@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.

"Intro to Computer Science" implies "Outro from Computer Science"

my colleague: I found some unused lab space in the building and now I am trying to figure out who allocates space in this building so we can use it

me: I figured out how to print my own door signs and now I allocate space in this building

@irene @ricci @dev you can get anything you want printed on a vest, and nobody will stop you

found a better image: https://mas.to/@srtcd424/117220279508959718

Edit: found a better image: https://mas.to/@srtcd424/117220279508959718

@skinnylatte and all of these apply to universities plus they have some extra prestige so more power.

".. as we watched the footage of terrified horses galloping over cindering heathland in the New Forest while yet another wildfire took hold, it no longer felt too soon to wonder .. why is Burnham ignoring what is in front of his face – the devastating impact of climate breakdown on the country and its citizens?"

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/14/why-is-andy-burnham-so-reluctant-to-talk-about-climate-crisis

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@josephcox/116994609630364826

Do not donate a penny to Wikimedia until the union is recognized

[Edit to add: If you are pausing donations, as I am, one thing you can do is email them at donate@wikimedia.org to let them know why.]

[Edit 2: here is what the union is asking for instead of pausing donations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Workers_United#Solidarity . That said financial support is how I support Wikipedia, so I'm still going the financial route for putting pressure on the organization.]

Welcome to 'fuck' :(

RE: https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/116900271689507016

Thank god nuclear is there to save us from climate change

I assume AI, but for once .. fuck it :)

Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...

...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.

I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.

"In the land of Khi, from village to village,
you could hear cocks crowing, dogs barking.
Fishermen cast their nets,
plowmen plowed the wide fields,
everything was neatly marked out
by boundary lines. For five hundred square miles
there were temples for ancestors, altars
for field-gods and corn-spirits.
Every canton, county, and district
was run according to the laws and statutes--
until one morning the attorney general, Tien Khang Tzu,
did away with the king and took over the whole state.
Was he content to steal the land? No,
he also took over the laws and statutes at the same time,
and all the lawyers with them, not to mention the police.
They all formed part of the same package."

Sometimes you can really tell a Wikipedia article is gonna be good from the table of contents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock

@beasts did anything change about your IMAP server configuration on the evening of March 22? I have a regular job that runs fdm (https://github.com/nicm/fdm) that seems to have been failing since then (yes I need better monitoring!) Likely an fdm bug, but if I knew what changed, if anything, it might make tracking it down easier.

RE: https://digipres.club/@misty/116558924676616687

Distributed development was a mistake. We should back to passing source code around on floppies.

A cursed feature of C in 1972: Labels and functions were reassignable (i.e., lvalues)!

For example, this is a clever way to initialize once:

goto init;
init:
ouptr = oubuf;
init = init1;
init1:

which is compiled to:

jmp *4120
mov 4136,4144
mov 4122,4120

Note the indirect jump and assignment to that address. All gotos used indirect jumps. This apparently would have also worked with functions.

#c #unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing