Today's quote, via Monteverde Ritma, OmniFlex nib, Colorverse Blue Dragon 2024 (standard) ink, Leuchtturm 1917 A5 80gsm, and Tommy Douglas, . quoted by Maude Barlow & Bruce Campbell, 'Straight Through the Heart: How the Liberals Abandoned the Just Society', 1995, p. 243.
#fountainpen #quote #monteverde #leuchtturm #tommydouglas #saskatchewan
@mayintoronto one of the things that amazes me the most is that they're spending billions of dollars on equipment to multiply trillions of matrices per second just to produce software that's bad at math
@itgrrl @ricci also, this reminds me of a story I recently learned about and had been meaning to post about. Did you know that Margaret Hamilton used to bring her daughter to the lab when she was working nights and weekends, and let her play with the AGC simulator?
Her daughter crashed the simulator by accidentally invoking program 01 and resetting the guidance system to believe it was back on the launch pad.
Hamilton felt that was a pretty serious bug but was told "no, there's no way a trained astronaut would accidentally do that."
A trained astronaut did, in fact, do precisely that while Apollo 8 was on the way back from the moon.
She was allowed to fix it for Apollo 9.
Bought a fountain pen rack from a chap in Blackpool over Etsy. Absolutely love it. He makes a lot of other models as well, and ceramic ink pots and other things. Highly recommended.
@inthehands as a veteran, I find the appropriation of military motifs by civil law enforcement extremely offensive, but also incredibly dangerous.
A particularly egregious example, that I wish people would address more often, is the use of the word "civilians" to describe people that are not whatever strain of police is using the term. "Civilians" refers to people within the general civil populace, as opposed to the military. The police (in all their various forms) are members of the civil society, and as such, civilians themselves.
Words have meaning, and those meanings matter. When we allow these subtle shifts in language, we normalize the militarization of police forces nationwide, but more than that, we reinforce the self-image of the police as separate from the rest of civil society. And history shows that when people view themselves as apart from civil society, they often see themselves unbeholden to the norms and ethics that govern civil society.
One can draw a pretty straight line from that to these guys cosplaying soldier, wearing full tactical gear, riding on MRAPs and HMMWVs, assault rifles on their shoulders like the movies, belt-fed automatic weapons mounted on turrets in the background for Kristi Noem's photo-ops. We, collectively, should have never let anyone get away with normalizing this from the second it started. Yet how many articles does one read in the press where no one ever bothers challenging a cop when they refer to the people that they've supposedly sworn to protect and serve as "civilians", as if they, themselves, are not?
I'd just like to remind everyone that each week approximately 23% of Americans take acetaminophen, so if it really caused autism, we'd have a way more functional train system in this country.
With bluesky (mostly) going down for a few hours today, I got to wondering about how decentralized the fediverse really is in terms of where its servers are hosted. I grabbed a server list from fedidb, with network information coming from ipinfo.io .
[EDIT: I did a better analysis on a dataset of 10x as many servers, see https://discuss.systems/@ricci/114400324446169152 ]
These stats are by the number of *servers* not the number of *users* (maybe I'll run those stats later).
fedidb currently tracks 2,650 servers of various types (Mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, misskey, peertube, etc)
The fediverse is most vulnerable to disruptions at CloudFlare: 24% of Fediverse servers are behind it. Also note that this means that I don't have real data on where this 24% are located or hosted, since CloudFlare obscures this by design.
Beyond CloudFlare, the fediverse is not too concentrated on any one network. The most popular host, Hertzner, only hosts 14% of fediverse servers, and it falls off fast from there.
Here are the top networks where fediverse servers are hosted:
504 Cloudflare, Inc.
356 Hetzner Online GmbH
130 DigitalOcean, LLC
114 OVH SAS
56 netcup GmbH
55 Amazon.com, Inc.
55 Akamai Connected Cloud
36 Contabo GmbH
33 SAKURA Internet Inc.
32 The Constant Company, LLC
31 Xserver Inc.
28 SCALEWAY S.A.S.
24 Google LLC
23 Oracle Corporation
16 GMO Internet Group, Inc.
14 IONOS SE
14 FranTech Solutions
11 Hostinger International Limited
10 Nubes, LLC
Half of fediverse servers are on networks that host 50 or fewer servers - that's pretty good for resiliency.
There is even more diversity when it comes to BGP prefixes, which is good for resiliency: for example, the cloud providers that have multiple availability zones will generally have them on different prefixes, so this gets closer to giving us a picture of the specific bits of infrastructure the fediverse relies on.
The top BGP prefixes:
55 104.21.48.0/20
50 104.21.16.0/20
48 104.21.64.0/20
41 104.21.32.0/20
41 104.21.0.0/20
38 104.21.80.0/20
32 172.67.128.0/20
31 172.67.144.0/20
28 172.67.208.0/20
28 162.43.0.0/17
27 104.26.0.0/20
26 172.67.192.0/20
26 172.67.176.0/20
23 172.67.160.0/20
19 116.203.0.0/16
17 172.67.64.0/20
17 159.69.0.0/16
16 65.109.0.0/16
14 88.99.0.0/16
14 49.13.0.0/16
13 78.46.0.0/15
13 167.235.0.0/16
13 138.201.0.0/16
11 95.217.0.0/16
11 95.216.0.0/16
11 49.12.0.0/16
11 135.181.0.0/16
10 37.27.0.0/16
10 157.90.0.0/16
75% of fediverse servers are behind BGP prefixes that host 10 or fewer servers, meaning that the fediverse is *very* resilient to large network outages.
Top countries where fediverse servers are hosted:
871 United States
439 Germany
156 France
148 Japan
75 Finland
57 Canada
49 Netherlands
38 United Kingdom
26 Switzerland
26 South Korea
21 Spain
19 Sweden
18 Austria
17 Australia
15 Russia
12 Czech Republic
10 Singapore
10 Italy
And finally, a map of the locations of fediverse servers:
https://ipinfo.io/tools/map/91960023-e8c6-4bee-9b07-721f2c8febab
Just in case you didn't already know, JD Vance is a fucking con artist.
