That Mozilla thing makes me think of an effect I keep seeing that I tend to call inversion of expertise. I'm sure there's a better name that's already established, but that thing where a priority is set that's manifestly absurd, such that only people *without* the expertise to realize the absurdity get promoted into decision-making positions.
That then further erodes institutional capabilities, and makes it even harder to incorporate expertise.
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My mother-in-law overestimates my command of the Spanish language (though knowing French is admittedly helpful).
She claims that I understand 80% of what I hear. It's closer to 30%, but I can piece a lot together through context.
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I have a friend who is being harassed and threatened semi-anonymously via Facebook. She knows *who* it is, but Facebook and Police are characteristically being uselss.
I am kinda useless at this side of deanonymization, but does anyone have advice or resources for deanonymizing enough to get cops to move?
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if you can host a file on a site where you can look at the access logs and then post a link to that file, you might be able to bait them into downloading the file which could give you their IP address in the access logs. A whois search for the IP address.could get you their ISP and geolocation information on the IP could get you the general area.
That's a lot of "ifs" and "coulds", though.
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How To Bait and Catch The Anonymous Person Harassing You On The Internet
Leo Traynor, an Internet user in Ireland, had a problem. More specifically, he had a troll, a very nasty troll.Kashmir Hill (Forbes)
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from there, of the police still won't do something, it turns to filing court orders to get information from the IP holders about who had the IP at the time of access and harassment.
Good luck.
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Just got a push notification on my phone:
To receive nearby offers and coupons, you need to agree to the location service's Terms and Conditions.
Um... no, thank you?
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@Mark Connolly 🍻 🚴🏼♀️ (he, him, his) I'm sure you will...
In fact, I think I've seen this notification once before.
No, this is no a new CAPTCHA, this is a new malware vector which tricks users to open #Windows command line and paste a command to download some harmful stuff.
Just reported by Mohamed Aruham on Twitter.
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Just took my first dose of metformin. The only thing I had on hand to take it with was Coke
This was not well planned out. I'm clearly off to a great start.
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In the world of computers, no matter what tool you use, someone will hate it and tell you you're an idiot for using it.
Don't worry about those people. Use the tool that works you.
(This advice probably extends beyond computers.)
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I actually wrote a column about this ten years ago, that is sadly still relevant:
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ME DRIVING PAST THIS LIKE FIVE MINUTES AGO: Oh hey, I didn't know it was called that.
ME FOUR AND A HALF MINUTES AGO: Wait, what the fuck?
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Trying to remember the formula to calculate sin (in radians). I remember it was an infinite sum of increasingly small fractions that would eventually iterate closer and closer to the answer.
It bothers me more that I never understood why the formula worked. If I did, I could just work it out myself (like the quadratic equation).
Maybe you’re looking for the Taylor Series?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor…
Here’s the derivation for sine:
@John Best Based also on another response, I'm inclined to answer yes.
Now I just need to make my brain understand why it works. I'm sure I'll be able to if I just have a chance to sit down and think about it. I'm already 90% there, I think.
nth term is (-1)^(n-1) x^(2n-1)/(2n-1)!
It’s valid no matter how large x is (i.e. it has an infinite radius of convergence).
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Speak for yourself! I fly economy class with the rest of us plebs. We demanded lower fares, and we got what we wanted.
It's a win-win tacit agreement between us plebs and the airlines.
The rubes are the _business class_ flyers, who are fooled into thinking they've gotten some sort of glamorous superior option, when in reality it's barely better than economy class.
Business class fares let the airlines make more money while saving us plebs some money, so we accept it fine.
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I love reading ancient cuneiform tablets. Classics such as "Fuck you, this copper sucks." (Ea Nasir), "I should get more new clothes, my dad's employee gets new clothes twice a month and it's embarrassing.", and of course "The sesame harvest will die — let nobody say I did not warn you!", which is absolutely a set up for "Per my last clay tablet.".
Social media & email may be part of the problem. But if we're still like this when we have to carve our petty bullshit into clay then it's clear that we're the problem. It's us.
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So when I was mormon and got my endowment, I was given temple garments (special underwear) that I was instructed to wear day and night. I was also told never to show them to anyone (especially non-members).
At the time, I was a convert to the church living at home with my non-mormon family. Once a week, I used to smuggle them down to the laundry room to wash them without anyone seeing them.
I was eventually told by a priesthood leader that this was unnecessary, but still...
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@Mx. Luna Corbden Bishop Roulette strikes again!
But yeah. The temple worker who gave me my garments laid down the law.
The trouble with making satirical posts is that it's not always obvious that they're satire. I'm learning that it's often better just not to.
