Skip to main content

It is too early to be navigating airport land. Fortunately the only suspicious item in my baggage was conditioner and I have located a full English breakfast.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Got a tattoo of the windows mouse cursor so that I can sit like this on Teams calls in the hope that someone frantically tries to move it.
A specky guy with a mouse cursor tattoo on his arm
A closeup of the mouse cursor tattoo
in reply to Jack

Frank Engelhard
Frank Engelhard
• •
@Buster ok, I'm going to remove it. Anyhow, it doesn't change my opinion on the tattoo fashion.
@Jack
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

@NanoRaptor I think that means we’re canon now.
@NanoRaptor

A few years ago I was on Scarlet (the yacht of @Sarah Brown and @Zoë O'Connell ) and noticed mid morning that I didn't have the bloating sensation I was used to having some time after breakfast. The reason for this, of course, is that Scarlet runs on lactose-free milk. Evidently I was slightly lactose intolerant, started buying lactose-free milk at home, and everything was better.

It shouldn't have been only today that I extrapolated this experience to cover a large takeaway banana milkshake.

@Sarah Brown @Zoë O'Connell
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Yuval Abraham, author of the 972 mag reporting on the #IDF’s use of the #Lavender and “Where’s Daddy” targeting systems in #Gaza, walked through the whole story in an extended segment on #DemocracyNow

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/5/israel_ai

#Israel #Palestine #FreePalestine #AI #genocide #NotInMyName #NotInOurName


Lavender & Where’s Daddy: How Israel Used AI to Form Kill Lists & Bomb Palestinians in Their Homes

The Israeli publications +972 and Local Call have exposed how the Israeli military used an artificial intelligence program known as Lavender to develop a “kill list” in Gaza that includes as many as 37,000 Palestinians who were targeted for assassina…
Democracy Now!
#ai #palestine #israel #genocide #freepalestine #lavender #notinmyname #IDF #gaza #DemocracyNow #NotInOurName

reshared this

It's rather lovely to get a postcard from @Neil Brown - thank you!
@Neil Brown
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Kerbal Space Program is basically a dollhouse for people with A-Level further maths.

reshared this

in reply to Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
• •

Observant viewers will note the presence of hydrofoils. Each one of those is an INTERPLANETARY SEAPLANE!

Also, not a single expendable launch in this game.

It does occur to me that “better drowned than duffers. If not duffers won’t drown” was an excellent summary of the Cambridge pedagogical approach in the early 1990s.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

the six sexual roles: top, bottom, up, down, charm, strange

reshared this

Overhearing people on the train. “They have to get people back into the office at $big-research-institute” with the accompanying impression that not doing this is responsible for some kind of scientific stagnation.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Sesquipedality
Sesquipedality
• •
dude, have they even scienced?
in reply to Sesquipedality

Alexandra Lanes
Alexandra Lanes
•
@Sesquipedality I think it’s possible they are the brand of academic who used to science. Ironically he’s something to do with public health.
@Sesquipedality
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Sesquipedality
Sesquipedality
• •
because the people who actually like dealing with people actually gravitate towards management, i think the assumption that social interaction is productive is kind of baked in. They seem to conflate their progress up the heirarchy with knowledge based progress, which is odd, but perhaps understandable in terms of how people are.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Sesquipedality
Sesquipedality
• •
uncharitably it occurs to me that this might have been my former employers, and it does nothing to change my very low opinion of them. One would hope in 20 years they might have improved, but stagnation would be entirely on brand for them.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I guess the takeaway from the xz backdoor situation is:

If you’re an open-source project maintainer, and somebody starts getting on your case for not doing enough free work for them, you reply “big Jia Tan energy there” and then block them forever.

in reply to Andrew Plotkin

David Adam
David Adam
• •
me, as I'm writing my first comment on bugzilla.redhat in 15 years regarding an EPEL request: wow this looks dodgy as
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

A new post on misleading Covid charts & why Covid really is low right now, and why we should be glad of it.

christinapagel.substack.com/p/hospitals-...

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Given the news of the xz backdoor, may I recommend this seminal paper from Ken Thompson's 1984 Turing Award lecture showing how a compiler with no backdoors in the source code can nevertheless propagate a backdoor.

