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mothsonasloth

Re:Organic Maps on Friday September 01, 2023 @08:09AM (#37349736)
Bookmarked. Definitely will use this for the Mongol Rally next year
There was a scare that BSE time bomb would explode in the UK in the 2010s

As prions in children of 1990s brains would develop as they matured into adults.

Never happened...

Re:Infantilism as a Norm (2018) on Thursday June 15, 2023 @06:06AM (#36338378)
I would argue that growing up in a comfortable Western lifestyle is contributing to this infantilism and will be one of the contributors of the decline of the western world.

If you are a Syrian refugee, the last thing you are caring about is the new Mario Nintendo game and Starbucks frappucino.

Time to get serious and have children (me talking to myself)

No stress testing the servers, naughty naughty.

Elon please hire me, I can use Jmeter to scale a 1000 users per second on my IBM Thinkpad to put load on the servers.

/s

I think Github have already won the cultural dev war. I hear many a developer saying Github instead of "Git".

A recent example from a mid level dev:

"I'm gonna branch from the github repository" - when the repository is self hosted

Re: on Sunday April 30, 2023 @04:32AM (#35760681)
I currently need to take the car to the gym as I am recovering from a broken leg. I tried walking but by the time I got there I was in too much pain.

Once my rehab is complete then I'll cycle or walk.

On a tangent; the calf muscle is a real hard muscle to build back...

Re:Dune: Part Two – First Look on Thursday April 27, 2023 @10:54AM (#35729059)
Really appreciated Villeneuve adding small scenes to the movie like the gardener watering the date palms and the ecology outpost. It rewards people who read the book and also helps people who are just watching the movie with understanding the world.

Curious to see what other tid-bits from the book they will keep in part 2. Hopefully we can see some Fremen Sietches.

On another note, I've always wanted to write a load tester library, I would call it Gom Jabbar. If the service falls over it fails the test.

"It is I that must remain and bare the heavy burden of their failure..."

https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ

Re:What’s the Point of Tech Conferences? on Monday April 24, 2023 @09:35AM (#35687449)
1. Swag

2. Fancy swag (that is definitely not a bribe)

3. Being wined and dined by sales people (that is definitely not a bribe)

4. Networking

5. Learn niche aspects of a programming language or framework, and prepare yourself for the future features

6. Food platters (can be hit or miss); word of advice, watch out for the fat Developers with the goatees and ponytails, or the skinny developers who dive bomb the food queue, they will clean up the buffet of the good stuff before you get there. Also duck out the presentation 5 minutes before lunchtime so you beat the queues.

CAN bus is a brilliant thing for car diagnostics and modification but with every good system normally has a sword of damocles.

I would imagine my Passat which has a CAN interface on the headlight cluster would be vulnerable to this attack as well. Maybe even the bonnet sensor could be vulnerable.

Car manufacturers could remove CAN interfaces from peripheral systems (lights, wing mirrors) but they probably won't because it would make maintenance a little harder and less cost effective.

The idea of a software update by the security researchers sounds sensible but updating ECUs (engine control units), CCU (climate comfort units), infotainment systems of legacy cars will not happen.

Say goodbye to the old car thieves with their manual tools, hello techy thieves.

Beko is a Turkish company, not Eastern European.
Really cool, I have often wondered about the "maps" in the Russian helicopter cockpits.

I think they also move depending on the heading and direction of the helicopter to show the relative position for navigation.

Would be interesting to see how they worked.

Pic of cockpit - https://www.alamy.com/dashboard-in-a-russian-soviet-helicopt...

Another piece of evidence that Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilisation.
Yea and that's the funny side, in UK you will find people trying to walk up mountains in trainers or crocs.

However in the UK you are less likely to find someone hiking with a crossbow, flares, military rations and some vitamin pills, and still get lost at the car park.

A gun for breakfast, lunch and a more formal gun for dinner.
This is a generalisation, but whenever I read stories like this I can't help think that it is a nice summation of American culture (from the lens of a British person).

