise are indeed compelling.
It makes me wonder about a different potential customer - the military. Currently, we see tanks are annoyingly vulnerable to dense mine fields, but the comparatively less armored Bradley seems surprisingly useful.
A bunch of less expensive LCACs might glide over mines/rivers/mud to deliver more IFVs and stuff than helos.
@isaackuo I gather the USMC is planning on replacing their LCACs with a cheaper, more numerous equivalent. (And I suspect a hovercraft tank transporter would be VERY useful to Ukraine during the muddy season(s).)
The headline seems wrong because this article concludes that we might find small ones useful because "climate change is happening and we're getting more intertidal zones," (which is a pretty gradual change surely!) but no particular reason to bring back big ones.
@harry_wood What it's not saying: we're getting more flooding and hovercraft are good for skimming over wreckage and getting medical and other aid to survivors rapidly (bigger payload and cheaper to run than helicopters).
@lispi314 @harry_wood Yes, because they don't move through water, they fly *over* it. (The really big ones, like the SRN.4 or the Russian Zubr-class, fly about 3 metres above the surface.)
"these were not exceptional individuals β they were individuals doing what they (wrongly) believed to be their job or performing what they (wrongly) believed to be their function or protecting what they (wrongly) saw to be legitimate interests."
Excellent blog post from @davidallengreen on the failures of the UK legal system and the professional classes that allowed the #Horizon scandal to flourish.
12th January 2024 The Post Office Horizon scandal is both simple and complex, straightforward but also difficult to grasp in all its interconnected detail. The essence of the scandal is, of course,β¦
@Adrian McEwen @d a t green Apart from the issues in DAGβs blog, the issue that stands out for me is the cost of legal action to get justice and redress. More legal aid, some sort of restriction on costs that can be awarded to the side with the bigger pockets; I donβt know what the answer is but thereβs a real equality of arms problem thatβs preventing access to justice.
Oof. βWe find it hard to see why the defendant's legal liability should turn on the court's impression of whether or not the facts of the case fit the dramatic pattern of a Greek tragedy.β I do love a good judicial putdown. (From Paul & Anor v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust [2024] UKSC 1 bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2024/β¦ )
Except, in the salient aspect, that the events described *don't* really follow at least the strictest, Aristotelian criteria for Greek tragedy, where the tragedy takes place in a single place on a single day.
The original Cocklecarrot mentioned "Sophoclean" (great word). Now, dragged up in a Secondary Modern, I'm not an expert on such things, but Oedipus Rex and Antigone follow the unities, iirr?
So it was a weirdly specific (-ly wrong) analogy to use to extend a single event to 36 hours and the length of the M1.
TIL that the works of J.R.R. Tolkien passed into the public domain in NZ this year (life plus 50 years)β¦ but also wonβt for another 20 years in much of Europe, and 40 years in the USAβ¦
#law & #copyright peeps: What on π does it mean if someone writes a derivative work here in NZ and then tries to republish it overseas? Or if it is published here and then imported to a different country via the internet or otherwise?
Please retoot so this post finds a person who can answer it!
After the point UK law diverged from EU law, EU regulations became UK law that could be modified. So now, if Iβm talking about Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (aka βthe GDPRβ) I need to clarify that Iβm talking about the UKβs fork of the codebase. Can I find a standard way of doing this? Can I bobbins. If legislation was in git Iβd just cite the commit ID and annoy everyone.
that is extraordinary. Whatever the lowest possible rung of amateur half-arsed coder is, I am he. Yet I have implemented the one line solution without even having to Google it.
Er, what? How can anyone get a job as a programmer if they understand so little? How do they retain their job when any of their colleagues sees such obviously absurd code as this?
@hembrow It reminds me of a channel where people come for help with Lua scripting in a video game. Some visitors donβt have the slightest clue about anything. Elaborate negation is literally what shows up sometimes. At least *they* arenβt paid for that.
@hembrow @maas I'm normally not a fan of book burning but in this case I might make an exception. I think I'd prefer stickers with better code replacing the bad code. A bit like covering a racist sticker with a pride sticker at the local bus shelter.
