Discussing the time @Zoë O'Connell and I were talking our boat, Scarlet, into Shoreham harbour when I saw light glint through a thin nylon thread in the air in front of me.
“Fishing line!” I yelled, more out of instinct as it posed no threat to us, surrounded, as we were, by the stainless steel rigging lines of our boat.
The line made contact with the starboard shroud. This did … very little to our 8000 kilogram metres per second of momentum. The line turned into a delicate gossamer spiral in front of us as it instantly broke.
The fisherman on the harbour wall high above us started jumping up and down, yelling.
Like, you cast your line across the entrance to a working harbour…
…in front of an approaching boat…
…which can’t see your line…
…and even if it did, cannot manoeuvre out of the way or stop in time even if it wanted to.
So, congratulations, I gu
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Discussing the time @Zoë O'Connell and I were talking our boat, Scarlet, into Shoreham harbour when I saw light glint through a thin nylon thread in the air in front of me.
“Fishing line!” I yelled, more out of instinct as it posed no threat to us, surrounded, as we were, by the stainless steel rigging lines of our boat.
The line made contact with the starboard shroud. This did … very little to our 8000 kilogram metres per second of momentum. The line turned into a delicate gossamer spiral in front of us as it instantly broke.
The fisherman on the harbour wall high above us started jumping up and down, yelling.
Like, you cast your line across the entrance to a working harbour…
…in front of an approaching boat…
…which can’t see your line…
…and even if it did, cannot manoeuvre out of the way or stop in time even if it wanted to.
So, congratulations, I guess. You “caught” a whopper: 4 tonnes! Shame you couldn’t reel it in. Go tell your friends about the one that got away.
Just had the whole “pharmacist looks on in pity while you stand there, clammy and sweating, as they prescribe UTI antibiotics” experience. Such fun and joy.
@Conor Mc Bride in theory you can drive the length and breadth of the country in a car with no brakes, no airbags, no seatbelt, and a spike in the middle of the steering wheel and arrive perfectly safely. The car can still provide the essential function of getting from A to B, just as C can provide the essential function of implementing software algorithms.
And, in my case, no driving licence (or indeed, ability)! But driving is the right analogy, because people lie to themselves routinely about how well they do it. I miss the old (I have race memory) times when you had all day to regret last night's botched program run and really think hard about tonight's. I think that might be another driving analogue: the car is remarkably good at protecting the driver from their incompetence.
not a software person, but isn't lead piping easy to put in but bad for everyone using and touching it ever after, while software in C is devilish for the original programmer but quite fine once running?
The biggest problem with C is that pretty much nothing gets checked, and even that it’s not actually possible to check it. If you code perfectly and defend yourself against all possible rogue input, you MIGHT be OK. If something goes wrong, chances are it won’t even be caught until several billion CPU cycles later when the damage it’s done has crashed around in memory like an alpha particle in DNA.
It is common, for example, to write functions which handle multiple types of data. In C, since it doesn’t really have a type system to speak of, you pass the package and then tell it what sort of data you have passed.
It doesn’t check. It can’t check. The only validation that you’ve passed a Spong and not a Wibble is you saying, “this is a Spong, scout’s honour”.
So then you execute Spong handling code and, oops, you actually passed a Wibble, and it goes and corr
The biggest problem with C is that pretty much nothing gets checked, and even that it’s not actually possible to check it. If you code perfectly and defend yourself against all possible rogue input, you MIGHT be OK. If something goes wrong, chances are it won’t even be caught until several billion CPU cycles later when the damage it’s done has crashed around in memory like an alpha particle in DNA.
It is common, for example, to write functions which handle multiple types of data. In C, since it doesn’t really have a type system to speak of, you pass the package and then tell it what sort of data you have passed.
It doesn’t check. It can’t check. The only validation that you’ve passed a Spong and not a Wibble is you saying, “this is a Spong, scout’s honour”.
So then you execute Spong handling code and, oops, you actually passed a Wibble, and it goes and corrupts something.
