Gregory's Server
Shoutout to everybody who is going on a walk this beautiful morning, maybe walking their dog, and NOT staring at their phone.
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Thinking of the beautiful tour we got of the abandoned Kasbah in the beautiful Atlas Mountains by the most friendly self appointed tour guide ever. Not far from the center of today’s #earthquake in #morocco. Linked from my site's moderators,: making sense of interaction and discussion patterns, healthy and unhealthy ones. I like this a lot! I am getting the feeling that actual money and engineering resources are beginning to flow into open protocols, interoperability, portable data and the like. Not too much yet, but a tad more than it has been historically. And I would attribute this to the EU and its Digital Markets Act. Is it just a token or are some big platforms actually trying to do this? I don't think we know yet. But it's the right direction IMHO. @J12t I think the EU is definitely one of the largest suppliers of impetus for the push, but I also think a big part of it lies with Right to Repair and adjacent movements. An incredible lawsuit against twitter and Saudi Arabia. https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:us:d204dd50-60eb-493a-b7d7-bc2c3c54641f “Gatekeepers” under the EU Digital Markets Act have been officially identified. They will have to do things such as interoperate shortly. It includes many products you’d expect, like Facebook, but not some others I would have expected, like Telegram. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4328  Pro tip: do not watch expression "iter.next()" in your debugger. Unless you really want to test your code's robustness against evil spirits. If you don't have a business even large enough to cover debt payments, the problem must be that the Anti-Defamation League is defaming you. Couldn't possibly be anything else. https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/04/elon-musk-to-sue-adl-for-falsely-accusing-him-x-of-antisemitism/  So AWS just takes away my server. "We have detected an issue with the underlying hardware. Your instance may already we unreachable. And no, we won't bother trying to resurrect it. Just consider it gone." I'm paraphrasing here, but that's the gist of it. Is that really the best you can do? Anybody understand how this cloud computing thing supposedly works? "Hardware malfunctioninig, therefore your server is gone" is not it. Fortunately I run UBOS and have backups. Should be quick. Nevertheless Checking on the status of my renewal credit card. The automated voice system says, and I kid you not, that my replacement card was shipped on "NaN date" to an address that consisted of 20 seconds of total silence. (For non-programmers: NaN = Not-a-Number, it's when you put some value into a number variable that is simply not ... such as 1 divided by zero).  Did the service spell it out (“not a number”), say it letter by letter (“en-ay-en”), or try to pronounce it as an actual word (like “naan”, the Indian bread, or like the middle of “banana”)? I think I saw a baby mountain lion crossing the road right in front of me, on my way to a little hike in the East Bay hills. Never seen one before. Unfortunately it was gone in an instant; no photo and I was driving anyway. He looked fierce, powerful, young and cute. I can relate to “the laws of physics [might] evolve and change over time.” Ok, fine. But “Different laws might even compete” is, to me, not so easily understood, to put it mildly. Mind boggling territory. Any #scifi stories on that subject that can help? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/opinion/cosmology-crisis-webb-telescope.html @J12t As a nonphysicist and particularly not a cosmologist, this piece was rather mindblowing. While is/isnot clickbait for science geeks, yet another effort by those authors (see their 2015 piece linked at the bottom of the article) to give the rest of us a readable preview of very serious goings-on and some of the arguments in the field. Similar impact from the sideangle reveal of exoplanet discovery in Sara Seager’s grief memoir.  @J12t opinion piece in the NYT not an article in a science magazine. Citing philosophers in a physics article seems strange "But the model has already been patched up numerous times over the past half century to better conform with the best available data" Yup, scientific theory adjusts to fit data rather than data adjusting to fit theory The 4th Doctor said something about views fitting facts, not the other way around :) https://mastodon.social/@guide@tardis.team/110990776108357241 I think I have been on the internet for 33 years now. 1990 sounds about right. The original wow factor for me was Usenet. You could just run this app — it wasn’t called an app then — on a close Apollo workstation, in my case, and have these incredibly knowledgeable discussions on arcane subjects you’d never find anybody in real life to talk about, and with people around the world. For free, too! If you were patient because I think for about 30 people we had one 9600 baud line. @J12t I miss the days of USENET. There was a magic to it that has been lost, though Mastodon seems to channel the occasional flash of it now and again.  @J12t Back in those days, I had business acquaintance with UseNet heavy, Jim Rutt (later CEO of Verisign and coiner of ‘snail mail.”) He used to say something like, “Usenet is where it’s at. We just don’t know where that is just yet.” Younger nerds may enjoy some of these particulars about Usenet and its earliest incarnation of ‘newsgroups.’ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771354 374 automated tests pass. Phheeewww. Time to cook dinner. How's homemade spaghetti with homegrown zucchini? Sorry, it's a closed family event. FediForum is now on the #indieweb events calendar. Would be nice to have some IndieWeb sessions, too. Join us? A really interesting story (in German though) how Copenhagen is transforming itself into a “sponge city” that’s resilient to major rainstorms avoiding flooding. That’s the kind of work every city and ever construction should do — but almost nobody does — to mitigate some of the effects of the growing #climatecrisis. What’s the fediverse app closest to what Usenet was in its prime? I remember hierarchical discussion trees with unread message nodes in the tree in bold. I think. |
@J12t Best — only good — reason for having a phone handy while out with the dog/dogs is the camera! 📸