Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

Cathode Ray Dude just ended his most recent video with an excellent little "anticapitalist diatribe" (as the section title calls it) expressing his frustration at how nobody makes offbeat products with the intent to actually be products anymore. → https://youtu.be/PDjleq0PJX0?t=2644

In case anyone's planning to thumbnail some PNGs and JPEGs in Python, whether you use PyQt, PyOpenCV, or write your own little wrapper around Rust's `image` crate using PyO3 or rust-cpython, I recommend not using Pillow.

On my test corpus with a warmed cache, the others consistently took about 2/3rds the time Pillow did... though PyOpenCV was a hair slower than the others at ~25 seconds rather than ~23. (Pillow was ~33.)

I knew the fiasco that was the Russo-Japanese war was instrumental in leading to the overthrow of the Tsar, but I never realized that the "sailed half-way around the world" part of "sailed half-way around the world to get smashed at the Battle of Tsushima" was the most hilarious comedy of errors I've ever heard of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mdi_Fh9_Ag

Folding Ideas just put out an excellent 2-hour deep dive into how everything blockchain-related works and how the blockchain ecosystem is effectively "Amway, but everywhere you look, people are wearing ugly-ass ape cartoons", started by wealthy rich programmers who are frustrated that the ultra-rich have shut them out and are trying to synthesize the opportunity to be the next Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

A great analogy for SIMD just developed over on /r/rust/: SIMW: Single Iron, Multiple Waffles

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qucind/stdsimd_is_now_available_on_nightly/hkpy4y4/

If anyone's getting an annoying donation nag from LibreOffice, this solution worked for me: https://www.remembertheusers.com/2019/11/0580-libreoffice-nag-notices.html

I just got introduced to this "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers" page.

https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md

.. which reminds me of a previous good one it's probably referencing: "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names":

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

...both excellent documents.

In case the embed doesn't show up, it's an interview with Alan Kay on the iPhone, the effect of these sorts of ultra-simplified computing technologies on society, and various related and important bits of insight on learning, teaching, and how the human brain works.

Just discovered this excellent article from 2017. It's the kind of deeply insightful thing I wish wasn't such an exception.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now

Just got another of those "You're infringing my copyrights. Take the image down or I'll sue"-as-a-comment-on-a-random-blog-post scam messages.

They're learning.

This time, they copy-pasted the DMCA boilerplate you'd send to "a service provider" like WordPress.com or Blogger (i.e. not the blogger themself) and you get to the download link without being asked to log into your Google account... but the "download proof" link is broken so I still don't know what the scam is.

For anyone following my blog for the fanfiction reviews, I've started to build a section for brief links to stories with "Magical-Muggle Cooperation" elements at the bottom of the "Recommended “Politics in Harry Potter” fics" page, pending my having time to give the topic a proper list post of its own.

http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2017/08/09/recommended-politics-in-harry-potter-fics/

You know you're nerdy when you got a hand-me-down PC and not only have you set it up headless to be accessed over SSH to take accurate benchmark measurements with Criterion.rs, you're wondering how difficult it would be to get the `beep` command to replicate PC Speaker sound effects from childhood DOS games to signal success/failure on completion.

So far, all I've managed to my own satisfaction is getting it to play the first measure of Dies Irae to signal a nonzero exit code.

If anyone wants that, here it is in shell script:

for X in 175 165 175 147 165 131 147 147; do beep -l 600 -f "$X"; done

...plus, this is definitely a "that could have gone much worse" situation.

I really need to scale back my online participation while I'm in the middle of my efforts to fix my sleep issues once and for all.

Impulsiveness and inability to recognize that I'm irritable until someone points it out are the biggest side-effects of me being tired.

Turns out that it was at least partially a "we were both feeling frustration at past experiences with other people" situation, so this is now more a description of what I intend to aim for when PCManFM for GTK+ 2.x goes away and I need to write a small patchset to fix the purely aesthetic disagreements.

(eg. I want my places sidebar to have a white background. They don't want to clutter up the preferences window for something that minor.)

Since the PCManFM developer I'm talking to seems unwilling to consider this, I might as well post it here so at least *someone* can get some insight out of it.

Random thought: Raytheon means "light of/from the gods"... apparently we didn't learn anything from the last time a light-bringer turned his mind to war.

(It began as the name of their first product, a rectifier tube for building AC power supplies for radios.)

Since I have a copy of Amiga Forever 2016, I'm also planning to make a bunch of test files for Amiga formats that can only be UNpacked on other platforms.

So far, I've made a test LZX using the LZX_Y2KF.LHA release and I just need some suggestions for other things I can make with freeware'd Amiga m68k apps to build up a repo's worth.

If anyone needs some legally clear RAR or CBR test files for their integration testing, I just put up a bunch made using the WinRAR license I bought to round out my retro hobby machine.

https://github.com/ssokolow/rar-test-files

#programming #testing

Something I was just introduced to. A twitter account that brings to light examples of past "fears of new things" to put modern ones in context.

https://twitter.com/PessimistsArc

Did you know that, in 1903, they were talking about reading print books in bed the same way people are talking about having your mobile phone near the bed now? Granted, I'd still want an OLED screen, night mode, and no social media apps, but it does put things in perspective.