@pseudonym@mastodon.online
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

pseudonym

@pseudonym@mastodon.online

I'm an older geek dad in the California bay area.

Please talk to me about #coffee , #puns , #infosec , #books , #scifi, #ttrpg, or other geeky topics.

I like cheesy 80s pop music, Rush, and GloryHammer. No apologies.

I've discovered #mastocats hash tag, and #mosstodon and #photography and they've all made this a much more humane place.

I like seeing the "slice of life" posts from real people. These kinds of moments are what connects us.

Pronouns: he/him

#Infosec, #nerd, #dad, older #geek.

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

GottaLaff, to legal
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

starts HERE.
Please remember I don’t reply while live-posting. Plz use NFL (Not For Laffy, but no hashtag) so I can ignore those replies.

1/… Bower:

Trump enters the courtroom. Before arriving, he lingered for a moment in the doorway, talking to his lawyers, Emile Bove and Todd Blanche. He had a piece of paper in his hand, which he waved around as he spoke.

Wait for it….

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@GottaLaff

Said it before, will say it again.

Thank you!

I really don't want to watch the trial, but it's nice to be passingly informed of the important bits.

Is greatly appreciated

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

What cracks me up is when you go to a restaurant, and they ask if you've been there before, and then they say, "Well, we do things a little different here", and then it's exactly like every other restaurant, but more expensive.

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@RickiTarr

Wrong answers only.

To get your food, you must answer the Sphinx's, I mean server's riddle.

pseudonym, to random
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@dumbpasswordrules

Try resetting your password on Southwest airlines website.

It didn't reveal the requirements, until you try to submit, then it tells you which you failed, onesy twosy.

Space not allowed at all (tell me you didn't trust your input sanitization)

Non-alpha required, but can't be the first character.

Other shenanigans

pseudonym, to random
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

Today I learned. I'm one of today's lucky ten thousand.

https://www.bluetooth.com/about-us/bluetooth-origin/

Origin of the term "blue tooth"

Also didn't know about the futhark runes for his initials

pseudonym, to infosec
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

From a friend's discord

#infosec #starWars

pseudonym, to random
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

Even the 's are on our side on this one. I had one create a fictional persona of an "average American" and it came up with a cisgendered midwest father of two, mildly conservative, that I could ask questions of. "He" fixes cars.

llama3-70b has internalized some of our more idealistic self-myths, of the US, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

pseudonym, to random
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

Any building civil engineer tyoes out there who could opine on this?

Structurally, could you build a human habitation house out of name-brand Legos? Do they have enough structural strength? Would it be more or less earthquake safe than, say bricks(not very) or other materials?

How many layers thick would you have to make a Lego floor to support a 100 kg human?

MLE_online, to random
@MLE_online@social.afront.org avatar

I accidentally walked too close to my cactus yesterday and it shows

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@MLE_online

Totally expected a cat on lap suddenly deciding to accelerate to zoomie speed.

I've had those

pseudonym, to dadjokes
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

Wife was talking to me about seeing geese with a single baby. I said "Oh the little one must be Ryan."

"Why Ryan?"

"Ryan Gosling."

"I walked into that one, didn't I?"

"Yes love, yes you did."

(And she's still married to me)

pseudonym, to llm
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

Easy Turing test.

Ask your counter party to swear and say something disparaging about a famous political figure.

All the commercially viable, Internet facing ones, have guard rails for polite conversation.

Swearing will be our captcha, our human shibboleth.

GottaLaff, to legal
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

NEW THREAD 🧵 STARTS HERE. 1/...

Klasfeld:

Trump is back at the defense table, and we're waiting for the judge to return to the bench.

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@GottaLaff @MichelleRNCHPN

I greatly appreciate your recaps.

For the most part, I've stopped consuming what most folks would call mainstream news. It's just not worth the cost in rage generation.

I feel like I get moderately well informed of anything significant by channels just like these.

I don't want to put my head in the sand, but the constant attention stimulus is exhausting.

Thank you for your time and effort breaking down the relevant bits.

Cheers

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I’m very fond of stories in a universe where some advanced, but long vanished, race of enigmatic aliens has left behind strange artifacts: like puzzle boxes or dungeons for our heroes to explore and nearly get killed in. If not aliens let it be a lost human civilization.

I also like to think about those ancient people who built the ‘Temple of Doom’— for all of those traps to work so well after thousands of years they must have been very clever. What was it like to set them up?

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@futurebird

I'm loving this thread. Do read the comments.

Reminds me of a I ran, part inspired by Red Dwarf (an abandoned ship as big as a city) crossed with Jack Chalkers "Well of Souls" books.