But the something it corrupts isn’t even necessarily just the stuff you passed it. It essentially starts randomly firing a machine gun into the crowd. And the crowd is the rest of your program’s data.
If you’re lucky, it fires a bullet somewhere the operating system cares about enough to use the memory management unit to protect and the operating system immediately kills the process. If not, something randomly gets corrupted, and you find out … later by … some means.
Translation State by Ann Leckie is batshit insanity Sci Fi at its finest. Seriously, it's a profoundly good book. If you liked the Ancillary Justice trilogy, you will adore this!
And presently they came to Tillingham, where, if Wells had done his research properly, he would have known it is basically a mudflat and far too shallow to float a torpedo ram, which had a draft of 6 metres.
Provided to YouTube by Universal Music GroupMaggie May · Rod StewartEvery Picture Tells A Story℗ 1971 UMG Recordings, Inc.Released on: 1971-05-18Producer, As...
Seeing someone on Reddit saying that they never used the maths (specifically, “pi”) they learned at school, and that it was pointless learning it.
I have used trigonometry and calculus in my everyday life to make short work of problems, mostly relating to DIY. If you reach middle age without m any this stuff, then I can almost guarantee that you have done several things the hard way when you didn’t need to.
@lnr whenever this sort of thing comes up, my response is always that the useful thing about learning maths is not necessarily the content but learning how to solve a particular type of problem and think in a certain way. Unfortunately, the way maths is examined means the learning to think aspect is often sidelined in favour of learning to jump through hoops
@alisonkiddle To be honest your Lego problems have been reminding me how much I always enjoyed that sort of looking at patterns and things, without necessarily having a purpose or even direction of thought.
making a cake this weekend, I calculated its circumference from the diameter to determine how long a strip of marcipan to make for the edge. Also regularly use volume calculations to roughly determine “Will the remains in this (cylindrical) pot fit in this (rectangular cuboid) container?”
I’ve used very little of the math they tried to teach me and forgotten an awful lot of it:(
But my opinion wasn’t that it was a pointless thing to be taught, but that school did one hell of a bad job at doing it:( At one point I was good at maths (at least compared to my peers) and slowly they sucked every bit of fun and wonder out of it:(
Apologies for the vagueposting, but when someone repeatedly makes a longstanding offer of helping with something, and you repeatedly ignore them for a couple of years, and then tell them that their position is, "I'm alright Jack, screw you", then don't be surprised if that actually becomes their position.
TERFs are the ultimate useful idiots for the right wing. After damaging LGBT and women’s equality in the UK, they are now helping dismantle the climate movement. bylinetimes.com/2023/08/29/gre…
@EveOfTheFuture (just here to be pedantic and point out that there's no UK Green Party. Ali is taking action against the Green Party of England and Wales. The Scottish Green Party - separate for over 30 years now - got rid of the vocal transphobes a while ago and has suspended formal relations with the GPEW on account of the latter's continual inability to deal with persistent transphobia. I don't know enough about the GP Northern Ireland to say if they're any good on transphobia)
@John Chivall @Eve (?), she/her (?) My apologies. I shall issue a correction immediately: the UK Green Parties about about as useful as chocolate fireguards.
@EveOfTheFuture Sharar Ali and his terf pals are egomaniacs on a holy crusade to force every organisation to be as institutionally bigoted as they are personally. This "protected belief" shit is being tried on everywhere.
Suing a political party for excluding you because of your opposition to their policies… That’s some serious absurdity. How about communists start joining conservative parties, then sue them for being excluded from leadership because of their beliefs. 🤦
the very first letter to my newly built flat was a death threat from TVL. Stating they had written multiple times. Which was odd as a) the roof went on a month before and b) it didn't exist on the post office list until a few days prior...
As an American, it boggles that anyone pays a direct tax (let's call it what it is) on public television. Here it's funded by donations and recurring support from various sources with maybe a smidge of tax dollars and to be blunt a good portion of it is BBC content, which I imagine the BBC is being paid for. And maybe that sounds horrifying and unstable, but it's really not. People pay into it and if they have a pledge drive every once in a while, they back it up with special content. It's basically the truest form of socialism we have here.