(Or maybe I just suck at satire. I don't know.)
A while ago my old temple clothing turned up. Just had an interesting conversation with Katy that made me realize something I hadn't before.
There's a specific bag that the church sells to put your temple clothing in. As far as I know, there's no rule saying you have to use it, but a lot of mormons do. I never really thought about it, but it's totally a dog whistle/status symbol. To an outsider, it's just a pretty ordinary (cheap looking) bag. To a mormon who's had their endowment, it screams "I'm worthy to go to the temple."
Due to poor planning on my part, I'm going to run out of coffee before more discretionary funding becomes available.
Boo.
@Todd on :mastodon: ain I'll survive. I'm not out quite yet, and I can switch to tea for a few days.
At least all the essentials are covered.
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@shapr
Unexpectedly? One of the first things I learned was that my parents wouldn't let me watch the cartoons my older brothers watched.
That reason was explicit lewdness and graphic violent views of the world. Pretty sure when I got to violate those rules, my first intro was Akira. Not a huge fan of fan service, I'm in for the bleak apocalyptic stories.
Next question, how do I get subtitles for media that doesn't already include them?
I have much to learn!
@Shae Erisson @TanekRune I've found that most media already has subtitles, bit there's always opensubtitles.org
Unfortunately, the subtitle files often need a little tweaking to get the synchronization right.
Well, booked my first appointment with the new doctor today. Haven't had my records transferred because I don't have $200 just sitting around for the digitization fee at the moment. Hopefully he'll be willing to renew my #ADHD meds using the previous prescripiton bottles as sufficient evidence of their necessity. I really don't want to jump through those hoops again.
It's not like I'll die without them or anything, but my life will get a lot harder.
@Shae Erisson I do plan to eventually pay the fee to have the records transferred. That should help quite a bit. It's just that the supply of meds won't hold out that long.
I should've gotten my act together sooner to take care of this, but you know... ADHD. 🙃
For me, turquoise is green.
You should answer the questions as if those where your only two color words, so that any color they can possibly show you is either "green" or "blue".
But, *of course* most of the colors they showed me I would *actually* describe as "cyan", a common color from my CGA roots.
“We created a self-opening fridge with an AI camera that tracks what you put in and take out.”
Please for the love of any and all deities I am PROSTRATE on the floor begging you for fair energy prices and accessible public transport I do not need a fridge incorrectly guessing what is in my 17 Tupperware containers and refusing to open because I haven’t paid my monthly £24.99 subscription of “Fridge Door Lock Plus” 
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@sunflowerinrain Ours had an issue a couple of years ago and thank all the deities we were able to get it fixed because it was impossible to find anything new that wasn't awful. And the repair person told us some choice things about the new fridges too.
Was the same thing all over again when our washing machine went. All these "smart" features now that will certainly break and no way to make it do what I actually want. At least it isn't collecting all our data. Supposedly.
I just put a loaf of #sourdough bread that I've been working on all day in the oven. Just realized that I forgot the salt.
I've made this mistake once before. It'll still be edible, but damn it makes me angry with myself.
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The untimely demise of an image upscaler
ML-based image enhancement models are great. Unfortunately, some of them are great only once.lcamtuf (lcamtuf’s thing)
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USB Floppy Drive
!retrocomputing
Came across an old USB floppy drive. I plugged it into my machine and it shows up, but I can't tell it it's actually working or not. When plugged in, it sounds like it's continuously reading, so I kind of want to test it. Can you even buy floppy disks any more?
That said, if I don't have any disks, I guess the question of whether or not it works is moot anyways.
I occasionally find 3.5" floppy disks at the local thrift stores. There are usually new old stock disks on ebay too.
The USB floppy drives usually only support IBM formatted disks and are useless for data recovery. For any other formats, a Greaseweazle will come in very handy.
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we're also still very fond of text files.
it used to be quite common for people to write up, say, videogame walkthroughs, or gender transition how-tos, or any sort of information somebody had personally put together, in a single long text file. a quarter of a meg was on the larger end of what you'd see, size-wise (when it's just text, that is a LOT), but not uncommon.
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I recommend people to investigate used enterprise storage.
If it passes badblocks & SMART checking (don't rely on that too much, manufacturers do silly things), it is likely to work just fine, and depending on one's location it is possible to acquire triple-redundant 10TB for less than buying a single 10TB drive new would cost.
Unfortunately, you're pretty much out of luck.
The used ones are not a good idea (despite looking cheaper), they're often messed up in a number of ways. 😿
.par2 files) partitions, and use good old tar right to the raw partition block device.
