Thanks for the link! I really like this man’s speaking style. He’s obviously carefully prepared his script and he’s speaking very clearly. Both are such rarities on youtube. The dry joke about Lockheed Martin’s timeframe at about the 20 second mark in this video made me do a genuine spit-take.

Hey, I’ve seen this done before, it’s basically limitless power. In Minecraft.

No, really, in Minecraft - albeit modded. Some sort of chunk loader in the Nether, plus some means of pumping fluids, plus some sort of interdimensional transport of fluids, plus some sort of lava-fueled power generator (all pretty standard and easy to make in an average tech-type modpack) equals unlimited free power.

Way back when I was admining an FTB server running on Minecraft 1.7.10 and dealing with lag issues (fucking Railcraft tanks…) I just decided to put an infinite lava source at spawn using the EnderTanks mod so that players wouldn’t need to put chunkloaders all over the Nether to get their lava power fix. They could just tune their own receiving tank to the same “frequency” (a three colour code) and voila, lava for power (or whatever else, like Tinker’s Construct smelteries, I love that mod) without lagging the whole damn server.

And of course the second tragedy is that the AI is absolute dogshit. They’re not powering an artificial general intelligence that could do useful things like help in running a modern global-scale Project Cybersyn. All this staggering amount of electricity wasted so that Github users don’t need to search Stackoverflow, so that people can say “hey google set a 4 minute timer” in their kitchens instead of hitting a half-dozen buttons on their microwave, so that people can tell Alexa to play Despacito.

Funny thing is, that’s already happened for Apollo 11, 14, and 15. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite has imaged the Apollo landing sites and could only see the flags standing upright for Apollo 12, 16, and 17. After 11’s flag was unexpectedly blown down during the return to Earth from the ascent stage rocket’s exhaust gases, NASA decided to put the flags on subsequent missions farther away from the lander. Didn’t seem to work for 14 and 15.

But there’s a fun and actually heartwarming twist. All the dye in the flags has been bleached out by solar radiation. They’d be recognized as American flags by the sewing stitches if you look really close-up, because the Apollo flags all had the stripes and stars stitched together. But from a distance they’d be pure white, as if we really did come in peace.

I’ve decided I’m going to try to make a 3D-printable TNG-esque commbadge, but using the elements of the CNSA logo. I threw something together to see how it works.

I’m not sure how detailed I can get with the laurels though on something that small. I’ll make sure to make the STL files available if I do succeed.

I have a close match to the blue but I’d need some sort of backing to put them on. I’m thinking of a glitter filament, white flecks on black, like a starfield. Or maybe just a glossy black would do.

Yeah, the CNSA logo is pretty dope.

Looking throught the changes, it seems all this isn’t quite as awful as it sounds at first. It’s more about requiring that apps-that-install-apps use the purpose-built API to do it, which was designed so that alternative app stores would be able to do things like easy installs, automatic updates, those sorts of things. I’d like to hear from the F-Droid folks give their thoughts on this.

I’m on your side on this. Usually when I’m grocery shopping it’s at the end of a long day, and I just don’t want to deal with other people in any capacity at that point.

No awkward small talk

Oh god so much this. Especially from other people in line. There’s something about my face that seems to invite conversations from strangers. I have no idea what it is. And it’s always the last thing I have any interest in doing. Especially when they’re offering recipe advice. Self checkouts are a godsend.

I agree on Matrix. It’s not ideal right now but it’s easily better than the alternatives. I don’t trust systems that can’t be self-hosted.

If it were a matter of life or death, the only thing I’d really trust is GPG and dead drops.

I like the cut of your jib.

It feels increasingly like total information control.

It absolutely is. And with Hexbear being hosted in France, I am deeply worried about the implications if the French government is now going this far on behalf of the Five Eyes and NATO.

That’s exactly why I thought this news was worth discussing.

I want to like Element, but the devs’ refusal to implement multiple account capability is a constant source of frustration to me.

The “hacker community” in the US which it springs from is so buddy buddy with the US security state that I don’t think a public humiliation like this will be needed.