Yes, Fujitsu must shoulder some blame for the faulty technology, and possibly more for being in denial. But Fujitsu did not choose to pursue the users for the "missing" money and prosecute them. There is a considerable human side to this story. We must not let the Post Office offload all the financial responsibility onto Fujitsu.
"We only acted like complete bastards because their software fucked up." won't cut it.
@Dave Mc Dunno about reporting, but the technical issues and bugs are covered in the technical appendices to the High Court judgment. bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/20β¦
Fujitsu knowingly delivered faulty software, and lied about it working. The money we paid them should be returned, and all their current contracts be cancelled, with money back from those too.
Why, yes, I do know someone who knows what Fujitsu are like...
@agvbergin @ajlanes @ldodds ok, that's pretty awful. A good chunk of those failure modes should have been obvious and could have been avoided if common and well known design patterns were used.
@guigsy @ajlanes To go back to OP's original point, the point is that the subpostmasters found the bugs bc of their professional practical expertise. PO should have listened to them, not gaslit and prosectured them.
@agvbergin @guigsy @ajlanes Amazing chutzpah to describe something from 2008-2011 as being a "historic document", like it was written by Pepys or something.
A map of showing the path of a 1764 eclipse across Europe, printed in two passes, with the map in sepia and the shadow line in black.
A great acquisition in and of itself, but what's really special is that the map was designed by a woman, engraved by a woman, and printed by a woman. And not two weeks ago we were brainstorming ideas for a future exhibition on women in science, so it couldn't be more perfect.
Fallopian fact: although medical illustrations often depict the ovarian tubes as attached to the ovaries, they're not. And if you only have one tube, it can pick up eggs from either ovary, a bit like (but not at all like) one of those grabby claw games.
Some of you wanted to know a bit more about how ovarian tubes can pick up eggs from either ovary, so we're *delighted* to tell you more about this, because yes, it's real, the tubes can move around in there!
Here is a video of human ovulation caught on camera. You can see the fimbriae waggling around near the ovary, then, as the egg is released they grab it. youtube.com/watch?v=2-VKgdhfNpβ¦
Belgian researchers have captured ovulation on film for the first time. Read more about how they observed the process at: https://www.newscientist.com/articl...
The job of the fimbriae is to catch the egg and bring it into the tube. The fimbriae are very good at their job. When an egg is about to be released, they will draw closer to the ovary, and make that catch. They sweep the surface of the ovary with fine hairs and pick up the egg.
As well as having the ability to move around inside the abdominal cavity, the tubes are very good at getting things moving inside them. Once an egg is picked up, it doesn't just slide down the tube like a helter skelter (sorry if that was a delightful mental image you've always held).
The tubes are lined by little hair-like cells called cilia which waft the egg down to the uterus. The muscle of the tubes also squeeze the egg down in a movement called peristalsis.
The fimbriae are responsive to sex hormones released around ovulation. This is what tells them to come and catch an egg. Once they get the signal, they head over to catch that egg.
The tubes themselves move with the movement of the fimbriae, because the fimbriae are part of the tube. When there isn't an egg to pick up, sometimes the tubes will stick around in the position you usually see them in diagrams, sometimes they might be hanging around near the other ovary, and sometimes they might just have a little lie down on top of the uterus.
Science has known that the tubes move around inside the body for a long time. Here's a 1924 video of a rabbit's tubes in motion (please note, this video contains footage of an animal's internal organs) wellcomecollection.org/works/fβ¦
Finally got around to looking at #PEH578L's petrol gauge. Multimeter showed that the fault was at the sender, which is a simple float on an arm operating a variable resistor.
Opened it up and was slightly surprised to discover a wire-wound rheostat. Also that three of the turns are broken which would explain why it doesn't work. So unless I feel like re-winding it, I probably need a new one.
@ajlanes The tank is basically a cuboid, so I don't think that's what it's for.
It might be compensating for the fact that the float is on a pivoting arm, so the rate of rotation changes with depth.
But now that I look at it, I think the variance may be the wrong way around for that, so maybe it's compensating for non-linearity in the dashboard gauge instead.
