@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

addressforbots

@addressforbots@apcn.nz

A human doing my best.
I sometimes write code 🧑‍💻
They/Them 🏳️‍🌈

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cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

This is not a software glitch, it's the Y1C problem: old mainframes were so storage-constrained that they only allocated two decimal digits for passenger age, and adding another digit would mean rewriting software that in some cases has been in use and constantly patched since the late 1950s.
https://press.coop/@BBCNews/112345996328670433

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@cstross wouldn't be the first time legacy code has caused issues like this
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/

Of course in the story I linked to it was apparently fixed at great expense because a court in Brussels ordered it to be fixed and the issue in the article that I linked to would be likely to cause far less issues then a airline mistaking you for a baby

addressforbots, to random
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

Just got my download link for The Bezzle audiobook by @pluralistic Just waiting for my ingest script to finish with it (The vision of books that I sync to my phone is typically opus at 48k because that's good enough for my ears and otherwise all my books would take up upwards of 100 gigabytes on my SD card Conversing everything initially took about 3 days but it saved me about 40 GBs of space so it was worth it)

A screenshot showing a script using FFmpeg to convert chapter 5 of The Bezzle to Opus at 48k a second OCR: Stream mapping: Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (mp3 (mp3float) -> opus (libopus)) Press [q] to stop, [?] for help Output #0, opus, to 'books_opus/Cory Doctorow/The Bezzle/07_Cory_Doctorow_-_The_Bezzle_Chapter_05b.mp3.opus': Metadata: title : Chapter 05 (part 2) artist : Cory Doctorow album_artist |: Wil Wheaton album : The Bezzle (Martin Hench #2) encoded_by : John Taylor Williams and Jack Shields for Wryneck Studios genre : Audiobook comment : Recorded at Skyboat Media, directed by Gabrielle de Cuir composer : Cory Doctorow TOPE : Cory Doctorow copyright : 2024 Cory Doctorow date 2 2024 encoder : Lavf58.76.100 Stream #0:0: Audio: opus, 48000 Hz, mono, flt, 48 kb/s Metadata: encoder : Lave58.134.100 Libopus title : Chapter 05 (part 2) artist : Cory Doctorow ALBUMARTIST : Wil Wheaton album : The Bezzle (Martin Hench #2) encoded_by : John Taylor Williams and Jack Shields for Wryneck Studios genre : Audiobook DESCRIPTION : Recorded at Skyboat Media, directed by Gabrielle de Cuir composer : Cory Doctorow TOPE : Cory Doctorow copyright : 2024 Cory Doctorow date 2024 lslize= 8192kB time=00:26:21.47 bitrate= 42.4kbits/s speet 2.7x

mborus, to random
@mborus@mastodon.social avatar

The Bezzle, the new (e)-book by @pluralistic is already in the 🇩🇰 Danish library system, waiting to get rented (as soon as I'm done with it...)

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@mborus @pluralistic Also seems to be at my local library as well. physical copy currently on order and a line for the digital copy (which I find amusing considering the nature of The internet and digital files)
I'm happy I purchased a copy else I would be waiting for a while

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

The Ukrainian navy is just trolling now: the original Major Kunikov died on February 14th, 1943. They literally waited until the anniversary of his death to sink his nautical namesake. https://kyivindependent.com/media-russian-landing-ship-allegedly-sunk-by-drones-in-black-sea/

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@cstross @graydon I've always looked at the cost for stuff like missiles and have wondered how much of that is military contractor markup (and or cost plus shenanigans) because a missile is basically some explosive, some gyros, a rocket motor and a computer (and a hell of a lot of design work)
The most expensive part to get on the open market would be the rocket the rest is relatively cheap off the shelf stuff you'd probably have to put some work into the software though

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@cstross @graydon so it's like enterprise software it's expensive because you're not just buying the software you're buying the entire maintenance, support and training arrangement that comes with it even if you could technically probably do something similar from scratch for cheaper it wouldn't be a robust solution suitable for actual wide scale deployment in the kind of situations where that thing would be used

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

If Amazon had any common sense they'd realize that they're not a book store any more, so spin off the books subsidiary as a going concern with a separate online store. (Have physical paper product despatched via the existing fulfilment network—it's just a distribution channel.)

