duncan_bayne

duncan_bayne, 19 hours ago to random

From the AWS CloudFormation docs ...

"Fn::If": [condition_name, value_if_true, value_if_false]

Or, as Greenspun put it,

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp."

duncan_bayne, 1 day ago to random

Non-Americans give the US a lot of shit over a lot of things, only some of it deserved. I know, I'm Australian, and we do it all the time 😁

But I really hope all the Americans here really, deeply, grok the significance of the verdict in the Trump case.

Much more important than any specifics of the case, or the involvement of Trump himself: an American court handed down 34 felony convictions to an ex-President.

In how many other countries would this happen? Can you imagine Putin, or Jinping, or Erdogan, in a similar situation?

You did well, and should be proud to be American.

duncan_bayne, 4 days ago to random

https://x.com/Nikos_17/status/1794641890769252720

The one good thing about the promised draft is that there is zero chance it'll come to pass, because it would require the Tories to win.

duncan_bayne, 9 days ago to random

Okay anyone know what this is about?

My suburb, Belgave, has just sprouted a few temporary installations of traffic monitoring cameras (photo attached of the control unit).

No-one I've spoken to at the Yarra Ranges Council or VicRoads knows what they are. I've emailed VGSO (at VicRoads' suggestion) and NTSurveys, because the latter's phone just goes to voicemail.

I'm very curious to know what data are being recorded, and how the data are being handled.

duncan_bayne, 15 days ago to random

Sorry kids, no eggs for breakfast tomorrow unless she moves first.

duncan_bayne, 24 days ago to random

TIL that there's a cafe nearby called JavaScript Cafe 🤣

Quinnypig, 25 days ago to random

Either Google Cloud has done something next-level horrifying, or this superannuation company is being highly misleading about their own mistake.

Bets?

https://www.unisuper.com.au/contact-us/outage-update

duncan_bayne, 28 days ago to random

"There are plenty of Jewish Zionists, myself included, who support Palestinian liberation and a safe and secure two-state solution for both people. The sad reality is that many of those Jews were murdered on October 7 by Hamas terrorists."

https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/article-799080

duncan_bayne, 30 days ago to melbourne

Oh no! Sichuan House in Melbourne (Victoria) has closed down. There was no announcement but first they closed for renovations, never re-opened, and their phone is disconnected).

Does anyone have any recommendations for good, authentic, Sichuan food in or around Melbourne now? 🙏

(Should add: I'm a snob, and cook my own Sichuan food at home, gong bao ji ding and ma po tofu, because there's nothing authentic near me.)

#melbourne #sichuan #restaurants

duncan_bayne, 1 month ago to random

Vizio: "We never stop questioning what's possible".

Also Vizio: "Maybe it's possible to violate the GPL and get away with it, even after getting the FSF involved."

https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-to-be-deposed-in-sfc-v-vizio-updates-relevant-faq-entry

duncan_bayne, 1 month ago to random

Over the weekend, I installed a local LLM to play around with Emacs integration and suchlike. (Related: if you haven't tried Emacs in a decade or two I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Ligatures, LSP integration, LLM integration, ...)

Anyways right off the bat the LLM hallucinated what is now my favourite non-existent HTTP response:

400 KO

🤣

tuxdevices, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to apple German

I just received my new work laptop (#Apple #Macbook Pro M3, ~€2000) just to discover that it does not support dual-monitor output despite having multiple video ports.

For a feature that even the cheapest laptops (and older MacBooks) have had for years, Apple now asks you to buy the MacBook Pro M3 Pro (€2500) or M3 Max (€4000).

This is essentially €2000 #ewaste. Not so "pro" after all.

duncan_bayne, 1 month ago to random

The evolution of the criticism of capitalism, from Marx through Marcuse, Galbraith, and Harringon, courtesy the late Robert Hessen ...

https://www.econlib.org/robert-hessen-rip/

"That these amenities had become available to most people did not cause capitalism’s critics to recant, or even to relent. Instead, they ingeniously reversed themselves. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse proclaimed that the real evil of capitalism is prosperity, because it seduces workers away from their historic mission—the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—by supplying them with cars and household appliances, which he called “tools of enslavement.” Some critics reject capitalism by extolling “the simple life” and labeling prosperity mindless materialism.

In the 1950s, critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Vance Packard attacked the legitimacy of consumer demand, asserting that if goods had to be advertised in order to sell, they could not be serving any authentic human needs. They charged that consumers are brainwashed by Madison Avenue and crave whatever the giant corporations choose to produce and advertise, and complained that the “public sector” is starved while frivolous private desires are being satisfied.

And having seen that capitalism reduced poverty instead of intensifying it, critics such as Gar Alperovitz and Michael Harrington proclaimed equality the highest moral value, calling for higher taxes on incomes and inheritances to massively redistribute wealth, not only nationally but also internationally."

The Philosopher Stephen Hicks produced a nifty flowchart explaining this (attached). "Startup Anti-Capitalism" perhaps - pivoting from failure to failure 😜

duncan_bayne, 1 month ago to random

@SteveThompson Seems like willful ignorance, at best.

