@n8@mastodon.social avatar

n8

@n8@mastodon.social

I care 100X more about how you argue and how you treat the people you disagree with than I care about what you think.

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n8, to random
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

Immigration pro tip: if you're from somewhere else but living in the UK, you can instantly gain a lot of clout if someone tells you where they're from and you can make a reference to it from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

(e.g., "I'm from Guilford" / "Oh, just like Ford Prefect")

n8, to random
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

I wonder what proportion of my old "ur1.ca" short URLs from the identi.ca/status.net days are still reachable...

(thought prompted by https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/112317310847290794 )

n8, to random
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

It feels like GItHub has an employee whose job description is "How can we make hyperlinks on the site less consistent on a daily basis" and that's cool & all; I really just want to know what that person's job title is.

n8,
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

For comparison, it also seems like there's someone whose job description is "make search worse and more difficult with every incremental change", but that has an obvious job title: Search-Engine Stoptimizer.

n8, to mysteries
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

What do the cool kids use these days for hardware GPG/SSH key devices?

I went off to grad school for a couple of short years & now everybody wants different key lengths & formats than when I started, but most of the search results that fall out when I look are from 2015--2018.

I'm talking USB here, not dedicated smartcards.

Not sure what to make of that. Was this a fad that's passed now? Everyone gave up and just trusts full-disk encryption to save them? Or use their smartphones?

geekygirldawn, to random
@geekygirldawn@hachyderm.io avatar

Naming is hard. I kicked off some discussions because I think we need to rename the CHAOSS Bus Factor metric to something less macabre. People seem to agree that we should rename it, but wow is there little to no consensus about what we should call it! What have I gotten myself into? I know better than to get involved in naming things 🀣 πŸ€ͺ

n8,
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

@geekygirldawn @luis_in_brief If I can elbow in on this one point: numerical accuracy is not the only criterion for a good term. Another useful facet of the "Bus"/"Meteor" term is that it communicates an event that is unforeseeable and instantaneous.

Yeah, layoffs can happen without warning, but not all job changes are sudden/unforeseen. Many come with advance notice, include transition time, handover training etc.

n8,
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

@geekygirldawn @luis_in_brief (or, to be more succinct β€” the macabre terminology is an admonition to projects to plan for the unexpected.

"This is normal and happens regularly" isn't really communicating that. So it might fail to have the desired effect... some percentage of the time....)

n8, to random
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

British -- and, IIRC, Irish -- friends: help me understand something. What historical era do the single-purpose "two prong electric shaver outlets" come from?

I mean, I've literally never seen one of the devices (owned or for sale), nor have I heard of anyone using them, but the outlets can be found absolutely everywhere, including places that no reasonable human being would ever tackle task ... like the public library. Or a moving train.

Are we talking 1980s here? 60s? 18th Century?

n8,
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

@penguin42 So is that, approximately... last century? Or were they still a thing up until the ubiquitous Lithium-pack era?

(I still can't imagine using one on a GWR train, though, regardless of the power source. Must've been hundreds of self-jugulars & accidental decapitations a year.... Which I suppose is a survival of the fittest question....)

n8, to random
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

Hey nerds: I'm interested in book / online-resource / blog recommendations written about compiler design.

What have you got that's contemporary? By which I mean post-Dragon.

I'm not writing my own compiler, FTR, I just want to dig into the topic for my own education, e.g. to the point that I better understand debates and changelogs about GCC, LLVM, and whatnot.

(it was a subject I liked as an undergrad, but that wasn't yesterday)

n8, to random
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

I still think that @patdavid and I could do a killer podcast wherein we read anonymized release notes and try & guess what the project is, then discuss the actual projects...

https://mastodon.social/@dsmoore/112038094666660770

n8, to mastodon
@n8@mastodon.social avatar

Really simple protocolly question: if you want to manually create the "message ID" component that forms that last bit of the public URL from a post or an attachment, is there a well-defined method to do that?

Please note that I am not asking if the URLs are meant to manually created during normal operations, so don't ReplyGuy that. This is a distinct question.

I'm sure there are some bits of the use-case that need clarification, but I don't know which. Do ask that.

TerryHancock, to random
@TerryHancock@realsocial.life avatar

deleted_by_author

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    n8,
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    @TerryHancock Are you referring to the Pelican importer again here, or is this a distinct incident?