I once lived in a flat in a weird corner of two roads - two addresses were used for it interchangeably. We had a TV License for one address but got constant grief about the other. We decided to ignore it and they told us "we're freezing your bank accounts!!!" When nothing happened we realised they were liars and thought no more about it.
@Effie Yeah. They are full of shit. The problem is that they terrify vulnerable people with their toothless "we are the gestapo and we are coming for you and your little dog" crap.
It broke, everywhere, badly. Ended up reinstalling from scratch, even on a different machine, but it Would Not Work. Kept throwing internal NPM errors.
Is it currently broken? I've resorted to a manual nginx config for now. but it's not ideal. Anyone else seeing flakiness from nginx proxy manager?
I had a similar problem - the auto-renew didn't work.
My setup had nginx proxy manager running on an unRaid box using macvlan network, and connected to unifi switching. What the problem was for me was the NPM box wasn't able to get external network connectivity so like you I ended up reinstalling it all over again.
Problem kept happening, so in the end I just ditched it all & went CaddyV2 and (touch wood) so far no problems.
This entry was edited (Sunday, August 27, 2023, 10:54 PM)
Heh, mine's not so different, multiple subnets - plus Wireguard 😀
I don't exactly know why but in the end it was definitely a inter-vlan connectivity problem I kept hitting. The pain was trying to prove it out as the official Nginx Proxy Manager container for unraid didn't include anything like ping / traceroute etc.
I was trying to renew my cert running version 2.2.1 and the following error popped up: [5/4/2020] [10:01:54 PM] [SSL ] › ℹ info Renewing Let'sEncrypt certificates for Cert #1: mywebite.com, [5/4/20...
I had an issue like this, I actually shelled into the docker container and found that the process to upgrade was running but had stalled. So I killed it and then made a new request and it worked.
they’re horrific. If they simply put dials on, that would make them completely visble for me. There are some with dials, but very few. It bewilders me people accept the touch control ones. Perhaps I odd.
Last year, @Zoë O'Connell and I went to the Southampton International Boat Show, only to find that it had been turned, by the organisers, into a “family day out to buy tat” show. Many exhibitors stayed away. Lots of stuff I wanted to see simply wasn’t there. Instead, you were made to walk through endless displays of crap patio furniture and other such tat, in slowly moving queues.
There used to be a boat show in London, and they killed it by turning it into a tat show too. Southampton was, until Covid, left alone to be a boat show, until last year. Even the RYA (Royal Yachting Association, the closest thing sailing has to a governing body in the UK) didn’t turn up.
Since then, the organisers have been bombarding us with email. After last year, I think a lot of people have decided to bot bother, and if we want to go to a boat show, go to Boot at Düsseldorf, the largest in Europe and an actual boat show.
The tone of the
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Last year, @Zoë O'Connell and I went to the Southampton International Boat Show, only to find that it had been turned, by the organisers, into a “family day out to buy tat” show. Many exhibitors stayed away. Lots of stuff I wanted to see simply wasn’t there. Instead, you were made to walk through endless displays of crap patio furniture and other such tat, in slowly moving queues.
There used to be a boat show in London, and they killed it by turning it into a tat show too. Southampton was, until Covid, left alone to be a boat show, until last year. Even the RYA (Royal Yachting Association, the closest thing sailing has to a governing body in the UK) didn’t turn up.
Since then, the organisers have been bombarding us with email. After last year, I think a lot of people have decided to bot bother, and if we want to go to a boat show, go to Boot at Düsseldorf, the largest in Europe and an actual boat show.
The tone of the emails has been increasingly, “we get what we did wrong, we’re sorry! Look! We persuaded the RYA to come back.”
It was almost working … almost.
Then yesterday they sent me an email about the new highlight of the show: their live music stage.
You have no idea what you did wrong, do you?