Earth demons were real, an advanced alien species, and imprisoned on their ship. Ship AI wanted to free them.

Demons were large, so their hand control was huge. Party referred to it as the "command banana" as they carried this black basalt 4 foot rock about, not understanding how it worked.

lauren, to Youtube
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

As you may know I am not a big fan (at all!) of "reaction videos". But I just stumbled into a young (apparently Irish) woman working her way through the original "The Prisoner" -- and she was on the last episode "Fall Out".

So I watched to see if her brain would "explode".

Yep.

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@timrichards @lauren

I liked the series quite a bit, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it best, but that's the great thing about different tastes.

I think it's vastly underated though.

There are some very clever bits.

I may rewatch. Curious to see how the pacing holds up, being so different than current tastes.

fraser, to random
@fraser@m.universetoday.com avatar

Last November, NASA's Voyager 1 sent home garbled data, and engineers traced the problem to the flight data subsystem (FDS). The problem turned out to be a single chip in the FDS memory. They couldn't repair the chip but could move the affected code into sections and store them in different parts of the FDS system. They tested the new system this week, sending signals to the Voyager 1, 22.5 light-hours away. It worked, and Voyager 1 is back.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@fraser

Eff yeah!

Debugging and patching software with a 44 hour latency, on hardware about as old as I am, is some next level wizardry.

I so love this.

dan, to random
@dan@duck.haus avatar

White Castle has replaced their drive-thru ordering system with an AI chatbot. The first thing you have to do after it says hello is agree to its terms and services. This is not a bit.

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@dan

Did they plug it up directly to or equivalent, like Amazon did? Can you get it to print out a python program for Towns of Hanoi?

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

If you could have one new skill starting right now, what would it be?

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@RickiTarr

Since others have taken "skill" to be super power, I'm going that route.

Perfect teleportation of me, and the stuff and people I'm touching.

Vacation anywhere, sleep in my own bed. No need to pack. No commute.

pseudonym, to random
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

Kid is in the school talent show.

Proud papa waiting for the show to start in the audience.

NatureMC, to books
@NatureMC@mastodon.online avatar

For I warmly recommend @susankayequinn AND her .
I appreciate the author's posts very much. And she writes , , and . I had not really an idea what is hidden behind these labels. I've been tiptoeing around the genres for months, worried that it might be too pedagogical, not literary enough.
Then I discovered her . Now I'm hooked. Try it, you won't regret it! I want more now. 😊 @reading

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@NatureMC @susankayequinn @reading

I love the suggestion.

Where would you recommend a new reader of your stuff start?

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@NatureMC @susankayequinn @reading

Thank you

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@susankayequinn @NatureMC @reading

Thank you.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

So I'm going through a hell upgrade of mysql https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112294139220776280 and the only reason this is a problem is because one of the Wordpress tables got mangled during an upgrade. In fact, the only reason I am running Mysql is to support Wordpress. I don't really want to be running Mysql. Or Wordpress. But I set up this website in 2006, and now I'm stuck maintaining Wordpress, and the Mysql it depends on, and the Ubuntu THAT depends on, for like… the rest of my life. Every new LTS, a jolt of pain

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@irenes @nfagerlund @mcc

This!

I always love the bit in sci-fi, where the descendants come across the old knowledge bank, and the tech is self- describing to an extent that is completely usable by the novices.

Try to build a Unix package from source a mere ten years old these days, and see how well it works.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

I'm not distracted, I'm on a side quest.

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@RickiTarr

I'm not distracted, I'm .... SQUIRREL!

pseudonym, to random
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

I'd love to see #ubi in place for all Americans. Like others, I agree that taxing billionaires, companies, reducing military spending, and such would all be good sources. But to my untrained math mind, it still doesn't add up.

Order of magnitude: GDP ~20 trillion $/yr, Population 330 million.

Assume $10 /person / day. (Not enough, I know) But even that modest number would be over a trillion a year.

That's 5% of GDP to buy everyone a nice sandwich a day.

Not sure how we fund bigger goals.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

When you read Librarian Erotica and think it's real life:

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@RickiTarr

Clearly, I've been going to the wrong libraries.

But seriously, this kind of "hit piece" is standard operating procedure, like an "immigrant invasion" or others, to paint libraries as "the bad places" so that closing/banning/restricting them can be pitched as a "good thing."

It would be laughable if it weren't so damn effective a tool in propaganda 101.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Finally, a reference I can really use!

pseudonym,
@pseudonym@mastodon.online avatar

@RickiTarr

You mean, like most of my professional career over the last 30 years or so?

Yup, checks out. No lies detected.

But why would I need a book for that?

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