uastronomer

@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za

Urban Astronomer Podcaster
Director at Monoceros Digital Consulting
AWS gun for hire, Linux/Unix consultant
We do managed Mastodon hosting - ask me!

He/him (Linux)
He\him (Windows)

Sometimes I write articles for universetoday.com

Lapsed #astronomer, exhausted #dad, small business owner, reader of books, player of #games, wrestler of #python, #admin of systems, will help you do stuff on #AWS.

#SouthAfrica

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uastronomer, to random

sigh

Google just disabled my wife's account. Apparently she provided a birth date that's "Too young" for their dangerous product.

Now she has to give them a credit card and national ID to get it back.

All because none of the 10x super geniuses at Google seem to realise that sometimes parents let their kids play with their phone.

I can only assume that one of the kids got prompted to enter their birthdate, and they did what they were told and now Google thinks their mother is 8 years old.

Despite literal decades of behaviour tracking on this account, heck despite decades of the account simply existing, they allowed one unverified data point to simply override everything they claim to know about her and...

Man. Who knew it was so easy to poison their databases.

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

I like running mastodon on small servers. It's my whole vibe. So before I ask my question, "Get more memory" is not the useful answer it would be in a more typical sysadmin forum.

So:
At least once a day, I get an alert that an ImageMagick process has been killed due to lack of memory. Are there any ways to possibly tune my Mastodon stack to use less memory?

Note 1: We can ignore both Redis and PostgreSQL as they are running on dedicated servers.
Note 2: I've just very recently seen @ekis suggest replacing Puma with a more efficient web service (one that's not written in Ruby). Would this make a significant difference to memory use?
Note 3: This is a FreeBSD server: Important if you have system tuning suggestions.

uastronomer, to southafrica

I have a friend who's looking for work. She's in the Gauteng area (South Africa), but can remote to anywhere - she's seasoned remote worker who has been working from home for over 10 years. She's got a broad range of skills from customer support and experience management, to project management and operations, to copy writing and WordPress management. She can even do some light web design and PC troubleshooting!

I first met her when she was the ops manager and customer support liason for a bespoke SaaS company (I was managing some of their AWS services for them), and always found her to be friendly, efficient, and confident in her work.

She's going through a lot right now, and has been freelancing recently, is pretty keen to get back into formal employment. If anybody knows of any openings that might suit her range of experience, let me know?

uastronomer, to random

Remember when "I like documentaries" reliably meant "I am a serious person trying to educate myself about important topics", and not "I watch youtube videos about mermaids being a deepstate plot to cover up the ancient aliens"?

uastronomer, to random

The thing about infinite economic growth, though:

Money isn't real. It's just a number. You can absolutely make number go up as long as you want. It's not tied to physical resources at all.

Look at a place like London. Where does their money come from? Financial services. Money going around in circles. Sure it touches the real world, but the actual wealth that's being generated is just numbers in an offshore bank's database.

A billionaire's wealth? Not a vault of gold coins, like Smaug or Scrooge McDuck, not even a number in a bank database, but stocks and shares, percentages of ownership of things whose value is a measure of nothing more than how much other rich people want it.

uastronomer, to random

Woops! Underpaid human data capturers and classifiers, who are used to train AI models, seem to be offloading their work to existing AIs, meaning that new models are being trained off the backs of old models, which is a really great way to undermine waves hands everything

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/16/crowd_workers_bots_ai_training/

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

It's kinda ironic, maybe even iconic, certainly emblematic of what the company has become, that HP's efforts to force me into spending as much money as possible by putting DRM on ink cartridges, but doing so sloppily and with no meaningful quality control and then adding a "Fuck you you dirty little customer" attitude to support, have only guaranteed they will never make another cent from me. And hopefully from anybody reading my story.

Let me tell you my story:

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

I want to talk about the Simulation Hypothesis. I've always felt that it's basically Religion for Tech Atheists, right? Some unimaginably advanced being created a simulated universe, and therefore wields absolute power over every aspect (including the power to simply shut it all down to free up CPU cycles for a quick game of Doom)

This is something I've argued before, back when I was on Twitter.

Now I've never properly investigated this idea or spoken to anybody who takes it seriously, because I think it's kinda silly. But I've noticed there's a big overlap with the Long Termism crowd, which makes me think that they assume that humanity is important in this simulation, that we're the whole point of the thing, somehow. Like Computer God built The Matrix as a place to study us or something. But if that's true, then why bother simulating the rest of the Universe? Nobody who actually works with computer models to simulate real world problems ever aims for perfect fidelity or completeness, because a) supercomputers are far too expensive to try simulate anything at that scale, b) it's impossible (refer chaos theory), c) it's even more impossible (quantum mechanics means your full simulation can only ever be probabilistic at best), and d) It's impossible (Scale! Do you have any idea how big and powerful a computer you need to fully simulate something, relative to the size of the thing you're simulating? Modern supercomputers can fill entire data centres, and are still not big enough to fully simulate a single neuron).
It's also completely pointless because, say, the wave function of a specific electron in an iron atom trapped in the Earth's core definitely has no relevance at all to the stock market, or folding hypothetical proteins, or the dynamic relationships between populations of predators and prey, or any other things that we typically model on computers. Full universe simulation is dumb and pointless, even if you're studying Universes.

