searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_pinching_conspiracy_theory

The finger pinching conspiracy theory[b] is an antifeminist conspiracy theory that originated in South Korea. It claims that there is a deliberate plot to spread and promote misandry through symbolic hand gestures, and that radical feminist groups have propagated these hidden messages to humiliate men with small penises.

The conspiracy theory first gained prominence in May 2021 when convenience store chain GS25 published an advertisement with a hand gesture, which faced accusations of allegedly disparaging penises and aggrandizing the defunct fringe group Megalia. The company retracted it and issued an apology. Since then, numerous organizations were met with similar protests from theorists and announced apologies.

Despite contradictory claims and a general lack of evidence, the theory persists; notably in the video game industry, where Nexon led a public allegation against its collaborators. It is viewed as an online harassment tactic employed by antifeminist backlash movements. The theory has been a source of misinformation circulated by internet-based communities and news media.

It actually is. I mean, it’s building a dictionary off of a variety of content ahead-of-time, rather than training it on the specific item in question, but that’s not uncommon for non-general-purpose compressors.

I mean, doing so to a (probably short) prompt is (a) lossy (and I gave a lossless example) and (b) lossy to an extreme degree, to where it’s probably not incredibly useful option for the kinds of systems that exist today.

But…existing diffusion models aren’t actually intended for this, either. I’d bet that you could train a model to do image compression along these lines, with a large dictionary, that could do usable compression along the lines of what is (jokingly) described in the article. Probably have a larger compressed form than what they’re thinking of.

EDIT: At one point in time, about over a quarter-century ago now, I went out and banged on a neural net post-processor for JPEG artifacts. The idea here is that JPEG very probably isn’t optimally representing the final image, as a human, using their knowledge of what the world looks like, can manually (if time-consumingly) clean these up. I didn’t meet with a lot of success; I only wanted to put a small amount of time into it, and I was working with much weaker hardware than people are running neural nets on today. But that generated a pre-existing dictionary, a pre-trained neural net, off a training corpus of uncompressed images. It didn’t try to reconstruct the image from scratch, the way something like this would, just clean up artifacts, but it has that same pre-generated neural net approach.

Despite the fact that it’s registered and paid for until 2040.

I can believe that Verisign might have some route to terminate service (even in cases where there is some contractual obligation to provide a service for a given period of time, someone can typically break the contract, just having to pay some sort of penalty for doing so), but I also suspect that they are legally required to issue you some sort of refund.

You generally cannot just sell someone a service and then refuse to provide it; that’ll violate consumer protection laws.

That probably won’t make the author happy—he probably wants the domain, not the money. But at the minimum, I will say that he probably doesn’t have to pay for service that he doesn’t get.

It might be that they are doing that; he doesn’t specify.

But it gets much worse. Once the 3rd-level domains are terminated, it is assumed that the now vacant 2nd-level domains will become available for registration. Should someone (other than me) scoop up fraser.name they would be able to recreate and control neil.fraser.name. They’d be able to hijack hundreds of accounts that are linked to that address. They could commit code with my authentication. They could seize control of IoT devices. There is no way to enumerate all accounts (online and offline) which have been opened using this email address over the past quarter century.

Yeah, personally I’d rather have some kind of key-based mechanism, at least as an alternative to the X.509-based system. Think of what PGP or SSH do. Like, the key is your identifier, not the endorsement of some centralized registrar.

Hyphanet does something like this, can do key-based addresses.

That has some drawbacks too—I mean, you are the ultimate authority here, and thus responsible for keeping that key safe, and that’s a big responsibility. If you think of all the attacks on cryptocoin wallets and stuff, I think that personal computers are not incredibly-well-suited for that—if we’re going to do that, we probably want something more like hardware-based keystores, like YubiKeys or similar, where a key cannot be exfiltrated if a PC is compromised, as PCs have a big attack surface. And it’s harder for humans to remember a key as an identifier, which means that they probably have to have a computer somewhere store a list of known and trusted keys (though doing so solves a lot of existing attacks, like phishing emails with look-alike URLs that attack the limited human ability to remember names, so there are pros and cons). And it avoids the risk that someone with access to a certificate authority’s key can compromise your security.

