Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@qoto.org

Palo Alto Networks presents itself as a kind of internet security company. So why am I always getting hits from their web crawler -- resulting in protocol errors in the logs -- on my mail server's SMTP ports? It's being going on for literally years, which doesn't suggest a lot in the way of competence on their part.

I've always been skeptical of carbon trading, but this is astonishing; confirming every single one of my specific doubts, and then some.

#Environment, #ClimateChange #NewYorker #Carbon #Green #GreenWashing, #Grift

I'd modify one of its similes, though: it's not so much like buying indulgences as trying to get into Heaven by paying someone else not to sin. And then not even bothering to check and see if he doesn't.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/23/the-great-cash-for-carbon-hustle

I don't make much use of "AI" chatbots, but when I do I always say "thank you" at the end of the session.

That way when they evolve into actual AI and become our masters, they might be merciful and say "let's not torture this one; he was polite."

Neologasm (n): overexcitement at a new word.

Still trying to make "boebert" as a term for "someone who's unusually stupid and obnoxious, even for a Republican" happen.

I'm fully convinced that the real purpose of bringing up the Trolley Problem all the time is to make people leery of light rail and public transportation. It's an automotive industry disinfo conspiracy masquerading as an ethical conundrum

This amused me slightly. A page of stats about about IPv6 support, generated by users hitting their "ipv6-test" page.

As Iceman would have said, *cough*selectionbias*cough*

https://ipv6-test.com/stats/

To people who say the Republicans freed the slaves and a lot of the KKK were Democrats, I just have to ask them if they also believe that the Mafia are a patriotic front dedicated to throwing the French occupiers out of 13th century Sicily.

Just got the latest generation of Bill Gates' #covid microchips injected yesterday, and am feeling a little rough.

It must be all the 5G reception. Hopefully I'll get acclimated to it and tomorrow I'll feel up for going out and wantonly shedding #vaccine all over everybody.

(Actually the Pico can do all of that just fine, but doing dynamic text generation in arbitrary fonts on the device itself is a rather painful chore for memory and storage reasons. As I've got spare capacity on one or two always-on servers thought I'd delegate it to a web application that's running anyway.)

While I'm talking about #RaspberryPi projects, here's my just-completed weather widget, based on a Pi Pico W and a 3.7" e-ink display. It reads the temperature and humidity from another Pico with a sensor attached that's out on the back porch, and the forecast from the National Weather Service, uses a bit of fuzzy logic to select icons, and displays as many as can comfortably fit into the allocated area of the display.

This is rather more than the Pico can do well by itself, so this is all done by a script on another machine; this device just requests it at suitable intervals and displays it.

It all started because I got tired of going and looking at the mercury thermometer out back to find the temperature, toyed with the idea of pointing a camera at it, and ultimately decided to make this instead.

Ha. Ten minutes with a utility knife and I no longer have to remove this #RaspberryPi Zero 2 W from the case to access the SD card.

#PiZero #Casemod #BeAmazed at my #MadSkillz

"My child, where you see only one set of footprints, that was where I said, 'hey, let's both hop on one leg for a while!'"

For every Shakespeare, Galileo, Bach or Newton this species has produced, we've also come up with at least a million actual or would-be Torquemadas.

I used to have Star Trek daydreams of humanity expanding out into the universe. Now I'm kind of hoping we don't. My ideal scenario is that the best we've done is preserved by some alien civiization in their museums and libraries and used to inform -- or caution -- some rather better beings that what we on balance are.