Biggles @Biggles@qoto.org

"Astra inclinant, sed non obligant." -- "The stars incline us, they do not bind us"

#latin #quote #quotes

making a QR code generator and scanner that works offline, eventually possible to save in a collection…

- no accounts ✅
- no popups ✅
- no customization ✅
- works offline ✅
- download SVG or PNG ✅
- scan via camera or files ✅
- rounded corners ✅

https://rosano.ca/qr

I genuinely don't remember making you all this stupid.

It always begins as a joke. Listen to me, both of you.

One sees a father or a mother of whom they do not approve --

And their brats won't shut up and the parents are so exhausted that they just let their children scream, all sticky and crying and hitting and wild.

And you say to your friends, "You should have to pass a test to breed." Do you understand? "You should have to get licensed to have kids."

It starts as a joke.

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*to the tune of Shout by Tears For Fears*

Cat
cat
Little potat
He wants to know where the treats are at
Come one
He's meowing at you
Come on

It's actually bad luck to say MacBook inside an office. You have to call it 'the Scottish Laptop'

If you're a #Discord user, make sure to email arbitration-opt-out@discord.com ASAP (at least before April 26) with your username and "I opt out of mandatory arbitration" to opt out of their attempt to force their users into mandatory arbitration and to prevent class actions. Don't let them silently take aware your consumer rights. Their new TOS with the mandatory arbitration agreement can be found here https://discord.com/terms#14

What do I do for a living? Like many of you, my primary occupation is entering passwords and two-factor codes all into a variety of apps and websites all day long.

Pinball Construction Set (cracked by @a2_qkumba, PACE protection, 12 encrypted blocks with 12 unique keys, all ultimately derived from a single master key stored in the unreadable PACE protection block, which we read and hard-coded)

https://archive.org/details/PinballConstructionSetSanIncCrack

#macintosh #retrocomputing

Holy shit!

"First measurements of p + 11B fusion in amagnetically confined plasma"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36655-1.pdf

Proton-Boron fusion is aneutronic and Boron is a *lot* easier to come by as reactor fuel than 3He: if true, this is the holy grail of nuclear fusion research.

... On the other hand, this is just first light on a P-B experiment. There's a LONG way to go to power break-even, much less a viable production reactor design. Like, oh, fifty years ...

If your GitHub doesn't look like this don't even bother applying

@amaditalks Yes. Here you go 👇

https://downsub.com/

I found this taped to the door of the geography department at GWU today and it brought me so much joy. A guide to figuring out when a map was made based on features. Zoom in. It’s amazing.

Great selection of modern CLI utilities - both new things and improvements on the classics: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2023/02/17/modern-problems-require-modern-solutions/

TIL that macOS ships with a default CLI command called "sips", for "scriptable image processing system" - and it can convert webp images to PNG, but it can also generate entirely new images from scratch using an almost entirely undocumented canvas-based JavaScript API! https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/sips

If you didn't already know, the Internet Archive has been hiring artists to perform pre-meeting mini-concerts twice a week since the pandemic started. We now have over 200 archived on our site for you to enjoy too:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/02/17/the-internet-archive-musiczoom-collection-continues/

Facts are facts.

Behold "Glaze", a software tool that subtly alters the pixels in a piece of art online 🎨 ...

... in a way that isn't detectable by the human eye 👀 ...

... but renders the image useless for training a visual AI. The AI can't detect the artists' style, and thus can't mimic it and copy it. 🤖 ✖️

It's item #1 in my weekly "Linkfest" newsletter here 📫 : https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-6-gps-on-the-moon-8-bit-jane-austen-and/

(Subscribe here! https://buttondown.email/clivethompson)

Computers have been beating the best human Go players since 2016. The Go world champion retired in part because AI is “an entity that cannot be defeated.”

But a human just trounced one of the world’s best Go AIs 14 games to 1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/man-beats-machine-at-go-in-human-victory-over-ai

I think this news story is more interesting than it might first appear (without knowing details, so grain of salt). It isn’t just a gaming curiosity; it points to a fundamental flaw with “deep learning” approaches in general.
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