@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

ravenonthill

@ravenonthill@mastodon.social

Just a dilettante amateur political science bird who lives in the US Pacific Northwest. If you want to know what I think, try my blogs at adviceunasked.blogspot.com and shinycroak.blogspot.com. I’ve also been known to write about science fiction, computing, and design.

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mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I order some Products from the United States.

The cost is $88 CAD.

There's a fixed international shipping cost of $48 CAD. Frustrating, but that is what the shipper has, so okay.

A couple days later, I get an email from UPS asking to pay the import duty fee. The import fee is $51 CAD.

That is more than half the cost of the product itself. I'm overall paying more for shipping+import fees than for the product.

When I moved here I assumed I could buy stuff from USA cheap because of NAFTA :(

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc I've shipped books from the US to China that got there faster than books I shipped to Canada.

In general I have found that postal shipping has the fewest surprises, but Post Canada is very slow on imports.

gabrielesvelto, to random
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.

I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@gabrielesvelto @willcage IBM designed parity checks everywhere in the System 360, so that the system would quickly stop in the event of hardware failure. ECC was implemented in main memory systems when it was discovered that solid state RAM was subject to transient memory failures from cosmic rays (really.) Early PCs used memory parity checks (which weren't adequate) until Apple abandoned them for cost reasons. Bad mistake.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221011-how-space-weather-causes-computer-errors

GottaLaff, (edited ) to random
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

1/... Via Kevinly Father on Twitter:

The Republican party is literally suing to prevent legal votes from being counted.

Bartiromo: I see that the RNC is filing a lawsuit in a battleground state to stop counting ballots past election day.

Lara : Yeah. Well, that's exactly right. You cannot have ballots counted after elections are over.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff one can scarcely count them before the election.

KarenDorman, (edited ) to Fashion
@KarenDorman@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Hey friends, does anyone know what either of these objects are?
(They were found in a deceased relative's jewelry box.)
Please boost for added eyes, thanks! 😊

The lettering on the object on the left says:
Hadley Made in USA
Both ends open up to 90⁰ and the main body expands and contracts about a centimetre.

A clever person has said that the object in the right is a Writescope telescoping mechanical pencil. Thanks!

@sewing

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@KarenDorman @sewing the one on the left looks like some sort of drafting tool. What does the lettering say?

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@KarenDorman @sewing I think it's some sort of dress accessory; the clip looks like it clips on to a pocket. You might try asking at a fancy menswear shop.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Something I've been noticing about search engines (well, google) recently is how bad they are at respecting word order in cases where it matters. Like, you search "convert x to y" and they match "convert y to x". Or this morning I'm searching "inset diamond in square equation" and i am indeed finding overwhelmingly things that contain both the words "diamond" and "equation", such as the "diamond method" for quadratics. But nothing related to insetting diamonds in squares.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc they're searching keywords; they don't know grammar. That's probably something an LLM would do better; LLMs are all about grammar. In some sense it may be that LLMs actually are grammars.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc sigh. Yes.

arstechnica, to random
@arstechnica@mastodon.social avatar

China orders Apple to remove Meta apps after “inflammatory” posts about president

WhatsApp, Threads, Telegram, and Signal removed from Apple App Store in China.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/china-orders-apple-to-remove-meta-apps-after-inflammatory-posts-about-president/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@arstechnica the first amendment is a local ordinance.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

If you're interested in understanding what's wrong with corporations right now, what's driving our global capitalist omnishambles? This is an amazingly insightful (if long, and entertainment-industry focussed) deep dive into the madness of modern management theories:

https://docseuss.medium.com/the-biggest-threat-facing-your-team-whether-youre-a-game-developer-or-a-tech-founder-or-a-ceo-is-8cd1ad359508

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross The US system of production depends on business owners using their wealth as productive capital and major business owners have abandoned this. If this continues, the end result will be a gutted economy dominated by a handful of wealthy people, like that of Russia or Mexico. These people aren't capitalists. I've started calling them economic nihilists.

http://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2024/03/neo-feudalism-anti-capitalism.html

GottaLaff, to random
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

Via Politico:

Economic advisers close to Donald are debating ways to devalue the U.S. dollar if he’s elected to a second term — a dramatic move that could boost U.S. exports but also reignite inflation and threaten the dollar’s position as the world’s dominant currency.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff Great. How to raise consumer prices and wreck the world economy.

https://www.propublica.org/article/robert-lighthizer-blew-up-60-years-of-trade-policy-nobody-knows-what-happens-next

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Someone over the hill is blasting music and just now they played "Time" by Pink Floyd and we were just thinking about how cool it would be to start Dark Side of the Moon with a very precise timing so that "Eclipse" either starts or finishes just as the sun is fully occluded

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc snicker snicker snicker

GottaLaff, (edited ) to random
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

Fixed.

Angry Staffer did his Q & A last night.

Q: ..posts abt Trump’s calls to MBS, Kushner calls to Bibi. How concerned r u Trump's conducting shadow govt interfer in MidEast that works directly against Biden policy & war efforts in region?

Angry:

I’m pretty concerned abt it..also par for course w Trump-He started doing it b4 he was elected the first time, & he’s doing it now. It completely shreds precedent but I do worry that he’s trying to enflame tensions to make things worse for Biden

ravenonthill, (edited )
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff there's a history of meddling in international politics to swing US elections. Reagan and Nixon obviously, but I think there are precedents from the interwar period and probably the gilded age as well.

Me, I fear most are things out of the blue that could swing public sentiment, and those are by definition unpredictable.

GottaLaff, to Israel
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

to open 3 aid corridors following 's call with

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-netanyahu-phone-call-israel-world-central-kitchen-strike-gaza/

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff I think Netanyahu's coalition being in trouble (the Haredim don't want to be drafted and their parties are part of his coalition) has something to do with it, too.)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/04/israel-ultra-orthodox-jews-haredim-benjamin-netanyahu-court-military-conscription-gaza-war

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

As part of their aggressive attempt to get people to replace their old headsets, Facebook's Quest 1 headsets, released in 2019, will be barred from purchasing any app on the Quest store released after April 30, even if that app would have supported the Quest 1 when sideloaded.

The aggressive deprecation schedule really makes me baffled why anyone would trust Facebook with their money here. This is a novelty/nice-to-have device, not something you upgrade every 2 years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewwilliams/2024/03/29/meta-issues-warning-that-impacts-many-quest-headset-users/?sh=42b7afa66306

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc why not? They do it with smartphones. You get this $1,000 device and it's obsolete in two years.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc nor I. But for people who have the money, it's common. For so many people buying fancy things is a status activity. It's the same way car dealers used to sell families new cars every three years. Car payments were just a normal thing.

graydon, to random
@graydon@canada.masto.host avatar

xv from this corner:

Every security service in the world is doing this. (Or they are now, as the possibilities percolate in.) Assume the xv effort is the RCMP; what's GCHQ done?

It will always be possible to run a secure server, but the cost, and the cost of having justified confidence that it's secure, can be made unbearably high. That's one of the goals of this kind of effort.

VLSI was a surprise. That doesn't mean incumbent power structures have to tolerate the results indefinitely.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@graydon @kithrup the problem here seems to be exactly that there are so many corners of open source where there are not "many eyes" and the common practices of pseudonymity make it easy for bad actors to infiltrate projects. I've never been comfortable with the idea that one can establish a trust relationship with someone who's hiding. At least, it is very difficult.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@graydon @kithrup when there are long-term, malicious actors involved, stable pseudonyms aren't reliable anymore - they can be used by moles.

With critical components, the code should be read by more than one person. That's just good practice. In open source, nobody identifies what's critical and nobody makes sure that second persons read the code.

I'm afraid I make a very bad anarchist.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Anyway the takeaway you should have from the xz debacle is that none of these problems would have happened if everyone had simply listened to my proposal to rewrite all existing software in Lazy K ( https://tromp.github.io/cl/lazy-k.html ). This is because if we were writing our software in Lazy K, we would be so busy trying to figure out how to get Lazy K to work we would not have any time to write backdoors.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc snicker.

ravenonthill, to random
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

Pick the political party that isn't fascist. Even if you hate the other party, it preserves the possibility of change. With fascism it's Orwell's boot, stamping as long as it can. Make the choice that leaves your country in the better future.

ravenonthill, to random
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

I wish my nightmares would stop coming true.

gwensnyder, to random
@gwensnyder@mstdn.party avatar

It's great to know that if you don't have bond money you can just request a different, smaller amount and pay that instead, I'm sure that is what happens for normal people all the time

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@gwensnyder this particular case, I gather that the hope is the Court gets something, rather than a whole lot of properties that are already encumbered in debt.

It's not clear to me that Trump is even solvent. OPM (Other People's Money.)

Added Josh Marshall comments that it's not clear Trump can come up w even the reduced bond. I suspect he's already got funding lined up but, well, we'll see.

GottaLaff, to random
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

To clarify. Via Rupar:

Ian, you're wrong. I watched the speech. Eric unpacks the relevant context here. It's a very odd look to be spinning for like this.

Eric Columbus:

Wise conway thread below about Trump's "bloodbath" remarks. And per @metzgov transcription Trump said the effect on the car industry would be "the least of" the effects of the "bloodbath for the country." This is the opposite of just talking about cars.

Me: Here's the thread:

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff the number of useful idiots is depressingly high.

MisuseCase, to TikTok
@MisuseCase@twit.social avatar

So many people on here are like “it’s better if is owned by an American company and not China” but @GottaLaff knows what’s up, the idea is to put it in the hands of some right-winger who will do what they accuse China of doing or who will do to it what Elon Musk did to Twitter. https://mastodon.social/@GottaLaff/112094226896024088

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff @MisuseCase it is possible to have both internal and external enemies, after all.

And, yes, privacy legislation would be a good thing. The constitutional right to privacy would probably be even better, but the chance of getting such a thing through is poor.

Meyerweb, to random
@Meyerweb@mastodon.social avatar

Open-source maintainers are coping with a rising flood of people submitting PRs that are just LLM-generated code, and I just. I mean. What is wrong with people that they didn’t immediately vomit the first time they tried this. Copy the output of an overengineered autocomplete and try to pass it off as my own work, while adding to someone else’s burdens in the bargain? I would rather die first.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@Meyerweb there have always been people who cheat and it's easier to cheat than ever.

There is also a genuine moral rot loose in the world. They see all these highly placed people getting away with crimes and they think, "well why shouldn't i?"

dabeaz, to random
@dabeaz@mastodon.social avatar

Thought: I'd bet a lot of projects would have fewer dependencies if pip was 100x slower. Maybe we should try to do that.

ravenonthill,
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social avatar

@dabeaz https://xkcd.com/1987/

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