@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

elithebearded

@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red

He/him of Usenet fame, if Usenet can be said to have fame. Diverse interests that tend away from "new"ness. Non-fiction reader and art appreciator.

Icon is from a "Signs of the Times" art project decorating traffic control boxes in Emeryville, California. Profile banner is my Dr Monocle character, a one-eyed spy using his small size for stealth.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ifixcoinops, (edited ) to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

"Ugh, worksona on main is so cringe"

  • man who fixes coin-ops for a living who unironically called his fedi account Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

(edit: and will never change it)

(edit edit oh it's spooky season, time to ruin this joke five minutes after posting it)

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@ifixcoinops Thing is your worksona is so different from most it is intriguing in and of itself.

overholt, to random
@overholt@glammr.us avatar

“I asked ChatGPT” is the new “Webster’s Dictionary defines” of crappy introductory sentences.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@lzg @liza @overholt Really? I thought it was the shrapnel plane diagram

elithebearded, to random
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

"I better take you home. Where do you live?"

"Staten Island."

"I thought you said you lived in New York."

Good start to this movie.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@nitpicking Probably not in 1972. (Sisters by De Palma)

elithebearded, to random
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

Hands down, the most frustrating thing I have to deal with with Firefox (and this may be a Linux only thing) is the restart to continue message interrupting something I'm doing.

Today I logged into my utility company's website, selected the option to make a payment on my bill, selected the method I wanted to use to make that payment, and then the page reloads to "Restart to Keep Using Firefox". Fuck you.

Can't I get a warning: "Restart needed soon" so that I can finish my in-flight work? Damn.

elithebearded, to random
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

The description prior to thus event that has most resonated with me for the situation in Israel is that their intelligence agencies have been so good they've never needed to compromise at a negotiation table. Just find and kill people somewhere and let the other side stew in disarray.

Now they have a situation where their intelligence has failed spectacularly and they have no negotiation skills. I worry it will get very ugly.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@nitpicking Yup. There's a non-zero chance that Netanyahu ignored some intelligence so that he could have a convient war while he rejiggers the justice system. But the leader of Hamas is only alive because Mossad hasn't found him and the scale of this operation may have surprised everyone up the chain.

Liquidream, to random
@Liquidream@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

"Amazon Launches First Satellites
in Bid to Challenge SpaceX's
Starlink"
Oh good. One step closer to the prophecy that WALL-E foretold... 😒

Clip from the Disney animated movie WALL-E, where a spaceship launches through a sea of satellites to get to space

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@Liquidream Do you know about Project West Ford, from the early 1960s?

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Someone wanna give me a ELI5 on the whole data-centres-waste-water thing, because I'm reading a paper on it and it seems like the author is... to put it politely, Reaching Quite A Bit

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@ifixcoinops

One thing that's always bothered me about the phone on the toilet thing is: how many people wash their phones afterwards?

fade, to random
@fade@zirk.us avatar

From today's G&S in AG&R class:

"You can see why the Athenians killed Socrates. Because he was annoying! Hot take."

(There's a lot of 'split into groups that each talks about a different speech from Plato's Symposium' so it's not all snappy lines today, but it's interesting as always.)

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@fade If Socrates was so annoying they'd kill him, how did Diogenes last?

bde, to random
@bde@functional.cafe avatar

I guess I’m one of today’s lucky 10,000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgm14D1jHUw

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@bde Also
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SZNbvnWEL48

fraying, to random
@fraying@xoxo.zone avatar

Everyone who said robot cars would be safer than human drivers owes everyone an apology for thinking so little of humans and assuming so much about technology. https://sfist.com/2023/10/03/driver-strikes-pedestrian-near-fifth-and-market-cruise-car-subsequently-runs-her-over-and-stops-on-top-of-her/

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@fraying A human will know that's a bad situation but it's not hard to imagine someone so paralyzed with fear of making things worse that they just stop there, too. I agree self driving cars are not really a helpful technology but I don't see this as a perfect example of why.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@fraying People are strange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Gregory_Glenn_Biggs

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

It's great to know that so many people at Google work "from the inside" to keep it this way; and are absolutely not bullshitting themselves or anything.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@jmhorner @thomasfuchs The best explanation of where that went wrong is it defined them as what they are not. And then it left open "well numbers aren't evul, they are neutral" so they started collecting numbers.

jacob, to random
@jacob@jacobian.org avatar

I think the best way to remember Diane Feinstein would be to pass a term limits bill in her name. If she’d retired, we’d today be celebrating her legacy; instead, we’re remembering how her refusal to step down obstructed democracy.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@jacob Term limits are not a panacea. Newer elected officials are less sure of what they are doing and more likely to accept the "help" of lobbyists uncritically

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@jacob Fair enough

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Littleun's school is doing a charity event that's clearly changed a bit over the years - the flyer has some cartoon penny-people waving flags and it says "1, 2, 3, 4, I declare a coin war!"

"Coin isn't enough syllables," I say, narrowing my eyes, "but alright, you can have my odd change if it'll get her class a root beer float party."

All US coins and bills accepted, it says, "WELL THAT'S BANG AGAINST THE PENNY-WAR SPIRIT OF THE THING" I say, but whatever, let's empty out the jelly bean machine, it'll be a nice excuse to show y'all the coin mechanism.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@ifixcoinops I got a real no-name one a few years ago. Someone "fixed" it to dispense for free though and I have not been able to revert that. I can see exactly what sort of spring clip thing they removed to do that and I have tried fashioning my own but it never works for more that a few cycles.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@ifixcoinops My vending machine, stuck on free dispense, still with my last attempt to fix that in place.

