µblog - archive for 2023-10 🏳️‍🌈

🔗 Évariste Galois (1811–1832)

When I first heard of Galois, back when I was a teen, the image of a mathematician dying in a duel sounded so weird. Turns out he was a restless soul, animated by the 1830 revolution, and that his mathematical interests were perhaps not his primary ones.

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It should be OK for Hungary to ratify Sweden’s NATO entry if Sweden promises never to help Hungary if it gets invaded by Russia – again.

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🔗 David Gerard: The beautiful mind of Sam Bankman-Fried

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Sometimes when I argue with people who are Wrong Online, I have to remind myself the reason they’re wrong is that they’re very young. Or libertarian.

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🔗 Bullets of vaguely silvery hue

In fact, not only have we obviously not matched the Moore’s Law gains in hardware, we haven’t even come close. And the hard part of software remains, as Brooks explained back in 1986, the “specification, design, and testing” of the abstract “conceptual construct” that is a software system. Actually typing code into an editor is the last, least-time-consuming, and probably least important step of the entire software development process (if you get to that step and it doesn’t feel that way, something has almost certainly gone wrong much earlier).

lobste.rs discussion, HN has nothing to say.

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🔗🎵 Lloyd Cole, touring Australia in December, says he stepped away from mainstream music.

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🔗🎬 Nomadland

I’ve been meaning to watch this for a long time, and came away a bit underwhelmed. Sure, it’s a beautifully shot film with a compelling premise, but for some reason its very low-key approach doesn’t grab me.

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Yesterday on HN: creating fake shell companies to fraudulently acquire and sell IP addresses to spammers is a victimless crime.

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Those who can, blog. Those who can’t, post snide comments.

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Far Cry New Dawn - farming circuit boards

You don’t have to complete Expeditions to get circuit boards. As soon as you’ve got the Wrath perk, exit Prosperity and head down the valley to the left. There’s a monstrous bison there you can easily snipe in its weak spot using a decent bow, then activate Wrath and bonk to death. Reload and repeat.

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🔗📷 Iconic Photos

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🔗🚀 Commercially Available Chairs in Star Trek

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🔗📺🇨🇦 Family Law

Probably the wokest show I’ve ever seen, but in a good way. Not the worst law drama, but also not the best.

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Guess we’re calling it Egghead’s LOLifesto then.

Update, Wed 18 October 2023: ok apparently lots of other people have THOUGHTS on pmarca’s store-brand techfash:

Ian Betteridge: Marc Andreessen’s manifesto

Believing that techno-optimism “is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy” while giving many repeated examples of what even a first year philosophy undergraduate which know was a political philosophy does not make you look smart.

TechCrunch: When was the last time Marc Andreessen talked to a poor person?

Vice: Major Tech Investor Calls Architect of Fascism a ‘Saint’ in Unhinged Manifesto

Andreessen also calls out Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as one of his patron saints. Marinetti is not only the author of the technology- and destruction-worshipping Futurist Manifesto from 1909, but also one of the architects of Italian fascism. Marinetti co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 and founded a futurist political party that merged with Mussolini’s fascists. Other futurist thinkers and artists exist. To call Marinetti in particular a “saint” is a choice.

Dave Karpf: Why can’t our tech billionaires learn anything new?

Who is lying to us, Marc? You serve on the boards of trillion-dollar companies. A few of your peers own media companies. A few others have chosen to bankrupt media companies that write mean things about them. You have been celebrated for thirty years as the genius-inventors-of-the-future. If the public is turning against you, who ought to be held responsible for such a change in the public mood?

Gizmodo: Marc Andreessen Is Wrong About Everything

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CW: rant.

I’d have thought that the hipsters who sneer at Mastodon for being too mainstream would also transitively sneer at people using Wordpress. So I don’t get the angst that WP’s coming ActivityPub integration is focused on Masto support.

Maybe if a large part of your online personality is gatekeeping and purity tests, don’t be surprised if real companies decide it’s not worth spending resources catering to you.

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Today in lobste.rs, I am informed that the Raspberry Pi is not suitable for production use because it’s not recommended to install the latest OS in place - a reinstall is required. I note this without further comment.

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🔗 David Chisnall succinctly describes the differences in how FreeBSD and Linux distros handle “3rd party” code

Basically, in Linux-land, everything is 3rd party, even the kernel.

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Blogger: I finally got my C programming environment set up just the way I like it.
Internet: here are all the footguns you have missed.

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If you’re into WW2 and podcasts, you could do worse than following “We Have Ways of Making You Talk” (link follows). Very UK-centric, but ranges widely, and at least the hosts are aware of how little they know about other areas and make attempts at correcting that.

🔗📻 We Have Ways of Making You Talk Podcast

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The idea that ISO is a useless organization that does nothing but overcharge for standards that no-one reads is such a weird nerd shibboleth.

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🔗 Michael Lewis’s Big Contrarian Bet

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Seen today while wading through the ordure that is ExTwitter: the term “genuine conspiracy theories”.

Context. Warning: brain rot (or maybe vaccine-created 5G-induced Marburg).

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New acronym dropped, 15 years ago: CBLWLOP - Chunky Black Laptop With Lots Of Ports.

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We regret to inform you that the Nobel Prize in Medicine is now “woke”.

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The older some people get, the madder they are at the free market. Not that it exploits labor and the planet, but that it no longer produces the products they want.

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