Have you ever thought about how your computer adds and subtracts? It takes a lot of hardware to handle floating-point numbers like 12.34. I opened up Intel's 8087 math coprocessor chip from 1980 to see how it works...
Cratering #oil use in #China shows the death spiral that could end oil
New numbers released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China tell the tale: in Q2, oil use dropped by a whopping 9%, and an even more incredible 16% for transportation.
Combined, drop in oil use was enough to pull Chinese #CO2 #emissions down by 1%. A large portion is due to boom in #electricvehicles and collapse in ICE vehicle sales, meaning transportation is simply getting more efficient.
https://electrek.co/2026/09/03/cratering-oil-use-in-china-shows-the-death-spiral-that-could-end-oil/
What we’re up against in the U.S. during this election.
Yesterday:
1. Meta closed the No Kings accounts on the day of the protest. Restored them later, saying “our bad.” But did not restore admin privileges.
2. We learned that millions of people had no idea about the protests because Meta suppressed posts about it.
3. Bluesky closed the @DemocracyMattersALot account for “unusual activity.” (No idea if it has been restored.)
And for months we’ve been watching the fascists do everything in their power to restrict voting rights.
The billionaires know they’re the minority. Not economically (which is obvious) but ethically. Otherwise they wouldn’t be working so hard to stop democracy.
I wanna believe most Americans are good people. We’re fighting for what’s right. But our enemy has massive resources and control. That what we need to quell.
Keep fighting. Stay vigilant. And for fuck’s sake, vote!
I also wanted to take some Aerochrome style infrared photos of autumn leaves today, but I grabbed the wrong IR-cut-filter… -.- oh well, these are nice too #photography #infrared
I miss Sun Microsystems so much
@futurebird You can encode every kind of media content, whether text, images, video, audio, as a single number, provided the number can become as big as it needs to be. Hackers sometimes spend a lot of time finding a large prime number that just happens to encode some forbidden file, like a ZIP file that contains the source code of some DRM-breaking software.
A lot of network security just consists of keeping certain large numbers secret from anybody but their owners.
It is incredible what we can do with numbers. It seems weird that just two thousand years ago, mathematicians spent a lot more time solving geometry puzzles than playing around with numbers.
But all the numbers a computer can compute are finite. You always get a limited number of digits. You can always add more memory for additional digits, but you basically always work with what can be represented by natural numbers. If you want something continuous that can also fully represent irrational numbers like √2 or π, you need an analogue computer, which comes with its own limitations.
Oh look what found its way onto my Eee PC :)
Took my first baby steps into #netbsd today :)
Demon core juice 🫶
Russia just performed another orbital manœuvre to get even closer to an ICEYE Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite used by Ukraine.
Bart Hendrickx: “In the past two days or so, Cosmos-2612 has made a further orbit adjustment which has now brought it in the immediate vicinity of the ICEYE satellite.
According to the latest TLE sets, the Russian satellite is now just about 1.5 km from ICEYE and getting closer.”
https://www.satobs.org/seesat/Oct-2026/0055.html
I want to spend a few moments describing how Cloudflare is measuring bots. I am a Cloudflare Specialist Solutions Engineer (SASE/SSE).
Cloudflare sees around a third of the entire world’s HTTP/S traffic. It can only observe proxied traffic that operators have deliberately sent through the network. Otherwise Cloudflare only knows about BGP routes. In the proxied HTTP/S traffic there are various network signals. These are things like headers (e.g. user-agent), the order of the headers, and fingerprinting of attributes presented in the TLS handshake. Signals are evaluated by a machine learning model that has as its input the ~30% of the web cited above. This is used to calculate a bot score of 2-100, with 2 being likely automated and 99 likely human. The scores are divided into bands designated as like likely automated, likely human, and definitely bot or human. There are also heuristics (signatures) for known bots which peg the score to 1. If your user-agent contains “curl”, it will just get that score. No need to look at the ML. The machine learning model uses Adaptive Intelligence, which is Cloudflare’s commercial name for its frequently retrained model. What the model is really calculating is the probability that any given request will be able to solve a challenge. It can do this because every time you see a Cloudflare challenge and solve it, you are helping to train this system to be more accurate in determining whether or not your request was automated.
In addition to the heuristics and ML, Cloudflare can check browser fingerprints and user behaviors by injecting JavaScript dynamically into pages. Previous version was called JavaScript Detections, which performed the evaluation request-by-request, but a new Precursor feature can evaluate browser behavior continuously through a session, and invalidate any previously solved challenge.
When people say dogs are loyal, I do not think they had a cat in their lives.
scrolling through my feed and every post is valued
Google’s AI pinned another man’s sex crime on a doctor, and a German court says Google must answer for it
Two German courts, in Munich and Aachen, have ruled that Google is liable for false claims in its AI Overviews and AI Mode, treating them as its own words.
Moved our git web server from cgit to stagit to reduce load on the server caused by crawlers, as it only uses static files.
https://git.dillo-browser.org/dillo/
Roughly 99.9% of requests are bots fetching commits and files over and over again at a rate of 50 req/s despite our robots.txt excluding any crawler. Stagit only exposes a small number of files and commits so they are not reachable to bots.
Sadly, many anti-bot protections rely on JS or fingerprinting which come with their own set of problems.
Heads up!
WHOIS is being retired. It will be replaced by Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP). See the links below for more information.
It will be strange not using the whois command-line tool to query domain info. I've used whois since forever. However, there is an rdap command-line tool for querying the new protocol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_Data_Access_Protocol
I’m thinking about switching from valerate to enthanate, but I’m still undecylate ...
Happy birthday to trailblazing programmer & computer scientist, Beatrice “Trixie” Worsley (1921-1972). My #linocut shows Worsley seated at the first computer in Canada, the FERUT (which she named) & a flow diagram of one of her programs.
Trixie Worsley earned one of the first doctorates in computer science anywhere, & was supervised by Douglas Hartree and Alan Turing at Cambridge. Amongst the first computer scientists in 🧵