The inscription on this monument built by the Ancients was damaged, but we were still able to translate it. Looks like we will find many valuable relics and treasure if we dig here!
seeing the hardest working, most experienced, wonderfully talented people i know all posting some variation of "i'm a fucking failure" in the past month is breaking my fucking heart.
YOU ARE GOOD. YOU ARE THE REASON THE WORLD WORKS AT ALL. DO NOT LET THEM BREAK YOU.
Toner, especially black toner, should not be shiny when printed. It makes it harder to read when brightly lit.
RE: https://social.coop/@shauna/116737114240403155
This is a post about cyber security.
small hack from a while ago:
A synchronized grid on my homepage people can draw on, and it updates a small epaper display on my desk. It's been fun to occasionally glance over it and see it has randomly changed because someone went by my website (https://www.svenknebel.de) and drew a new pattern 😃
People who hijack control-k to be "in-site search" instead of "browser search" should be ticketed and towed.
If you've ever thought, "I wish I had a shortwave radio to mess around with," why not buy an XHDATA D-219, which costs about $16, runs on two AA batteries, looks retro, and fits into the palm of your hand? (It also does AM and FM.)
One of the best things about being a professor is that I pretty much get to be my own boss. One of the worst things about being a professor is that my boss is *terrible*.
Looking to have a pet #raccoon?
"Maine tops the list, where owning a pet raccoon is relatively straightforward. You don’t need any special permits or licenses, and there’s no cap on the number of raccoons you can keep as pets."
https://exoticpethub.com/pet-raccoon-laws-by-state/
You OK, Maine?
@robinhouston have you seen the laser-sighted comté cutters tho https://dadaux.com/trancheur-fromage-mini-comtoise/
The “saltie” BBC Genoa, registered in Antigua and Barbuda, arrives in Duluth at sunrise, 3 June, 2026. Photo by David Schauer.
#ShipsOfMastodon
#GreatLakes
#LakeSuperior
#HeartOfTheSunrise
#DestinationDuluth
“What a perfectly timed entrance!” - David Schauer
I don't know who needs to hear this, but if people have always told you that "it's not 'sherbert' it's 'sherbet'," you can tell them to kick rocks -- it was apparently sherbert before it was sherbet.
@spacehobo if you zlib compress a stream, running a rolling source checksum to flush the compressor when the bottom N bits are zero (or when the block is too big) you get blocks averaging a bit less than 2**N in size. Publish the checksum catalog of those variable-sized blocks and use them to do remote differencing. After a delta, the block boundaries will resynchronise, so compression doesn't defeat the differencing. The decompressor only needs complete plaintext, and complete compressed blocks
I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.
Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).
I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.
I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.
In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.
Well... Tridge and #Claude, it seems: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390
The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly *unlike* the person I met back in the day.
I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:
If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.
That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.
No one.
I'm interested in commissioning an #artist to make some "box art" for a fictional 1980s home computer video game. The game is about a heist in a San Francisco office, and I'm envisioning a montage showing various heisty / officey things. The game is not commercial, it is educational software produced as part of a research project -- but I obviously expect to pay the artist.
I'm interested in vintage-looking artwork in the style of 1980s game box art. I'm not interested in AI-generated art. If you're interested, please reach out! If you're curious, please boost!
Who wants to bring back Roman numerals?
I for one
Hey #lazyweb, what's your favorite way to store huge amounts of data for long-term offline storage? The best thing I can think of is to get two n-terabyte drives, make a Linux software RAID1 with them, write the data, and then store the disks in a sealed plastic container in a cold, dry place.
You can assume that security/privacy of the data doesn't matter, that I could individually encrypt archives on the storage, or that I could use a single-password full-disk encryption option. But I'm most interested in increasing the chances that the data will be there if anyone ever wants to read it.
Obviously, increasing the number of individual disks would also increase reliability (e.g., >2 replicas), but I'm also interested in affordability / being reasonable. This isn't priceless info.
RE: https://posts.rat.pictures/@hannah/116608823103795054
Threads like this are why the Internet is great. 🏆