My favourite funny hacker-to-fed pipeline story is Beto O’Rourke. Everyone nowadays knows him as a failed DNC puppet. But he spent much of the 1980s as a founding member of the famous hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow under the handle “PsychedelicWarlord”.

I don’t trust Signal one bit. Never have. The original creator Moxie Marlinspike has been neck-deep in Silicon Valley culture for decades. During his tenure in charge of Signal’s technical development he made a lot of strange decisions. Forcing his “Mobilecoin” cryptocoin scam in the standard Signal app. Denigrating the concept of warrant canaries. Refusing to allow non-Signal-owned servers to communicate with Signal apps. Requiring that only Signal apps distributed on Google and Apple’s app stores be allowed to communicate with Signal-owned servers, etc. Requiring phone numbers for account creation. I don’t buy for a moment that he or his colleagues are pro-privacy activists.

Are private chats not end to end encrypted? They should be, so it shouldn’t be possible to moderate.

Telegram has a few different chat type options:

• Public, which is what it sounds like, available for groups. Server-side encryption, so Telegram (the company) can see everything.

• Private, which is like an unlisted/unsearchable public group chat, same encryption limitations.

• Secret, which are strictly one-on-one, and default to server-side encryption. The user can select end-to-end encryption for these on a per-chat basis. It can’t be made the default.

If not, it sounds like the app is a complete joke.

Oh it always has been from a security perspective. They use a homegrown E2EE known-to-be-flawed protocol called MTProto instead of using a professionally-audited one like in Matrix.

What sort of incompetent no-long-term-planning 3-second-attention-span halfwit would ever think that using a dynamically-typed scripting language with barely any standard library and which is famous for undefined behaviour would make a good backend language, just to save a few dollars in the short term, was ever a good idea?

Oh, right, just every tech company upper-management drone on the planet.

Node is one of those things that baffles me. Why use a shitty language originated during a two-week cocaine binge by Brendan Eich as the basis of server backends? I can understand the tragic compatibility need to keep using Javascript in browsers, especially after Google inexplicably pulled the plug on Dart as a potential browser language and redesigned it to be just another Typescript clone that’s been crippled so that it can transpile to Javascript. But it’s not like we’re starved for good backend languages.

In all honestly it’s one of my favourite examples of a proper B-movie: it’s not a bad movie, it just had ambition that outstripped its budget, so it’s cheesy, but still very entertaining because there are lots of good ideas in the script and actors who put in the effort. I’d rewatch Robot Jox over boring predictable Marvel slop anyday.

I am going to lose my mother fucking shit with Debian 12 on this laptop that works perfectly with 11. Every permutation of different ISOs from net install to the full-scale 8GB BD image, secure boot on and off and cleared of all settings when on, all of it just results in grub not finding the freshly installed system and being told that I need to load the kernel first.

I’ve used Debian for literally decades. I have never had these kinds of problems. I am in that calm-rage phase right now that I rarely ever get pushed to.

Update, so I tried Fedora 40 (KDE spin). Installs perfectly, boots perfectly. Except that it thinks the right control key is a “<” key. Normally I’d just handle that with Xmodmap but apparently Xmodmap is deprecated on Wayland and I can’t figure out a fucking way to change the fucking key that’s physically labelled “Ctrl” is be a mother fucking control key. Another one of those standard bleed-edge-Linux things like pulseaudio and systemd and networkmanager and wayland itself where the “advanced” replacement is a broken buggy piece of shit that was pushed out to production distros way before it was ready. I’m looking forward to being able to easily remap a single key in ten years when Wayland is finally mature and has just been itself replaced with the next broken buggy piece of shit released well before its time.

Update update: Thanks to the Arch wiki I’ve got remapping via udev working. I’m no less angry about the lack of a straightforward user interface to do in Wayland what should be a simple remapping, like xmodmap can easily handle in Xorg systems.

Updat update update: Wow, I hadn’t quite realized how sweary I could get when that angry. I don’t get that angry that often. I should work on better strategies for handling that.

Have you ever watched Robot Jox?