yeroc @yeroc@qoto.org

the end of the .io domain: https://every.to/p/the-disappearance-of-an-internet-domain
unexpected consequences from territory changes…

I was confused why Google has to (further) open Android to other app stores while Apple can leave iOS totally closed. After reading 400 comments, I found one (and 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 one) that seemed to hint at why. Any lawyers know if this is correct?

Some of us are aware that -40° Celsius is also -40° Fahrenheit. It's the only point where the two scales agree.

But did you know there are palindrome temperatures and they're very useful also!

16° Celsius = 61° Fahrenheit
28° Celsius = 82° Fahrenheit

There’s nothing quite like tight kerning to make a design look dean and modem.

Always have a comma in your password, that way if it is part of a leak it will break the CSV file.

This is the UK Government "Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework" for Software Developer.

It is an attempt to define expectations for staff in different IT jobs and compares the same role at Junior, Senior, Lead levels.

https://ddat-capability-framework.service.gov.uk/role/software-developer

They have Data Engineer, Data Scientist and others, too.

Following up on #RSECon24. #SoftwareEngineering #DataScience #dataengineering

48 years ago, on Sept. 17, 1976, NASA rolled out its first space shuttle, named Enterprise, from its manufacturing plant in Palmdale, CA.

The shuttle was planned to be named the Constitution, but thanks to a massive write-in campaign by Star Trek fans, President Ford relented and advised NASA to change the name to Enterprise.

Star Trek creator Roddenberry and many of the show’s cast members attended the Shuttle rollout ceremony.

https://www.nasa.gov/history/45-years-ago-space-shuttle-enterprise-makes-its-public-debut/
1/n

In her prime, Ellen McIlwaine had up-and-comers like Bruce Springsteen open for her... but eventually, her career took a turn, and she began driving a bus in Calgary. Her story is being told on film at CIFF. #yyc #calgary

https://livewirecalgary.com/2024/09/10/bruce-springsteen-opened-for-her-but-she-ended-life-in-obscurity-the-forgotten-story-of-ellen-mcilwaine-to-play-at-ciff/

This is the sort of madness I absolutely love to see in the world. Marvellous.

Man builds £30,000 canal in his garden to house his barge
https://metro.co.uk/2024/08/20/man-builds-30-000-canal-garden-house-barge-21458913/

"Whenever I, or someone else, posts a link to this blog on Mastodon, it DDoS's me and brings the site down for a couple minutes."

https://kevquirk.com/blog/mastodon-is-ddosing-me

Don’t fuck with moon dust. No seriously, do not fuck with moon dust.

Absent any moisture or atmosphere, millennia of asteroid impacts have turned lunar regolith (soil) into a fine powder of razor sharp, glass-like particles. What’s more, the solar wind imparts an electric charge on the dust, causing it to cling to any and every surface it touches through static electricity. On earth, sand tends to get smoother over time as wind and water tumble the grains about, eroding their sharpness. Not so on the moon – lunar dust is sharp and deadly. This is Not A Good Time if you’re an explorer looking to visit our celestial neighbor.

During Apollo, the astronauts faced a plethora of unexpected issues caused by dust. It clung to spacesuits and darkened them enough that exposure to sunlight overheated the life support systems. Dust got in suit joints and on suit visors, damaging them. It ate away layers of boot lining. It covered cameras. Upon returning to the cabin, astronauts attempting to brush it off damaged their suit fabric and sent the dust airborne, where it remained suspended in the air due to low gravity.

Inhaling moon dust causes mucus membranes to swell; every Apollo astronaut who stepped foot on the moon reported symptoms of “Lunar Hay Fever.” Sneezing, congestion, and a “smell of burnt gunpowder” took days to subside. Later Apollo missions even sent a special dust brush with the team to help clean each other and equipment. We don’t know exactly how dangerous the stuff is, but lunar regolith simulants suggest it might destroy lung and brain cells with long-term exposure. 1

In fact the dust is so nasty that it destroyed the vacuum seals of sample return containers. We no longer have any accurate samples of lunar dust, “Every sample brought back from the moon has been contaminated by Earth’s air and humidity […] The chemical and electrostatic properties of the soil no longer match what future astronauts will encounter on the moon.” 2

Whats worse, the solar-charged dust gets thrown up off the moon’s surface via electrostatic forces. The moon doesn’t technically have an atmosphere, but it does have a thin cloud of sharp dust itching to cling to anything it can find.