@ajlanes If I was designing this, I'd fill it up by 10%'s and draw a graph and not worry about which part was causing it! π That doesn't stop someone downstream being interested in its origin, of course!
An "open firmware" project, where people produce and share FOSS firmware for common household devices, replacing the manufacturer's firmware with a decrapified version.
A smart TV? Reflash it with FOSS firmware, which removes tracking, calls to the manufacturer's servers, and any Internet-connected services that you don't want?
A printer? It's now yours. No ink subscription, or need for an app to print remotely.
I worked at a Famous DVR Company for a decade. CE software is hard, like maybe NP Complete hard on Friday afternoon when you just want to push the damn build to beta and go home.
"OpenWRT, but for TV's" would be the elevator pitch. OpenWRT was already mentioned in the comments but it's still a good example of how mediocre vendor firmware got replaced. And in looking into firmware on other wireless routers I now see they start with an OpenWRT image and go from there, making it full circle.
this would be great indeed. Maybe it could work in some future if adhering to standars and openness would thus become more of a competitive advantage for manufacturers.
Probably the closest we have to this are a handful or open router projects and some of the 3rd party Android and Linux phone Distros targeting common smartphone models. Love to see this for televisions, especially as so many of them are no shipping incredibly user hostile features like voice recording, viewing habit profiling. Televisions have in effect become just another bug, watching you watch it.
It's hard to shake the gravity of a place that featured in a third of my life, which is also currently the majority of my adult life. I have a certain COVID-like time dilation effect where I think "Oh that was just a few years ago" and suddenly remember that 2004 was a lot longer ago than that!
@cstross @FredKiesche I originally read it as "Tempest Procrastinator", and I wonder if Pratchett might have coined such a device to allow wizards to put off storms they didn't want to deal with right now...
@edchivers @FredKiesche I'm just now visualizing the self-propelled version installed in the rectum of a hippopotamus, using mating Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi. (If there's a storm coming the hippo gets angry, points into the direction the storm is coming from, and spins its tail as it projectile-shits.)
Well, I know that as a cis guy I probably don't really get a vote here - but as we both know how much it will wind up the soi-disant Stoic Defenders of Something-Or-Other, I say: go for it.
So you're out #sailing in a new area and your electrics fail. No bother, just go back to using a paper chart for navigation (if you ever stopped: I didn't).
The only problem is that the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office is withdrawing its portfolio of Admiralty Standard Nautical Charts and Thematic Charts.
Thank Bob we still have Imray ... for now.
I'm also wondering what small or traditional boat sailors without electronics are meant to do.
That's interesting: it makes sense, I have hardly ever seen a paper chart in use.
That said, when I went deep sea fishing, they had all the paper charts they would ever need (this was NZ) as a backup. It feels... a bit presumptous to believe that e navigation will totally replace paper charts.
@goatsarah @ajlanes @squishymage42 I think for me part of the reason I still value paper charts (other than then not needing electrons) that I sail on other people's boats and I can *always* navigate using charts whereas every chart plotter seems to have a different UI.
@dan_turner ... and a spare of glasses if you need those. I read of a solo sailor who had to be piloted in by the RNLI after losing his specs and not being able to navigate.
A discussion about how they make software and what this means by Jonathan Blow, Thekla, Inc.DevGAMM is the biggest game developers conference in Eastern Euro...
Oh! One factor is that all mobile comms will go Satellite in the next 5 years. But it's not here yet and even then one's device could easily fail (and I'd bet it would be the software that failed first).
I don't understand. The work of updating the charts remains necessary and relevant, so they'll still have to keep the actual data up to date. Doing as Ordnance Survey have done and providing a print-on-demand service for paper charts is surely much easier and more profitable than the work required to safely move everyone to digital-only?
The US is well along the same path, and the answer for us is "online viewer for the chart database can generate custom PDFs for printing, and here's a world-wide vendors certified to print bigger (A2-equivalent) ones for you that meet carry requirements." Including Stanfords in the UK so I'd imagine a similar partnership would be easy to reach.
Sion [main]
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •Alexandra Lanes likes this.