robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@niconiconi

@niconiconi Do you have a source for not-terribly-expensive wirewrap tools and various components (or small pcbs) with wirewrap posts?

@dwarf This looks really amusing. How did you get it to happen?

@xenolune@useless.merveill.es Pirate flags were intended to be invitations to surrender under threat of bodily harm though :/

@timorl @sundogplanets

You meant The Lost Steersman (3rd book) as opposed to The Language of Power (4th book). Also, the second technically contains intelligent aliens, only the characters in it do not recognize them as such, and it contains some other alien life (hard to say whether characters recognize it as alien).

There's a spectrum of "humanness" that aliens in fiction display: with e.g. Solaris' ocean on one end (with its inscrutable thought processes) and (most of) Star Trek/Star Gate aliens on the other (with their social structure that one would not be surprised to find in some group of humans).

I think you are not after more realism (i.e. more towards Solaris) in this axis, but rather in terms of physical construction of aliens that should match the environment. Please tell me if I'm wrong.

Hal Clement is a good source of various kinds of socially very human-like (are always curious, have the concept of asking questions, form families/bands/...) aliens that live in weird environments. His stories concentrate on some aspects of the environment, and so the aliens might not be as fleshed out as you'd want (pun intended).

Some examples: Weirder/less concrete aliens: Foundling Stars sketches aliens that live at long timescales and large sizes. Proof sketches aliens that are made of plasma (or rather, of plasma currents) in stars (but it focuses more on the inferential distance between them and humans than on their composition). Uncommon Sense describes some aliens that live in vacuum and weird sensory apparatus they have (with very little attention paid to any other part of them). More concrete ones: Mission of Gravity describes aliens on a high-gravity, water-ammonia world. Close to Critical describes a water-based world where surface conditions are close to critical conditions of water with life on it. Planetfall describes aliens that perceive via vibration and EM wavelengths of VHF at the shortest.

I'm probably forgetting some other obvious authors, will think some more.

@Kaosmage@mastodon.social

Ignorance _of the facts_ is a defense (at least in CH and PL, I presume in US too), ignorance _of the law_ usually isn't, but various countries have weird exceptions to that (to the tune of "didn't have a way to determine what the law says"). In this case we'd be talking about ignorance of the law. @molly0xfff

@moonbolt

First, second part: There are two reasons you would care. One of them is safety of people you directly interact with and the other is Kantian approach to affecting the societal outcome.

For the first of these, I expect those people are doing some estimates of their own or are following some rule-based approach. I'd ask them. If that fails to yield anything useful, I'd put myself in their position, see what I'd be doing then, and behave in a way that me-in-their-position would find fine. Thus the problem reduces to the original one.

For the second, I stopped trying to reevaluate it a long time ago, because I consistently concluded that this produced requirements that were less strict than the ones produced by other concerns. (That's basically always the case when you aim at a lower chance of contracting covid than the societal average.)

I'm going to redo my estimates for the original question soonish, so will write them up while doing them in a following post.

@alilly Different people might understand your question differently: do you mean _exactly_ those names, or the families of those names and some subsets of their standard short forms (like Alex for Alexandra.... there would be more in languages other than English)?

@alcinnz What you're describing sounds like an improved version of ublock's element picker. If you did the selector alone, it'd probably be welcome and useful in ublock.

(That said, that picker has sadly gotten less useful over the years due to advertisers avoiding elements that _can_ be found using css selectors.)

@moonbolt I just tried to think of anyone I know whose commonly-used name is longer than 2 syllables and I failed (everyone whose name would be longer has adopted some more-or-less standard shortening for daily use). This suggests to me that this is how it might trend for your name, so you might wish to pick a 2 syllable short version yourself before people start trying to find one that works.

@alexis Load cell? Wouldn't it be easier to measure pressure at the bottom?

I still get amused once in a while by the combination of pomp and absurdly detailed requirements in the Swiss constitution:

"Im Namen Gottes des Allmächtigen!
Das Schweizervolk und die Kantone,
in der Verantwortung gegenüber der Schöpfung,
(...)
gewiss, dass frei nur ist, wer seine Freiheit gebraucht, und dass die Stärke des Vol­kes sich misst am Wohl der Schwachen,
geben sich folgende Verfassung:
(......)
Der Anteil von Zweitwohnungen am Gesamtbestand der Wohneinheiten und der für Wohnzwecke genutzten Bruttogeschossfläche einer Gemeinde ist auf höchstens 20 Prozent beschränkt.
(...)"

@forteller Does it claim to be hot? Is it actually hot? Is it using lots of CPU?

For example, if the thermal sensor misreported the temperature and claimed it to be higher, this could be the effect (fans at full throttle, CPU throttling).

@moonbolt Similar to how some pictures have two sticky interpretations (rotating dancer, face or two vases, ...), your appearance is very close to different interpretations. Shift involves something tiny changing that changes the interpretation that people have when looking at you (there's no stickyness involved -- that detail is large enough to overcome it). The change is small enough to not/nearly not trigger human motion detection reflex. Thus, people (or at least humans) don't notice the moment of shift, but can always easily tell your state.

@PeterCxy Ah, I see: among the ones that probably didn't had any optimizations applied to Date generation. @niconiconi @robookwus

@PeterCxy

What I'm confused about is anyone who actually tries to write optimized Date generator (you implied that happens?). This is a case when someone clearly cared about making it fast, and did the more complicated thing to do so. @niconiconi @robookwus

@PeterCxy
I'm confused why anyone is regenerating Date field value for every request. It's eminently cacheable (for the next second), and some sort of RCU setup (or optimistic concurrency control, but that's more expensive on average) with a periodic task that updates the value should work well, and not require optimizing date printing.

@niconiconi @robookwus

@modrinth Frankly, this seems to me to be something-like-a-vulnerability since forever: using polymc gave code execution on your desktop to whoever runs the metadata server, without leaving any verifiable audit traces (something like binary transparency logs could be used to leave indelible audit traces of all versions of meta files that were ever used by clients). If I understand the related threads on twitter correctly, then metadata server would be contacted without explicit user request when "shit updates itself" (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/196460#issuecomment-1281510701), so the rate at which that happens is likely nontrivial (so acquiring access to the metadata server would be valuable from the POV of creating a botnet).