Reflections on trusting trust | the morning paper
https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/09/reflections-on-trusting-trust/

#SecureSoftwareSupplyChain #SoftwareSupplyChain #XZBackdoor

Reflections on trusting trust | the morning paper

blog.acolyer.org
#xzbackdoor #SecureSoftwareSupplyChain #softwaresupplychain
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

reshared this

Final leg of journey home from eastercon is (of course) a rail replacement bus. I suppose this does at least signify that stuff is being improved and mended but still. And sigh they can’t decide which bus is going where.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

A girl can dream...

reshared this

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

on this Trans Day of Visibilty, remember that you are valid, you matter, and you’re trans if you say you are

if you’re not cis, this day is for you

and remember that on this, the most holiest of trans days, TDoV and The Matrix’s 25th anniversary…

she is risen 😉

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Is anyone on Mastodon knowledgeable about Tironian notes? I've got tentative readings of two headings in a 9th c. Text from the Loire Valley, which mix Tironian notes and Latin charaters. But there are 13,000 T. Notes in Schmitz, many of which look very similar. Thanks!!

@histodons @litteracarolina @medievodons @chaprot #bookhistodons @mssprovenance

#bookhistodons @histodons group @mssprovenance @Anna Dorofeeva @Pierre Chambert-Protat @Medievodons group

reshared this

in reply to Matteo Zenatti

Mark Saltveit
Mark Saltveit
• •

@matz
Sure! Be forewarned, the MS is very hard to read (which is why it remained for us to decipher.)

Line 1: the start seems to be "Versus in baptisterio" but after that -- "Petri" something maybe. Extremely hard to read. The last character that looks like some Carolingian miniscule A's -- "abstergentis"? "delati"?

Line 14: we read "De petra manante"

We = me + Mike Fontaine (Cornell) + Rachel Fickes (Middlebury library.)

line 14 of BL Harley MS 2735 fol. 1r
Line 1 of BL Harley MS 2735, fol. 1r
@Matteo Zenatti
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Congratulations to trans folk celebrating their refractive indices today

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Happy clock bullshit day to all those who celebrate. May you quickly remember how the fuck to do the oven.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Jonathan👣🚲
Jonathan👣🚲
• •
I did three devices in 30 seconds or so. That isn’t the worst part of clock bullshit.
in reply to Jonathan👣🚲

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
• •
@Jonathan👣🚲 I feel like the designers aren't trying hard enough to get into the spirit of capitalist enshittification if it was that quick and easy.
@Jonathan👣🚲
in reply to Sarah Brown

Jonathan👣🚲
Jonathan👣🚲
• •
One of these devices is 24 years old and still mostly operational, so I guess not. It helps that two of them have a rotary dial used to set the clock. The third (which happens to be the oven) has that stupid short capacitive tap to adjust by a minute, medium hold to start racing through many 10-minute increments per second kind of scheme. On the other hand, the cooktop that’s part of the same physical device goes through its 17 regular power levels at only 2 per second.
in reply to Jonathan👣🚲

Jonathan👣🚲
Jonathan👣🚲
• •
How are these interfaces rarely any good? Extreme nonlinearity. Extreme debouncing so you can’t just tap through, and a solid tap is coming up on the acceleration threshold. I feel like strangling the people making these, or making them use their own creations if that isn’t too cruel.
in reply to Jonathan👣🚲

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
• •
@Jonathan👣🚲 Actually the worst for me is my induction hob. It uses capacitative touch, which doesn't work if it gets wet, which it frequently does.
@Jonathan👣🚲
in reply to Sarah Brown

Jonathan👣🚲
Jonathan👣🚲
• •
Same here. It doesn’t take much moisture to make it unresponsive. At least a quick wipe tends to suffice. Why is everything dying to be a smartphone in the rain?
in reply to Sarah Brown

Sjaak K.
Sjaak K.
• •
Our seven year old technician fixed the oven challenge within seconds. Not a clue how.

On Ross Anderson… https://tech.lgbt/@Diziet/112180620655432068

Ian Jackson

2024-03-29 19:27:07


Oh no. He was my officemate and colleague while I did my PhD. He was a thoroughly excellent nuisance to a lot of evil people.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

One worrying thing about the whole xz debacle is that maintainers are probably going to be even less inclined to trust people they don't know coming in to offer help (99.9% of whom are, one hopes, _not_ state-sponsored attackers ...), and thus it will be even harder to relieve the pressure on overworked maintainers.

reshared this

in reply to Colin Watson Colin Watson reshared this.

e. hashman 🇵🇸
e. hashman 🇵🇸
• •
it will amplify network effects, I think. We will be more likely to trust people we already know and less likely to trust newcomers with zero background. And I'm sure you can see how that's a problem...
in reply to e. hashman 🇵🇸

Colin Watson
Colin Watson
• •
@ehashman Yeah exactly. And we saw the racists coming out pretty quickly for this one, so I'd bet it will be particularly harder for newcomers with Chinese names for a while
@e. hashman 🇵🇸
in reply to Colin Watson

mirabilos
mirabilos
• •
I have mild doubts the person was actually Chinese, but they surely presented as such
in reply to Colin Watson

the tower fairy
the tower fairy
• •
And refactors/improvements in critical areas will now be viewed with even more scorn than until now... demanding maintainers become the sole point of failure for codebases layout
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

the radical leftist urge to stay in bed and to sleep some more

reshared this

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

reshared this

in reply to chjara

Ian Jackson
Ian Jackson
• •
It's much worse than that picture. Imagine tens of thousands of those tiny pencil-like things stacked up, one on the other, in a fractal tree, with the gigantic edifice on top.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I rag on github a whole lot, but this is one feature it has that I really like.

