Two or three instance changes back, I was blathering about building an off-highway vehicle sort of thing to scoot around events like Wasteland Weekend. For obscure reasons, I was determined to build such a vehicle primarily with unistrut and teleperf. Progress stalled a while back, and I kinda forgot about it.

Dawned on me, today, that I could vastly simplify my design, mechanically, if I use diesel-hydraulic propulsion. No need for linkages which allow suspension travel, just flexible hoses!

@frobozz @W6KME
I recently had a conversation with a colleague about software longevity and upgradeitis. Specifically about MSWord and the problems the colleague was having with some older documents and recent versions of Word. I mentioned that I had written my PhD thesis in troff (in 1988).

This led to my searching for that thesis in my archives and, upon finding it (this alone surprised me 😉), putting it through troff (on Debian Linux) to see what would happen. Worked perfectly, including pic and eqn aspects! Generated a perfectly fine PDF.

#troff

Bad night to be a fascist asshole.

I noticed something interesting on #Instagram: there is no longer a “Create with AI” option when you press the New Post (+) button. The button has reverted to its pre-AI behavior of…wait for it…creating a new post.

Either I got A/B tested into this UX, or they’ve given up on the feature, which would be pretty good news.

(I think it’s not just an A/B test, because my other accounts have also been switched to this flow).

PS: No, it doesn’t mean Meta has given up on AI. There is now a big old Muse button on the titlebar. But it does suggest that the mandatory “create with AI” flow was a bust, and people found it annoying.

#ai

One of the very few things President Carter got wrong, before the dark times, before Reagan, was cancelling the breeder reactors. If spent fuel is raw material for more fuel, it's not waste that causes a long term storage problem.

Of course, if we weren't trying to provoke a war with Canada, the best neighbor a country could ever hope to share a border with, our "spent fuel" waste would be exactly what they need for their CANDU reactors.

RE: https://dmv.community/@pixelpusher220/117494239975188736

I'm generally kinda sorta pro-nuclear, based on the assumption that the risks and the storage problems are outweighed by the certainty and severity of the harm done by fossil fuels, but I'm not sure I'm all that pro-nuclear in this dysregulatory environment.

Microsoft, translated:
From a security perspective, treat pseudointelligences as insider threats, just like you treat your employees.

TIL if I add a dash of scorpion pepper tabasco every time I mix a drink with the cheap fake grenadine in the liquor cabinet, you can't tell it's cheap fake grenadine.

One of the hard things: discovering that a beloved friend has gone LLM-crazy.

@jaystephens @jillholl @dirtwizard666

voting alone is stupid

organizing, educating, protesting, boycotting, resisting, building community, etc... and not voting, is stupid

we do it all, and #vote

anyone saying we just have to vote is an idiot

anyone saying we should do all the good works, but not vote, is also an idiot

or a right wing agent provocateur working to destroy our efforts

once a fascist is in power, say goodbye to all of your good works outside the voting booth

It's friday, which means I have to metacognate 5 paragraphs of nonsense for one of my classes, which, over the course of the term, accounts for 10% of my grade. This is not a task best approached while afflicted with sobriety.

Ate pickled herring with no shot of akvavit to chase it. Don't recommend.

Many moons ago, a mentor told me that all 2N2222 resistors in a plastic package are fraudulently labeled PN2222s, and that I should only use 2N2222s with a metal casing if I need it to handle anything close to the rated current, or a heavy duty cycle.

Can anyone confirm?

I usually won't even click on these, but this is INCREDIBLY well done, and the vocalist sounds far closer to Pete Steele than I thought anyone ever could.

What if Type O Negative wrote Cry Little Sister? (from The Lost Boys Soundtrack, reused more recently in various streaming stuff. CHVRCHES has a great cover of it, too.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-DaqAmNBEw

The one person at the VocTec who recognized my Einsturzende Neubauten shirt was the apparent metalhead.

A suffusion of yellow?

Grumble, the production Mirari PPC MicroATX board has been delayed AGAIN, due to component shortages. I guess that gives me more time to sell enough stuff to afford one.

Several times, I've dreamed I'm stuck using a 386sx 25 with no FPU.To add insult to injury, it's one of those Packard-Bells that Costco was pushing, c. 1990.

My subconscious does seem to come through with one small mercy: it seems to be running an approximation of GEM, and it includes what might be Tom Almy's Forth. Next time, I'm going to try get my brain to conjure-up the Adlib tracker, if I manage to lucid-dream.

Beginning to suspect that the bandwidth of Bird 43 slugs was chosen so you have to buy at least 4 of them to cover all the commonly used ham bands.