To be continued...

uastronomer, to random

Wife and I started watching The Rookie. I have two comments:

  1. This is really, REALLY well made. gripping, we're all so invested in ALL the characters, not just the midlife crisis dude.

  2. but wow, this is the most hardcore copaganda I ever saw in my life. i mean WOW. Who knew the world-famous LAPD were such an even-handed, respectable bunch. Rodney who?

Even the racism was a one-time thing that the ToughCop immediately called out HIMSELF, like it was a demo to his rookie to show that he might have been shittily racist to some mexican stereotypes but there's just no way to know if he even meant it.

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

A recent post here reminded me of that time a three letter agency gifted NASA three spy satellite cameras they had never used. Because they were spares they'd built in the 1970s but were now so old and obsolete as to be unusable, and there was no point in keeping them a secret anymore.

These three cameras were basically a set of Hubble Space Telescopes.

NEVER complain about space agencies taking money that could be used to solve poverty when spy agencies are able to spend NASAs entire budget filling store rooms with ultra-sophisticated toys just so they can collect dust.
It's like attacking your local motor mechanic for "perpetuating the destruction of the planet" when Shell and BP are right there but not such easy targets.

Edit: Seems I got the details wrong. I wrote this from my memories of how it was reported at the time. Correct details are in the replies.

uastronomer, to random

Edit: This is NOT a subtoot to anybody who follows me, specifically looking at conversations about games...

Excited person: "I just discovered X, which I really love and I'm so happy to be able to enjoy X"

The well-meaning Internet: "Then you should totally try NotX, and spend less time on X to instead do NotX"

uastronomer, to random

Only just occurred to me now that hiring terrible lawyers to incompetently argue the silliest defenses is absolutely a tactic. Loud abrasive lawyers baiting judges with crowd-pleasing zingers that make more sense in hollywood than in a real courtroom is a GREAT way to lose the case, while also giving your weirdest supporters exactly what they like so that they will have no problem believing that the judge, the courts, the whole damn system is biased against our guy.

uastronomer, to random

There's an illustration going around to explain the difference between a million and a billion. It says that a million seconds is 12 days, while a billion seconds is 32 years.
And somebody reminded me of this yesterday and it suddenly struck me how misleading that is.

After all, there are only a thousand millions in a billion, so why the massive difference between 12 days and 32 years?

Well. There are 86400 seconds in a day. But only 365.25 days in a year.

That's why it seems like such an enormous leap.

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

A typical Tesla owner comment:
"Love my car, Elon rules, Tesla are so awesome. Not entirely happy with the catastrophic steering and brakes failure while my family were inside, but otherwise awesome car. Great to have an opportunity to enjoy the countryside for a change while we wait for the dealership to open on Monday, instead of just rushing by"

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

Opening my monthly statement from my medical aid and suddenly feeling deep affection for them, because I remembered a report they sent out a few months ago. It was about a motion from several of their shareholders to stop offering certain plans and services that were less reliably profitable.

And they had rejected those proposals, on the justification that "We're already profitable, there's no reason to abandon our core mission of providing medical care to our customers. We're an insurance company, our job is to distribute risk for our customers, not to eliminate the ones who need us most"

I would have appreciated this even if I wasn't one of the accounts that would have been affected. It shows that, for all the dry inefficiences of bureaucracy and clumsy systems that come with any private insurance company, there are still human beings with working souls in charge.

uastronomer, to random

"Walls don't work"

Yeah, we built one on the Mozambique border, specifically to stop the syndicates from moving stolen cars across the border, and they aren't working.

https://mg.co.za/news/2024-03-12-syndicates-use-makeshift-bridges-to-drive-stolen-cars-out-of-sa/

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

Best civilization?

uastronomer, to random

Is it the new normal that batteries don't list a voltage anymore?

Is it implied in the form factor than any AA cell will give you 1.5V (even if it's one of those awful 1.2V rechargeable NiCd cells I still have lying around somewhere)?

interfluidity, to random
@interfluidity@zirk.us avatar

Can anyone point to a comprehensible explanation of why this is? Is it some kind of relativity effect, like time is very different if you are traveling near light speed?

“Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad more quickly – 58.7 microseconds every day – compared to on Earth.” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/02/moon-nasa-coordinated-lunar-time

ht @danjac

uastronomer,

@interfluidity @danjac So yeah, that's pretty much right.

Bear with me, I'm trying to simplify this as much as possible without going so far as to just wave me hands and say and I'm also trying to be quick about it so this isn't 100% accurate but...

The Theory of General Relativity describes gravity, and how it distorts the shape of spacetime. Gravity makes objects with mass attract each other by distorting the space around them, and in the same way it also distorts the flow of time. So time moves more slowly within a strong gravitational field than in a weak one.

You ever see the movie 'Interstellar', where they visit the planet close to a black hole and when they come back the guy who stayed behind is suddenly really old? It's exactly that, only much less extreme.

The theory of Special Relativity describes another way time is distorted - as you move faster, your local time slows down (and also your shape changes and your mass increases), so that probably also affects the rate of time on the Moon compared to Earth. I didn't bother clicking the article to see if they reference that at all, though, so my apologies for being lazy!

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

If you read my soon-to-be-published article about a rather brutal rebuttal to Avi Loeb's "We found alien debris" oceanic expedition and think I'm being unfair to him, please note that

  1. I've kept his name out of it, if you knew who I was talking about then you're either a superfan of the guy, or you already know everything about him and therefore it's weird that you're questioning my opinion of the guy...

and 2) I was actually WAY nicer in my first draft, but Angela Collier's rather excellent video about him convinced me to not do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI

rolle, to fediverse
@rolle@mementomori.social avatar

Argument: "A good social media platform must work so that you can just open it and start using it right away."

I disagree. How is this even possible? Nothing is served on a silver platter. Let's take for example computers and Internet. You have to choose the browser app, then you need to select the website you want to use. If you don't find something, you need to open a search engine and look for it.

You make micro-decisions like these every day. Why is the Fediverse different?

uastronomer, (edited )

@rolle To add: "You have to know the conventions and iconography of a given user interface". It's why people hate switching from windows to Mac, or vice versa (or LOL, Linux). It's not that any of these options is bad, it's that people THINK it is bad because it's different and now they have to update their muscle memory to click the mouse slightly differently in different locations, understand different focus behaviours, all of that.

Change means learning, and people only ever want to learn things that interest them, which is why nerds who love tech will change but regular folk who just want to get their work done will not.

Anyway, I've drifted off topic. This is what the "Social media should work out the box intuitively" folk don't realise is actually happening. No social media software has EVER been like that, there's only "Stuff I've used for years and can operate in my sleep," and everything else.

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

My wife's cousin and her cohabitating partner are hobby brewers. They gave us a bottle of mead for Christmas, but they'd recycled a cheap whiskey bottle, I'd forgotten all about it.

Just finished a glass.

Woah. Potent.

uastronomer,

I suspect covid wine was a uniquely South African phenomenon. Our department of health decided that the best way to protect us was to immediately go full prohibition on alcohol and nicotine.

So a lot of people, myself included, started brewing weird booze from fruit juice and baker's yeast and zero proper equipment or experience at all.

I soon learned that you could just make sugar water and save money on fruit juice and it would taste exactly the same.

Also, all the smokers and vapers got really good at spotting black market cigarette smugglers in parking lots.

uastronomer, to random

emacs vs vi

What's that all about? I've been messing about with Linux and commercial unixes since 1998, and I've never used emacs, nor met anybody who uses it. I assume it's a text editor (else why would it be vs vi), but apparently it can visit websites, join online chats, edit graphics, wash the dishes and solve world peace?

I'm not sure how I know this since, to repeat, I've never knowingly met anybody, in person, or virtually, who uses it. What's going on?

uastronomer,

@scruss @flockofnazguls @leoncowle Maybe vi and emacs are naturally tribal, drawing their users together out of each other's sight...

Binder, to random
@Binder@petrous.vislae.town avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    uastronomer,

    @bitprophet @Binder All this time I thought it was Google Authenticator

    uastronomer, to random

    Today is not a good day for concentration. Late night + woken up by the death dog desperately wanting to patrol the yard, woken up by alarm to get daughter to school at 5am because field trips, and yawn I think... um. What was I saying?

    uastronomer, (edited )

    I think that, generously, I'm running on 3 hours sleep. Those powerhouse productivity types who get interviewed by people like Tim Ferris? The ones who describe a daily schedule like "get up at 4am, journal, do 20km on the treadmill, take time out to admire the sunrise, do yoga, spend an hour on affirmations, have a kale and nootropic smoothy for breakfast"?

    Bunch of filthy damned liars. their REAL secret is caffeine, cocaine, and nicotine, plus a staff of underlings to fix their confused exhaustion-related cock-ups.

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