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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 17th, 2024

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  • I watched a documentary about that: Into Eternity

    What I thought was interesting about the film was the balance between entertaining a fantastical vision of some future explorer stumbling across the radioactive site, and the mundanity of most of the actual work.

    One of the engineers said something like: “When we seal this up with so much concrete, there’s no way you’re getting in here without machinery. We should be more concerned about a future civilization that comes back here for radioactive materials when they’ve exhausted all other natural sources”

    And then there’s a whole section of the film about rules-lawyering the storage site. The dump was chartered by the Finish government to seal waste “for all time”, and the engineers were mad that nothing is truly permanent.


  • I liked it. I thought the action was pretty good and Jared Leto worked well. Setting aside my IRL feelings about the “AI” industry, the film had me caring about Ares and the future of programs like him. Whether intentional or not, I thought that the plot connected to how governments IRL are trying to turn “AI” into tools of hate.

    Going into the film, I was a bit surprised that there was no real connection between it and Tron Legacy. I though the whole plot about Isos being advanced programs would have some relation to Ares, but it’s not even brought up.





  • Does this mean it should be possible to have 30 simultaneous JS8Call transmissions on a single SSB CB channel?

    Yes. If you play around with JS8Call, you’ll notice that the UI picks a frequency offset from the SSB band and parks itself there. If you move the offset frequency to be near other traffic, the messages from nearby offsets will auto-populate in the yellow text box.

    Do people have to transmit after each other or can they transmit at the same time while being spaced out within the the same channel?

    Data frames are synchronized to 15 second time windows (I think). You can transmit during the same window as anyone else, as long as you’re not both on the same frequency offset.






  • I use a PiKVM to manage my server at boot.

    It streams video from the HDMI port so I can see what’s happening before boot, and plugs into a USB socket to emulate a remote keyboard.

    Saved me the other week when I installed a new network card and the server lost its network connection. Since I could still reach the KVM, I logged in remotely and solved the issue.

    Although some KVM devices can take power from the USB connection to the host, you should make sure your KVM has an independent power supply. Otherwise, when you shut down your server, the KVM will lose power and then you can’t remotely turn it back on again.



  • I love movies with abstract imagery and themes. Usually I can piece things together and figure out what the film is trying to say, but not Megalopolis.

    Like, what was Megalopolis (the in-film construction project) supposed to represent? It was one guy’s vision for a better future that he was going to build no-matter what. Fine! But then Adam Driver’s character makes a big speech at the ribbon ceremony about how we need to start a conversation about the future. What conversation? The guy never listened to anyone else during the film! Maybe his wife?

    Why was everything wrapped up in the names and imagery of late Roman republic? To imply that American society is reaching an end of its current unsustainable phase. Ok, but then you name Adam Driver’s character after the guy who turned Rome into a militarist principate. So what better future should we be looking towards?

    What was the whole deal with Carthage, the crumbling Soviet satellite which destroyed part of the city? The Megalopolis project only got underway when the destruction cleared out a chunk of New Rome, so are we to assume that our bold conversation about the futute can only happen when the once-forgotten ghost of Communism smashes America? But then the satellite’s crash has no impact on anything except some buildings. The mayor doesn’t face any problems as leader during or after this disaster, and the MAGA-coded villains don’t really change tactics either. Adam Driver’s plans are obviously helped by this, but he already had buy-in from the Mayor. It’s not like the disaster was some catalyst for change, but rather a convenience so we don’t have to watch Adam Driver finger-snap another building demolition.

    Megalopolis threw a lot of ideas on the screen, but I kept waiting for a payoff that never arrived.


  • I know it’s late advice, since you already switched from Bazzite, but I’ve never understood why people have an aversion to adding a layered package to the immutable system.

    My attitude has always been: If an update breaks something, the whole point is that I can roll back. I’ve been running Fedora Silverblue with many layered packages for several years, and the worst thing that ever happened was when I had to delay a system update by a few hours because the latest build of a layered package hadn’t hit the repos yet.

    Plus, for anything like development work that requires build dependencies, I spin up a toolbox to compile it. The nice thing about the default toolbox is that it’s a base Fedora install, so all the system libs are compatible with my host machine. I’ve found it’s often simple to compile a project in the toolbox and then launch the executable from my host system without adding any new layered packages to it.



  • I lile my pinenote a lot. I mostly use it for reading.

    As long as I’m reading or doing any touch-screen-y things (taking notes, viewing images, etc) it’s great! For anything that involves writing/copying/pasting text, it’s not very usable with just the on-screen keyboard, you really need an external bluetooth interface. I find web browsing very tedious if I have to type anything in the url bar without a physical keyboard.

    Also, it’s still very much a WIP. The version of Debian it shipped with had a bug where I couldn’t install any software updates without deleting some random lib64 directory. Once I did that, everything was fine. The device has no security by default, so I created a new user with an encrypted HOME.

    With import tariffs to the US, I ended up paying $500 for it, which really got me down. As a $400 open hardware machine, it would have been easier to look past the rougher edges. And I wish it had more RAM.

    But overall it’s worth it to me because I’ve wanted a more libre e-reader for a long time. It’s gotten me back into reading books, which has been a lot of fun. Plus, because it’s an actual computer, I set it up as a tablet-like interface to my home automations.




  • From the original 404 article:

    And yet, this is of course an extreme example of the broader political project of AI chatbots and LLMs: They are top-down systems controlled by the richest people and richest companies on Earth, and their outputs can be changed to push the preferred narratives aligned with the interests of those people and companies. This is the same underlying AI that powers Grokipedia, which is the antithesis of Wikipedia and yet is being pitched by its creator as being somehow less biased than the collective, well-meaning efforts of human volunteers across the world.

    You may already know this, but a lot of everyday people don’t. They still think that a computer can’t have bias, and if all these tech bros and business leaders are talking about AI then maybe it does make sense to replace our society with an impartial machine. This article is for them.


  • I once got assigned a work project to add new functionality to the web service of a recently-acquired company.

    The meat of their codebase was a single lua file to handle web requests, query value from Redis, and then progressively filter out items in a loop. Of course, because Lua has no continue statement, the file was a long series of if / else blocks. It was clear that the development style was to just keep adding new things to the loop. There were, of course, no tests.

    I asked the former CTO of the acquired company (now in a sales) why they went with Lua. His reply was something about how if Lua is good enough for fintech, it should be great for web services. He must have been good in the sales role, because when I learned how much our company paid to acquire this crappy Lua script, my jaw dropped.

    Anyway, that’s all to say that in my sample size of 1, Luarocks has been the least painful part of Lua.