- Taking two knives (machete and a cutting knife), as though they are out to fight nature.

- Camping gear but not taking other tools that would complement them, narrow blinkered view on specific problems whilst missing others.

- Relying on technology without low tech backups, "its a fancy modern app in your finger tips".

Sure there is the saying, "stupid is as stupid does", and stupidity is universal. However I always find American stupidity to have a distinct flavour; with naive "positivity" and some sort of gung-ho attitude, compared with British or European stupidity.

Probably someone just testing a spam bot on your site before deploying it for real.
Re:Is the Living Computer Museum Dead? on Friday February 17, 2023 @04:57AM (#34832814)
Always wanted to visit it whenever I was next in Seattle, I guess I will need to wait a while though.

In the UK we have a few smallish computer museums; one in Manchester University, one at a London University and then we have the National Museum of Computing at Bletchely park (not to be confused with Bletchely park museum, as there is some politics)

It is important in the case of NMoC that it is preserved, especially that they have a working Colossus machine and many other historic British computing achievements.

This is just the ol' media favourite of "violent video games alters human behaviour" but flipped 180 and refreshed with a trendy climate wrapper.

Games for years have had dystopian, catastrophic and other themes. Sure they have inspired some people but on the whole I don't see how this would be anymore effective than:

- A climate crisis flyer handed out by a hippie looking person at an organic food market

- A saturday morning talkshow piece presenting on how a farmers fields are suffering drought

- A 24 hours news story on wildfires

"In one ear, out the other".

As a Java dev who learned C++ at university the hate towards C++ is misplaced.

C++ is a no thrills language which lets you have freedom but freedom to also shoot yourself in the foot 100+n ways, but this gives you a good foundation as a developer IMHO.

Every time I think about garbage collection in Java, I can appreciate that I am not having to write code to destruct an object or worry about passing references incorrectly.

Re:Surviving Disillusionment in Software Development on Saturday December 31, 2022 @07:26AM (#34195846)
I'm in the same boat, that I have contemplated starting a business making houmous as a street food vendor.

The author's article does resonate with me but to add, I think the software game has changed a lot since the dot-com era. It has changed for worse, we are disconnected from the hardware and the users.

We are just middleware integration specialists, depending on an ever decreasing amount of pioneers building systems, frameworks or low level processes.

I want to build Dijkstras algorithms not write integration tests for APIs made terribly by Stripe

Re:Tor Browser 12.0 on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @01:50PM (#33898444)
It originated from Terry Davis the creator of TempleOS, but okay I get your point.
Re:A History of Encabulation on Sunday December 04, 2022 @04:47AM (#33852112)
I tried to write a Java SE application to be embedded in my retro encabulator to improve sinusoidal malleance, however due to a resonance cascade in 1.4 JVM it terfumbled and produced a cryptic stacktrace.
Re:Gaslighting is Word of the Year 2022 on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @04:11AM (#33785318)
This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Re:London's Ultra Low Emission Zone to cover entire city on Sunday November 27, 2022 @06:59AM (#33762363)
Perhaps it's me but I have been stung so many times with these controlled zones.

Dartford crossing, London - forgot to pay

Heathrow drop off - forgot to pay

ULEZ Old Street - forgot to pay

Mersey Gateway bridge, Liverpool - forgot to pay

It seems like a deliberate design pattern to make revenue.

I can't exactly login and pay whilst driving.

This is not the first and won't be the last case of its kind.

The interesting thing politically is if this will be enforced or not, as I am sure there are a lot of Silicon valley founders worrying now. At best they will get some deserved extra scrutiny, at worse will be getting investigated.

I've seen talk about Holmes' political connections, but she surely is too toxic for them to get her a "free pass". She might get relief from somewhere else though?

Couldn't you, y'know just get a new job offer and not tell them about it until your 60 days have elapsed?

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