Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

@whitequark the really fun part is aiui everyone got Too Good At Aerodynamics and every racing league has increasingly draconian rules to stop you from building horrible nightmares.

my favourite being:

rules to prevent "dirty air" which is basically just aerodynamic caltrops that keep you in the lead if you ever get it

rules to force your wheels to be aligned with your chasis, because just tilting your entire car is aerodynamically favourable if you're driving in a circle

@whitequark the Americas Cup sailboats are, more of less, half a glider that can get away with dipping its toe in a few inches of water

was watching videos about racecars and had concluded (i know very little about racecars) that a racecar is more or less an airplane that is optimized solely for landing, and must be landing as hard as it can at all times

The idea in this paper is that wings could have evolved to flush camouflaged or otherwise-concealed insects into flying up and revealing their presence. Some modern birds do this.

(Images from Macaulay Library, via Park et al 2024)

Naming my new AI startup DemiUrge™

Imagine a cave, where various persons are imprisoned since birth. They are chained so as to create a fixed gaze upon a wall, on which can be seen the shadows of various entities walking past outside the cave— people, horses, carts. This audience would be, by nature, highly engaged with these shadows, which we may call "content". So what if— among these shadows— we were to include advertisements?

Stabiles Interview mit unserem Eidgenössischen Datenschützer #EDÖB: https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/datenschuetzer-warnt-vor-nationaler-polizei-datenbank-fuer-bagatelldelikte-weshalb-muss-die-urner-polizei-wissen-dass-sie-in-lausanne-illegal-abfall-entsorgt-haben-ld.1777606

«Unsere Staatsidee darf doch nicht einem zentralen Datensilo geopfert werden! Das sind Rezepte autoritärer Regenten.»

#Datenschutz #Polizei #Schweiz

I am just going to say that... this weird art that looks like a T-shirt and my next book about R (#rstats) and Graphics are related. #nospoilers 🤭

This is Dotty, one of the chickens who lives with my parents in Scotland. Dotty doesn't know much, she's just a chicken. But even she knows that toothbrush botnet story is bollocks.

Been getting this sense lately that the fediverse may be thinning out a bit, and in parallel getting a sense people I know are finally jumping to "bluesky" in numbers.

Trying to figure out exactly at what point I decide I'm willing to create a feed over there. My position has been "I'll post there when I don't have to use their servers to do it", but I continue to suspect this will literally never happen because their protocol is designed to look like federation without being ever federatable

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

a CEO can never be held accountable therefore a CEO must never make a management decision

#FOSDEM is over for me, the trip back begins. #TrainThread time!

I am going from Brussels to Zurich on the direct way, so of course we start with the Eurostar (Red) to Rotterdam Centraal. Wait what!?

It turns out the Eurostar Café has Duvel, so a little travel beer is in order.

Bit miffed. I tried the Mixtral model and asked it some extremely gnarly molecular biology questions. It came up with answers that surprised me (on archaeal DNA semi-continuous replication without Okazaki fragments), and unlike other models I've tried, Mixtral responded with stuff I didn't know about and that apparently checks out.

This passage from @debcha's "How Infrastructure works" is such a truth that often gets forgotten or ignored on the hunt for profit. It's a very familiar and recurring theme in resilience engineering texts and research. And it also rings true for me in this current trend of continuous layoffs that take more and more slack and capacity out of tech systems being maintained (in addition to the human cost) as remaining humans need to do more work in the same amount of time.

It was the revenge of a lifetime to make it to SBB's railsways talk on time and being late to DB's. #fosdem

It was mandatory to recover my mastadon login because no other social media seems to be relevant at #fosdem.

Ok, San Miguel 0,0 is a drinkable alcohol free beer.

Ok, it's Friday afternoon and I'm tired of messing around with Prometheus, so it's time for another paper-reading liveblog!

Today I'm reading "Bigger, Longer, Fewer: what do cluster jobs look like outside Google?" by George Amvrosiadis et al.

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/CloudComputing/CMU-PDL-17-104.pdf

1/n

#distributedsystems #CloudComputing #simulation #liveblogging

I gave #linkedin an honest try, for a year or more, in terms of finding #work.

It's a cesspool of #toxicpositivity and fake job postings.

Now I'm asking, with all urgency -- to anyone who has anything #tech to offer, please consider a guy who has:

- 30 yrs of experience
- out of work for 20 months
- 3 kids, one of who is coming up on her first birthday
- a track record for secure systems
- a month left before being evicted