The backside of the mechanism in my hand. There is a heavy gear to spin the product dispenser and a heavy metal disk sandwich with notches on the middle disk and a spring loaded finger to fit those notches. The forces the mechanism to only allow rotation back a limited amount and only from certain positions. A comically long screw holds a piece of bent metal in place, my attempt to recreation the stopper that would require a coin in the slot to rotate.
The same mechanism as before but the gear and disk sandwich have been removed. You can see how terrible my metalwork is for the coin feeler / turn controller. You can also see that the notched disk for the coin is marked "25" for US quarter dollar.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@ifixcoinops Yes, from scraps around the garage

clarkesworld, to random
@clarkesworld@mastodon.online avatar

If you've been blocking AI from scraping your website, there's another one to add. This time it's Google.

I've updated my post on the subject.

https://neil-clarke.com/block-the-bots-that-feed-ai-models-by-scraping-your-website/

#ThisShouldBeOptIn

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@clarkesworld When did they add this? I swear I don't remember it from last time I went through https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers looking for "bots" to block

grunfink, to fediverse
@grunfink@comam.es avatar

One year of #snac

If the source code version control history is to be trusted, I started developing snac (a simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C) exactly one year ago (Sept 19th).

It was not my first experience with ActivityPub: I had built a prototype version in Python some months before (hence the "2" in the snac2 repository name), and back in 2019 I made some partial implementation for an unrelated (and now forgotten) blog project, so the protocol was not totally new to me.

These are my thoughts about one year of development.

Why did I start it? Because I read somewhere about the (still baffling to me) humoungous requirements of a basic #Mastodon installation. I read a lot of people affirming that was the bare minimum: "it CAN'T be done with less resources". But I've always seen it as a glorified short message application and challenged myself to write a feature-complete #Fediverse instance with the following goals: keeping it small, simple, easily deployed, and lacking the bloat software tendencies of modern times.

Did it come out as expected? not totally sure, but probably yes. I even implemented more things that I originally planned (I initially said a big NO to myself regarding adding Mastodon API support, but finally did it and it works mostly well). The program is still somewhat small (a stripped binary of less that 300k probably counts). The no-database, no-cookies, no-javascript absolute rules still apply. I'm fine with the (opinionated) web UI that shows conversations as threaded trees instead of the plain, dull stream of posts that Mastodon or Twitter show. It cooperates pretty well with the always growing ecosystem of ActivityPub applications.

Was the time and effort worth it? On this, I'm not sure. I'm old and depressed and unemployed, so developing snac has kept my brain busy and entertained for a little while. But it has been more work that I expected: the ActivityPub specification is a bit diffuse in some areas, so every implementation does some things a bit different and many corner cases had to be implemented; some parts (specifically, the Mastodon API) have been very tedious to implement and test; and also, helping users debugging remote systems is difficult and very stressing for me. Fortunately, some fellow developers have helped me and I'm immensely thankful to them.

Has it been a success? I'm pretty sure about this: no. I thought that the small footprint, the lack of moving parts and the feature set would be attractive to a large base of users, but this has not been the case. Perhaps I've been unable to reach the neccessary potential users for it to reach some critical mass (a failure of the PR department 😆). Perhaps what I consider interesting features (minimalism, footprint, the web UI concept, Mastodon API compatibility, etc.) are not that valuable for most. Perhaps people disregard it just because it's not Mastodon. Perhaps there are errors and crashes that I'm not aware of. Perhaps snac is rubbish and I'm unable to see it. The reality is that snac is a niche and unknown part of the Fediverse ecosystem and there is no sign that the user base will grow from the current small fistful of deployments out there.

What about the future? I'm also not sure. Apart from some pending bugfixes and wishlist items mentioned in the TODO file, I've implemented all the features I initially expected and then many more, so I consider snac a finished program. New bugs will happen, that's for sure. New ActivityPub applications will show out there and, if experience tells me anything, they will all have slightly different protocol interpretations that will need some code tuning on my part. Development will continue; snac is a maintained program. But big changes will probably not happen anymore.

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@grunfink It sounds like an interesting project, the sort of thing I'd try if I had found it when starting out. Maintaining the install of a rails project with multiple dependencies is not my idea of fun. I quickly decided I didn't want that and shelled out for someone else to host me (masto.host, for around the cost of a virtual machine from Dreamhost).

Do account migrations work in snac? Is there an easy way to import historical posts? Those are things that might make switching tempting.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@grunfink As I guess you know, standard Mastodon migration will try to transfer followers and also puts a link in old account to new

cm, to 5000 German
@cm@chaos.social avatar

I hate vim, exhibit : trying to paste and it doesn't, but shows "visual" in the status bar.

fsck it, there's nvi on the system... now why this angry fruitsalad-colored, non-standard abomination is the default on debian instead of nvi is beyond me...

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@cm I like vim, but the defaults really need taming to keep me happy. I have used nvi, but it has always been subtly different from what I expect. And that included when my default the the native vi under Solaris. (elvis is even worse.)

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@resuna @cm Vim defaults are bad if you like vi, and distro vimrc choices are often worse. For a long time, probably into this century, I was using personal compiles and "set compatible" (or mostly compatible via cpoptions). To me vim fixed the bugs I noticed in true vi. Yeah, it probably introduced other bugs, but not ones I ran into as much. True vi had a very bad issue forgetting marks if you used them extensively, which I did.

elithebearded,
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

@resuna @cm Not saying it is. Just that I went with vim because it fixed the bugs I cared about and was more compatible in ways I noticed. You seem to have started on this path earlier than I did. I probably didn't start using vi alternatives until 1995ish

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