Dave.

Yes, on my imaginary forum you have to submit your new account application in the form of a handwritten note - on carbon paper, so I can tell that an actual pen or pencil pressed against the page - along with a $10 processing fee that goes directly to my beer fund. People who don’t know what carbon paper is are automatically excluded from my forum.

Once approved, all posts need to be submitted in a similar manner, along with a transcription fee of $15 to compensate for me having to read (a) your god-awful handwriting , and (b) your god-awful post.

I aim to have all posts and comments processed within 20 business days. To this date I have always comfortably beaten that metric, seeing that nobody has posted anything yet.

All the people in the thread dissing the station and suggesting all they needed is “X many Y terabyte drives for $2.50 each and give them to people to take off site and store and rotate somewhere and all this wouldn’t be a drama”… Those people have yet to discover that manual processes using fallible humans does not work long term.

The station’s IT staff no doubt looked at all of this and decided that off-site backups via a third party was the simplest and most cost effective route. I have no doubt the middle-company advertised that all the actual storage was in Backblaze, a quite reputable storage company. The only thing that has bitten them in the ass is that the middle-company has folded unexpectedly, requiring them to scoot to court to get Backblaze to give them access to their data.

After all of this, it’s quite possible that IT will now get enough resources to do the backup via Backblaze directly. If Backblaze wants to put a bit of PR spin on it, they’ll task a few engineers to set this up for them. And if Backblaze was smart, they’d go looking for alllll the other little PBS affiliates in the same boat and offer them the same setup.

which could be a pretty big obstacle to grid-scale deployment.

Well, on a grid scale if you’ve got a 100MWh battery and you want to charge it at 3C, then you’re looking to find a spare 300MW out on the grid somewhere for 20 minutes.

That’s not impossible, but you’ll buy that 100MWh a lot cheaper if you’re willing to get it over the course of a few hours. For example, buying power in the middle of the day when there’s excess solar, to then drop it back into the grid in a one hour burst during peak times in the evening for 10 times the price.

That kind of thing is where the battery will make the most profit, so slow charge rates don’t really matter.

The only one I use regularly is !! , because it feels good hammering out “sudo !!” in response to yet another attempt by the OS to limit my godlike power in my tiny command-line domain.

Especially punching in those two exclamation marks at the end. It makes it feel like an extra hard JUST DO IT command.

“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a big company, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab 'em by the auto-update. You can do anything.”

Hey, if it’s good enough for the esteemed President of the United States of America, it’s good enough for Microsoft.

Debian GNU/Hurd is out there now too, I’ve been meaning to stick it on a VM. I’m sure it’s a perfectly acceptable substitute for Win11 for nearly all users.

😬

I dunno, a few more steps down that slippery slope and then you’ve got Triffids. That’s pretty predatory.

“AI-PAL, buy more milk for me we’ve run out and I need it for custard tonight”

AI-PAl notices insufficient funds in the account linked to the EZEESHOP integration, and mulls through various options:

• Inform user, but they said they needed it tonight? OPTION REJECTED.
• Check for other accounts the user has, maybe there is more money elsewhere. No other accounts detected. OPTION REJECTED.
• Create OnlyFans account and begin posting generated pictures of feet. Slow ROI. OPTION REJECTED.
• Attempt to hack bank systems to top up account to buy milk. COMMENCING. FUNDS REQUIRED:$3.98. FUNDS ACQUIRED: $2,960,327.48. PURCHASING MILK.

I had Claude with auto-permission on accidentally delete an Open3D build folder in its workspace today while updating an old project to the bleeding edge out of github. I had the older release in, “open3d” and “open3d-debug”, so it cleverly used “open3d*” to tidy both folders up, so that the latest version, in the folder, “Open3D-main”, would be used from now on.

Except guess what? The windows box it was running on treats filenames as case-insensitive, and all folders matching open3d got nuked.

* sad trombone noises *

Cue grovelling apology from Claude offering to re-download and build Open3D again, a process that takes a couple of hours on my PC. Interestingly, it only noticed a few more steps further down the road, not immediately.

Luckily it was working in a sandbox copied from the real repository, so I just copied it back. But I really do have to get my act together and run things in proper isolation. Everything is backed up elsewhere on this build PC, but it would be a hassle if it got wrecked.