Since JiaT75 backdoored xz-utils, I have blocked him and now get to see a warning in every project he touched.

I hope wasmtime et all are doing some careful review..

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

reshared this

in reply to see shy jo

Toasterson
Toasterson
• •
Independent from projects doing their due diligence we need a list so we can Crowdsource the audit.
in reply to Toasterson

Andrew Bartlett
Andrew Bartlett
• •

@Toasterson Been thinking about both the need for DFSG redaction in Debian (due RFC texts, but which we need as the build uses the tables) and Samba's tarball generation (pre builds the docs).

Perhaps it is time to find a way to have pristine from git release tarballs.

At the very least an effort for reproducing and analyzing of tarballs vs git sources just as we do reproducible builds would seem advised.

Next time it will be checked in of course, sadly.

@Toasterson
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Very sorry to hear that Professor @rossjanderson passed away last night. Aside from his (numerous) contributions to Information Security, he was a mentor to and advocate for many researchers in the field. He will be sadly missed but leaves behind a strong legacy.
@Ross Anderson

reshared this

in reply to Steven Murdoch

Ian Jackson
Ian Jackson
• •
Oh no. He was my officemate and colleague while I did my PhD. He was a thoroughly excellent nuisance to a lot of evil people.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Christians: This Friday we celebrate!

Non Christians: Cool! What’s the occasion?

Christians: Our god died. Tortured to death quite horribly, in fact.

Non Christians: You celebrate that?

Christians: There are sound theological reasons.

Non Christians: Bit weird, but ok.

Christians: We call it “Good Friday”

Non Christians: …

in reply to Sarah Brown

Diego Roversi
Diego Roversi
• •

In fact the word good stood for "holy", not the modern meaning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday#Etymology

And of course christians don't celebrate good friday, but commemorate it. It's like say that jews people celebrate Holocaust_memorial_days.

in reply to Diego Roversi

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
• •
@Diego Roversi Yeah yeah, we get that there are sound reasons behind the Lovecraftian weirdness.
@Diego Roversi

I’ve just read “we bite each oþer” on here and I now can’t stop wondering if it should be “oðer”. Old English had “ōþer” but I think the modern English pronunciation is voiced ð

reshared this

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Simon Brooke
Simon Brooke
• •

Completely agree!

The use of eth in Anglian and Brythonic names seems to imply a soft 'th' sound, whereas the use of thorn seems to imply a harder one; and my understanding is that the same is true in modern Icelandic (Seyðisfjörður, Egilsstaðir vs Þórsmörk, for example).

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

RUDE!
This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)

reshared this

in reply to George Takei :verified: 🏳️‍🌈🖖🏽

Ecomate
Ecomate
• •
Here are eight planets that vary greatly in size, and a ninth that is smaller than the others 🙂
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I see GamerGate is in the news because it’s coming up to the tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown caused by transphobic harassment from TERfs organised on social media. They were using the same tactics that, months later, would be the hallmark of GamerGate.

And yet the surviving narrative is that this sort of organised, “culture war” harassment originated with GG.

It didn’t. They did it to trans women, and probably others, first, and we raised the alarm, and nobody thought it mattered enough to do anything.

And then they came for the rest of you.

They keep doing this. We keep raising the alarm. We keep being ignored.

Maybe one day people will learn.

in reply to Sarah Brown

Jesse Cohn
Jesse Cohn
• •
Thanks -- I'll have to look further into them (a cursory googling isn't very helpful). I seem to have missed a really important chapter in the cultural-political history of our times.
in reply to Sarah Brown

FinalOverdrive
FinalOverdrive
• •
It originated with stuff directed against black...anybody.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

TIL >It is also not unheard of for geese to mate with swans, with the offspring of a swan and a goose known as a swoose.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-43054363
via
https://elk.zone/mastodon.social/@kottke@botsin.space/112175718843261399

New Zealand goose: How one blind bisexual bird became an icon

Henry the goose spent many years in a love triangle with two swans, helping raise their children.
By Yvette Tan (BBC News)

reshared this

Job hunting, oh my

I'm looking for work again, after the most recent temporary thing came to an end. (Arguably I did it all too quickly!).

