yeroc @yeroc@qoto.org

This story gripped our province and country in July 2024. Nothing short of a miracle that all 7 crewmembers of the Elite Navigator returned home safely. #Lucky7 #Newfoundland

“From the raft, Eugene watched as the first of two divers came down from the helicopter and swam up to the raft. “He said, ‘How many people on board?’ I said ‘Seven.’ He said, ‘How many alive?’ I said, ‘Seven.’”
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/lost-at-sea-lucky-7-newfoundland

Émilie du Châtelet, who hypothesized conservation of energy, established kinetic energy as distinct from momentum and proportional to (speed)², and combined work by Newton and Leibniz with her own original ideas in "Institutions de Physique," was born #OTD in 1706.

Du Châtelet is an important figure in the development of classical physics, but she is not nearly as well known as many of her male contemporaries.

Portrait: M. Q. de La Tour

every few months i think of tom brier, before his accident, who sight-read the Super Mario World Athletic theme in the most playful, joyful style

watching tom's hands having fun with the theme brings a smile to my face every time. 🥲

after his car accident in 2016, the ensuing neurological damage impaired his ability to play. i look forward hearing about any small progress he makes in his recovery over the past 8 years, no matter how tiny 🙏 you gave the world a whole lot, tom.

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

#piano #retroGaming

Worrisome trend on macOS: developers releasing only an iPad or iPhone app and expecting macOS users to use the same interface. They don't respond the same to macOS hotkeys, don't integrate properly with browsers and external apps, and some don't even scale beyond iPhone size. 😡

Every single word that @doublemmartin Melissa Martin writes is golden. Heartbreakingly so at times. As always it behooves you to read everything she writes. And to subscribe to her substack. https://open.substack.com/pub/melissamartin/p/escalation?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Just dropping this here... This was from a couple of years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngSTY2SPwRk

Léonie comparing ChatGPT output with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser is one of the most apt descriptions I have seen.

https://htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2024/7/

Two years later.

Want to know one of the major reasons Mastodon didn't catch on with journalists and large website owners?

It is *invisible* in referrer statistics.

Here's my blog from the last month.

BlueSky now sends me more traffic than Bing.

How much traffic does Mastodon send? It is impossible to know due to the "noreferrer" header in all links.

(I'm not saying your privacy isn't important. But you can't grow a community if no-one knows you exist.)

Mitogen 0.3.19 is out with support Ansible 11.
https://pypi.org/project/mitogen/0.3.19/
🗒️ https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/changelog.html
#Ansible #Mitogen

@b0rk Funny* story.

When I was learning Unix (which would be around 1986), I had learnt just enough about pipes to be dangerous.

I had a lot of files in a directory and I wanted to delete all of them except a few.

I knew about rm and I knew about permissions and that it would prompt me if I removed write permission. So I did a chmod 400 (or something) on the few files I wanted to keep.

I also knew about the yes program.

So I confidently typed

yes n | rm *

fully expecting all the files to go except the 3-or-whatever I’d removed write permission from.

Reader (Julia): they were all deleted.

I was quite confused by this, as well as upset because I actually needed those files. This was when Unix was very much _not_ open source. I was at Edinburgh University, and there were some real Unix experts there. I went and consulted one, Paul Dourish, and asked him what I’d done wrong.

He contemplated a a while and said he thought what I did should have worked. Somehow, he had access to the source code for the Unix I was on. He looked at it and said something like: ah, there’s the problem.

The rm program, when prompting to override the 400 permission and delete, uses isatty() to see if the input is from a keyboard or a pipe. And if it’s not a keyboard it…
… have you guessed? …
ignores the input and assumed ‘yes’.

[Paul said: “You shouldn’t have typed that without reading the source first!”]

It’s now 2024 (as you know). I just tried it again (in a terminal on OS X’s Unix). Still the same behaviour. Consistent/

I don’t like programs behaving differently with pipes…especially assuming the user wants his/her files deleted.

* I did not think it funny at the time.

The Fediverse seems to now have enough people for it to be worth sending low-effort spam, so why is the #Mastodon report-spam UI so bad. Two 'select all' buttons would make it so much easier to use:

First, you report something as spam. Then it presents you with a list of 20 almost identical spam posts. Are any of these spam? So far, every time that dialog has been presented to me, all of them have been spam. But I have to select all of them.

The next dialog is terrible. It asks me which instances I want to send reports to. Presumably this is triggered by the previous one and lets me report the spammer to any of the instances that have seen the spam post. There are two problems here:

First, you need to understand how federation works to even know why this is a question. This is not a normal-human-friendly UI. Just send the report to all of them.

Second, even if you do know how federation works, I can't imagine a choice other than 'report to everyone' or 'report only to my instance admin' making sense. Yet there's no 'select all' button, so I have to click a bunch of times.