"We did not explore whether Khader indeed used words like the ones you claim he did"

duncan_bayne, 1 month ago to random

Many open source projects keep using Discord, when Discord is known for banning open source client implementations.

Why do projects keep supporting a platform that is explicitly hostile towards the philosophy underpinning their projects? It baffles me.

duncan_bayne, 1 month ago to random

"A table from Finance Minister Bill English's office shows 663,000 households - or 40 per cent - receive more in tax credits and other benefits than they pay in tax. Thousands more are neutral contributors, or are close to it. ... By comparison, the top 3 per cent of individual income earners, earning more than $150,000 a year, pay 24 per cent of all tax received."

I wonder how far NZ can push this arrangement before too many of the people with the money simply leave?

duncan_bayne, 2 months ago to random

💥 - haven't had a cap explode like this in years. (Two year old Meross smart plug from a pack of four - the remaining three are all working fine for the time being).

duncan_bayne, 2 months ago to random

Setting up a couple of old ProLiants I had lying around, to donate to Merribek Tech:

https://www.merri-bek.tech/

Blowing out the dust.
With my IBM SK-8840 keyboard.

duncan_bayne, 3 months ago to random

Today I got to wondering - why doesn't Hamas end the war by surrendering?

In the course of answering that question I found this WaPo article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/15/hamas-surrender-palestinian-lives/

... that asks the same question.

"Some questions are naive. But some naive questions are clarifying in their naivete. As an example of the latter: Why doesn’t Hamas surrender?

And, relatedly, why aren’t more people demanding that Hamas surrender?

...

To put the burden on Israel to end the war is to forget that there was an agreed-upon cease-fire between the Jewish state and Hamas before Oct. 7. The party that violated the cease-fire — in the most flagrant, provocative way possible — was Hamas. Having started this war, Hamas should end it.

...

The essence of the matter is: Hamas does not surrender because it believes, fervently, that Israel has no right to exist and that armed “resistance” to it, even at the terrible human cost currently being paid by both Israelis and Palestinians, is justified."

duncan_bayne, 3 months ago to random

Years ago I wrote a text adventure (a.k.a. interactive fiction), called Witching Isle 1. I intended to follow up with at least one sequel but it hasn't happened yet.

Anyhow, you can now play it online, here:

https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fwitching-isle.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com%2Fwitching.z5

Source code (it's written in Inform) is here:

https://git.sr.ht/~duncan-bayne/witchingisle1/

duncan_bayne, 3 months ago to random

Waiting for the power to come back after the storms ... my expectation is "days" at this point. 500k Victorians without power last I checked.

One generator for "tech", the other for the fridge+freezer.
Large tree branch down.

simon_brooke, 3 months ago to random

I'm going to have to replace my eight year old MacBook; it's beyond the point I can afford to keep repairing it. I really want the next one to be the last laptop I ever buy: we cannot afford to keep generating e-waste.

My current thought is a @frameworkcomputer, mainly for repairability. Does anyone have alternative suggestions for a very long life laptop? Low power consumption is also desirable, UN*X/Linux of some kind required.

duncan_bayne, 4 months ago to random

@codinghorror Rand would have agreed with him 😜​

"Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements ... [for example] the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism."

I'm not American but I understand the term there is "stigginit" ... doing the irrational just because authority figures are (for once, admittedly) advocating the rational.

In Australia there was a significant intersection between the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers, political racists, and generally all flavours of woo.

Years ago in New Zealand, where I was a literal card carrying member of the LibertariaNZ, we had a few allies who supported us essentially because they (correctly) believed that a minimal state would give them the opportunity to pursue their own irrational goals (religious, in particular).

I try to avoid the Libertarian monicker these days because of the sheer number of crazies attracted to it.

duncan_bayne, 4 months ago to random

Happy Australia Day 🇦🇺​

"There are so many reasons to celebrate Australia as one of the few countries that the world’s displaced persons seek to flee to. That is the ultimate measure of a nation’s success, and this thought should be pondered by the “leaders” of the many countries from which people flee."

― Ron Manners ( quoted in http://pc.blogspot.com/2024/01/a-rum-reason-to-raise-glass-on.html )

duncan_bayne, 1 year ago to random

Introduction time ... 👋

I'm a husband, father of three, enthusiastic FreeBSD and Emacs user, and hardware and software hobbyist. I have rescue greyhounds, enjoy riding my 2000 SV650S, and am (very slowly) learning the alto recorder and guitar. My daily drivers are a PineTime watch, a Pixel 3 running LineageOS, a ThinkPad X250 running FreeBSD, and a ThinkPad W540 running Mint for (casual) gaming.

You can find my personal stuff on Gemini at gemini://duncan.bayne.id.au/.

My day job is with Swift Navigation, where I'm working as a director of engineering in the cloud software space. My first job in tech was as a C developer, working on Internet server software with Netwin in New Zealand.

You can find my professional stuff on the Web at https://duncan.bayne.id.au/.