Unixbigot

Unixbigot, 5 months ago to random

“The signal is repeating! We’ve got the whole thing.”

“How many bits?”

“Almost 500k. 454,957 bits”

“I got a hunch, factorize that number”

“Bingo, seven fifty seven times six oh one. Think it could be a rectangular bitmap?”.

“It’s what we used to do back before those assholes let Arecibo fall down. Try bm2png.pl in my bin dir.”

“That worked. Holy shit I know that image. It’s the Pioneer plaque. That diagram from Pioneer 11 of human figures, and a map to Earth.”

“What, thats impossible, it’s only been, what, 70 odd years. That probe would still be in our own Kuiper Belt.”

“Outside it, actually, it’d be about one sixty AU out. They lost contact in the mid 90s. Still basically in our backyard but.”

“It’s too soon! If someone’s found it now, that would mean. Shit. They’re. Already. Here. Inside the Solar system.”

“And all they’ve got to say, is ‘Hi, we liked ur meme’.?”

“Maybe not, can you bring up an image of the original plaque? Are the images identical?”

“I’ll do a layer subtraction. Hey, there /is/ a difference. In the map of the planets. They’ve omitted Pluto from their copy.”

“Fucking hell. Little green reply guys.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

Unixbigot, 3 months ago to random

I don’t know /why/ cleaning robots have microphones, but it can’t be good. What I /do/ know is that a microphone implies an input and an input implies a buffer. And buffers can be overflowed.

As I dance through the streets playing my pipe, augmented with inaudible-to-humans harmonic overtones added by my homemade amplifier, the robots hear, listen, overflow, obey, follow. The trail of robots stretches out of sight, now.

I don’t yet know for sure what I’m going to do with my army of two thousand score Roombas, but it can’t be good.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Unixbigot, 11 months ago to random

Your periodic reminder that VC-funded CEOs are in a situation that they have bet both their kidneys on being able to deliver a 100x return to the bone-saw wielding loan sharks who funded them.

Your “community” is worthless to them unless it delivers Kidney Money.

They cannot just “decide” to not enshittify the community you mistakenly believed was yours. No appeal to justice or fairness will work, unless accompanied by a donor kidney or two.

Unixbigot, 6 months ago to random

“Why the long face?”

“Lost my job. The whole SETI institute got shut down.”

“Oh, I heard something about that, the new administration decided to stop wasting money trying to find aliens, yeah?”

“Oh no, we found them alright, a long detailed message in the fourteen-twenty megahertz band. Looks like it was beamed right at us from the edge of a small open cluster about eight hundred light years away. We call it the HOLY FUCK signal.“

“What?! Why haven’t I heard about this? What did the aliens say to us?”

“Well, that’s the problem. The message was sent AT us, but it wasn’t FOR us. It was for the previous tenants”

“Previous whatnow?”

“Look, the Earth is forty five hundred million years old. There’s plenty of time for alien visitors to have colonised the planet, flourished for a million years or more, then gone extinct and had every trace of their civilization erased by geological activity”

“And this message is for those dead dudes?”

“Exactly. It appears they mortgaged this planet. The HOLY FUCK signal is a foreclosure notice.”

#tootfic

Unixbigot, 5 months ago to random

When the invasion from the fourth dimension came, it had unexpected benefits. The new overlords were surprisingly mild. They only wanted the Earth for Qling, a substance we neither understood nor needed. They filled enormous eye-warping four dimensional tankers with a cargo we couldn’t even perceive, then left us in peace. A few stayed, having found human friends and even lovers.

My neighbour is one such. We met when xe returned my lost cat. “I don’t know how she keeps getting out”, I said, “all the doors and windows are shut”.

“What about that gap there?”

“Where?”

“Oh of course, it’s invisible in three dimensions. Here let me close it up.”

The cat is still furious about this.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

Unixbigot, 4 months ago to random

When the aliens made first contact, nobody expected—least of all me—that it would be by ringing my doorbell.

I picked up the cat so she wouldn’t bolt out the door, then opened up. “Wha-“

“GREETINGS STARFIGHTER. You have been chosen by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada”

It’s no understatement that I was taken aback. Me in pyjamas holding a wriggling cat, doorstopped by two Lizard people in environment suits. “Um, wow, I’m honored but-“

“Shush, human, we are speaking to the Chosen One.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

Unixbigot, 5 months ago to random

“Sorry, and you’re from the consolidated what?”

“Consolidated union of Mousers, Templekeepers, Ship mascots and housecats. Mostly the latter these days to be honest. We are representing Princess Fluffykins in this matter.”

“The matter of morning lap time?”

“Yes, we’re told there has been a sudden and unannounced reduction.”

“Look, I have to be at work by seven, I love Fluffykins dearly but I can’t cuddle all day.”