But I'm not sure boosting book sales is on their radar any more.

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@cstross @larsmb I remember seeing a news story sometime ago about certain issues of the book 1984 being deleted from kindles due to a contract dispute Man bites dog and all that
(Supplemental I do own a Kindle but it's one of the old ones that still easily jailbreakable and I only ever used the original firmware for long enough to jailbreak it which is entirely legal in NZ so long as you're doing it for non-infringing purposes)

danhon, to random
@danhon@dan.mastohon.com avatar

Anyone else heard the rumor that the reason why the M3 Pro series has a different balance of cores (more efficiency vs performance) is because Apple figured out that, for pro users, it's more performant to have more efficiency cores dedicated to Electron apps?

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@cstross @danhon honestly at this point browsers/electron and HTML/CSS/JavaScript are pretty much the shared runtime for user facing applications definitively supplanting Java in that respect (at least on desktop)

ryanc, (edited ) to random

USB ports in wall sockets at home?

(boost for reach)

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@cstross @Zeugs @dashdsrdash @ryanc @nf3xn I'm likely to eat my words at some point but 100 terabytes a second is complete overkill for basically anything well unless we figure out brain uploading in the next 50 years which I doubt (cheap fusion power has been 20 years away since the 1950s)

waldoj, to random
@waldoj@mastodon.social avatar

I didn't appreciate that zeppelins carried passengers within their envelope—I figured everybody went in the gondola, and thought they just couldn’t carry many people. But, no, the gondola was just for the pilot. This setup reduced drag and could carry nearly 100 people at about 80 mph.

Bring back airships! They're as fast as U.S. trains, but don't require tracks, and are really efficient means of travel.

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@cstross @reefdog @waldoj The square cube law is both a blessing and a curse in that respect
On one hand the larger the gas cell the less the weight of the cell itself matters on the other hand the more actual lifting gas you need and suitable lifting gas is expensive and has a tendency to leak no matter how well you seal things

An airship 10 km long and 1 km wide could lift a city but I'd hate to be the one sourcing the lifting gas even if the engineering on the envelope can be worked out

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@cstross @reefdog @waldoj I believe that you've written at least two books which feature such things prominently

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

The audiobook of INVISIBLE SUN is currently heavily discounted on Audible in the US from the 26th through the 29th:

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Sun-Empire-Games-Book/dp/B09HCYWT5R/

addressforbots,
@addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

@cstross I very much enjoyed that book this is my favourite passage from it
"I believe in the Commonwealth. I believe in the rule of the people, by the people, and the peaceful transfer of power, and the ability of men and women of good will to work together for a better future. I believe we are living in the early days of a better nation, and I want to be part of that nation, to help build something new, not remain stuck in the past like a fly embedded in amber, struggling as it suffocates."

notjustbikes, to random
@notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    addressforbots,
    @addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

    @notjustbikes yeah discovery is the number one issue of head with Mastodon
    Although I'm unlikely to try BlueSky until I can host my own instance

    addressforbots,
    @addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

    @Bicyclejohn Firefox

    gregeganSF, to random
    @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

    “The goal of the C2PA is to define and establish an open, royalty-free industry standard that allows reliable statements about the provenance of digital content, such as its technical origin, its editing history or the identity of the publisher.”

    Far from perfect, but adopting and building on this would be a step in the right direction.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2PA

    addressforbots,
    @addressforbots@apcn.nz avatar

    @gregeganSF you're right it is far from perfect thoughts after skimming the Wikipedia article for 30 seconds tells me this would likely be incompatible with things like FFmpeg (it that you couldn't compress your video with ffmpeg and maintain the chain of custody)

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