RIP Southampton International Boat Show. Something sharing your name may continue for a while, but you are gone and missed.
Strip the copper out the walls and fucking run, I guess
The ideology is more complex - they're cutting the police and army too, so god help us all they're apparently true believers - but the results are the same
@Sarah Brown The worker eventually stops by itself if it isn't restarted via cron, but we don't have a way to stop it nicely at the moment. Ideally, we should catch the SIGTERM signal and make it exit after its current task is done.
Ra ra Prigozhin Tried to overthrow Putin He moved his army into the game Ra ra Prigorzin Turned round halfway to the Kremlin And got a bomb smuggled onto his plane
Just seen a taxi with “advanced bookings only” written on it.
Mate, I’ve booked multi leg rail journeys in the uk involving backtracking and stuff and know the difference between London terminals and London via Thameslink.
How advanced cash hiring your mere car possibly be?
We shouldn’t give them ideas, but maybe in the future a taxi between Cambridge and south Cambs would require split ticketing due to different conditions of carriage.
I've booked journeys you people can't even imagine. Rail replacement buses on the shores of Crewe... Hi vis jackets gleam in the dark near the ticket gate...
Weird to see so many mentions of Fulton County when your only exposure to it as a concept is through a certain sci fi trilogy that's currently a popular TV series...
@Mallory 🏳️⚧️:freebsd_logo: It’s where the “Silo” trilogy is set. They’re in a hole in the ground in Fulton County, southwest of what used to be Atlanta.
There are a couple of places when driving I have to play certain tracks, because it's the law:
Crossing the bridge between the Algarve and Spain, I play Back to the Future because it's a timezone border and growing up in an island nation, that still weirds me out a bit.
The A3 near Petersfield has a roundabout with a brown tourism roadsigns to "Bird World". That one gets the Jurassic Park theme.
Discussing the British Press, and I'm reminded of the time when I had a moderate amount of celebrity in the UK LGBT community, and the press tried to do a hit piece on me.
Now here's the thing. There's a cheat code, and I'm going to explain what it is:
They will contact you for comment.
If you say nothing, they will publish the piece and say you were offered the chance to comment.
If you tell them to fuck off, they will publish the price and say your response was foul and unprintable.
I did neither of these things. I told them that this piece wasn't journalism. It was ridiculous tittle tattle and represented everything that was wrong with a failing and dying industry more obsessed with clickbait than proper reporting. I asked them if they didn't have proper news to report, and said that they should be ashamed of themselves.
They're basically screwed at that point. "We contacted Ms Brown for comment and she said that this was ridiculous tittle tattle and that the reporter should be ashamed of herself."
They're not gonna say that.
I'm
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Discussing the British Press, and I'm reminded of the time when I had a moderate amount of celebrity in the UK LGBT community, and the press tried to do a hit piece on me.
Now here's the thing. There's a cheat code, and I'm going to explain what it is:
They will contact you for comment.
If you say nothing, they will publish the piece and say you were offered the chance to comment.
If you tell them to fuck off, they will publish the price and say your response was foul and unprintable.
I did neither of these things. I told them that this piece wasn't journalism. It was ridiculous tittle tattle and represented everything that was wrong with a failing and dying industry more obsessed with clickbait than proper reporting. I asked them if they didn't have proper news to report, and said that they should be ashamed of themselves.
They're basically screwed at that point. "We contacted Ms Brown for comment and she said that this was ridiculous tittle tattle and that the reporter should be ashamed of herself."
They're not gonna say that.
I'm struck by something one of my history teachers once said about medieval castles. They weren't meant to be impregnable. They were meant to be annoying enough that an invading army would decide to investigate other priorities instead.
The piece never ran.
If you're a trans person in the crosshairs of the British press, make yourself an annoying target. They're on a deadline, and if you make them conclude that life is too short, they will leave you the fuck alone.
I LOVE this. It's so much better and more effective than the normal strategy people suggest for bullies which is "ignore it and they'll go away". No they won't.
