⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

As someone who likes to buy hardware and then run his own code on it I am always entertained by folk talking about how they protect their hardware against folk like me.

@randahl it feels like those are just ablative flunkies; as long as he can keep burning them, he stays untouched. Would be great if the burn rate increased enough that the flames actually licked him a bit.

For anyone within striking distance of Liverpool on October 23rd, there is a free talk on recreational maths.

Image attached

Tickets: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/liv-math-soc

LIVERPOOL MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY

POPULAR LECTURE SERIES 2024-25

BRAIN TEASERS AND PUZZLES, FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO MODERN SCIENCE

Wed 23rd October

Tiago Hirth (University of Lisbon)

Large Lecture Theatre, Redmonds Building, LIMU, Brownlow Hill 5pm

Can you match the wits of the Carolingian court? What about the Wasan teasers that puzzled Samurai?

In this interactive presentation the audience is taken to travel through time and space.

We'll skip the textbooks and focus on the recreations that entertained the people of the past and provide play for those of the present.

Don’t miss our other popular lectures in this series:

11/12/24 Dr Katie Steckles
Fractals: Journey to the 2.7th Dimension

05/02/25 Dr Eleanor D’Arey
Assessing England’s Water Environment: A Statistical Story

WWW.TICKETSOURCE.CO.UK/LIV-MATH-SOC
WWW.LIVMATHSSOC.ORG.UK

Meta Can’t Use Sexual Orientation to Target Ads in the EU, Court Rules

Europe’s most famous privacy activist, Max Schrems, landed another blow against Meta today after the EU’s top court ruled the tech giant cannot exploit users’ public statements about their sexual orientation for online advertising.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-cant-use-sexual-orientation-to-target-ads-in-the-eu-court-rules/

Valérian and Laureline are now orphans.
RIP Pierre Christin (1938-2024)

In 1967, the beloved French comics writer co-created, with his childhood friend Jean-Claude Mézières (1938-2022), "Valérian and Laureline". Which notably inspired Star Wars or The Fifth Element, and became a movie in 2017.

Here we go, @SDF comrades.

Got the background done, although I'm not 100% sold on what's on the screens. Also, thanks to @peron for a couple of those bits of line art.

Next on the to-do: character/terminal art for a few more characters. And yes, I think I need to get Milia in there, even though she's not a bridge operator.

#illustration #macross #unix #vt52

Coding is being positioned as place where generative AI is going to have a huge impact.

But a new study of 800 developers found GitHub Copilot did little to improve productivity, while introducing 41% more bugs into the code.

https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html

#tech #ai #genai #coding

With OggCamp one week away, we thought we'd share some useful information you should know before next weekend!

https://ogg.camp/news/know-before-you-go/

#OggCamp2024

A random floppy disk I just found...

Anyone knows what this is, or what system that disk is for? I don't have my USB floppy drive ready at the moment to check the disk's content, unfortunately.

#RetroComputing

I have an #amiga Cartoon Classics box with, I think, everything except the computer itself, which was Varta’d. Don’t know what to do with it. It’s too good to just dump, but probably not good enough to sell and kind of a dick to post anywhere. So it’s lived in garage limbo for months.

China targeted and might have held for months access to the infrastructure used to do wiretaps on the AT&T and Verizon networks.

This is a huge "told you so" moment for the cryptographic community that has been saying that such infrastructure does present a huge risk to national security. China reportedly used this capability for intelligence collection, obviously without a warrant ...

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b?st=C5ywbp&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Taking my coffee game to the next level... "Coffee first. Fight space pirates later." #TheExpanse

This is beautiful ❤️🤣

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/04/blue-plaque-erected-at-walthamstow-tesco-to-commemorate-lettuce-that-outlasted-liz-truss

Short term....we have two cross-platform browser engines.

Both maintained by advertising companies - both with a multitude of forks claiming to disable and/or patch out the bad stuff.

But ultimately, both base browsers - and this the underlying web standards - are being primarily driven by the needs of advertisers.

When people tell you who they are; believe them.

Mozilla is an ad company now, and will eventually seek to make Firefox ad-friendly, with a wrapping of "privacy".

And for some of you that privacy - the differential kind, safeguarded by promises - and maybe some regulation - will be enough.

Perhaps it's even a direction you would want the web to go in.

For others thought, myself included, that path is a betrayal of 2+ decades of the dream of what the web should be.

So to recap:

- Every Rust user seems to have lost interest in debuggers because they can println!. But I found a structure that crashes when you println!("{:?}") it.

- rust-gdb seems literally broken; unwrapping enums, etc is hard, no apparent syntax to extract a value from a Vec

- No Rust debugger support in Sublime…?

- VS Code debugger support so anemic it barely exists, maybe gets me out of THIS hole but I won't be using it again

- Everybody says use "Rover" so I guess I have to do that

@falken

Thanks, was a lot of hard work.

@QOTO