And it probably isn’t just the moon. “A 2005 NASA study listed 20 risks that required further study before humans should commit to a human Mars expedition, and ranked "dust" as the number one challenge.” 3

The coolest solution I’ve heard about in next-gen spacesuit design is a mesh of woven wires layered into the suit. When activated, the wire mesh would form an anti-static electric field that repels dust. Quite literally a force field. 4
#astronomy #apollo #moon #lunardust

Grace Hopper famously said that the most dangerous phrase in the language is "we've always done it this way."

We traveled through the Canadian Rocky Mountains yesterday. Some amazing views from The Canadian.

The frontend community is in crisis. I know, because I could spend every waking hour helping e-commerce and productivity apps fix the *unbelievably* bad performance that is now the hallmark of contemporary, JavaScript-first web development.

But it's worse than that. This stuff has infected public services; the sorts of sites that have to serve *everyone*, iPhone or no.

Part 2 of this series is the hardest to watch, but essential to understand how far we've fallen:

https://infrequently.org/2024/08/object-lesson/

@slightlyoff I’ve wanted to get back to you for a while because you were a big reason for our e-commerce website being the way it was, technically speaking.

We took your earlier publications to heart, and we applied every kind of optimization we could think of, just to try and stay a little bit ahead of the competition. I think we did all right in that respect.

When the company was shut down at the end of 2018, I finally put together a document outlining our techniques. It’s not a tutorial and lots of things aren’t perfect, but I think a lot of this can still be used.

I was weirdly proud of the server-side cached pre-renders for several cohorts (at FRONTEND > web server > httpd in the link below), which we were continuously building for the 5 most viewed pages. These on disk static pages didn’t have a long TTL but this allowed us to reevaluate the need for a pricy CDN.

These Apache2 rules allow for high throughput of the pages that are cached in this way. Because of this, we have been able to withstand traffic generated through TV mentions and other publicity without the help of a CDN or any autoscaling.

Of course we eventually placed nginx in front of httpd and these rules became somewhat redundant, but not if you include brotli and other CPU-heavy compression.

Anyway I’m geeking out on a dead website. Here’s the doc:

https://github.com/GuillaumeRossolini/il

The whole AI thing has me endlessly confused. Half the market is crashing because investors didn't see any signs of payoff in the quarterly earnings report, but I'm so lost as to what exactly they were expecting to see. Did they just not pay any attention at all to what these companies were actually doing with AI?

Were they expecting exponential Instagram usage growth as a result of Meta making it so you can have a conversation with the search bar? Or maybe everyone was going to buy 10 new Windows licenses in celebration of Microsoft announcing they want to install AI powered spyware on everyone's computer? Or was Google going to sell more ads by replacing all the search results with reddit shitposts. Either I'm missing something or everyone's 2 remaining brain cells are just really busy fighting to death for 3rd place.

Mac people: if you miss the older style menus bars, when they still looked cool, give Lickable Menu Bar a try. mtm set up with the shiny Tiger menu bar again, and really like it.

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/lickable-menu-bar/id6444217677?mt=12

@mcc I worked at Tripod (owned by Lycos) when Lycos also acquired Angelfire. It turned out that the entire site (login, html editor, uploader, everything) was run on a single CGI that was written in C.

The CGI binary was named a.out, which I was told stood for “angelfire.out”.

This is unrelated to your 404 page, but I don’t get many chances to tell this story.

Just saw a Google AI commercial in the Olympics where a kid asks AI to write a heart-felt letter to her Olympic hero.

Are marketers insane? The whole point of heart-felt letters is that they come from a place of authenticity.

As the general vibe heats up, why not distract yourself with a way to keep cool that we abandoned for some reason?

youtu.be/uhbDfi7Ee7k