yeroc @yeroc@qoto.org

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

Did everyone that works in website usability go on strike because I feel like literally every website now looks like this comic

"The extreme left pointed at some books and said: ‘It hurts my feelings.’ The right-wing realised later, being slower, that they could weaponise this: ‘This book hurts MY feelings.’ Soon the only safe books will be books like ‘Cooking With Lettuce’."

Margaret Atwood letting nobody off the hook, in conversation live at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, live-streamed to 45 local library branches in Denmark.

#Books #Atwood

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” - Frederick Douglass, 1857

@SwiftOnSecurity We have a special channel you can’t use in Canada because of weather radars. But there are fun stories from when I was touring the world with the Wi-Fi folks working to get the 5GHz band opened up for unlicensed use. Some countries required a “study” and told us which “consultant” to hire and it was very clearly just paying a bribe. We paid no bribes and the citizens there got Wi-Fi eventually anyway.

Two students who discovered a novel proof of the Pythagorean theorem in 2022 have wowed the math community again with nine completely new solutions to the problem.

While still in high school, Ne'Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson from Louisiana used trigonometry to prove the 2,000-year-old Pythagorean theorem, which states that the sum of the squares of a right triangle's two shorter sides are equal to the square of the triangle's longest side (the hypotenuse).

Mathematicians had long thought that using trigonometry to prove the theorem was unworkable, given that the fundamental formulas for trigonometry are based on the assumption that the theorem is true.

Jackson and Johnson came up with their "impossible" proof in answer to a bonus question in a school math contest.
They presented their work at an American Mathematical Society meeting in 2023, but the proof hadn't been thoroughly scrutinized at that point.

Now, a new paper published Monday (Oct. 28) in the journal American Mathematical Monthly shows their solution held up to peer review.
Not only that, but the two students also outlined nine more proofs of the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry.
https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/mathematics/high-school-students-who-came-up-with-impossible-proof-of-pythagorean-theorem-discover-9-more-solutions-to-the-problem

A story I like telling is how I ran the AV at a place and when I deployed adblock the detections fell off a cliff. I wish more people had this visceral "holy shit" moment. "It was this easy the whole time?" ~2012. I recently deployed uBlock Origin to an F500, on my insistence.

The CRA had *huge* data breaches and has not only covered it up, like this Fifth Estate investigation proves, but I am here to tell you that the innocent people, including my wife, who were victims of this fraud through no fault of their own, have been VILLIFIED by the CRA.

My wife *still* has problems dealing with her online CRA account since it was hacked during the pandemic. She is black-flagged.

Very glad the CBC dug into this!
@akurjata
#cra #CanPoli #CdnPoli

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-revenue-agency-taxpayer-accounts-hacked-1.7363440

Found this Canadian educational software mag from 1996. Very interesting to see the prices and ads!
Also tagging @vga256 😁)

Ongoing discussion, but it looks like Bitwarden may be starting to make moves towards no longer being open source:

https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/issues/11611

Previous issues opened against the SDK have been met with replies that suggest they have no intention of reconsidering the licensing decision:

https://github.com/bitwarden/sdk/issues/898

From Facebook .....

I just learned the professional way to say "I told you so":

"This was identified early on as a likely outcome."

Put together some notes on the Gemini terms-of-service: it looks like their paid API tier doesn't train on your inputs to the model, but the free API tier does:

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/gemini-terms-of-service/

Data used to create fine-tuned models, even on the free tier (they have a free tier!) won't be used for training. I hadn't realized you could fine-tune a model there for free, that's pretty wild: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/model-tuning

On this day in 1893, silent superstar Lillian Gish was born in Springfield, Ohio. In 1988, I wrote to her asking if silent films had actual dialogue written out in the scripts or if there was just a general description of what was being said. This was her remarkable reply.

@StoliarSteve #Silentmovies #LillianGish #letters

Canadian Thanksgiving is this weekend.
It corresponds to the European harvest festival which has been ongoing since pagan times.