What’s the range like with halow? I’ve been eyeing it off for a while. Seems like a nice high gain omni and a bit of height would make it go a fair way.

The best kind of content for engagement is hate. You get users angrily defending both sides, stacks of comments, reposts (both in support of, and "OMG look at what they’re saying), the whole shebang.

Meta has learned that promotion of hate content pays off handsomely on those sweet sweet engagement metrics that shareholders love.

So of course they’re going to pay the hatemongers for content. Even when their own content policies ostensibly forbid it. Because that’s what makes line go up and they’ll do anything to keep that happening.

Its in the early phases but its been a sucess so far.

Mesh networks, you say? I’ve gotta get in on the ground floor of this new advertising opportunity so I can rake in that sweet early adopter cassssh!

Claude! Code me up an ad-injection framework for this meshtastic dongle I just bought, stat! Time to get me a big ol’ chunk of advertising real estate!

(sad /s)

These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.

It’s the tragedy of the commons writ large.

Started off with cooperation and general good behavior between users, passed through corporations bulldozing the place and putting in paid parking for their strip malls, now we’re at the Wall-E stage where advertising billboards talk to robots mindlessly doing tasks in abandoned cities for some nebulous “greater good”.

but air resistance is a bitch. You wanna go twice as fast, you need four times as much power

Unless your supersonic aircraft is up a lot higher than your subsonic one. Coffin corner is a different beast when you can go above Mach 1.

So perhaps this will work out as twice as fast for only 3 times the fuel. An acceptable tradeoff, perhaps.

According to OpenAI, the agents eventually chained together multiple vulnerabilities, escaped their testing environment, gained internet access, and attacked Hugging Face while attempting to complete the ExploitGym cybersecurity benchmark.

This is just gross incompetence on OpenAI’s part. It took days for the LLM’s to do what they did. Meanwhile, nobody’s looking at network traffic or wonder what the LLM’s are doing sucking down a bunch of tokens.

exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed.

_Thinking......_

_Still Thinking......_

The article is quite fixated on how dialup was around in the early 2000s, and how Americans used dialup in the early 2000s with screeching modems, and how AOL turned off their dialup last year and only a thousand people were using dialup by then.

But there’s no indication that this has anything to do with the application, except for maybe everyone used a popular means to connect to the Internet to use it when it was first built.

Now if someone maintained a bank of modems and people legitimately called them up and connected to the system like it was an ISP, and it was secure by way of that was the only way to access it as opposed to over the Internet, then sure, I can see that maybe it’s time to work on that part.

On disk 17 out of 37 of a Microsoft Office install in 1994:

GRONK-GRONK-GRONK-GRONK-GRONK

Disk error reading Drive A:

Abort, Retry, Fail?

Firstly, suspend might be an option compared to hibernation for your subsequent startups if you can suffer a slow startup the very first time.

Otherwise look up “Linux from scratch” .

A lot of boot time is decompressing and mounting initrd, loading modules there, mounting the root filesystem, jumping to that.

Build a kernel that has exactly the minimum modules needed for your system, skip initrd and jump straight to a root filesystem and call your init binary (it can be BusyBox even) do exactly what’s needed there to get your network+graphics card up and running with a single shell script, done.

Also look at COW filesystems. Read only base with an overlay file for writes. Discard that file on each boot and you basically have a system that is always at the same state on startup.

Ok it occurs to me that people use this like they use a spellinng/grammar checker in a word processor.

Spellcheck:

• They have an idea.
• They type up the idea.
• They run spellcheck and it churns through their document and it fixes mistakes that it can see.
• They send it to someone for review.

LLM coding:

• They have an idea.
• They type up the idea.
• LLM churns on the idea and spits out a solution-of-sorts.
• They send it to someone for review.

Regardless of other opinions of it, they see it as a tool that helps take the effort out of getting ideas into reality.

Edit: Oh wait, this is c/programming. Fuck. Ok, give me 5 minutes for me to sharpen my pitchfork and come up with something that matches the groupthink, I’ll be right back.

If you’re including a link to your tool, you can add one sentence at the end:

This keeps the post focused on discussion and feedback rather than promotion, which is generally better received in developer communities.-

At least proofread your post and remove the LLM comments first, because it surely won’t be better received in developer communities at the moment.