Become and annoying target! Make them rethink their priorities if they're not going to get what they want out of you without a ton of effort.
@http_error_418 @stavvers and if they are asking in good faith, something like "ovarian cancer is very serious, here are the symptoms" will actually be helpful So it's a win-win strategy
@Boobook @VickiWoodward apparently mel giedroyc and sue perkins used to watch out for people crying on the british bake-off and then run over and start swearing and slandering famously litigious people so the camera crew couldn't do that grotesque "zoom in and relish their tears" thing
Seems to me they’re not screwed at all, as they can either flat out lie or hedge with, “did not reply to our question by press time.”
Which is technically true: even if you replied to their email, if your response didn’t answer their question, then they can simply say you didn’t answer their question.
Sadly, the only real solution to this problem is for the general public to move to better press outfits, which is an issue coming and going, the lack of better press outfits PLUS a public that kind of likes the rubbish.
There should be an AI bot that churns out dense but meaningless text, sort of like lorem ipsum with actual words. If they get pages of it in response to questions maybe they'll look elsewhere or reconsider the topic. 🤖
@msbellows @http_error_418 @stavvers then again, the NYT especially is notorious for bad-faith, outright un- and anti-scientific reporting on trans people and running hit pieces on doctors and the community.
@riley *blink* my Boots had both phenylephrine and pseudoephidrine versions last time I wanted some (about 6 weeks ago). You have to ask for the latter from a locked cupboard though.
It's been a while since I last visited UK, so perhaps they have changed their policies.
Replacing pseudoephedrine with phenylephrine in the hope that people would confuse the polysyllabic names that both abbreviate as PE is still a dirty trick.
Had to get a part from Spain for my car the other week because it had sprung a worrying leak (and the aprt from Mitsubishi was an eye-watering cost). The part? A plastic bag. My vehicle - designed for at least some off-road use relies on a plastic bag to work.
One of those cases where alt text would help even somebody with reasonable eyesight. I haven't got a clue what I'm looking at here beyond some sort of tool and some sort of fixing on some sort of wood-effect surface.
@Ed Davies @Mona app anyway, it’s a plasterboard expansion bolt and deployment tool for countries where it’s too much bother to build houses out of actual house.
Is there any urban wildlife as dangerous and aggressive as the British Herring Gull?
It will absolutely fuck you up for a chip.
Apparently Sydney, in Australia, is having problems with aggressive gulls and they’ve employed dog walkers to scare them off. I saw a picture.
In England, the gulls would take the dog. Easily. It was not a big dog.
The Herring Gull would totally win in a fight.
Don’t mess with them. They remember you, and after making you bleed, will make a point of shitting on you every time it sees you afterwards.
If it wants the chip, give it the bag. Honestly, not giving it the chip is risking you getting into some serious “I just killed John Wick’s dog” type shit.
They're not urban but there's a species of Tasmanian parrot that is absolutely not to be fucked with. They're like crows joined the mafia & got elected mayor.
@Uraael An old girlfriend who spends a lot of time in Venice refers to the Venetian gulls as "the Gabbiano* crime family." @goatsarah _ *'Seagull' in Italian
In March of 2018, 18 years after being banned from the Empress Hotel in British Columbia, Novia Scotia resident Nick Burchill wrote them a letter and asked f...
@Inken Paper Thing is (and we have Canada geese in the UK too), they’re basically bluffing. You can run screaming at geese and they will usually flee. Geese are colossal bullshitters who only follow through if they think you are intimidated by them (see also swans).
A seagull, however, will bear a grudge on you and your descendants for generations if you cross it.
@Inken Paper It knows how to make your life a misery and it will fight a war of attrition against you literally for years. Every time you leave the house, it will shit on you. It will dive bomb you with its mates. It will learn your habits and lie waiting in ambush. They are basically mafia.
@Keith Edkins🔶🇪🇺 🇺🇦🏳️🌈 Perhaps something akin to Speed (1994), where there’s a bomb in your genitals and if you go less than 55 strokes per min… no, I got nothing.
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