Gregory's Server
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"The words "deny," "defend" and "depose" were discovered by detectives on the shell casings found at the scene where Thompson was killed, police sources told ABC News late Wednesday evening." "...NYPD detectives said they were working to determine whether the words were meant as a message from the shooter and a hint at his motive." Top people on the case. https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-shot-chest-midtown-manhattan-masked-gunman-large/story?id=116446382 TIL that to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its construction, the operators of the Iwayagawauchi Dam in Japan's Saga prefecture had it pressure-washed into a picture of Godzilla. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwayagawauchi_Dam More images here: https://soranews24.com/2024/11/27/big-dam-godzilla-appears-in-japan-as-power-washer-art-on-side-of-195-foot-dam%E3%80%90video%E3%80%91/
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  jfc this paper "Profound similarities between highly nAChR affine toxins (i.e., from snakes of the Ophiophagus (cobra) [...], Rabies lyssavirus [...] strains [...] and Cobratoxin (naja siamensis) [...] and SARS-CoV-2 specific proteins were found by analyzing the toxin’s amino-acid (aa) sequence alignment and comparing it to the motifs in spike glycoprotein (SGP) from SARS-CoV-2." https://bioelecmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42234-023-00104-7 Paraphrased, that reads "At a molecular level, parts of the Covid19 virus look and seemingly behave a lot like cobra venom and rabies." Turns out being "covid cautious" is just a revealed preference for not wanting strangers to sneeze rabies and snake venom analogues into your lungs. Wear a mask. I am saddened to report that using a high precision silicon nitride bearing in a trackball is absolutely decadent to the touch, oil-on-glass smooth with the perfect slight hint of heft in the motion, looks absolutely amazing and does not work well at all. Update! You just have to let it oxidize slightly, for a day! It works perfectly now that the shine has dulled just a bit. This is great. Verdict: you should replace your trackball with a silicon nitride bearing machined to micron precision. You will definitely not regret replacing your trackball with a silicon nitride bearing machined to micron precision. And, Christ On A Bike, going to press to announce the important developments in your shiny new security protocol, with "Security Considerations: TODO Security" _right there in the text of the spec_ does not fill me with confidence that you are taking this seriously. My daughter is trying to convince me that the phrase "social butterfly" implies the existence of a "social caterpiller", which justifies her wrapping herself in a quilt, her "social cocoon", and refusing to get up today. I have to admit it's a pretty good argument. Solid wordplay, reasonable-sounding if ridiculous conclusions, ticks all the boxes. Kinda dad-proud right now, gotta say.
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Unreasonably fond of the realization that the “Mediterranean diet” fad is a random second- or third-order byproduct of pension fraud. I feel like there’s some sort of higher-level behavioural insight here, about how quickly people will latch on to things that give them any sense of agency over themselves, whatever the basis.
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 @mhoye “If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.”  I don't think people do latch on to agency in that way. It's more an illustration of the idea that if people hear something seven times they believe it After all, over 50% of heart attacks are now caused by covid. That beats the supposed 30% reduction from the Mediterranean diet. But you don't see many people running around with n95s on  This hotel room has a _baffling_ artefact in it embedded in a wall panel. These are keyboard LEDs embedded in a… wall panel? What _is_ this? What was it?
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  Could be a TTD, or other terminal setup for deaf or blind folk. "Ask at the desk" lol. Edit: damned spell corrector!! Update: I was wrong; Micca found this, this is a receiver for an IR keyboard? Built into a wall? https://mastodon.social/@Micca@charr.engineer/113137549223908842
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   Never outsource core functions, never outsource change management, safety margin is not slack, redundancy is not waste. Never outsource core functions, never outsource change management, safety margin is not slack, redundancy is not waste. Never outsource core functions, never outsource change management, safety margin is not slack, redundancy is not waste. Never outsource core functions, never outsource change management, safety margin is not slack, redundancy is not waste.    While I completely agree, the problem is that executives only care about short-term profits so will happily guy a company - see: Boeing. Executives correctly believe that the one and only purpose of a corporation is to make as much money as quickly as possible. Literally nothing else matters. Safety, long-term health of the company, employment, pensions…nope. "Never outsource core functions, never outsource change management, safety margin is not slack, redundancy is not waste."
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https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete I"m convinced that any software deployed for medical reasons - implants, tools, analytics, doesn't matter - needs toolchains that generate reproducible builds stored in escrow that are made free and public the moment device support ends.
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@mhoye there's plenty of non-profit orgs in the pharmaceutical space, it feels like they should be joined by one or more implant specialists. And part of any approval should be ensuring that such an org has all the information required to maintain those devices for the lifetime of the patient. @mhoye (including the OS, lest someone upload a toolchain that works perfectly on one specific build of Windows XP and is useless elsewhere) @mhoye Exactly! SAAS-centered, licensed IP approaches are wholly inappropriate for embodied technology.
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  @mhoye abso-fucking-lutely — all of copyright law has entered the chat. The CFAA and the DMCA need to come down full force on Microsoft here. The FBI needs to be kicking in some doors. TIL that the purported skull of Mary Magdalene is enshrined in a gold reliquary in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, in France, and that reliquary is _the_ most Warhammer-40k-looking real thing I have ever seen in my life, bar none.
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"Naming things" is just a semiotic proxy metric, the two real hardest problems in software are understanding yourself and understanding other people.
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 This is a remarkable graph. You might have heard that "EV sales are slumping", "people are starting to avoid EVs", etc. That's not what's happening. What's happening is "Tesla is cratering so hard that it's skewing the aggregate market data." Or, put differently, "Tesla is failing harder than the entire rest of the market is succeeding, combined."
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As always, domestic abuse is _the_ flagship infosec threat model, the one where the victim has the least resources, the least recourse, where they're closest to immediate physical harm. That this industry has failed at and mostly abandoned the idea of even pretending to try dealing with a threat model that's difficult and unprofitable and mostly hurts women is not news, but this new Windows Recall feature is next-level professional negligence. @mhoye I got called an "AI hater" for pointing out exactly that (and the potential abuse by law enforcement) in https://mastodon.schub.social/@denschub/112478869422925619 and ... in a chat-thingie. I love working in tech. :this_is_fine: (but, to be fair to them, "AI hater" *is* correct.) @mhoye change the xkcd cartoon from govt agents beating someone with a wrench to an abusive husband beating someone with a wrench, and maybe these sheltered nerds will believe it. While the existence of adderall implies the existence of subtracterall, by carrying this logic forward we can deduce the existence of a Godelian Incompletenerall under which one's hyperfocusing on literally everything will paradoxically reveal you have hyperfocused on a vanishing fraction of all possible things, allowing one to work industriously on everything while simultaneously feeling as though one has accomplished nothing, in this exceptionally long but somehow meaningless essay I will
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 @mhoye Lazyweb, a question: let's say that you could teach a "cultural anthropology" type of course about computing to first year students, to prepare them for the codebases, communities, patterns and software philosophies of the programming world. You've got about ten weeks to run it. What would you teach in that course and why? (RTs appreciated for reach.)
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 @mhoye Ooof, this is very close to what I studied at university! I would *not* teach coding and related architecture or methodology. They can learn that elsewhere. Instead, you could explore why the tech world is the way it is. Looms, punch cards, Babbage/Lovelace. @JamesGleick ’s “The Information”. Shannon and Turing for compsci theory. Lessig’s “Code is Law” + an intro to FOSS for practice. Top it off with @timnitGebru ’s stochastic parrots.  @mhoye Wow nobody mentioned |
@mhoye Preach, brother!
“It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.”
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/