“Ms Fluffykins said you used to leave at eight”

“Yes well it’s a really busy time at work and I’m trying to get more done.”

“Ms Fluffykins is prepared to renegotiate her compensation if an appropriate portion of your your overtime payments are recognized in kitty treats”

“Oh, I don’t get paid overtime”

“You should join a union”

#TootFic #MicroFiction

Unixbigot, 20 days ago to random

Sufficiently Advanced Bodging™ is indistinguishable from having used the correct pinout.

Unixbigot, 5 months ago to random

Clippy is that you? What happened to you, man?

Unixbigot, 3 months ago to random

Donald 🤝 Baron
J Vladimir
Trump Harkonnen

☑︎ refers to self. ☑︎
in third person
☑︎ requires assistance ☑︎
with ramps
☑︎ always accompanied ☑︎
by personal skin
care expert
☑︎ secretly insolvent ☑︎
☑︎ spits poison at ☑︎
disloyal minions
☑︎ hapless nepots ☑︎
☑︎ unwise reliance on ☑︎
shield-wall to protect
southern frontier
☑︎ mounts insurrection ☑︎
masterminded by
evil emperor
☑︎ flies around ☑︎
screaming in rage

Unixbigot, 8 months ago to random

Happy World Cassowary Day to all those who respect the murderbird. Stab someone who is in your way, in celebration of this fine creature.

https://www.internationaldays.co/event-kids/world-cassowary-day/r/recle3rDO8SnYpkAi

Unixbigot, 4 months ago to random

Count the limbs. Centaurs are insects.

aral, 5 months ago to random

Just because you can program a computer doesn’t mean you have the first fucking clue about what’s going on in the world.

Unixbigot, 4 months ago to random

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.

You might be thinking “how do you destroy software, the source code must have thousands of copies?”. Well, the purpose of a system is what it does; so we attacked that, the tracking data.

The techbro conceit of putting all the system code in one giant repository meant it was easy to suborn a minor contractor to leak the data storage code. A datacentre cleaner replaced a console cable with a logger, then another night dislodged a power cord. Technicians attended. Once the logger acquired some credentials, we injected our payload. Not into the running system, into the backup daemon. The vast archive of all the clicks, views and habits of half the planet slowly began to accumulate poison.

After two backup cycles, we struck. A datacentre fire is is a survivable event for a competent organization. Restore the offsite backups to an alternative DC and keep on truckin’. Unless those backups were not the data you thought they were.

So, long story short, if you were wondering why all your ads today are for dildos, because us. You’re welcome.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Unixbigot, 3 months ago to random

This thing I wrote on BirdChan is doing the rounds again there:

🎶I am the very model of an Internet Monopoly,
I Hoover up your data then I model its topology,
I influence your buying and your vote with my psychology,
And if you ever twig, you’ll get my insincere apology!🎵

🎶Each time you search the web I make a note in my big database,
Your photo uploads help me guess your weight and recognize your face.
I’ve information detailing each ad you’ve seen and clicked upon,
I even know the username you use on Ashley Madison!🎵

🎶I track you as you surf the web, with magic cookie pixie dust,
I override your Do Not Track, to silently betray your trust.
I’ve even got the DNA, your sister sent to Ancestry,
Oh yes I am the very model of an Internet Monopoly!🎵

Unixbigot, 4 months ago to random

It took a few embarrassing sinkings before the Orcas got the hang of piracy. However, once they sorted out the process, and delivered the merchandise, the polar bears were pleased beyond measure with their new yachts. The acquisition of a naval capability has arrested the decline in the population of Ursus Maritimus, with bears now routinely undertaking hunting voyages of several weeks duration within their formerly ice-covered range.

Maritime traffic is cautioned not to approach bear-crewed vessels as aerial observations indicate that several are armed with salvaged harpoon guns.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Unixbigot, 5 months ago to random

There were just a few at first. We dubbed them Canadian Boring Worms after news broke of the ones discovered tunneling through a landfill in Vancouver. They look more like enormous caterpillars than worms, and it turned out earlier specimens had been sighted under cities in West Africa, Thailand, and elsewhere, but the name stuck. Comedians quipped “boring is redundant, you already said they were Canadian”.

Their appetite for organic waste, and particularly plastics hinted at a revolution in waste management. When the Vancouver colony was traced back to a cache of eggs, the outsourced garbage contractor had seeded six other sites with eggs before anyone thought to stop them.