It’s humorous, but last I checked, the best general-purpose compressors with the highest levels of compression—even lossless, which is probably not what most people think of when they think of neural nets—are neural net based.

Neural net-based compressors are computationally expensive, which is why we don’t normally use them for most day-to-day tasks, but they really can produce really small outputs.

I’m going to take the text of the US Constitution and stick it in a text file.

$ wget https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5/pg5.txt
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt 
48326

Okay, so 48326 bytes.

Let’s do lzo. You’d expect a limited amount of compression — LZO is “fast” compression, usually only used where compression speed is really important, like where you want to be compressing stuff that’s going to be decompressed once and your bottleneck is throughput to disk:

$ lzop <pg5.txt >pg5.txt.lzo 
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.lzo
24843

Okay, how about gzip? That’s Deflate, an older, but pretty-widely-used general-purpose compression algorithm.

$ gzip <pg5.txt >pg5.txt.gz
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.gz
16660

Okay, what about LZMA? That’s a newer, more-CPU-intensive thing that’s probably a good general-purpose choice that’ll generally give better compression ratios. It’s the kind of thing that I’d probably use in a lot of cases. (Personally, these days, I tend to use pixz, which provides both indexed access for tarballs and parallel compression and decompression, which is important for modern processors.)

$ xz <pg5.txt >pg5.txt.xz
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.xz 
15488

Okay, now PAQ, a neural-net-based compressor:

$ zpaq a pg5.txt.zpaq a pg5.txt -method 5
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.zpaq 
13063

Yeah, I’m very much Team Lone Monitor. You can only see sufficient detail to work with text in a limited area in front of you. I can flip between desktops in sway faster than I can look from side to side. Honestly, my current monitor is already probably excessive in screen space for productivity stuff.

And the ergonomics are preferable if you’re using secondary monitors much. You ideally want the display in front of you:

https://worksmarthub.com/monitor-ergonomics/

If you only change four things today:

Adjust your chair height first.

Raise your monitor so the top is at or just below eye level.

Position it about an arm’s length away.

Centre it directly in front of you.

These principles align with ergonomic research on neutral posture and reduced upper‑limb load (Rempel et al., 2007).

I remember working on a dual monitor setup split in the middle back in the 1990s, and while it was never a huge issue, after a day of working, my neck was stiff from looking to the left.

Added bonus of a single-monitor setup: less power use, and you can work on a (more-portable) laptop without extra screens without breaking your workflow.

EDIT: Note that this is just talking productivity stuff. If you also play games or something on the machine, then having stuff in your peripheral vision can have value, just as in real life. VR rigs push that even further.

EDIT2: If someone does come up with some sort of software that makes useful use of peripheral vision for office stuff, someone will be selling VR products aimed specifically at this in short order. I remember in…the early 2000s maybe, when Intel was trying to convince businesses to buy 3D hardware, and had ads talking about how 3D chart viewing would increase productivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Van_Pelt

Well…the in-compiler time analysis I think wasn’t as good then, though I recall doing my own ad-hoc profiling, logging time for each unit. But the refactoring stuff should be available.

I dunno how far back distcc goes.

checks git repository

The git log goes back to 2008, so almost 20 years, but it’s also talking about release 3.0 then, so there might have been time outside a VCS or with history that didn’t get imported.

Wikipedia says that ccache goes back 24 years.

I mean, none of the optimizations I listed rely on multiple cores.

It’s true that just running parallel compilation jobs on your build machine is a simple way to speed things up, no disagreement, but it’s not like optimizing compilation time isn’t a thing outside of that.

I think that there’s a legit rejoinder of “Why aren’t you optimizing the code to reduce compilation time, if it’s such a problem?”

For something like C++, ccache, distcc, PIMPL (to reduce use of templates, which blows up C++ compilation time), precompiled headers, make code more modular to reduce the size of the compilation unit that changes when any one change happens, break stuff into libraries, etc. Look to see whether there are things like build timestamps being inserted into headers that are producing unnecessary recompilations. clang and gcc can profile compilations to identify what’s chewing up time.

If you see your wallpaper then you aren’t really doing anything.

I use sway these days. It’s tiling, so I rarely see my desktop background anymore.