    (BTW, I have a half-finished WP-to-Pelican port of my own blog, and it did fetch the images & download them, with a couple of still-undiagnosed failures, but it's too far back for me to remember exactly how that went down. But I'm saying I wouldn't give up on it yet....)

    garrett, to random
    @garrett@mastodon.xyz avatar

    As FOSDEM 2024 is approaching (3 & 4 February), here's a reminder about their COVID policy:

    FOSDEM does not have a real COVID policy.

    n8,
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    @garrett FOSDEM High Command has long been lazy-mode addicted to the free venue that it gets, and permits that to perpetuate a number of other negatives for attendees & would-be attendees (starting with the unbelievable overcrowding). I see this as just another symptom of that core problem.

    I mean, I get it. As a recurring conf organizer myself, a free venue is a massive boon, perhaps even the biggest one imaginable. But everything else is sloppy because of that and audiences shoulder the pain.

    n8, to random
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    Programmers will look you straight in the eye and say "that was discussed on an issue a year ago" rather than write a single word of

    n8,
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    @afranke Sounds like you weren't at the hackathon where we decided to stop using issues and move to a new Telegram channel.

    n8, to random
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    Do other people put on specific types of music to serve as an appropriate background match when reading particular books? Or am I the only normal one here?

    n8, to random
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    On today's episode Why We Can't Have Nice Computing, if you have a file or folder with a trailing space in the name,

    • You can't tell in MacOS Finder
    • You can't tell in GitHub's web interface
    • You can't tell in GitHub Desktop

    But it will break stuff in actual git.

    n8, to random
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    Next year I think I'm going to launch "Free Software White Elephant Secret Santa", where everybody puts their name in, gets a name drawn out at random, and then you commit some random code of your own into the main/trunk repository of the name that you drew.

    n8, to random
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    Inside you there are two muppets.

    One is a cookie monster: voracious, loud, devouring everything its eye beholds whilst flinging broken and wasted cookie chunks in every direction, but never satisfying its hunger.

    The other is, I dunno, probably a rolf the dog or something. Feed the cookie monster.

    evan, to random
    @evan@cosocial.ca avatar

    I am so deeply saddened to see this opportunity to save lives passed over.

    https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144562

    I do not see an explanation of the reasoning for why a condemnation of the Hamas attacks was not included. If that was the sticking point for the US and UK, why would they leave it out?

    n8,
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    @evan Well, that link is a press release (despite the hostname); one would not expect a press release to make attempts to present the set of differing viewpoints or to explore the background/rationale/contexts of parties who are in disagreement.

    As a press release, it's actually not bad at all. But it's not reportage.

    n8,
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    @evan There were some comments on news podcasts from Robert Wood about the US rationale; the council and the wording of the resolution not (1) condemning the Hamas attack and (2) not affirming Israel's right to defend itself. I found this print link in the news feeds: https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2023-12-08/un-chief-and-many-nations-demand-immediate-humanitarian-cease-fire-in-gaza-but-us-remains-opposed which seems to be the same comments, plus this about the UK abstaining: https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-war-un-security-council-resolution-to-demand-ceasefire-in-gaza-fails-13025836

    The latter implies that the resolution had details in it ("the proposal") which might be relevant. ?

    n8,
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    @evan Obviously the specific-wording complaints could be a cover; if a resolution condemning both parties was put forward, would the US and UK have voted for it? Dunno. But it does sound like the wording included condemnation of IDF, rather than just calling for a truce, so maybe that's a real red line?

    Also you gotta suspect all the other SC members knew beforehand that the US would use its veto; the resolution wasn't a surprise. Probably the point was more to apply big pressure in public.

    n8,
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    @evan Ah; good clarification, thanks. Several things I read said that UAE had sponsored the resolution. I've never heard anything about how that works procedurally (now or previously), in drafting or in amendments, but if it was authored by UAE, it doesn't sound surprising that they would refuse/decline altering the wording that way, at least not to me.

    n8,
    @n8@mastodon.social avatar

    @evan
    I also definitely heard a longer news story last month about how Hamas (and the broader Israel/Palestinian conflict) is viewed differently between the governments and populations of the gulf region, which talked about those regional governments taking public stances that are more, say, absolutist than their policies are, which seems relevant in retrospect as well, but so far I haven't been able to locate it again πŸ˜•....

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