All of this adds friction to reporting spam.

If all you do is post warnings about how bad things are in the world, you are adding to the anxiety which eventually creates apathy.

Find the positive out there. Share a pic of a puppy, or a news article about a little girl who makes friends with a crow.

Balance what you put out there. There is good in the world. And THAT is just as important as the bad things that are happening.

Maybe more so.

When I was a PhD student, I attended a talk by the late Robin Milner where he said two things that have stuck with me.

The first, I repeat quite often. He argued that credit for an invention did not belong to the first person to invent something but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one needed to invent it again. His first historical example was Leibniz publishing calculus and then Newton claiming he invented it first: it didn’t matter if he did or not, he failed to explain it to anyone and so the fact that Leibniz needed to independently invent it was Newton’s failure.

The second thing, which is a lot more relevant now than at the time, was that AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence if you want to build things that are actually useful. Striving to replace human intelligence is not a useful pursuit because there is an abundant supply of humans and you can improve the supply of intelligent humans by removing food poverty, improving access to education, and eliminating other barriers that prevent vast numbers of intelligent humans from being able to devote time to using their intelligence. The valuable tools are ones that do things humans are bad at. Pocket calculators changed the world because being able to add ten-digit numbers together orders of magnitude faster allowed humans to use their intelligence for things that were not the tedious, repetitive, tasks (and get higher accuracy for those tasks). If you want to change the world, build tools that allow humans to do more by offloading things humans are bad at and allowing them to spend more time on things humans are good at.

I finally learned about an easy way to disable some tests on ci. Tag them with e.g. `@Tag("onlyOnCi")` and configure maven-surefire-plugin with excludedGroups set to `onlyOnCi` and do that in a profile activated by `env.CI=true`.

I guess almost everyone else already knew this, but I'm happy now :)

I have written about using a ferro rod to start fires in the past. But I never really explained a few things. As a prepper, sure I could buy a lifetime’s worth of Bics and always be able to light a fire. But years ago I learned how to use a ferro rod and steel to light a fire and here is why. About 10 years ago I made a pledge, as an offering to Lugh, to use only a ferro rod and steel (my bush knife) to start the bonfires for a whole year.

At first I was clumsy and it took a while to get that flame going. As time went on, I learned what the best tinder was (fine dry swamp grass and curls of fatwood kept in a pouch), the best technique (hold the rod to the surface and make a slow solid shower of sparks down onto the tinder) and got so that I could get that fire lit with one swipe on the rod (have the whole little fire pyramid ready with tiny kindling and a space to stuff the lit tinder under). It was the learning, conquering a challenge, and making a life saving thing without the disposable use of fossil fuel. From a practical point of view, it makes sense to always have alternatives as well.

Bic lighters are absolutely shitty when they get wet. It takes a lot of energy to dry them out and get them to light (running the wheel on your jeans for 5 or 10 minutes) which might be perilous if you were in a situation where getting that fire going was important. Bics can be lost, run out of fuel, etc. so having an extra method of making fire is common sense.

But that is the least of it. Learning how to do something that is outside your current skill set is the whole point. Doing the preparation ahead of time by creating a fire pouch with everything you need in it and keeping it with you and dry at all times. You are training your brain to think ahead, use methodical procedures and develop small motor skills.

After I started using the knife and ferro rod, I realized I wanted a sheath to keep them together so early in my learning to do leather work, I made this sheath that keeps them together. The cotton pouch can hang on my belt under my coat to keep tinder in as well, but I usually just keep it in the camp kit. The best way to prepare for future difficulty is to learn to use your gear now.

#bushcraft #prepping #GetPrepared #Offerings #Witchcraft #Lugh #LughSamildánac #TuathDéDanann

The SHA-256 hash of this sentence begins with 0573e7473.

@frankdelporte I totally agree with the article but you can't blame everyone for not upgrading. Project Jigsaw broke the contract that had been there all along without a good replacement for dynamically loading JARs. Backward compatibility was broken and thus made it hard to move forward. I think this was a bad move for Java and there's still no good alternative.

Periodic reminder in light of the #nyt strike that #wordle started life as a free, vanilla javascript website with no DRM and not owned by the nyt, and I packed it into a single html file that you can download and run offline or from any site, like this: https://jon-e.net/wordle.html

https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/local_wordle

#Calgary just had its driest month since December 2003. Total precipitation was just 0.9 mm. #YycWx #YYC #ABWx

Good to see such transparency on electricity prices for EV charging! Can't remember seeing this in the Netherlands.

Via Felix Hamer on the birdsite:
"Did you know LIDL is actually one of the bigger players in France when it comes to Fast Charging?"

#ev #evs #electricity #electrification