But not everyone uses a tiling system.

While I like the idea of avoiding having onscreen pixels wasted showing useless information, and I think that tiling systems do help achieve this, I avoided tiling systems for some years, as a fair bit of software still didn’t play well with it (e.g. I remember default behavior with GIMP being half of the screen being the main window, half being the GIMP toolbar window). I think that we’re past that phase now, but there are people who prefer stacking window systems for various reasons and don’t use tiling systems.

looks at image with ten visible LED fans

I don’t have a problem with people decorating their computers however they want. They paid for it. It’s their computer. Everyone’s got their own aesthetic preferences.

However, the last build I did, I was getting a little exasperated with how increasingly-hard it is to just find desktop components that don’t have RGB lighting on them any more. I mean, to me, the desktop computer is a box that has a bunch of circuit boards in it. I’m generally not looking at my RAM sticks or motherboard segments, and don’t have a glass window on the side to admire it (it gets dust in there, and I’d rather have a sturdier case without glass). I could do without the extra light pollution in my life. Most stuff can be disabled, but it’s kind of obnoxious to be buying and figuring out how to disable hordes of little RGB LEDs.

I’d also add that where LEDs exist, they have multiplied over the decades not just in number, but also in brightness.

If I wanted to have my computer be a light show, which I don’t, I’d get a DMX512 controller for it, and real lighting effects hardware.

Maybe going for rack-mount hardware is an option. It’s something that I’ve thought about sporadically over the years, and it does have certain benefits, if you’re willing to give up portability. But rack-mount builds generally command a premium due to the market being less price-sensitive, and noise is often a more of a factor, since datacenters don’t care about keeping things quiet for employees.

So I had the following situation: I am writing my entire software documentation in emacs orgmode, so that I can export it to LaTeX later on.

I use and enjoy org-mode.

However, I’d be hesitant to use it in cases where someone might need to have other contributors that might submit patches to the document or to interchange the original documents with others. It’s not really a great interchange format.

The problem is that org-mode is kind of like…oh, Microsoft Office .doc format, just for emacs. It’s not really a frozen, specified format, and the “big” implementation is really tied to a single text editor software package, emacs. There is some limited support in other software packages. I know that vim has a package with support for a subset of org-mode features.

And…that probably isn’t a situation that will change. org-mode won’t freeze, because people want the ability to easily extend it. There will never be another non-emacs full implementation, as it already has things like Emacs Lisp support baked in (for things like spreadsheet-like org-mode tables with calculations that need to update table cells).

That means that other serious users of the format likely need to use emacs. Some people probably aren’t going to do that, unless a software package being documented is, say, an emacs software package. And that prevents a lot of people from being able to use it.

I’d also guess that it’s also probably not the most-secure format to be handing around, for (due to things like the aforementioned embedded elisp snippets). If you remember Microsoft Office macro viruses back when people were exchanging a lot of Office files…it was a mess.

Org-mode is fine for what it is, and I happily use it for my own internal notes, but I think that if I, personally, were writing technical documentation—I have, in the past—that might need to be interchanged and I needed more functionality than what, say, a given dialect of Markdown provided, but didn’t want to use HTML (which is not the most-pleasant to work with in plain text format), I might look into something like AsciiDoc. There are a few other, similar, formats used for technical documentation, like ReST, but last I looked, AsciiDoc was the most-appealing to me, and it’s what I’ve personally used for plain-text technical writing. There is an emacs package providing an AsciiDoc major mode. pandoc supports it.

Oh, no, I was thinking having them on. Like, sweat building up, stuff like that, weight.

Though I’m not sure that people are generally comfortable wearing VR headsets, as they exist in 2026, for many hours.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking

However, if both the difference in mass between the two bodies and the distance between them are relatively small, each may be tidally locked to the other; this is the case for Pluto and Charon

They’re apparently tidally-locked, so that’s one issue out of the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(moon)

Periapsis: 19 592.61 km

Apoapsis: 19 598.92 km

Eccentricity: 0.000161[10]

So it’s pretty close to a circular orbit.

Orbital period: (6 d, 9 h, 17 m)

But it’d still have to change length by about 6 km every 3 Earth days.