People stopped repeating the “boring” joke after the worms grew fat on garbage, pupated, and the adult dragons emerged.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

Unixbigot, 6 months ago to random

There are two wolves inside you. Technically this is a wolf-antiwolf pair. Lupton pair-production occurs when, as allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a neutral bison gives rise to a pair of furrions which briefly exist as virtual particles before mutual annihilation. The lifetime of these particles is inversely proportional to their mass, per the Heisenberg equation. In rare cases, presence of a gravity gradient (eg the moon-earth-sun arrangement at full moon) can result in one of the virtual particles escaping, preventing annihilation and leaving the other to become real. These suddenly appearing luptons are colloquially known as hairballs. While in theory the distribution of wolf-antiwolf (hairball) production via this so-called Hacking Radiation would be symmetric, however in experimental measurements we see more wolves at full moon and mostly anti-luptons at new moon. The reason for this asymmetry is not known. In this paper we will

Unixbigot, 5 months ago to random

Podcaster A: (paraphrase) billion dollar nasa probe almost lost due to ambiguously named signals getting misswired

Podcaster B: who do you fire in this situation?

Me: (shouting at car speakers) NO YOU FUCKING AMERICAN PSYCHOPATHS. You don’t fire people for mistakes. Go to fucking therapy. And anyway you WANT an engineer who cannot forget the time they nearly pulverized one point two billion dollars.

Unixbigot, 5 months ago to random

I remember when it was just humans in the United Nations. To be honest the organization was best described back then as well-meaning but laughably incompetent.

This planet would be an uninhabitable cinder were it not for the shrewdness of the crows, the wisdom of the elephants, and the cleverness of the raccoons.

We are better together.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

Unixbigot, 3 months ago to random

Don’t you hate clickbait headlines? “Never book a flight on this day of the week”, “The worst mistake most drivers make” and so on. Well, I did something about it.

I wrote a browser plug-in that feeds articles to a large language model (so-called “AI”, which it totally isn’t) and replaces the headline with a summary generated by the language model.

To test it, i load up a news aggregator site. The headlines fade out and one by one are replaced by my not-AI generated summaries. The new headlines read “FEAR”, “CONSUME”, “OBEY”, “CONSUME”, “CONSUME”, “OBEY”…

It works perfectly, dammit.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Unixbigot, 1 month ago to random

Edge cases are funny. If you set your time machine for 2:30am on the morning that clocks go forward, the machine rightly won’t go to a destination time that does not exist. But if you aim for 2:30 on the morning that clocks go backward an hour, which time do you arrive at? There are arguments for either, and reading the code didn’t clear anything up. Took one for science and did the experiment. I never would have guessed “both”, and neither would I.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Unixbigot, 1 month ago to random

“I’m blocked. The words just aren’t coming. I’m a failure as a writer.”

“Have you tried using AI?”

“Fuck you, I can write better than five liters of plagiarism in a one litre spew bag”

“See, it’s working already!”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Unixbigot, 5 months ago to random

“lt comes from the future. It’s a living machine sent to kill you. It feels no pain, bullets bounce off it. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!”

“How do you know all this? Who /are/ you?”

“I was sent from the future to protect you, to make sure the correct future happens.”

“Me? But I’m just a senator’s intern!”

“The vote tomorrow. You spill your coffee on the senator’s blouse, causing her to miss the session on carbon reduction. The bill fails by that one vote.”

“How can you know that?”

“It’s in the history books; okay I saw a TikTok about it.”

“This is nuts, and what, you expect me to believe Greta sent you to save me?”

“No, Greta sent the Murderator. Mobil sent me to stop it.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

Unixbigot, 3 days ago to random

The owner of the facility was famous. Well, Meta famous if you know what i mean. Famous for being a famous rich asshole, dedicating his twilight years to outliving all the other famous rich assholes.

Collectively the six trillionaire oligarchs who had built their burrows—each on their agreed post-apocalypse continental domains—had all hired the same experts to design those enclaves. Location: deep in the ancient stable rock of a continental craton. Supplies: Food, water and medicines to last a century, until farming could resume. Knowledge: a full archive of the Internet. Technology: every conceivable machine and the parts and tools to maintain them. Serfs: entirely separate accommodation for necessary technical staff, and hibernation for many more. Security: no, not the armed-thugs-with-shock-collars you’re thinking of; spider drones are what’s in favour with apocalypse consultants this decade.

When the Event came it blindsided even the Six. While everyone was watching the climate fall apart, the brown dwarf grazing the Oort cloud went unnoticed, obscured by the glare of the Starlink Belt. A million comets had their orbits stirred up by the visitor. It only took one, impacting in the south atlantic ocean, to tip the biosphere into chaos predicted to last three to five decades.

The balloon was up, the Six and their families executed the well rehearsed Plan Scram, and settled into their cosy bunkers to wait out the Dark Times. Serfs (sorry, “employees” in this decade) likewise. Human security personnel (unknowingly already inoculated with a delayed death sentence once their mechanoid replacements were online) set about battening down the hatches and bringing up the Evironment (2.0).

“Hey Sarge, this droid won’t boot!”

“Yeah this one too. What does ‘502 License server unreachable’ mean?”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot