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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

    Even though I fully expect the police here aren’t doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I’m at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can’t “arrest their way out of the problem”.

    I imagine that’s poor compensation when you’ve just had your phone snatched, however.





  • Having just watched the lecture, the only classified info I can recognize is the capabilities of 80s era satellites.

    Given that, I think it’s quite a shame that the whole thing is only now available. Rear Admiral Hopper seems to have been someone who deeply understood both computers and people. The prescriptions she gives regarding “systems of computers” and “management” vs “leadership”, to name just two, are spot-on. Her lecture is quite grounded in what I’d call “military thinking”, but that’s just because she’s in a room filled with people who are of that life. In my opinion, everything she talks about is applicable to communities and businesses.

    The general gist of the entire ~90mins reminds me of Project Cybersyn in its perspective on how computers could serve society.


  • The idea is neat, and there is a certain precedent for the approach in .htaccess files and webserver path permissions.

    Still, I worry about the added burden to keeping track of filenames when they get used as stringed keys in such a manner. More plainly: if I rename a file, I now have to go change every access declaration that mentions it. Sure, a quick grep will probably do the trick. But I don’t see a way to have tooling automate any part of it, either.



  • I align with that article 's conclusion; in fact such a “fediverse browser” is exactly what I think the fediverse needs to fully replace closed/proprietary/traditional social media.

    However, some of their arguments seem off. For example, for the client to be able to choose/implement it’s own sorting algorithm, it seems to me that it would need to have access to all posts. At that point, your client is just another server, with all the problems that we’re originally trying to avoid.

    I have the same problem with your proposal / nostr’s approach: you may obtain a portable identity but all the “content” tied to that identity still has to live somewhere - someone else’s server or your own.







  • In case you’re unaware, the “deep inhale” is because that phrasing is historically tied to the WINE project, as per their website (winehq.org):

    Wine (originally an acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”)

    And at this point it’s like a 10-year old meme (if not 20) to bring it up when someone may seem unaware of the distinction between emulation and what Wine does.

    It is a bit tired of a reference, and I imagine somewhat off-putting of a response to receive when you don’t know the reference yourself. The acronym is in the spirit of the GNU one (“GNU’s Not Unix”), and as the other commenters have explained the fact that wine does something different than emulation is very relevant when you get into the nitty-gritty details, so it has extra sticking power in terms of memes in linux/foss communities.



  • Disclaimer: not a physicist, and I never went beyond the equivalent to a BA in physics in my formal education (after that I “fell” into comp sci, which funnily enough I find was a great pepper for wrapping my head around quantum mechanics).

    So space and time per se might be continuous, but the energy levels of the various fields that inhabit spacetime are not.

    And since, to the best of our current understanding, everything “inside” the universe is made up of those different fields, including our eyes and any instrument we might use to measure, there is a limit below which we just can’t “see” more detail - be it in terms of size, mass, energy, spin, electrical potential, etc.

    This limit varies depending on the physical quantity you are considering, and are collectively called Planck units.

    Note that this is a hand wavy explanation I’m giving that attempts to give you a feeling for what the implications of quantum mechanics are like. The wikipédia article I linked in the previous paragraph gives a more precise definition, notably that the Planck “scale” for a physical quantity (mass, length, charge, etc) is the scale at which you cannot reasonably ignore the effects of quantum gravity. Sadly (for the purpose of providing you with a good explanation) we still don’t know exactly how to take quantum gravity into account. So the Planck scale is effectively the “minimum size limit” beyond which you kinda have to throw your existing understanding of physics out of the window.

    This is why I began this comment with “space and time might be continuous per se”; we just don’t conclusively know yet what “really” goes on as you keep on considering smaller and smaller subdivisions.



  • Yes, sway presents itself as a drop-in replacement for i3 (just built on top of wayland instead of xorg).

    I’ve used it on a Thinkpad laptop for close to 4 years, and on my desktop for the past 3.

    The only problems I’ve encountered are some apps not being Wayland-compatible; xwayland makes the rendering work for those but then things like sharing a window or the entire screen don’t always work. Notably, Discord’s sharing doesn’t work, but I can use OBS to record any entire screen since [the OBS devs] put in the work to properly support Wayland.



  • Wow, that is a better source.

    Seems like the lesson here is that Evil Empire should have worked to acquire the Dead Cells license, and Motion Twin should have found a way to transfer or sell it to them, a few years ago.

    Having been lucky enough to work in a software coop for a handful of years myself, I am disappointed but unsurprised to learn that these dynamics were at play internally and/or between the 2 studios/companies. It’s all too easy to assume the horizontality (and especially the right to have a say in the decisions the group takes) that you experience in your daily work at the 1 place will also be present when the 2 places interact.