If you ever get to the point of thinking about multi-drive enclosures/cradles though, don't go for USB.
At that point, anything less than SAS (an expander card & breakout cables in an old computer case can do the job quite well) will inevitably prove frustrating through all sorts of annoying issues.
Conventional Hardware & Software RAID has also been exclusively for stuff where you don't care about integrity ever since 520B sectors have stopped being used. (Those 8 additional bytes were for integrity-checking features.)
Now, such features are implemented instead in modern filesystems since awareness of the data structuring is necessary for sane & reliable recovery (conventional RAID assumes that the drive firmware will both detect *and* notify of errors, which is incredibly optimistic in a setting where general pessimism is the sane attitude).
1. TIL about 520/528B drives. According to one forum post they might even go back to the 70s ("someone on the Internet said it, it must be true!")
2. Integrity checking features? You mean extra space for higher-level checks besides the (40 or so) extra error correction bits used to protect the 512 bytes of data?
I.e. the wrong data could be correctly written to disk. ECC won't catch that during a read, but the extra 8 bytes could.
The amount of ECC the drive
adds is unspecified, but even before drives switched to 4K sectors with "512 emulation", the size of ECC was typically much higher than in early 5¼ ESDI/SCSI/ATA drives.
1/
The extra "tag bytes" were mostly intended for file systems that wanted additional metadata associated with the sector, as done e.g. on the Xerox Alto, Apple Lisa and early Macintosh, and IBM AS/400. This could include an identifier for the containing file and offset, but could also be used for filesystem-level error detection.
2/
It is not unknown for drives to erroneously write to the wrong sector, and when the victim sector is read later, the drive will return that _wrong_ content with no error indication. Using the tag in such a way as to detect this kind of error is obviously useful for the filesystem or RAID layer. In the case of RAID redundancy it may be correctable, but otherwise it's still desirable to report an error rather than blindly proceed with invalid data.
3/
4/
@mos_8502 :verified: Oh, you already said that...
Mass data storage is fairly cheap these days, even if backup methods are lagging behind. Go ahead and file away that datasheet under “Documents/Datasheets/Company Name/TGS17362.pdf” or however you want to organize your shit.
@justinto This one is essentially what I do, but I also add in grated cheese both into the batter and on top of the batter once it’s in the loaf pan. But the cheese isn’t needed.
kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/c…
Classic Beer Bread
This classic beer bread recipe, with its four simple ingredients, requires nothing more than a bowl, spoon, pan, and oven in the way of tools.King Arthur Baking
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Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •reshared this
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Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.
cthos 🐱
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •I think that's because it's a confluence of factors? The market reacts to the hype, big companies react to the hype to increase their stock price and then look at each other like "oh crap, we have to keep going or our *competitors will win*", lather rinse repeat. I think there are decision makers that know it won't pan out at some places, but feel obligated to get in on the hype before the bubble pops.
Was the same way with Blockchain and dotcom (in bigger ways).
Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
in reply to cthos 🐱 • • •cthos 🐱
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
in reply to cthos 🐱 • • •cthos 🐱
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •Oooohhhh great question. Ed Zitron encapsulates the end result in "rot economy" but I don't think I've seen a term for it. Like, Ed talked a lot about the impacts of this in this piece: wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-ki…
Let's make one!
The Man Who Killed Google Search
Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
in reply to cthos 🐱 • • •cthos 🐱
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •cthos 🐱
in reply to cthos 🐱 • • •Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
in reply to cthos 🐱 • • •cthos 🐱
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
in reply to cthos 🐱 • • •⸸ foxx ░ nova ⸸ :~$ :demigirl: :progress2:
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
in reply to ⸸ foxx ░ nova ⸸ :~$ :demigirl: :progress2: • • •Dave
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •I'm sure it happens for other reasons, too, but in #uspol we see it because the person appointing / hiring has a position (political view) that does not reflect observed reality, such that people with sufficient expertise can't support that position and don't get hired / appointed.
I'm sure it happens all the time for more bureaucratic reasons to.. institutions are almost always incapable of winding down and ceasing operations, even when that would benefit the persons they serve.
ShadSterling
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ • • •Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
in reply to ShadSterling • • •book and concept by Laurence J. Peter that states that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence"
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. • • •@BoydStephenSmithJr @ShadSterling Kind of... that's the idea that someone is promoted because they are competent, but fail to be promoted once they reach the ceiling of their competence, ensuring that they eventually end up in a job for which they are definitionally unsuited.
What I'm pointing out differs in two ways: the promotions in this case are *because* they're incompetent, and I'm looking for the systemic consequences of that selection rather than the individual consequences.