Apart from the challenge of persuading myself that I'm actually good enough to do _any_ described job, I find I haven't a clue what job titles mean these days. Cambridge University hides everything under a "Computer Officer" blanket, and I know I'm a system administrator (who does networks and other stuff too), but the job market is full of "Thing Analyst" and "Site Reliability Engineer" and "DevOps" and I haven't a clear idea what boxes if any I fit into.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

So is Stormy Daniels the only contractor that Trump has ever paid?

reshared this

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I made an HTML/DOM viewer you can paste into your console to view or debug any website in 3D. Choose from random/gradient/clear colors or whether layers have sides.

You can save it as a bookmarklet so it's 1 click away. It's just a tiny IIFE JS function.
https://gist.github.com/OrionReed/4c3778ebc2b5026d2354359ca49077ca

3D DOM viewer, copy-paste this into your console to visualise the DOM topographically.

3D DOM viewer, copy-paste this into your console to visualise the DOM topographically. - DOM3D.js
Gist

reshared this

Star Trek Prodigy is silly.

"You want us to jump? I do not think that option is logically sound"
"In outer space, there is no sound"
"Your rebuttal is correct, but nonsense"

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

Etymology is so cool.

The term "microblog" comes from micro + blog, ie small blog.

Then, "blog" is a shortened form of "Web log". And a "log" comes from "log book", which is a book used to record events on a journey.

So get this, the "log" in log book is because you would use the book to record the progress and speed of a ship by using a reel attached to a chip log... So called because it's made of wood... ie a log.

So a microblog is a small record of your journey.

I think that's very poetic that this very post is a direct descendent of mariners from 400 years ago.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

I had to sign up to a private dentist (no NHS in the area). One thing I always notice the few times I've had to go private for things is that you don't get lectured.

With the NHS it's like waiting for the NordVPN bit in a YouTube video, except you can't skip it.

You need to lose weight, stop drinking, eat better, exercise, wash behind your ears, phone your mother, come more often, not come as often, get more sleep, work less, just be happier, find some "me" time, stay informed but worry less, get out more, close the door (were you born in a barn?).

I wonder if there's been any papers on contrasting primary care providers who moan at their patients and those who don't. I can't help wondering if it's counterproductive.

It's made me much happier to book checkups knowing that we both start on the basis that I'm trying.

reshared this

in reply to kæt

Mike
Mike
• •
I've never had that from any dentist.
I've been with the same NHS dental practice for maybe 10 years.
The biggest difference is that there seems to be a revolving door of dentists where if you are unlucky (like my wife) you never see the same dentist twice.
in reply to Mike

Charlotte Walker
Charlotte Walker
• •
@MikeFromLFE My personal experience within the same practice is that when you are an NHS patient they just do the bare minimum to patch you up, now I’m a private patient I have a plan for restorative/preventative work to improve my teeth for my future life. Obviously that costs, but it’s silly not to help people to keep their own teeth into older age
@Mike
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


1946 book of reportage by I. F. Stone

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)
#palestine #israel #refugees #freepalestine #ceasefire #zionism #gaza

reshared this

in reply to Ruby Sinreich

Alexandra Lanes
Alexandra Lanes
•
@Ruby Sinreich @MyView Outside Israel, perhaps? I get the impression (from what other journalists report, so...) that Israeli TV isn't really showing very much of the devastation in Gaza.
@Ruby Sinreich @MyView
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

MyView
MyView
• •

@ajlanes
That's common among media that supports and encourages their government's bad policies and very bad behaviour ...

We've had the same thing over the past quarter century from a media reduced to three owners ... one being Murdoch and the other two being well known CONservative recipients of Mate$ Rate$ ...

No such thing as a Free Press in many countries now.

@Alexandra Lanes
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

it's not "clocky transfem voice", okay, it's the distinctive regional accent of 🏳️‍⚧️, that country all the hot girls are from

reshared this

in reply to xanna

Finn
Finn
• •

"they find that basically nonbinary people do whatever the heck they like"

damn right lol

I'm going to #eastercon this coming weekend. If you're going too and you'd like to, let me know so I can say hi!
#eastercon
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Colette
Colette
• •
We shall be there (and I've just made your name badge <g>)

This judgment in the Family Court, written in the form of a letter to a 14-year-old, is an excellent example of the law trying to be accessible. https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2017/48.html

A (Letter to a Young Person), Re (Rev 1) [2017] EWFC 48 (26 July 2017)

www.bailii.org

Ben Evans reshared this.

in reply to Sesquipedality

Alexandra Lanes
Alexandra Lanes
•

@Sesquipedality It's an interesting exercise in attempting to express the reasoning in accessible language. To me it seems a little patronising but it's been a long time since I was 14 so I'm a poor judge of that... and was never very typically 14 anyway.

Problematic how?

@Sesquipedality
⇧