Big caveat here: emacs was always my primary editor, and while I’ve used vim to a more-limited degree, I haven’t put the kind of time into it to have me personally aiming to reproduce vim UI stuff. So this is not from personal experience.

My suspicion is that trying to switch over all of emacs to vim-style conventions is going to be a chore. Like, there are definitely packages that do some of that, but they aren’t going to do 100% of emacs and all of its package library.

However, there are people who do do a lot of this. My understanding from skimming things like /r/emacs on Reddit has been that Doom Emacs is a popular way “big makeover” to go for vimmers.

The core, most-modern package for vim emulation—there have been several packages to provide vi-like and vim-like behavior—is evil-mode.

Whether or not it requires a login for old.reddit.com depends on client IP. I see this on a few networks, not on others.

If I flew a flag, I wouldn’t personally lower it for Dolly Parton.

But I also wouldn’t be upset if someone else did (or if someone else chose not to do so).

I also wouldn’t lower such a personal flag for Donald Trump’s death, and US Flag Code does specify it on the death of people who have served as president. I don’t feel that he’s earned a salute of respect from me. That being said, I understand and would expect federal institutions and such that do follow US Flag Code to do so.

The big concern with filesystems becoming corrupt is that all of the data can be lost on a filesystem. Most of the time, this doesn’t show up, but if you lose power at just the wrong time, it can happen. With FAT, HFS, ext2, and similar filesystems that were vulnerable to corruption on power loss, that was a real risk.

So having some kind of power source to make an unclean shutdown unlikely avoids the risk of a really, really bad scenario.

The general shift away from reliance on those filesystems has mitigated the really-bad-case that drove a lot of UPS use.

Databases are probably the most-critical case where applications update a file on disk constantly, and where corruption would be bad. As long as they live on a filesystem that itself can’t become corrupt on power loss, they’re normally structured with a carefully-ordered series of writes and use of write barriers so that they cannot become corrupt.

An individual file can be partially written out. Like, say I’m saving a file in Photoshop, and I have only written half of that file. What winds up on the disk is the first half of of a Photoshop file. That’s an invalid Photoshop file. For some applications, that can matter. Like, say (a) I chose to overwrite an old file and (b) the application doesn’t atomically store the new file (like, write it out, fsync(), and then rename the new file over the old) and © there’s no backup or other system in place.

Or, even aside from partially writing out a file, I can entirely lose work that isn’t saved at all, if I’m not using a software package that makes use of some sort of autosave system. If I haven’t saved all day, then, well, all of that unsaved work is going to go away if there’s a power loss.

That’s a much smaller potential data loss, but, sure…power loss can cause data loss, even if it doesn’t produce that “everything is lost” filesystem corruption.

I’m not asserting that there’s no utility to a UPS; quite the contrary, as my comment was explaining to OP why there is use some people have for having NUT even if he personally doesn’t care much about it for his use case. I’m just pointing out that some of the major reasons for having a UPS+host-side-software combination that existed in, say, the 1990s aren’t really much of a thing in 2026. That was that you really did not want machines using filesystems normally used then to perform an unclean shutdown. Even with a UPS and host-side software like NUT, you can have data loss, as NUT cannot force all software to save unsaved data; there’s no standardized mechanism for forcing applications to save. If the PC is attended, you might get a warning and have a chance to manually save, but that’ll be the best that’ll happen, and if the PC is unattended, well, that save isn’t going to happen. But what NUT and similar software can do is to, when the UPS battery level gets low, trigger a clean shutdown. That ensures that the OS has time to perform a clean shutdown, and on filesystems that have a risk of filesystem corruption if the power is cut—FAT, HFS, ext2, and similar—a UPS with host-side software would avoid that case from arising.

If someone wants to have a UPS in 2026 on filesystems that don’t have those limitations, that’s fine. They may want to have, say, a five minute window to save their work if they are at the PC when power loss occurs. It may help avoid problems that arise from software that cannot cleanly handle power loss—I that Steam can, if power loss occurs while it is updating itself, wind up in a broken state from which it cannot automatically recover when restarted, as I’ve done that myself.

But generally, if you lose power on a system in 2026, you aren’t facing a “I might lose the contents of my hard drive” scenario.